Concrete Poetry Research Articles

«Маленькая Спарта» Яна Гамильтона Финлея: поэтика артефакта в ландшафтном искусстве

This paper addresses the unique example of landscape art in the second half of the 20th century — the so-called Little Sparta, a park created by Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). In this work, which was in the making for 50 years since 1966, there are certain elements rooted in the long-standing tradition of English landscape gardening; yet, this practice is reconsidered, and incorporates the experience of Conceptual art, as well as Postmodernist irony. Since Finlay was not only an artist but also a writer, the literary component plays a major part in his garden — in particular, the concrete poetry movement that maintained the indivisibility of the text’s message and its appearance. The present paper focuses on the concept of ‘garden poems’ or artifacts, which include objects, inscriptions, and natural surroundings. To create these artifacts, Finlay used the synthesis of various literary and artistic methods. The current paper investigates some of them, such as manipulations with the scale of objects and their material qualities, ways of visual and rhythmic organization of text, principle of vocabulary entry, playing with meanings and sounds of words, philosophical interpretations of everyday items, and searching for palpable forms to illustrate abstract notions. The classical theme of genius loci is of special importance here, as it is rendered unconventionally through ‘signing’ the landscape and positioning ‘focus frames’ within it, to guide the viewer’s eye.

Designed Words: Aesthetics of the Future in Brazilian Concrete Poetry

Designed Words: Aesthetics of the Future in Brazilian Concrete Poetry

Another Dimension: Sweeney Reed's Visual Poetics

Another Dimension:Sweeney Reed's Visual Poetics Brian Reed (bio) The Heide Museum's 2011 exhibition Born to Concrete offered a rare opportunity to survey the history of visual poetry—a "hybrid genre … in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa"—in Australia from the late 1960s onward (Bohn 100). It included a range of mixed and multimedia pieces, including typewritten texts, collages, prints, sculptures, and found objects, and it featured such figures as Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, ΠO, Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch, and Richard Tipping. While some of these individuals are well known in other contexts, Danko for instance as a conceptual artist, the exhibition spotlighted a corpus of lively, creative text-based work largely excluded from surveys of Australian literary history. Reviewing the show for Jacket2, Michael Farrell reported that he felt as if he had entered "another dimension," viewing material that, "despite the overlap with poetry in verse," seemed to "operate" in ways entirely otherwise than Australian literature studied in the academy. Indeed, although the bibliography on visual poetics in other national traditions is extensive, one will find no mention of visual poetry as a genre or practice in field-defining monographs such as Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry (1987), Paul Kane's Australian Poetry (1996), Martin Harrison's Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004), and Philip Mead's Networked Language (2008).1 Farrell also commented that he found Born to Concrete timely and compelling because it spoke to quite contemporary issues and debates within the Australian literary world: "As visual aspects of poetry become more popular there's a real excitement in discovering the visual aspects of poetry's heritage." Subsequent events support this claim. An expanded version of Born to Concrete was put on by the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2013. This second exhibition sought greater regional diversity, for example, showcasing the role of Brisbane's Nicholas Zurbrugg, and it added other important individuals such as Vernon Ah Kee, Eugene Carchesio, Gordon Hookey, and Grant Stevens. A selection of pieces from the revamped Born to Concrete then appeared in a 2014 issue of Australian Poetry Journal along with essays and reminiscences by insider-practitioners. Jaya Savige positively reviewed both the Queensland show and the special journal issue in the Australian, commending them for publicizing a "remarkable," "diverse and energetic" body of work. [End Page 195] This essay continues this process of reassessment and recovery by discussing three works by a central figure in Australian visual poetics, Sweeney Reed (1945–79). Today's younger poets have grown up surrounded by digital technologies, and they are accustomed to communicating multimodally, that is, freely blending text, image, and sound. Unsurprisingly, they no longer feel swayed by once-common arguments that visual poetry is gimmicky or unserious, that, as Wallace Stevens once proclaimed, typographical play and other forms of visual experiment have "nothing to do with being alive," "nothing to do with the conflict between the poet and that of which his poems are made" (168). Reed's poetry may predate the internet era by a quarter century, but it unequivocally demonstrates that the deep attention that humanists have long devoted to print-based texts is just as crucial—and just as rewarding—when applied to hybrid visual-verbal forms of expression.2 ________ The son of the modernist painters Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, Sweeney Reed was adopted at an early age by John and Sunday Reed, art patrons and founders of the Heide Museum. A year spent in London in 1964–65 was transformative. He befriended Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bob Cobbing, participants in the international Concrete Poetry movement, and he worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art during Jasia Reichardt's influential show Between Painting and Poetry. After returning to Australia, he began energetically promoting visually expressive poetry and text-based visual art via galleries that he ran in Melbourne, first in Carlton and later in Fitzroy. He held exhibitions, organized poetry readings, and published broadsides, catalogues, and books under his own imprint. Reed himself was not prolific. As Linda Short explains, his finished works were often the outcome of "long gestation" and "continued notation and...

