Concrete poetry
Encyclopedia
Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry
in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.
It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry
, a term that has evolved to have distinct meaning of its own, but which shares the distinction of being poetry in which the visual elements are as important as the text.
, by the group Noigandres (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos
, Décio Pignatari and Ronaldo Azeredo) with the poets Ferreira Gullar and Wlademir Dias Pino. Two years later, a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published. One of the earliest Brazilian pioneers, Augusto de Campos
, has assembled a Web site of old and new work (see external links below), including the manifesto. Its principal tenet is that using words as part of a specifically visual work allows for the words themselves to become part of the poetry, rather than just unseen vehicles for ideas. The original manifesto says:
Although the term is modern, the idea of using letter arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem is an old one. This style of poetry originated in Greek Alexandria
during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Some were designed as decoration for religious art-works, including wing-, axe- and altar-shaped poems. Only a handful of examples survive, which are collected together in the Greek Anthology
. They include poems by Simias and Theocritus
. Early examples of typographically based concrete poetry include the following poem by George Herbert
(1593–1633) (here in a scan of the 1633 edition of Herbert's The Temple), in which the poem is merely a comment on the title, which presents the poem's principal meaning typographically:
Another early precursor from Herbert is "Easter Wings", in which the overall typography of the poem is in the shape of its subject. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
contains a similar effect in the form of the mouse's "Tale
", which is in the shape of a tail. In the early 20th century, artists and poets comprising the Futurism
movement used concrete poetry as a dynamic expression of their anarchistic philosophies. F. T. Marinetti
was the most prolific poet among them, and created several works that destroyed all typographic conventions. More recent poets sometimes cited as influences by concrete poets include Guillaume Apollinaire
, E. E. Cummings
, for his various typographical innovations, and Ezra Pound
, for his use of Chinese
ideogram
s, as well as various dada
ists. Concrete poetry, however, is a more self-conscious form than these predecessors, using typography in part to comment on the fundamental instability of language. Among the better known concrete poets in the English language
are Ian Hamilton Finlay
, Dom Sylvester Houédard
and Edwin Morgan. A well-known concrete poets are András Petöcz
in the Hungarian language
and Joan Brossa
in the Catalan language
. Several important concrete poets have also been significant sound poets
, among them Henri Chopin
, Ernst Jandl
, and Bob Cobbing
.
Another precursor to concrete poetry is Micrography
, a technique for creating visual images by Hebrew-speaking artists who create pictures using tiny arrangements of Biblical texts organized usually on paper in images which illustrate the text used. As noted in the entry, micrography allows the creation of images of natural objects by observant Jews without directly breaking the prohibition of creating "graven images" that might be interpreted as idolatry
. The technique is now used by both religious and secular artists and reportedly is also used by Arabic writer-artists.
The French poet Pierre Guarnieri, collaborating with the Japanese poet Seiichi Niikuni
, also used the term spatiality in relation to concrete poetry, implying that the white space between words also holds meaning. Mechanic, phonetic, semantic and visual poetry also approach the idea of concrete poetry. Poets emphasized that language is not only a means of communication, but that language also has a material dimension.
New forms of concrete/visual poetry are still being created, such as the interactive and puzzle poetry by Jennifer 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.
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.
It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry
Visual poetry
Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. It is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry, and at one time was synonymous with it.Visual poetry was heavily...
, a term that has evolved to have distinct meaning of its own, but which shares the distinction of being poetry in which the visual elements are as important as the text.
Development
The term was coined in the 1950s. In 1956 an international exhibition of concrete poetry was shown in São Paulo, BrazilBrazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, by the group Noigandres (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos
Haroldo de Campos
Haroldo de Campos was a Brazilian poet, critic, and translator. He did his secondary education at the College of St. Benedict, where he learned the first foreign language, like Latin, English, Spanish and French...
, Décio Pignatari and Ronaldo Azeredo) with the poets Ferreira Gullar and Wlademir Dias Pino. Two years later, a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published. One of the earliest Brazilian pioneers, Augusto de Campos
Augusto de Campos
Augusto de Campos is a Brazilian writer who was a founder of the Concrete poetry movement in Brazil. He is also a translator, music critic and visual artist....
, has assembled a Web site of old and new work (see external links below), including the manifesto. Its principal tenet is that using words as part of a specifically visual work allows for the words themselves to become part of the poetry, rather than just unseen vehicles for ideas. The original manifesto says:
- Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history — taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.:
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Some were designed as decoration for religious art-works, including wing-, axe- and altar-shaped poems. Only a handful of examples survive, which are collected together in the Greek Anthology
Greek Anthology
The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature...
. They include poems by Simias and Theocritus
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...
. Early examples of typographically based concrete poetry include the following poem by George Herbert
George Herbert
George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in...
(1593–1633) (here in a scan of the 1633 edition of Herbert's The Temple), in which the poem is merely a comment on the title, which presents the poem's principal meaning typographically:
Another early precursor from Herbert is "Easter Wings", in which the overall typography of the poem is in the shape of its subject. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures...
by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
contains a similar effect in the form of the mouse's "Tale
The Mouse's Tale
"The Mouse's Tale" is a concrete poem by Lewis Carroll which appears in his novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Though no formal title for the poem is given in the novel, the chapter title refers to "A Long Tale" and the Mouse introduces it by saying, "Mine is a long and sad tale!"-Concrete...
