Jennifer Scappettone on International Visual and Concrete Poetry

Join Jennifer Scappettone, poet and Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, as she reflects on international poetry movements as context for works on view in Tang Chang: The Painting that is Painted with Poetry Is Profoundly Beautiful.

Tang Chang pioneered a new style of visual poetry in his native Thailand, often repeating words and phrases drawn from his observations of daily life. The resulting poem-drawings have a visual relationship to the Concrete Poetry produced in the middle of the 20th century in South America and Europe and Japan. 

FREE, open to all. 

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone’s work blends scholarly research, translation, and the literary, visual and performing arts. She is the author of the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2017), and of the critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her translations of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in an award-winning volume called Locomotrix (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Visual poems of hers have been installed and performed by dancers and musicians at locations ranging from WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, to Trajan’s aqueduct in Rome, to Fresh Kills Landfill. She is an associate professor at the University of Chicago.