| The dissertation examines the poetic adaptation of painterly techniques considered to be indicative of a modernist or postmodernist sensibility. It also attempts to elucidate the influence of pre-war French poets on post-war American poets in respect of this interdisciplinary concern. The French poets include Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Andre Breton; the Americans, Frank O'Mara and John Ashbery of the New York school. The poets were selected both for the experimentalism of their poetry and for the quality of their critical writings on the art of their day, especially painting. In each case, the poet's art criticism is analyzed as a proto-poetics in which issues pertaining to the creation of plastic works reveal their formal utility for the creation of a new poetry, whether radically avant-garde or more critically eclectic. Close attention is paid to essays on important painters identified with Cubism, Futurism, and Dada-Surrealism in France, Abstract Expressionism and New Realism in the United States. After each analysis, poems from different stages of the poet's career are closely examined either as illustrations of a new plastic poetic (poem-paintings) or as novel hybrids of plastic and literary strategies (parodic poem-paintings or ekphrastic meditations).;Although the parallels between modern poetry and painting go beyond the use of avant-garde techniques, my investigation focuses primarily on the latter instance, examples of which include simultaneism, collage, imagistic disjunction, chance operations, automatism, and a general indexical conditioning of works to shift aesthetic attention from the finished product to the actual creative process. For the poet, the association of such techniques with the plastic arts gives them a quality of proximity to the most advanced aspects of material culture. Thus, the literary adaptation of these techniques implies a transgressive crossing of borders not only between media, but between the categories of art and life: life not as nature, but as the human body enmeshed in modern techno-industrial society. In attempting to fuse these categories, avant-garde techniques are promoted as a means of overcoming literary and artistic technique as such, yet a means that can also vastly extend human powers of expression and representation on the model of technology itself. |
