Graphopoetics is a blog for examining texts that combine poetry with visual art elements. This includes work that falls within the sphere of poetry comics, illustrated poetry, as well as some digital (or e-) poetry and works of visual poetry. I am keeping the scope of the blog very broad, at least for the moment, as all of these kinds of poetic work fall within my field of interest, and what unites them is how they can be usefully read with consideration of their visual elements alongside their written text. 

The main bulk of the blog posts will be short pieces of commentary on individual graphopoetic works. It is my hope that by building up short pieces of close reading on work that I find interesting, I will slowly develop my thoughts around this area of literature. As the blog goes on, I hope to broaden the content into other kinds of articles, such as interviews with authors and artists, description of my own creative work, and more broadly theoretical writing, but the main focus will be close analysis of individual pieces. Each post will include a description of the piece in terms of its medium, visual style, language, and subject, followed by an account of reading the piece, with reference to any striking visual elements and how they interact with the text.

I am taking inspiration for this approach from two sources in particular. One is Mark Byers’ excellent commentaries on poem drafts included in the Bloodaxe Archives at Newcastle University. The other is Leonardo Flores’ extensive body of writing on digital literature on his website I ❤️ E-Poetry, which is also structured around short pieces on individual works. 

I will probably return to this introduction at some some to expand and refine some of what I’ve said here, as I post more content and my thinking about the subject develops.