Concrete Poetry Research Articles

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECT-BASED LEARNING THAT UTILIZES SHAPE POEM TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING VOCABULARY IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

In the 21st century, the evolving educational landscape demands innovative approaches to foster skills beyond mere understanding. Project-based learning, emphasizing authentic experiences and the development of 6C skills, emerges as a fitting model. This study explores the impact and teachers’ perception of project-based learning by utilizing the shape poem technique on vocabulary mastery among fifth-grade students at SD Laboraturium Undiksha Singaraja, a school aspiring to bilingual status.Theoretical frameworks draw on the aesthetic appreciation of poem, emphasizing its visual representation. Insights from various studies underscore the effectiveness of project-based learning in improving academic achievement and attitudes, particularly in language acquisition. The shape poem technique, a subset of concrete poetry, aligns with young learners' preferences for creative and enjoyable approaches.The research methodology employs a mixed-method design involving quantitative assessments and qualitative insights. Statistical analyses reveal significant improvements in vocabulary mastery through pre-and post-tests, supporting the efficacy of project-based learning with the shape poem technique. Teachers' perspectives, as elucidated through questionnaires and interviews, emphasize the positive impact on students' vocabulary mastery. They express confidence in its suitability for young learners, fostering motivation, creativity, and real-world language application. The teachers envision sustained benefits and anticipate continued application in the future, reinforcing the belief that students will experience lasting growth and development through enjoyable, authentic, and meaningful learning.In conclusion, the implementation of project-based learning by utilizing shape poem technique proves to significantly enhance students' vocabulary mastery. Teachers' perceptions affirm its effectiveness and potential for future applications, heralding a positive shift in language education paradigms

Information poetics: communication and combinatorics in concrete poetry

ABSTRACT While Max Bense advocated information aesthetics primarily in his theoretical works, many Concrete poets applied the principles of information theory and modern communications technologies to their poetry, whether or not they explicitly embraced Bense’s analytical framework. As Eugen Gomringer (the ‘father’ of German-language Concrete poetry) wrote in his manifesto ‘from line to constellation’: ‘our languages are in the process of formal simplification. reduced, terse forms are emerging’. But Concrete poetry was notable not only for its concision, or for the visual and spatial emphases generally said to characterise it; rather, many Concrete poets also employed algorithmic or combinatoric methods or used repetition and variation in ways that mirrored the functions of redundancy and entropy in Claude Shannon’s theory of communication. With Bense’s information aesthetics as background, this essay will explore how the concept of information shaped the practice of these Concrete poets.

Homage to the square: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

ABSTRACT Started by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Jessie McGuffie in 1962, the little magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. – along with the Wild Hawthorn Press which launched in 1961 – was an influential (and combative) presence within the small press milieu of the 1960s. Both magazine and press displayed a ‘constructive’ sensibility that encompassed geometric abstract painting, Russian constructivism, Op art, and concrete poetry. This constructive aesthetic often appeared in the context of relatively ‘square’ themes – teapots and old tired horses – that in the countercultural climate of liberated mind and body, seemed quaint. ‘Square’ therefore denotes a tendency toward the orthogonal (as opposed the curvilinear) and a sense of propriety that is deliberately unhip. In both cases, the ‘square’ nature of POTH was a critical incitement aimed at the Dionysian excesses of contemporary poetry, art and the Mimeo Revolution that propagated them.

Wittgenstein’s Conception of Translation in His Later Philosophy of Language as an Approach to Cummings’s Untranslatable Concrete Poetry

E.E. Cummings’s concrete poetry raises the canonical problem of poetic untranslatability. It is commonly accepted that a poem is constituted as a unity of form and content, and any change in the form of a poem results in the loss of the poetic value and, eventually, translation failure. Two basic approaches have been proposed regarding the untranslatability of Cummings’s concrete poetry: mimicry and equivalence of effect. However, the former is impractical, and the latter is an indirect one. This paper proposes employing Wittgenstein’s conception of translation in his later philosophy of language to solve the question of the untranslatability of Cummings’s concrete poetry. By analysing three of Cummings’s concrete poems ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’, ‘mOOn Over tOwns mOOn’, and ‘Buffalo Bill’s’, this study suggests that poetry is translatable in the sense that the same language-game in the source text (ST) can be played in the target text (TT) by reconstruction or invention.

