La poésie graphique : Christian Dotremont, Roland Giguère, Henri Michaux et Jérôme Peignot
The purpose of this thesis is to define a type of modern visual poetry (20th – 21st), that we called graphic poetry. The graphic poetry focuses on a plastic and visual experimentation of the graphic sign, demonstrates an important conscience of the visual potential of the written form and tries to produce poetry in the materiality of the writing shapes. This artistic practice of poetry follows and also renews the poetic and plastic avant-gardes of the 20th century, more particularly surrealism. The graphic poetry refers to a practice of poem which is specifically graphic and includes a painting of the sign as a typographic work of the letter in order to produce the poem. The main characteristic of graphic poets is their double vocation : they are writers and visual artists. They experiment writing in its linguistic dimension and its graphic dimension, because they believe that the action of drawing a line or making of a linotype setting — namely the painting or the drawing of the word, of the graphic sign, the typography and the publishing — is already literature. In other words, graphic poets think that the creation and the materialization of the poem proceed of the same gesture. Christian Dotremont’s logograms, Roland Giguère’s artists’ books (Editions Erta) and prints-poems, Henri Michaux’s anthologies of invented painted signs and Jérôme Peignot’s typoems are some forms of graphic poetry. Our study focuses on francophone works, which come from Belgian, French and Quebec fields, published between 1950 and 2004. Three characteristics mainly define the graphic poetry : the ambiguity and the nomadism of the sign in relation to the semiotic systems (graphic, iconic and plastic), graphics rhythm and lyricism, as modalities of the expression of the subject in the graphic material, and a questioning of the distinction between autographic arts and allographic arts, requiring new ways of perception and reading of the poem and the book, that we called visual-reading and touch-reading.
Visual poetry 20th-21st Graphic poetry Artist's book Christian Dotremont Roland Giguère Henri Michaux Jérôme Peignot Relations between poetry, painting and typography Visual semiotics Rhythm, lyricism