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Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"The Image and the Word"

PANEL 26

26) "Rude Color of What an Amazing World": Avante-Garde Art and American Poetry
Panel Chair: Viorica Patea, Universidad de Salamanca
E-mail: vioricap@usal.es 

"The image is the poet's pigment," wrote Ezra Pound. The interaction between poetry and visual arts marked the beginning of the twentieth century and has remained the hallmark of postmodernist poetics. Cubist, Dada, Expressionist, Surrealist and abstract painting articulated the technical repertoire that was later adopted by other artistic disciplines. American modernist poets such as Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Loy, Stevens, and Williams found in the technique of visual arts the key to recentering poetic expression on abstract designs that put an end to poetry's reliance on mimetic principles. The aesthetics of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry is based on the principles and techniques of nonfigurative arts, which it constantly seeks to integrate and translate into its own poetics.

The two loci classici in the history of interartistic relationship between poetry and painting go back to classical antiquity – Simonides of Ceos's (6 BC) apothegm evoked by Plutarch, "Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture", and by Horatio's "Ut pictura poesis" – continued in the Neoclassical period with Lessing's Laokoon (1766), a treatise that postulated the unbridgeable distinction between visual spatial arts (painting and sculpture) and the temporal verbal art (poetry), and culminated with Virginia Woolf's dictum, "On or about December 1910, human character changed".

In order to define their artistic endeavors artists have often resorted to an analogy with another art. The Romantics cherished the nightingale or the Aeolian harp and conceived of poetry in terms of music. Yeats aspired to the fluidity of dance. Among the modernists, Eliot conceived of poetry in terms of music, Pound and Loy sought the solidity and dynamism of sculpture and painting, and Williams, Moore, Cummings and H.D. resorted to painting, photography and cinema, while Wallace Stevens invoked the eye that paints and the mind that composes.

The modernist aesthetic is characterized by an increasing tendency to transgress and displace the boundaries of different genres and art forms, a tendency conducive to postmodernist forms of intermediality further generated and explored in the more recent works of the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, LANGUAGE poets, and Hybrid poets.

This panel invites consideration on the multiple forms of interaction between American poetry through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and other artistic forms.

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Please submit all paper proposals directly to the Panel Chair using this form no later than October 15, 2018.

Panel Chairs will notify applicants of their acceptance/rejection no later than November 15, 2016.

For information on the Conference Venue see the Organizing Committee's website.

SAAS members, ASA members, and other scholars (not necessarily affiliated with any of these associations), are invited to submit proposals to the panel of their choice. Donwload this form, fill it out, and send it via email to the chair of your selected panel.

In order to present a paper, participants who are not SAAS, ASA, APEAA or HELAAS members will be required to pay a one year's membership fee (and enjoy the benefits for the following year) plus the conference fee.

Students have to become SAAS members (if they are not SAAS/ASA/APEEA/HELAAS members already) and pay 50 percent of the registration fee (60€ early bird/75€ late registration) if they wish to present a paper and/or attend the "Félix Martín" Doctoral Seminar.

Deadline: October 15, 2018

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.