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

LETTERS ON THE PAGE AND ON THE SCREEN: CONCRETE POETRY AND “MOVIES OF WORDS” BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE POEM BY BPNICHOL

The article discusses two texts by the Canadian poet Barry Phillip Nichol (known under the pseudonym bpNichol): the poem Evening’s Ritual from 1967, printed in the collection of visual poems Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1967), and the poem Letter from 1984, included in the digital work First Screening (1984). The 1967 text belongs to the tradition of concrete poetry, while the 1984 text is closer to the art of cinema and electronic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Importantly, the 1984 text attempts to translate the 1967 text into the digital realm, as the content of the texts is identical. The researcher highlights the difference in the performative realizations of the same statement. The author notes that in the case of the poems Evening’s Ritual and Letter from the collection First Screening, the intended meaning can be identified not so much with the proposition as with the performative effect produced on the recipient. In other words, the meaning is realized primarily in the realm of the pragmatics of artistic communication rather than semantics. By exploring the performative effect, the author suggests finding it in the structure of “scriptural imagination” (J. McGann), the preconception of the experience of writing, and notes the difference in configurations of imagination in both texts. While the printed text of Evening’s Ritual allows the reader to be a co-author of the statement, the digital text of Letter excludes the reader from the process of meaning-making.

The Specter of Sartre in Brazilian Concrete Poetry: Paideuma, Affect, Politics, and the Question of World Literature

ABSTRACT: This essay returns to Brazilian concrete poetry's origins and conception of the paideuma. It does so in order to unearth the cardinal, yet underestimated legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre for the Noigandres group's conception of poetic form, literary engagement, and world literature. Drawing on their theoretical writings as well as those of Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Oswald de Andrade, Ernest Fenollosa and Pound, I illustrate how the French thinker configured a matrical part of what the poets deemed the cultural-morphological process. Third, against the grain of the numerous critiques that have shortchanged the concretes' participatory experiments, the essay endeavors to throw light over the intervening power of their political poetics, concluding with an assessment of Haroldo de Campos's "poemalivro," Servidão de passagem (1962). By way of a return to antropofagia, the ideogram, and the Poundian paideuma, I show how Campos's breakthrough shatters "the Sartrean dilemma" and alters the theory and practice of committed literature, configuring itself as a generative, constellatory, and mediational praxis for counterconstructing the present (H. Campos, "Respuesta" 43).

Plasticity and the Poetics of Inside-Out Inversion in Emmett Williams and Roman Stańczak

Informed by the current call for a reassessment of the concepts of radicalism and extremity in the fields of literature and visual arts, my study aims to investigate the radicalities entailed by the tactics of turning inside out the materialities of poems and artworks as exemplified, respectively, by Emmett Williams’s concrete poetry and Roman Stańczak’s sculptural works conceptualized as inverted everyday objects. Taking a cue chiefly from Catherine Malabou’s explorations of plasticity, I propose to argue that by destabilizing the interior/exterior dichotomy of the forms belonging to their respective fields, both Williams and Stańczak challenge the commonplaceness, transparency and rigidity of text, sign, and the quotidian object, thus, on the one hand, gesturing towards what the philosopher terms as “the twilight of writing” and, on the other, articulating a need for a more processual and contingent, or plastic as Malabou would have it, way of thinking about literature, art, and life. As I hope to demonstrate, by employing certain strategies to exteriorize the “insides” of the poem (the syntax, the page grid, spacing, or the shape of the grapheme), Williams foregrounds the discursive interplay of the graphic and the plastic, whereas Stańczak’s altered objects foray into inquiries on (the lack of) transcendence. The final part of my analysis seeks to envision political dimensions of both concrete poetry and Stańczak’s visual works as filtered through the lens of plasticity. The implications brought about by plastic reading, as I claim, link with new models of meaning-making and forms of resistance to ideologies of power.

Saudades: Toward a Sociopoetics of Diaspora, Migration, & Exiled Writing

Unpacking the term saudades, this article weaves together Claude Lévi-Strauss's research in Brazil for Tristes Tropiques with both Oswald de Andrade's 1928 Manifesto Anthropofago, and Rose and Bob Brown's visual poetry, travel guides, cookbooks, and young adult history books about Brazil. One can consider these projects as decolonial theory, poetry, and sociopoetics seventy or eighty years before decolonial theory became a widely discussed term. Augusto de Campos of the Noigandres group and a leader of the International Concrete Poetry movement wrote introductions to facsimile editions of both Oswald de Andrade's manifesto and then later to Bob Brown's republished collection of visual poems, 1450-1950. Although almost completely unknown now, Rose herself authored three children’s books, Two Children of Brazil, Two Children and their Jungle Zoo, and Amazon Adventures of Two Children, one social geography, Land and People of Brazil, and one biographical history, American Emperor: Dom Pedro II of Brazil, all while living in Brazil. Rose and Bob together edited the Brazilian American business weekly in the early and mid-1920s. All of these people may have known each other in Brazil as they worked and lived among overlapping circles of friends and colleagues involved in the modernist avant-garde, but as-of-yet, whether they met or not remains a mystery.

