Illustrating Poetry [DRAFT]

• Cover art and author photographs - e.g. Tim Love
• Accompanying illustration - Around the period of the Georgians, it was quite customary to produce volumes of illustrated verse. The practise lost credibility with the onset of Modernism. Ted Hughes ("River") and Stevie Smith (who saw her line drawings as integral parts of the poems) have used illustration. Beckett's Fizzles (1976) was a collaboration with Jasper Johns. Magazines like Rialto used to have illustrations too. Nowadays illustrated serious poems are likely to be
  • Haiku
  • Poems inspired by paintings
  • In online magazines
• Bordering imagery (William Blake - though his images encroach upon the text sometimes; illuminated manuscripts)
• Using the letters/words as images (Lewis Carroll)
• Integrated word/image - more the province of artists nowadays?
• Computer animation - Peter Howard or Jennifer Ley
• Videos (Tony Harrison's V etc). On Mediolanum (an Italian TV channel) there's a 30-minute poetry program which mixes reading with pop-videos and poetry-videos. MTV's Unplugged and in particular the "United Stated of Poetry" venture (Walcott, Cohen, Rita Dove, etc) were important too. Some shorts are based on poems (e.g. Paul Bush's "The Albatros").
• Books for children - see for example the lavishly illustrated Poetry for Young People: William Carlos Williams by Christopher MacGowan (Editor), Robert Crockett (Illustrator).