Travelling into the World of Bilingual (Code-Switching) Concrete Poetry

Abstract The paper examines the complex phenomenon of intermediality, “multimedial transgression”, and “culturally agitating hybridity” resonating and flashing over ages and cultures. It reviews concrete poetry, which may be considered as a real multimedial text with linguistic and pictorial coded aesthetic message, the poetic intention evolving from the mixture of verb and picture. Examining from the aesthetic of reception, code-switching of concrete poetry comes into the focus of the research. We may feel that for a recipient knowing both languages (for the recipient of concrete poetry), it is more advantageous for the speaker combining the expressions of the two languages since one with a mixed language always relates what he would like to say in the language he can express his thoughts more properly. In fact, this is such a code-switching that the recipient may perceive as a single code on the basis of simultaneity of text and picture. The study highlights reading alternatives that concrete poetry offers us as well as the travel it takes us on. By analysing the mode of interpretation, we can observe how visual poems overbalance the conventional linearity of writing, how figurativity becomes equivalent to the text in the course of creating meaning, while reading is guided by the sight of picture, which confirms the sight as well. Thus, language and picture are practically trapped by the calligram. Text (concrete poetry) understanding is described as integrative by the paper, coming into existence as a result of the constant correction and supplement of situational and ephemeral understandings. It considers the hermeneutical circle/spiral of understanding as a travel, which is always unique and not to be repeated.

Bivocalidade científico-poética em uma seleção de poemas de Arnaldo Antunes

Arnaldo Antunes é conhecido por combinar as criações lexicais com recursos gráficos e sonoros, explorando uma linguagem verbi-voco-visual em termos de James Joyce. A poesia concreta, gênero discursivo escolhido pelo autor, transcende os limites das forças criadoras descritas por Bakhtin como a centrípeta, encontrada no poema, e a centrífuga, observada nos campos discursivos e no heterodiscurso do romance, o que permite problematizar a linguagem criativa do poeta que acessa discursos do campo científico por meio de uma arte discursivamente responsiva. Esse artigo tem como objetivos estudar a expressividade em uma seleção de poemas, mapeando os neologismos semânticos sintagmáticos resultantes de uma nova motivação e uso em novos contextos, aliada à noção de signo ideológico e escrutinar discursos relativos aos campos ideológicos, levando em conta a linguagem verbovocovisual.

Vanguarda brasileira: poesia Concreta, Gullar e Mallarmé

A vanguarda Concreta brasileira, surgida em meio à modernidade dos anos 50, resgatou para a cultura nacional um referencial literário importante. Mallarmé influenciou a poesia Concreta e gerou novas descobertas, como as que redundam seja nos poemas verbivocovisuais, seja no inovador trabalho de Ferreira Gullar, que experimenta os limites da poesia em seu poema O formigueiro.---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25094/rtp.2017n23a430

タイポグラフィの分析(4) : タイポグラフィとコンクリート・ポエトリイの関連性について(第19回研究発表大会)

タイポグラフィの分析(4) : タイポグラフィとコンクリート・ポエトリイの関連性について(第19回研究発表大会)

Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971. By Jamie Hilder

Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971. By Jamie Hilder

All down the line: Permutation poetry in three South African journals, 1965–1975

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the literary journals Wurm , Ophir and Izwi published a significant amount of formally experimental poetry by several local as well as a few European writers. This work included the specialised forms of procedural and permutation poetry, which were popular internationally during this time frame, but which also fall into a longer tradition of concrete poetry and related forms. In the following article, I explain these specific forms in relation to a global literary-historical framework. I then provide an overview of all of the permutation and procedural poetry published by these three periodicals within the decade, 1965–1975, and offer a descriptive analysis of the texts concerned. Keywords: South African poetry, constrained poetry, procedural poetry, experimental literature, South African literary journals

Kinetic Art

ABSTRACTFrom 1962 to 1966 the author was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. During this period awareness of Kinetic Art grew nationally and internationally. Two student-run magazines – Granta and Image – became important platforms for dissemination of information and critical discourse about Kinetic Art in the context of other avant-garde developments. Having met several pioneers in the field in Paris before University, the author soon made contact with Professor Richard Gregory in the Experimental Psychology Department of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory with whom he then collaborated. He worked closely also with Mike Weaver, an academic in the English Literature faculty, who initiated the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Kinetic and Phonetic Poetry at St Catharine’s College in November 1964. They infused the Cambridge context with influences in Concrete Poetry and Kinetic Art from elsewhere. This article describes this period of early experimentation and reflects briefly on its legacy.

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACTThis article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.

The Event in John Latham and Bob Cobbing

ABSTRACTThis article documents some examples of the event-responsive poetry of the British poet Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) and compares it to the unique theory of the event structure developed by British sculptural and conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006). It establishes points of intersection between their practices, and particularly at the level of aesthetics where very little comparative work exists. While both men are best known for their experimental 1960s work (Cobbing in relation to sound and concrete poetry, and Latham in relation to conceptual art) this article focusses on their earlier work as being preparatory to their later, more developed practice. Artistic affinities are contextualized in relation to World War II, the dialectic of romantic and classical art, and the institution of welfare-capitalism. How poet and artist both visually represented time (drawing on scientific discourses to do so) is further identified as a link between their practices.

The Effect of Science Lessons Utilizing Concrete Poetry on the Primary School Students’ Science Academic Achievement and Science Learning Attitudes

The Effect of Science Lessons Utilizing Concrete Poetry on the Primary School Students’ Science Academic Achievement and Science Learning Attitudes

Looking Back while Moving Forward: The Case of Concrete Poetry and Sankofa

There are symbols in African oral literature that share connections with concrete poetry. Exploring the potential of this relationship will improve conventional understanding of concrete poetry while underscoring the versatility of African oral literature.

Sea Change by F. Viva

Viva, Frank. Sea Change. Toon Books, 2016.What kid ever wants to be shipped off to some old relative’s place for the summer? Well, if you read any juvenile literature the answer is, of course, almost none. And Eliot is no exception.At first glance, Point Aconi, Nova Scotia does seem an unlikely place to have the ‘great time’ that Eliot’s mother claims he’ll have. There’s the offhanded old great-uncle and his mangy old dog, a rag-tag bunch of kids, some who have issues, the very unappealing food (tongue and onions or pickled pigs feet) and having to work on a fishing boat, all of which seem like a nightmare come to life.But, as in most of these kinds of novels, Eliot comes to love and appreciate the unique locale, care about the quirky kids who live there, and adapt to local ways. His growing maturity is evident when he takes on a local bully and helps him get a job. He also figures out the best way to help his new best friend, Beth, who is being physically abused by her father.Despite the predictability of some of the storylines, the strengths of the story are found in the strong sense of place and the various characters who live there. Viva is an author, illustrator and designer with several picture books to his credit and certainly, the quality of the book’s production is high with many artsy, retro-style illustrations and text formatting that is reminiscent of concrete poetry. The text flows and bends to highlight Eliot’s thoughts and observations, making the book all that more interesting.This short illustrated novel should find an audience with middle grade readers who like stories with interesting characters. The Canadian context makes this attractive for classroom use, too.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReview: Tammy FlandersTammy is the Reference Coordinator in the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources at the University of Calgary. She also reviews juvenile resources with an eye to classroom use in her blog, Apples with Many Seeds.