(im)Material Geographies: From Poetics of Terraforming to Earth Scripts

The article explores the work of two contemporary poets, Alice Oswald and J.R. Carpenter, with reference to the material and immaterial aspects of their poetic projects. It is argued that although disparate in their form, both artists’ works are linked by their interest in the environmental forces as (im)material manifestations of more-than-human agency. In this sense they can be seen as belonging to a longer and broader strain of poetic endeavours (like concrete poetry and land art) that struggle to problematise the relationship between form and meaning. The article also employs the notion of earth scripts which allows to see such poetic and artistic practices as forms of descriptions of the earth characterized by differing degrees of sensitivity to the environmental challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Poetic foundations for watery terrain – three poems below Venice

The Venetian lagoon is a geographical extremity imperilled by extreme weather events. Increasingly regular flooding endangers the lives and livelihoods of Venetians, not to mention the built and natural environments around them. In response to the documentary film Saving Venice (Bulling, 2022), I have produced a short series of poems that address the existential threat that climate change poses to Venice. The first poem refers to the MOSE sea-gates project, a feat of engineering designed to prevent catastrophic flooding of the lagoon. The second takes up the motif of the foundations of Venice, specifically the use of wooden pylons that excise oxygen and moisture and prevent the city from sinking. The third poem deals with the effects of erosion caused by shipping. This poetic work builds upon my previous creative and critical output focussed on Venice as a liminal and literary space, notable for the in-between-ness that comes from being a city built on water (Venzo, 2015; Venzo 2019; Venzo 2022). Extending this scholarship on Venice as a city both real and imagined through writing, these poems represent this watery terrain as simultaneously poetic and ecological (Bryson, 2002). Using the technique of concrete poetry (Draper, 1971; Bray, 2012), each poem syncretises these hidden elements that speak to the effects of extremity, to address the “slipperiness” of this physical environment and construct new foundations in word and image.

Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo — House of Extreme Music Theatre: Performative Translation of Croatian Neo/Avant-garde

DB Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo — House of Extreme Music Theater work with material from the Croatian historical avant-garde scene in all their performances of exhausting, physical theater, which they approached through the Zagreb circle of zenithists, “through Kamov and Čerina as predecessors of the Futurists (but not the Marinettists), and their influence on the literary-revolutionary circle of rebellious youth. Some of them included August Cesarec, Đuka Cvijić, Zora Ruklić and members of their ‘Republic of Stenjevac’, members of the Zagreb group Zenit, the lyrics of a visionary film through the books of Ivan Martinac, concrete poetry by Josip Stošić and the silent art that we ‘shachtophonize’ for our parallel performance canon” (Vrvilo 2020). Their systematic work on the performance and reactualization of the neo/avant-garde can be defined, by using Roman Jakobson’s definition, by intersemiotic translations (cf. Munday, Ramos Pinto, Blakesley 2022: 9) into musical theater which, in their example, is based on manipulating sound objects/installations/sculptures with the cut-up technique of original texts into schachtophone scores (moving away from music notation to graphic notation) for schachtophone music, all through the vision of the performance of exhausting (physical) theater with Indoš’s constant dedication to Artaud’s theater of cruelty, the alchemical theater of pre-logic and pre-rationality, a theater that, as a magical ritual, can lead to the healing of society.

Gathering effects: structuralist activity in Form, 1966-69

ABSTRACT The collision of constructivist artistic practice and structuralist philosophy was showcased in the journal Form, published from 1966 to 1969 out of Cambridge, England. Concrete poetry flourished alongside kinetic art; architecture dissolved into environmental design; experimentation with new media techniques replaced expressions of meaning. This essay describes how the editorial work that brought Form into being served to gather disparate strands into a shared disciplinary agenda that marks an apotheosis of 1960s visual art.

