Peter Dukes is a writer-artist, with degrees in Fine Art from Central St Martins (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MA). He is a member of academic staff at University of Westminster, London.
His practice includes gallery and online exhibitions, curating, publication, readings, conference presentations and screenings. His work and focus has shifted from visual and media arts to engage directly with poetry and textual art. His PhD research examines visuality and poetics in an expanded field.
He began his practice-based doctoral research in October 2017 (part-time).
Thesis title: Visuality and poetics in an expanded field – visualist practice, theory and audiences in late modernist poetry.
The term ‘visual poetry’ (together with related terms, such as graphic poetry) is an established descriptor, but has been applied to a varied range of practices. For the most part these have been closely related to concrete poetry, and tending to subsume the poetic beneath the visual. This research aims at restoring a balance between the two terms, and explores the possibility of devising a more encompassing theory of visual prosody than is currently available. The following questions develop the project aims:
- What constitutes a rigorous visual poetics in the expanding field of late modernist and current practices – a field in which poetic work engages with a wide variety of formats, sites and outputs?
- How can practical creative work in visual poetics embody a revised theory of graphic prosody?
- Can a toolkit be developed for future practitioners and researchers in graphic prosody, locating this within a fully expanded and networked field of visual poetries?
- What orders and categories can contain the diversity of practices in visual poetics, providing a flexible and encompassing taxonomy of visualist poetries?
This is a practice-based project, which includes the production of poetry which engages with visuality; the curating of visual poetries by others, for public display and critical framing; the study of prosody and poetics; examination of the affordances given to poetry through graphic layout, typography, sequential form, image/object-juxtaposition (or integration); visual and media arts practices which include text (these are diverse); the intertextual and the paratextual.
Supervisors: Dr Ahren Warner and Dr Eleanor Morgan