Филологические науки/3.

Теоретические и методологические

проблемы исследования языка

T. Nazarova

North Kazakhstan State University named after M. Kozybayev, Kazakhstan

Concrete Poetry: Experimentalism and Intermedia Impact of Language

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.”

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.

According to Wikipedia, experimental literature refers to written work that emphasizes innovation, most especially in technique. As it is said in Routledge Companion, experimental literature is irreducibly diverse. Unfettered improvisation and the rigorous application of rules, accidental composition and hyper-rational design, free invention and obsessively faithful duplication, extreme conceptualism and extreme materiality, multimediality and media-specificity, being “born digital” and being hand-made – all of these, and many others, are ways of being experimental in literature.

Artistic experimentation in literature became a prominent force in the 1910s, and American and European writers began experimenting with the given literary forms. Tendencies that formed during that time period later became parts of the modernist movement. The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20^th century. For example, in the Dadaist movement Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes. The futurist author F.T. Marinetti espoused a theory of words in freedom across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his novel Zang Tumb Tumb. The writers and poets associated with the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems and novels.

Experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of writing, some of which eventually filter into the mainstream itself. Experiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself. Sometimes the modifier experimental is used more or less interchangeably with avant-garde, and sometimes innovative. Though the terms function roughly synonymously, there are important nuances of difference in connotation, especially between experimental and avant-garde. Avant-garde begins its career in the military context, but then migrates to the political sphere. Consequently, aesthetic avant-gardism continues to be allied with political radicalism in a number of 20^th and 21^st century literary movements. Experimentalism’s connotations, by contrast, are scientific. Experiment promises to extend the boundaries of knowledge or artistic practice. Strongly associated with modernity, it implies rejection of hide-bound traditions, values and forms. To call literature experimental is in some sense to aspire to compete with science; challenging science’s privileged status in modernity and reclaiming some of the prestige ceded by literature to science since the 19^th century.

In the last third of the 20^th century, avant-garde writers began to express certain reservations about the category experimental, which they viewed as dismissive, a way of segregating innovative literature and preventing it from reaching an audience or infiltrating the mainstream. According to the British novelist B.S. Johnson, experimental to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for unsuccessful. Sukenick’s view is that the term experimental belongs to the ephemeral metalanguage of the publishing industry, where it is used to resolve contradictions between publishing as business enterprise and publishing as culture institution.

In the early 21^st century, many examples of experimental literature reflect the emergence of computers and digital technologies, some of them actually using the medium on which they are reflecting. Such writing is variously referred to electronic literature, hypertext and code poetry. We are living, at the moment, a real historical, societal, technological but also literary mutation. Internet and the digital technologies modify our way to face books, literature, the act of reading and the act of writing. The transition from paper to digital formats is very complex, multiple and fascinating. Internet is a new tool accessible to the writer and the reader, it allows us to incorporate new formats and new materials (audio, image, and video) in the writing processes. The Intermedia is a concept brought to light by Dick Higgins, poet, composer and writer. The essential idea of the Intermedia is based on the utilization of all the medias at the creator’s disposal.

Contemporary electronic code poetry similarly explores the fabric of language. According to Steve Tomasula, code poetry “foregrounds that code is a language, and also that language is a code.” The electronic literature of code poetry and new media is rooted in the technology of its own creation. Code poetry is highly self-conscious, and its aesthetics are concerned with revealing the mechanisms by which it is generated. It is a practice that sees itself as poetry and programming in equal measure. In contrast, new media fiction and poetry, while reliant upon their technological underpinnings and programming foundations, hide such infrastructure. Code poetry, new media literature, and the Futurist impulse to experiment with typography all point towards the potentialities of the visual dimension of language, literature and narrative. Concrete poetry explores not only the visuality of language but also of the page, which becomes a canvas, with white space as much a part of the literary work as words themselves.

While the origins of concrete prose can be found in early novelists such as Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, Joe Bray argues that the fascination with visual form has not abated in 20^th and 21^st century novels, pointing to modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary writers for whom the page is still very much an experimental surface. Similarly, having established the canon of concrete poetry, at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, through recourse to seminal poets such as Stephane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Eugen Gomringer, Joe Bray considers the way in which contemporary poetry might still be influenced by this heritage.

From the beginning of the 20^th century right down to the present, experimentation in literature has taken the form of collaboration across media, or even co-optation of one medium by another; in other cases, it has been more akin to baiting a threatening competitor, poking at this dangerous beast through the bars of its cage to stir it up and see how it reacts.

The present experimental literature of globalization seeks to challenge the forces of cultural and economic globalization, internationalism and capital markets. The proliferation of technology in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries certainly suggests further potentialities for literary innovation. It is logical to assume that an experimental literature of tomorrow (be it in the printed book, on the tablet computer, online, or across media in multiplatform environments) might offer greater participatory pleasures for its reader-users.

Bibliography

1. Calinescu, M. “The Idea of the Avant-Garde”. Duke University Press, 1987

2. Federman, R. “Surfiction – Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction”. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1999

3. Herman, D. “Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative”. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002

4. Sukenick, R. “In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction”. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

5. Weaver, M. “Concrete Poetry”, Journal of Typographic Research, 1, 1981