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Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics itself would emerge out of critical engagement with the work of the poets’ artist peers: adapting compositional practices and techniques; adopting conceptual vocabularies. At times, this leads to intermedia experiment ( Calligrammes, collage, concrete work); at others, to a renewed focus on the medium–specificity of poetry: both the peculiar possibilities of language as material and resource for art–making, and the repertoire of techniques and conventions through which this material is deployed. The work of W. S. Graham (1918–1986) is at once an exemplary and singular instance in this history. If his life was spent in obscurity and neglect, Graham’s work is nevertheless central to any story of modernist poetics in Britain from 1940 onwards: he was associated with the “New Apocalypse” poets of the early 1940s, and then came under the patronage of T. S. Eliot at Faber at the end of that decade, before falling out of fashion as the anti-modernist “Movement” began its long hegemonic rule over the various organs of poetic taste. But he is also central to the story of modernist art over the same period. Unlike Stein and Reverdy, John Ashbery and Barbara Guest, Graham was not an art critic; but like them, he was a “poet among painters”: in Glasgow, London, but most of all St Ives. He was apprenticed in the shipyards of Clydeside in his teens, first as a draughtsman and then as trainee engineer, and in later life would produce meticulously rendered calligraphic copies of his poems, as well as watercolors, sketches, abstracts, and mixed-media works.
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poetry
painting