‘A Stone Within’: Visual Poetry & Wellbeing in the work of Alec Finlay and Thomas A. Clark

Thomas A. Clark is a poet and visual artist, born in Greenock in 1944. His work is characterized by its concentration on form, its attention to the materiality of language, and its focus on the natural world. His visually innovative poetry has been associated with a variety of movements and genres including the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s and, more recently, the resurgence in writing about the environment referred to as the New Nature Writing. In addition to publishing more traditional page poetry, Clark produces work in a wide variety of media – from folded paper forms to large-scale installations, sound works and prints. Additionally, Clark and his wife Laurie were among the first artists to open ‘artist run spaces’ in Britain, having run the Cairn Gallery since 1986. One poet regularly displayed in the Cairn Gallery is Alec Finlay (1966 –), whose work, like Clark’s, uses innovative form as a means through which to encounter the natural world. In particular, Finlay works with variations on sets of objects over time: nest-boxes, cloth tape, and botanic labels all make an appearance in his work, alongside neon and new technology.

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price

Reviewed by: The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price Rebecca Kosick Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968. Northwestern UP, 2014. 272 pp. In The Object of the Atlantic, Rachel Price develops an historically-rooted theory of "concretude" that takes shape in the Atlantic region between empire and globalization. Through readings of writers such as José Marti, Joaquim de Sousândrade, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete poets and artists, Price demonstrates how a shared aesthetic interest in concretude alternately mirrors, engages, and anticipates economic shifts from objects to networks. The book's definition of its central theme is wide-ranging, moving between spectrums that include the endpoints of material and immaterial, presence and absence, "thingly" and virtual. Within these categories is further variety still. Objects are contrasted to networks, processes, dematerialization, and voids, and they are paired with materiality, commodities, products, and the everyday remnants of material culture, among other things. Materiality, in turn, sometimes refers to the fact of these various objects as depicted in writing and other times refers to the materiality of writing itself. The materiality of writing includes written form, as in Price's discussion of a "signature use of colons" in Martí's late-nineteenth-century New York chronicles. Price describes how Martí's chronicles, a series of newspaper articles written by the Cuban poet while living in New York City, "juggle distant geographies and carefully modulated paces, miming the global operation of capital" (53). She argues that, in these chronicles, frequent and unorthodox use of colons "visually string together far-flung places and times into a delicately connected whole—a concrete diagram" (53). Just as the chronicles "mime" global capital, the colons create a diagram-like effect. Later, Price describes how their "form enacts the culture of the stock market: harried, pitching, linking far and near through the exchange of commodities—made equivalent, as the colons make chunks equivalent" (55; emphasis added). The materiality of writing here is thus a formal and visual strategy that serves to imitate an extratextual material reality. Later, Price pushes back against a dominant reading of mid-twentieth-century Brazilian concrete poetry that suggests the movement's aesthetics were straightforwardly reflective of "the euphoric national developmentalism characteristic of the era of President Juscelino Kubitschek" (166). Instead, Price shows that what concrete poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and Haroldo de Campos called "'ultimate' or 'total' realism" had specifically to do with "a desire to make word equal thing" (167). Here, she argues that the materiality of writing is not a visual and formal "representation of external reality but reality itself" (167) and makes the case for prescient links between concrete poetry and the coming rise of "a more networked, more virtual, and more extensive capitalism" (21). Though the neoconcrete movement that formed in (somewhat antagonistic) response to concrete poetry and art accused concrete poetry of "a naïve fidelity to a scientific objectivity that conflated antilyrical anti-expressionism with a fetishizing of objecthood," [End Page 539] Price argues that concrete poetry already showed an interest in the pairing of the material and immaterial that would predate later moves away from the objectual and toward the processual in neoconcretism as well as in the poema/processo movement that coincided with the dawning digital age. A careful revealing of this type of insight—one in which literature anticipates coming aesthetic and political-economic shifts—is one of The Object of the Atlantic's strongest claims. And the book's meticulous, historical exploration of transatlantic networks of power juxtaposed with close readings of the region's aesthetic output helpfully reveals further ways aesthetic concretude relates to extraaesthetic reality. One example would be Price's address of the complex relationship between Spain and Latin America as it engages questions of objecthood and subjecthood at turn of the twentieth century. Resisting the persistent divide between Latin American and Penninsular studies, her discussion of Spanish critic and theorist Ramiro de Maeztu shows how Cuba's "independence (or loss) is but one event in a dense web of multiple, interrelated movements throughout the...

