Photopoetry 1845 2015

From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History represents the first account of this challenging and diverse body of work. Nott traces the development of photopoetic collaboration from its roots in 19th-century illustrative practices to the present day. Focusing on work from the UK and US, he examines how and why poets and photographers collaborate, and explores the currents of exchange and engagement between poems and photographs on the page. The book not only considers canonical figures, but brings to light forgotten practitioners whose work questioned and shaped the relationship between word and image. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History provides a new lens through which to explore poetry, photography, and the spaces between them.

From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History represents the first account of this challenging and diverse body of work. Nott traces the development of photopoetic collaboration from its roots in 19th-century illustrative practices to the present day. Focusing on work from the UK and US, he examines how and why poets and photographers collaborate, and explores the currents of exchange and engagement between poems and photographs on the page. The book not only considers canonical figures, but brings to light forgotten practitioners whose work questioned and shaped the relationship between word and image. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History provides a new lens through which to explore poetry, photography, and the spaces between them.

The Getty Research Journal is an open-access publication presenting peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. The journal will be published through Getty’s Quire software beginning with this issue and made available free of charge in Web, PDF, and e-book formats. Topics relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global cultures. This issue features essays on a fragmentary Kufic Qurʼan of Early Abbasid style produced in Central Iran; cuttings from a twelfth-century Bible written in southeastern France for a Carthusian monastery in the orbit of the Grande Chartreuse; French archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy’s nineteenth-century documentation of Ilkhanid monuments, particularly the Emamzadeh Yahya, one of Iran’s most plundered tombs; the wartime encounter between Polish painters stationed in Baghdad and Iraqi artists during the British military reoccupation of Iraq in 1941–45; and the integration of photography and poetry in East German samizdat artists’ books of the 1980s. Shorter texts include a notice on a large folding panorama of the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia, taken around 1880 by Brazilian photographer Rodolpho Lindemann. The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/grj/19/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Hughes’s extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book’s unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes’s techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes’s changing ideas about how poetry ‘ought’ to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes’s major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes’s poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne - the first complete translation since 1913. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature. Sweeney Astray not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.