Graphic Poetry: How To Help Students Get The Most Out Of Pictures

Abstract

Thispaper attempts to give an account of some innovative work in paintings andmodern poetry and to show how modern poets, such as Jane Flanders and AnneSexton, the two American poets in particular, express and develop radically newconventions for their respective arts. Also elaborated are how such changes inartistic techniques are related to profound shifts in intellectual assumptionsand how teachers might be able to help their students get the most out ofpictures in Graphic Poetry class, apart from simply giving the students thedefinitions of the so-called “graphic poetry”. Modernvisual artists advocate the essential principle that art must set aside theconventions of the recent past and find new forms of expressions. Themultiplicity of perspectives, abstraction, and obscurity all characterize theartistic tendencies in the period. Jane Flanders’s “Van Gogh’s Bed” and AnneSexton’s “The Starry Night” will be taken as examples to explain how the majorartists in the period experiment with new forms and advocate theories of artthat still exert influences on our ideas about the value of art. In addition, thepaper also attempts to focus on the development of the central ideas of theModernist period from within the mental world of the artists/poets discussedhere because, in the poet’s/painter’s work, there are clear marks of individualcharacter and temperament. Students can be motivated by these marks in thepainting and then can easily understand the meaning that a poem conveys andthus enjoy the words and images in it.