The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art

This chapter will examine connections between prose poetry and the visual arts, focusing principally on modern and contemporary French poetry, but including comparisons with other European and North American texts. It will argue, first, that writers of prose poems have frequently also responded to the visual arts, from Baudelaire, Rilke, Reverdy, and Stein, for instance, to Ponge, Ashbery and twenty-first-century writers. Second, it will propose that despite those affinities, responses by the poets to particular artists or works of plastic art often took the form of poetic prose, essays, or verse poetry rather than prose poems. The influence of French writers on the development of the prose poem outside France is well known; the chapter will additionally investigate whether the cross-linguistic influences that operate in more than one direction between French and other poetic traditions are also associated with the writers’ responses to visual arts. Finally, the paper will consider an example of a contemporary multi-lingual artist-poet (Alessandro De Francesco, b. 1981) who is investigating what happens to the poem-art-object in the contemporary digital age.