Why experimental poetry? 

As a Ph.D. student researching and writing on various kinds of experimental writing practices, I have found an enormous gap in teaching materials on experimental poetry. Scouring the web for particularly OA (open access) teaching materials for poetry, broadly, yielded very few results pertaining to upper-level academic study which go beyond the basics of teaching poetry (i.e. learning about rhymes, similes, and metaphors.) I compared this to a search for teaching resources on “contemporary art” and found that this search term produced much more robust results with information about contemporary visual artists and movements such as conceptual art and performance art. 

If there is any mention of the lineage of experimental poetry in the guides I’ve found, it is hinted at in sections on Modernism, but not often carried forward into the present-day as a contemporary movement. In short, I have seen open educational resource (OER) guides for teaching poetry to upper-level students, but never one that focuses on the non-mainstream, or that engages in any discourse around the field of poetry and all the creative innovations happening within it today.

The open-ended nature of the term “experimental” may be partly to blame. What constitutes an experimental poem? I feel that there is a gap in understanding not only what experimental writing means, but also where it came from and to what lineage(s) it belongs. To attempt to bridge this gap, I would like to introduce some formal terms that can be used to describe experimental writing. Though by no means exhaustive, these terms can help us define the contours of the genre. 

What is experimental poetry?

I like to consider as experimental any poetry that uses creative innovations to draw attention to its form. Experimental poetry rejects the idea that poetry must adhere to the historical forms of verse: sonnet, villanelle, rhyming couplet…although experimental work can surely still utilize these forms, if the point is to make a statement about form. There is always, in experimental poetry, an attention to form and, usually, a subversion of the reader’s expectations, challenging the idea of what poetry is or can be. Thus, the difficulty to define it, but also the beauty of its expansiveness. 

What I think of as experimental poetry comes from a lineage of experimentation in writing and visual art which began to appear in Europe in the Avant-Garde movements of the early Twentieth century. Surely artists and writers were experimenting with form long before this, but if an origin point must be nailed down, this would be it. 

Beginning in around 1907, the legendary poet and art collector Gertrude Stein began holding literary salons in her Paris apartment. The writers who frequented these salons––Ernest Hemingway, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others––helped shape literary Modernism. For this project, I see Modernism as the place to begin. It is here that the formal experimentation I am interested in started to take shape and evolve alongside the visual art movements that were forming contemporaneously. 

Tracing this experimental attitude into the 1960s, the next movement I would like to note is OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), which was a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960. OuLiPo emphasized creating texts using strict and systematic restraints, often quite mathematical. For instance, they invented a technique known as n+7, in which you would replace every noun in a sentence with the noun that is 7 entries ahead of it in the dictionary. This style of writing was hugely influential for Conceptual writing, which often relies on some organizing principle external to the text. For example, the use of text that has been appropriated from other sites, and organized in some way. 

Conceptual poetry, like Concrete poetry, which this project is also interested in, emphasizes the materiality of language and how we use and interact with it. This concept has changed over time, especially with the advent of the Internet, which has hugely shifted the ways in which we engage with language, as well as which texts are readily available to us. 

Much of the work compiled here can be classified as Conceptual. The main conceit of Conceptualism is that it provides, as Craig Dworkin argues in his introduction to the Conceptual Writing page on UbuWeb, some “alternatives or challenges to the Romantic lineage of expressive poetry.” If the main goal of poetry is not emotional expression, then what else can it do? How can studying these experiments with language help us, together with our students, become more curious about the language that surrounds us every day? How can it help us understand the new direction(s) poetry is moving towards?

From Modernism, to Postmodernism, to Fluxus, to Conceptual and even Post-Conceptual movements, these are the lineages of experimental poetry I wish to trace, unpack, and add to with this project, by providing both primary texts as well as commentary in the form of scholarly engagements, reviews, interviews, and conversations. As will be apparent from the posts on this site, I am focusing mainly on experimental poetry, but visual artworks, sound pieces, or works in other media may also be included.