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Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition

Clarke and Sheppard were invited to contribute their shared research into questions of representation and the relationships between the verbal and the visual, the relationships between reading and looking. If textual and visual elements are fully integrated do we adopt a ‘reading’ or a ‘viewing’ approach to the text.

Clarke responded to the writings of Sheppard by analysing the structure and content of the poetry and then by experimenting with visual equivalent to produce image/text works for exhibitions.

This research project used psychological, critical and creative methods to study how readers respond to the visual aspects of poetry. Funded by the AHRC and based at the universities of Dundee and Kent it investigated both readers’ responses and the creative processes of artists and poets. Using methods from literary criticism, aesthetics, experimental psychology and creative practice to study how readers respond to hybrid works which combine the textual with the visual including digital poetry, concrete and visual poetry, artists’ books text, film and poetry combined with photography.

The Poetry beyond Text project was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy , a leading organisation for visual arts in Scotland and also the Scottish Poetry Library one of only three poetry libraries in the U.K. Via these two exhibitions the project engaged audiences through workshops, lectures, gallery tours, and artists’ talks; as they sought to discover what determines whether the visual aspect enriches the meaning of the words (and vice versa) or whether each element limits the force of the other.

Sheppard has played a notable part in the ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry Movement’ and is Professor of Poetry and poetics at the University of Edge Hill and the editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.