SEEN AS READ : AN EXPLORATION OF VISUAL POETRY

Will be run next as a group course in 2023. Now available as an individual program, with details here www.stevenjfowler.com/courses
Taught by Steven J Fowler. For booking, via paypal, please click here

What are the possibilities of poetry on the page, or screen, beyond, or expanding with, its semantic content? Far from being a domain of contemporary experimentation in marginal literatures, what we know as visual poetry reaches back into the very origins of poetry, far more than more formal, mainstream writing. This online course exposes the roots of the language arts, from cave paintings to undecipherable manuscripts, before touching upon the possibilities of the modern visual poetry by taking in great swathes of modern art engaged with text. We explore Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry, Minimalism, Poster Poetry and Originary Visual Poetry in a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else.

Participants will be sent a succinct document of resources once a week for seven weeks – ideas, examples, concepts, history, accompanied by exercises or prompts. Then on a private blog-forum responses and work can be posted, with comments and feedback from all involved. When the course finishes, an event or publication will consolidate that which everyone has produced.

Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, taken from all over the globe - from canonical modern artists to "outsider" poets, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Henry Michaux, Bob Cobbing to Rosaire Appel, Sophie Calle to Sophie Podolski, Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly.

The Voynich Manuscript / Jenny Holzer / Judit Reigl / Annagret Soltau / Seiichi Niikuni

An introductory talk, commissioned by The Arnolfini and UWE in summer 2020 for their online festival, exploring Asemic poetry, featured on this course

Email stevenjfowler@yahoo.co.uk with any questions.