Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond

Drawing upon a corpus of artworks considered across different art disciplines and institutional boundaries, this book works analytically and comparatively with literature, music, video, film, architecture, and performance art. It covers some of the key areas of contemporary theory and criticism and is primarily concerned with the changing nature of poetic practice as it is produced, consumed and disseminated through a variety of works embracing both high and popular culture from early modernism to the present. What the following chapters have in common—besides my conviction that poetry and poetics should be “at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television” —is an attempt to delineate the possibility of a truly transversal poetics, one which creates a space for a reconsideration of contemporary poetic language while navigating through the complex interactions between the artistic and the ideological, the historical and the theoretical.