Poetry of visual enactment: the concrete poem

Abstract

Abstract The poetry of visual enactment can be traced back to this century's general dissatisfaction with the cognitive structures oflanguage as well as to the distrust of the truth-value of representation; hence it might be viewed as the embodiment of man's search for ‘Truth’. One can explain it by the conviction that sight holds a primacy among the senses as well as with the assumption that the ocular is ‘the sine qua non of truth, its own evidence’ .1 One might link it to the objectivist-concretist impulses born out of the avant-garde ‘revolution of the word’, or treat it simply as a minority technique of free verse prosody punctuated by the regained emphasis on visuality and typography. One might also relate it to the hermetic tradition, to word magic and to the original meaning of the word poet, maker. Indeed, concrete poetry allows all these explanations, histories and theoretical frameworks. But, I am convinced, its most important aspect — the one that is not independent of the above listed ties and connections but rather brings them together into an integral unity — is the performative nature of concrete poetry.