ABSTRACT
Not all poetry confines itself to printed words surrounded by blank white space on a page. In performance, and even in modest readings of poems on the radio or in live performance, there is more than one mode in operation (sounds, speech, movement, gesture, etc.). Furthermore, there is a long tradition of poems being presented alongside illustrations, drawings, paintings, photographs and other highly visual modes of expression. This chapter looks at what kinds of affordances are available when poetry works alongside other modes in a range of different media. Some of the history of the relationship between poems and images will be explored: not only poems alongside illustrations but also the visual dimension of poetry itself. An exemplary account of poems operating in a cross-cultural multimodal format is discussed, and the transformation from written poetic text through libretto, musical composition and dance is traced through works by Milton, Handel and Mark Morris. Contemporary artworks are also used to convey the possibilities of explicit multimodal practice.
