Contemporary visual and digital poetry

Guest lecture by Ana Amélia Rodrigues dos Santos (University of Leicester, UK).

The lecture explores the critical functions of visual and digital poetry. Starting with observations on language use in modern and contemporary visual and digital poetry, it will map out poetic innovations throughout the twentieth century that involved a process of materialising and motivating language. Special attention will be given to the impact of new technologies on the transition from print to digital poetry and on the reading process. The analysis is grounded in a detailed understanding of the poetic composition, including their intermedial and intertextual components, and the reader interaction. The main corpus is composed of the visual poems “Woman” and “Viole(n)t” by US-American K.S. Ernst, “Nome” and “Não tem que” by Brazilian Arnaldo Antunes, and Eunoia and “Odalisques” by Canadian Christian Bök; as well as the digital poems “Amor de Clarice” and “Poemas no meio do caminho” by Rui Torres (Portugal), and “Game game game and again game” and “A nervous system” by Jason Nelson (Norway).

Ana Amélia is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Leicester, in the UK, where she developed a holistic analysis of perception and use of language in contemporary visual and digital poetry. Her area of study falls within non-traditional poetry, and she is currently interested in the production of visual and digital poetry made by poets that belong to marginalized groups, particularly women.