Филологические науки/3.

Теоретические и методологические

проблемы исследования языка

T. Amelina

North Kazakhstan State University named after M. Kozybayev, Kazakhstan

Concrete Poetry – Experimental Typography

What is a concrete poem? It is a term used to describe a kind of experimental poetry emerged simultaneously in Germany, in Sweden and in Brazil in the early 1950s, and then spread to other countries. The Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer and the Brazilian Noigandres poets are considered the founding fathers, who have defined the genre in various essays and manifestos. Concrete poetry reached its peak in the 1960s, and gradually fizzled out in the early-mid 1970s. On his web site John Grandits says that “Concrete poems are poems that use fonts, and shape, and texture, and color, and sometimes motion.” [3]

The term “concrete poetry” was coined by the Noigandres poets in their “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry”. In 1956 an international exhibition was shown in São Paolo, inspired by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. In the 1970s much of the group activity petered out, but individual poets continued working in the vein.

Above all, concrete poetry creatively operates with space as an additional expressive category by arranging words in non-linear patterns across the page. “Concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent”, the Noigandres poets write. Drawing upon both textual and visual models of signification, concrete poetry is thus a hybrid between text and image, and forces readers to oscillate between reading and viewing models.

Concrete poets explore the material dimension of language, its visual, acoustic and semantic aspects. They endeavor to create autonomous linguistic realities, in which the perceptual qualities of the signifiers (the signs) rather than merely the signifields (the concepts they refer to) are emphasized. One of the mainstays of concrete poetry is an emphasis on structure, method, functional construction, and a rejection of subjective expression.

Grandits uses concrete poetry, poetry in which the words have been arranged in such a way as to form images, to both tell and illustrate the story of Jessie, a high school girl who marches to the beat of her own bagpipes. Grandit’s use of letters and words to create images reveal his sly sense of humor and make the reader want to laugh out loud (especially the way he uses the word “bOObs” to illustrate the cheerleaders’ “attributes” in the poem “Pep Rally”). Grandit’s use of one long line of flowing, bouncing text to illustrate the movement of volleyball in “Volleyball Practice” is inspired. His use of unconventional text placement really helps the reader see inside the protagonists head and see what she was thinking as she “wrote” it. Concrete poetry, written by Valerie Bodden, is an analysis of the concrete poetry form, beginning with its origins and history while providing a range of examples through the present day.

Jon Whyte took concrete poetry to a new level. His work is a complex melding of words and visual form, but it is well worth the effort to try to understand. The questions below are designed to provide a common entry point into Jon’s work for students and teachers alike. They can be used to analyze one poem together as a group, or they can be copied and distributed for individual reflection. These questions can be applied to any of the poems in this exhibit to act a springboard into deeper understanding. As you delve deeper, more questions, specific to the poem at hand, will no doubt emerge.

We can note that experimental poetry is not poetry in the usual sense of the word. This type of poetry does not pretend to be easy. Concrete poets skillfully operate with metaphors and can distance us from the essential function of speech; it allows them creativity, the reinvention of the world, fiction, symbolic recreation, and also the destitution of the extant and the pernicious alienation.

There are now so many kinds of experimental poetry being labeled “concrete” that it is difficult to say what the word means. In an article in The Lugano Review (1966), the English critic Mike Weaver, distinguishes three types of concrete poetry: visual (or optic), phonetic (or sound) and kinetic (moving in a visual succession). The sound poem, defined by Weaver as an “auditory succession” in which, “the figure (sound) rises off the ground (silence) producing a configuration of filled time against emptied time”, evolves most obviously from the oral tradition of poetry. The kinetic poem is “a visual succession” in which “the dimensions of the visual figure are extended to produce a temporal configuration only possible by the sense of succession”. [1]

And Mike Weaver sees individual poems within these three classifications as related to either the constructivist or the expressionist tradition in art. The constructivist poem results from an arrangement of materials according to a scheme or system set up by the poet which must be adhered to on its own terms (permutational poems). In the expressionist poem the poet arranges his material according to an intuitive structure.

Concrete poetry is such a poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the meaning of words, rhyme, rhythm, etc. According to Jessica Smith’s Manifest, the poem is a set of topological figures or features, where each poem is a microcosm and words are subject to disintegration, death, and other natural events that individuals of all types face. [4]

We have been around the world with concrete poetry. And if we still don’t know what it is except for some conclusions relating to “pure”, or what may come to be known as “classical” concrete poetry, it is the triumph of the new experimental forms rather than their failure. The day we know exactly what concrete poetry is will be the day we know exactly what poetry is. We have said that the pure concrete poetry extracts from language an essential meaning structure and arranges it in space as an ideogram or a constellation – as a structural word design – within which there are reticulations or play-activity. The concrete poem finds itself isolated in space to make a significance of its given materials as contemporary man finds himself isolated in space to make a significance of his life. The concrete poem, they contend, by liberating words from meaningless, worn-out grammatical connections, cleans up language; and by means of its orderly method, it places a control upon the flow of emotions, thus creating a distance from the poem that allows the poet as man actively perceiving and articulating his experience to examine and consider the quality of his human materials.

New forms of concrete poetry are still being created, such as the interactive and puzzle poetry by Jeniffer Kathleen Phillips. Some of these contain poems within a poem or visual messages triggered by the sound or synergy of the shape of words and letters. And according to Claus Cluver, concrete poetry, whether as visual poetry, sound poetry, or verbivocovisual poetry, embodied the striving for intermediality encountered in all of the arts, responding to and simultaneously shaping a contemporary sensibility that has come to thrive on the interplay of various sign systems in art and life, and for which the attempts at distinguishing between art and non-art are increasingly losing their relevance.

Bibliography

1. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge Mass., 1999)

2. Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes: poems of peace and war (1913-1916). Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980

3. Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry, edited by D.A. Beaulieu. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Housepress, 1999

4. Decio Pignatari, “Concrete Poetry: A Brief Structural-Historical Guideline”, Poetics Today, 3, no.3 (1982)

5. Mary Ellen Solt, “Typography and The Visual Concrete Poem”, Visible Language, 6, (1972)

6. Mike Weaver, “Concrete Poetry”, Journal of Typographic Research, 1 (1981)

7. Noigandres, “A Pilot Plan for the Concrete Poetry”, Sao Paolo, 1958