Concrete Poetry: A Brief Structural-Historical Guideline

Abstract

The Chinese 'word,' or ideogram, for red is based on things everyone KNOWS. (Pound 1960:22). Concrete poetry, going beyond the application of ideogrammic process as practiced by Pound, introduces space into the ideogram as a substantive element of poetic structure. In that way a new rhythmic, spatial-temporal reality is created. Traditional linear rhythm is destroyed. If we were to put this in Joycean terms (see Part I of Ulysses), we would say that concrete poetry results from the interaction of the verbal, from the ineluctable modality of the visible and the ineluctable modality of the audible, in a very short space of time through very short times of space. Joyce, like Pound, does not use the blank space of the page as an element of composition. He achieves in each of his famous metaphorwords a small verbivocovisual ideogram, to use his own terminology: silvamoonlake.1 This example also illustrates that panaroma of all flores of speech, which Joyce began in Ulysses, and realized completely in his work of maximum complexity, Finnegans Wake. With reference to spatial achievements, one must cite above all the last, impressive work of Mallarme, Un Coup de D~s (1897). This is the first poetic work consciously and structurally organized according to space-