", which is in the shape of a tail. In the early 20th century, artists and poets comprising the Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
movement used concrete poetry as a dynamic expression of their anarchistic philosophies. F. T. Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...
was the most prolific poet among them, and created several works that destroyed all typographic conventions. More recent poets sometimes cited as influences by concrete poets include Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
, E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
, for his various typographical innovations, and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, for his use of Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
ideogram
Ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s, as well as various dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ists. Concrete poetry, however, is a more self-conscious form than these predecessors, using typography in part to comment on the fundamental instability of language. Among the better known concrete poets in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
are Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.-Biography:Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside...
, Dom Sylvester Houédard
Dom Sylvester Houédard
Dom Sylvester Houédard , also known under the acronym dsh, was a Benedictine priest, theologian and noted concrete poet.- Life :Born on Guernsey, Houédard was educated at Jesus College, Oxford...
and Edwin Morgan. A well-known concrete poets are András Petöcz
András Petöcz
András Petőcz is a Hungarian writer and poet -Life:Petőcz began his career in literary life in 1981. He was the chief editor for over two years of the art periodical Jelenlét ., which was published by the Faculty of Humanities at the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest, and soon became...
in the Hungarian language
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
and Joan Brossa
Joan Brossa
Joan Brossa i Cuervo Joan Brossa i Cuervo Joan Brossa i Cuervo (Barcelona, Catalonia,(1919–1998) was a Catalan poet in the Catalan language, playwright, graphic designer and plastic artist. He was one of the founders of both the group and the publication known as Dau-al-Set (1948) and one of the...
in the Catalan language
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
. Several important concrete poets have also been significant sound poets
Sound poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...
, among them Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin was an avant-garde poet and musician.-Life:Henri Chopin was a French practitioner of concrete and sound poet, well-known throughout the second half of the 20th century...
, Ernst Jandl
Ernst Jandl
Ernst Jandl was an Austrian writer, poet, and translator.- Poetry :Influenced by Dada he started to write experimental poetry, first published in the journal "Neue Wege" in 1952....
, and Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival.-Early life:...
.
Another precursor to concrete poetry is Micrography
Micrography
Micrography , also called microcalligraphy, is a Jewish form of calligrams developed in the 9th century, with parallels in Christianity and Islam, utilizing minute Hebrew letters to form representational, geometric and abstract designs...
, a technique for creating visual images by Hebrew-speaking artists who create pictures using tiny arrangements of Biblical texts organized usually on paper in images which illustrate the text used. As noted in the entry, micrography allows the creation of images of natural objects by observant Jews without directly breaking the prohibition of creating "graven images" that might be interpreted as idolatry
Idolatry
Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...
. The technique is now used by both religious and secular artists and reportedly is also used by Arabic writer-artists.
The French poet Pierre Guarnieri, collaborating with the Japanese poet Seiichi Niikuni
Seiichi Niikuni
was a Japanese poet and painter. He was one of the foremost pioneers of the international avant-garde concrete poetry movement, creating works of calligraphic, visual and aural poetry...
, also used the term spatiality in relation to concrete poetry, implying that the white space between words also holds meaning. Mechanic, phonetic, semantic and visual poetry also approach the idea of concrete poetry. Poets emphasized that language is not only a means of communication, but that language also has a material dimension.
New forms of concrete/visual poetry are still being created, such as the interactive and puzzle poetry by Jennifer 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.
See also
- Altar poemAltar poemAn Altar Poem is any type of poetry where the characters, words, and lines have been written in such a way that when looked at as a whole, the poem forms an outline that is easily recognizable to the reader. The object that is outlined must be related to the poetry and usually gives more meaning...
- Carmina figurataCarmina figurataCarmen figuratum is a poem that has a certain shape or pattern formed either by all the words it contains or just by certain ones therein...
- Haptic poetryHaptic PoetryHaptic poetry, like visual poetry and sound poetry, is a liminal art form combining characteristics of typography and sculpture to create objects not only to be seen, but to be touched and manipulated...
- Lyco artPaul HartalPaul Hartal is a Canadian painter and poet, born in Szeged, Hungary. He has created the term "Lyrical Conceptualism" to characterize his style in both painting and poetry, and has created a manifesto to describe his thesis....
- List of concrete and visual poets
- Something Else PressSomething Else PressSomething Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
- Digital poetryDigital poetryDigital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers...
- CalligramCalligramA calligram is a poem, phrase, or word in which the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting is arranged in a way that creates a visual image. The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem...
- TextbaseTextbaseTextbase is a collective of writers and artists in Melbourne, Australia that have been producing collaborative artworks in text and visual arts since 1996. The group has been advancing an avant-garde poetics and art practice since its inception. In 1998 Textbase ventured into small press publishing...
- Line (poetry)Line (poetry)A line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided, which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or clauses in sentences...
Further reading
- Higgins, DickDick HigginsDick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
: Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. State University of New York, 1987 - Robert G. Warnock and Roland Folter: "The German Pattern Poem", in: Festschrift Detlev Schumann, Munich 1970, pp. 40–73
- Medium-Art, Selection of Hungarian Experimental Poetry, editors Zoltan Frater and Andras PetoczAndrás PetöczAndrás Petőcz is a Hungarian writer and poet -Life:Petőcz began his career in literary life in 1981. He was the chief editor for over two years of the art periodical Jelenlét ., which was published by the Faculty of Humanities at the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest, and soon became...
, published by Magveto, 1990, Budapest, ISBN 963-14-1680-1
External links
- Concrete Poetry: A World View by Mary Ellen Solt on UbuWeb, which hosts a large amount of concrete poetry
- Spidertangle: International mail list of visual & concrete poetry
- The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry
- Visual Poetry in El Taller de Zenón
- Ancient Greek pattern poems
- Concrete-Visual Poems in the WWW. Selected and Indexed by Michael P. Garofalo