t may be that Cambridge is just awash with people studying prosody, rhythm, metre and everything, almost always working on material written before 1900, but my own sense is that what might be more helpful would be more work on how to read and understand modern compositional forms that reflect the media of the printed page in relation to digital forms and compositional practices that have come to play an important part in modern poetry.... I recall Denise Riley telling me that some of her poems with long lines were working with the parameter of the size of the screen she was writing on: the screen and font were shaping the length of the line ... but from Emily Dickinson's page poetics to Olsonian composition in the expanded field of the typed page, into the widespread use of typewriters, xerox machines, laptops and now phones, concrete forms, dirty and clean, use of fonts and page space, the new sentence, the differences between different poetics of white space in lineation and page arrangement etc .... and how all those shake down when poetry is digitised and read on screens... 

at various stages I've contemplated writing a short history of white space in modern poetry from Emily Dickinson and Mallarme onwards.... so as well as neglecting the traditional musicalities of verse and poetry, along with the problems of free verse prosody, aren't we in a long period of neglecting the critical articulation of the page and associated digital forms that are very much part of the medium of modern poetry.... I think much of this is taken for granted by people who read a lot of modern poetry, but totally baffling, silly or nonsensical avant-gardism to people who don't.... 

Drew

On 16/01/2018 09:32, Tilla Brading wrote:

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