Visual Poetics and a Play on Shortness

Holly Pester

doi:10.16995/ddl.264

Abstract

This paper investigates how concrete or visual poetry has an inherent 'conceptual quickness'.

Highlights

Eye Glasses A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley
The main point I want to flash with this paper is the way that concrete or visual poetry has a poetics of quickness
This ‘instant’ or ‘flash’ quality is on one hand owing to their function as an image, but is there something more interesting to be said about the tension between reading and seeing in a concrete poem? I’ll start with the Godfather of the Konkrete, Eugen Gomringer, and his book of concrete poems ‘Konstellations’, published in 1963 and translated into English in 1967.2

Summary

Introduction

Eye Glasses A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley. Cutlet A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. They’re brief in terms of shortness but there’s something conceptually quick about them. It’s that minimalism and the objecthood/objectness/objectivity in these texts that positions them as a move towards the concretisation of poetry: to the state where the form of the text = its content.

Results

Conclusion