Brook Cottage, the Tomlinson home in Gloucestershire (photograph by Richard Swigg).
George Oppen’s poetry first caught the eye of Charles Tomlinson when he singled out The Materials from a number of books that had been sent to him for review. It was a momentous discovery, leading to a prompt exchange of letters and their first meeting, followed by a steadily deepening friendship that lasted until Oppen’s death in 1984.
Visual poetry is an odd egg: it never seems to extinguish. It continues at the periphery, way back in the corner of our literary eye. Possibly surprising is that many poets around the world have a thriving fascination with text as visual material. Perhaps vispoets stare at words longer than most, but their work is enmeshed in the design elements found in the alphabet and in symbols generally.
Trevor Joyce is an Irish poet whose innovation and creativity constitutes a sustained challenge to the conventions of poetry and reading in Ireland and abroad. Writing and publishing in Ireland since 1967, Joyce has seventeen collections of poetry and is cofounder and coeditor of New Writers’ Press.
