Toward a Critical Poetics: The Art of Carl Andre, Dan Graham, and Eva Hesse, 1965-1970

Possible Poems: The Poetics of Carl Andre and Dan Graham, 1959-1969, is a counter-history of the early careers of two artists. While art historians tend to associate Carl Andre with Minimalism and Dan Graham with Conceptual Art, each considered themselves poets before they were visual artists. Both Andre and Graham began their careers writing poetry during a period when high modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams remained vital models. Andre produced mature poems, often in emulation of Pound, starting in the late 1950s. In emulation of Andre and others, Graham began writing and constructing a largely unknown body of poetry in the mid-1960s. "Possible Poems" demonstrates that for Andre, poetry preceded and inspired his sculpture. While historians consider Graham's work as emblematic of the conceptual dematerialization of the late-1960s, "Possible Poems" establishes an alternative narrative-arguing that this work represents a new strain of material poetics, a plastic and objective approach to language and its assembly, that has roots in the poetics of the first half of the century. Grounded in extensive archival research, "Possible Poems" situates Andre and Graham's earliest, often-overlooked work in the specific culture of New York City-in the context of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, the possibilities of new communication technology imagined by Marshall McLuhan's popular media and cybernetic theory in the mid-to-late 1960s, and the rapidly-changing social mores precipitated by the sexual revolution at the end of the decade.