From Mallarmé to Bernstein and on, creative producers have for their own reasons sought to terrestrialise the <<blancs>> of the page. Exploring spatiality, this paper takes its cue from T.S. Eliot’s concluding remarks in ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’: ‘there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos’ (Eliot 1965: 189). Eliot’s final clause—chaos—is mobilised here as generative and excursive, a strategy which can open heterotopic sites to problematise the horizontality of the poetic line.
Dan Disney
Dan Disney currently teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul. He is the editor of Exploring Second Language Creative Writing -- Beyond Babel (John Benjamins, 2014), and is completing a book of villanelles. Forthcoming books include Report from a border (co-devised with graphic artist John Warwicker), and Writing to the Wire (co-edited with Kit Kelen).
