Sounding Stigma: Graphic Poetry, Mysticism in the Flesh, and the Marked Body

This dissertation assembles an eclectic group of artists and theorizes the “graphic” textures of their work. I distinguish “graphic” poems from simply visual experimental ones, in that graphic poets describe their compositional process as violently marking or “stigmatizing” language. From textual collages to blotted and dismembered words to slashed lyrical lines—these broken forms register violence against racially and sexually stigmatized bodies, re-presenting literally unspeakable scenes. Furthermore, as graphic poets insist, these textual swatches are meant to be heard as well as seen. When read aloud, graphic poems summon the stammers of the dead, sonically translating stigmatized forms into syncopated rhythms. I theorize the rhythmic contagions of graphic poems as plural performances of what Fred Moten calls “mysticism in the flesh” in which the vulnerability and volatility of embodied encounter can yield generative kinships.