Multimodal Encounter: Two Case Studies in the Recovery of the Black Signifier

Abstract

Material drawn from a range of archival sources can offer students a fuller experience of poems, poets, and poetry. Print periodicals, individual vol- umes, selected and collected works, anthologies, and digital resources provide different routes to the poet’s corpus, often with contradictory results. When students experience work across several different platforms, encountering different versions of the same poem and the same poet, the attendant discrepancies occasion valuable lessons about literature and lit- erary history. Sometimes, these multimodal encounters offer partial exer- cises in collation, defined as “the process of comparing different manuscripts or editions of the same work” (Baldick 2015, 66). But even comparing different editorial manifestations of the same poem or poet can be quite revealing. Such juxtapositions can also provide considerable advantages for the work of critical interpretation, at the level of the indi- vidual poem, the single volume, and the total output by any given poet.