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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Iconicity and Typography in Steve McCaffery's Panel-Poems

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description

This paper discusses Steve McCaffery's "Panel-Poems", first realized in the 1960s, with respect to the international context of concrete poetry and the emergence of a poetics of iconicity amongst a North-American avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. The material emphasis of McCaffery's poetry is played out typographically in his work "Carnival" (1967-75) through procedures that place the letter, the smallest denominator of language and the page in newly imagined networks of signification. The experiment with the environment of writing is sustained by a reliance upon the typewriter and other forms of scription that conceive of the reader as an active participant in the creative process. Lastly, in this paper, it is considered how the architecture of McCaffery's "Panel-Poems" looks ahead to contemporary configurations of the mechanics of type and to further stages in the historical narrative of visual poetry.