Paying Homage

Paying Homage Iris Lee Stoler (bio) Woman at the Cusp of Twilight Daniel Shapiro Dos Madres Press www.dosmadres.com/shop/woman-at-the-cusp-of-twilight-by-daniel-shapiro/ 112 Pages; Print, $17.00 Reading Daniel Shapiro's Woman at the Cusp of Twilight is similar to leafing through someone's family photo album. Most of the subjects are no longer living, and the chronology is mixed up, but the faces (and stories behind them) are inviting and real. This gives pleasure. Shapiro introduces his poetic tribute to his maternal relations with a family tree, which for me, was both positive and negative. I began by scrupulously referring back to it as I read each poem, bookmark at the ready, wanting to orient myself to all the relationships and events in their lives. However, at about one-third of the way through, I decided this method was keeping me from appreciating each poem on its own merits. And there are many merits. This book differs from Shapiro's previous book of poems, The Red Handkerchief (2014), which is lyrical and imagistic and strongly first-person. That book does contain several poetic odes to family members, but the poems dwell mostly on romantic and sexual themes. (One, "Your Name Means 'Forever'," is reminiscent of Cavafy in its elegiac, nostalgic quality.) In this book, Shapiro, as curator of this family portrait, modestly conceals the "I" for the sake of leading the reader into the lives of the characters. The voice is more-or-less evenly divided between omniscient distant narrator and direct address to an individual. The work is nicely varied; there are ten concrete poems (a wine glass, Coney Island parachute, a potato, among others), several dramatic monologues, and one ekphrastic piece ("Abe, Cast in Sepia"). Most poems focus on Shapiro's parents, aunts and uncles; a few on his grandparents; and one (a sad tale of a dead child) invokes his great grandparents. Aging, dreams deferred and eventually renounced (his mother's dance career), sibling issues, marriage, and one unhappy divorce: these are some of his subjects. In "So Much in Love" Shapiro directly addresses his mother about her lost career. He addressed this more successfully in the poem "Dance" in The Red Handkerchief, where his lineation and language fly; here the language and structure are flatter, filled with not-so-interesting details. I found this so in a minority of other poems where he seems to want to give information by "reminding" the recipient of the poem of past events. When this happens, it takes precedence over his usual concern with sight and sound, as in "Max and the Memory of Elke." But now on to all the good stuff. Concrete poetry is so tricky. It can so easily turn to visual kitsch. Shapiro's concrete poems are delightful. "The Cemetery at Torrey Pines," which contains the line that is the title of the book, is a tree-trunk-shaped description of his mother at the grave of her mother. The last line makes subtle reference once again to his mother's aborted dance career: It's the treethat appears to be dancing, rooted butswaying with abandon in the breeze. [End Page 20] "Parachute Jump" attempts perhaps a bit too much, but the unpunctuated, free-floating (pun intended) lines relate perfectly to the subject matter. (Full disclosure: I grew up in Coney Island; partiality is possible here.) Shapiro is excellent in matching his lineation and metrics to his subject matter. The abrupt short lines in "Hannah" appropriately signify the drama, tension and tragedy of the story. "The Peach Tree" is a memory piece which needs to be read out loud to get the benefit of the tempo: That branch jutting over the fenceladen with fruit— but when he looks back, no one's there,only the tangy scent of peacheshangs in the air. "Rhapsody in the Sun (Esther's Dream)" is all about Grandma meeting up with George Gershwin, and appropriately, the language swings: Scintillations. Above the water,pale-green willows hung their long hair down. It's all lovely –until the turn: Because the unbenign presence growing insidecrowded out...

Somut Şiir Bağlamında Tarık Günersel’in Şiirleri

Somut Şiir Bağlamında Tarık Günersel’in Şiirleri

Jamie Hilder. Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971.

Jamie Hilder. Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971.