Jan Erik Vold’s Concrete Poems: a Way to Enhance Students’ Creativity and Grammar Skills in Norwegian

"Jan Erik Vold’s Concrete Poems: A Way to Enhance Students’ Creativity and Grammar Skills in Norwegian. The current paper aims to present the didactic use of the Norwegian concrete poems. The concept of concrete poetry will be approached through Jan Erik Vold’s literary perspective as the promoter of concretism in Norway. In order to prove the effectiveness of these poems in the teaching process, a survey was conducted including a questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended questions. The respondents were 1st- and 2nd- year students of BA in Norwegian language and literature and a group of 3rd-year students from The Centre for Language Industries, enrolled at the Faculty of Letters, at Babeș-Bolyai University. This research aimed at the effectiveness of using Vold’s concrete poems when teaching specific language structures in Norwegian. Thus, a survey was done at the end of one semester of experiment when I used Jan Erik Vold’s concrete poems for my students during my Norwegian language courses and seminars. The results showed that especially during these seminars students read, analyse and design concrete poems in Norwegian, including grammatical and typographical poems, ready-mades, tongue twisters and nursery-rhymes-like poems, in order to better understand and to revise a specific grammatical, syntactic or lexical structure in Norwegian. Keywords: Norwegian language, concrete poems, Jan Erik Vold, visual poem, grammatical poem "

Robinson, Rachel Elizabeth. Visual and Plastic Poetics: From Brazilian Concretism to the Chilean Neo-Avant-Garde

This book focuses on three relatively unknown members of the Chilean neo-avant-garde and their debt to Brazilian concrete poetry: Juan Luis Martínez, Rodrigo Lira and Cecilia Vicuña. Even though they do not appear to have been directly influenced by the Brazilians, as the author freely admits (p. 10), there were other ways they could have learned about this fascinating movement. Indeed, although the Brazilians wrote in Portuguese rather than Spanish, they were famous throughout South America. Via a series of detailed analyses, Robinson convincingly demonstrates that the Chilean poets employ a number of concrete principles such as lexical isolation, spatial distancing and syntactical dislocation. Reflecting life in an oppressive society, she concludes, their poetry deserves to be much better known. Concrete poetry itself, to be sure, is an offshoot of the current worldwide interest in visual poetry, which can be traced back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard (1898). Thirty-six years ago, unaware that visual poetry would soon encompass exciting new versions, I ventured to describe it as ‘poetry that is meant to be seen’ (The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928 (1986), p. 2). Robinson proposes a modified version of this definition: visual poetry is ‘poetry that is made to be seen’ (p. 16). This reformulation nicely captures the concretist aesthetic, which she examines at considerable length. Since concrete poets treat the word on the page (or elsewhere) as an isolated construct with no history or origin, they force the reader/viewer to consider the written word solely as an object. Thus, as Robinson skilfully demonstrates, the three Chilean poets ‘emphasize the materiality of language, dismantle linear narrative, confuse traditional verbal and pictorial conventions, and engage in a meta-discourse on art’ (p. 13). Exactly how they implement this ambitious program is the subject of the book. Ignoring the concretist credo that critical analysis should originate in a vacuum, Robinson provides numerous biographical details that expand our understanding of the poetry.

Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology. Ed. by Nancy Perloff

This book might be more accurately called a ‘primer’ or ‘reader’, rather than an anthology, as it should be an essential text on any introductory reading list relating to concrete poetry or the twentieth-century literary avant-garde more generally. Perloff’s introduction is a detailed and analytical account of the genre, tracing its international development from the 1950s to the present day. The selection of poems grew out of a 2017 exhibition curated by the editor – in her words, it singles out some of the leading practitioners of concrete poetry rather than aiming to be a comprehensive scholarly retrospective of the form. However, the selection has considerable range and depth. While readers familiar with the work of Eugen Gomringer, Augusto de Campos or Ian Hamilton Finlay might quibble the inclusion of certain poems over others from their œuvres, the cumulative effect is to provide a satisfying overview of work by poets who self-identify as concrete, as well as those who are influenced by its formal developments. Over 150 pages of the volume are given to the work of concrete poets themselves. In the first three sections the work of three seminal practitioners – de Campos, Finlay and Gerhard Rühm – is showcased through sizeable selections. Subsequent sections are arranged by country of origin: Brazil, Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and France, and the United States and Canada. A final section, ‘Postlude’, includes a small selection of visual poetry which builds upon the typographical manipulations of concrete, including American poet Susan Howe’s collages and the digital poetics of Brazilian André Vallias. In total there are 134 poems by 40 poets, plus further images of poems in the introduction. Throughout, the quality of the reproductions is stunning. Poems are printed in colour, an essential semantic as well as aesthetic component of much concrete poetry. Where the original print format of a poem deviates from the two-dimensional page, as with the folded paper structures of Finlay’s ‘standing poems’, these are presented with detailed photographs, often on a double page. Perloff includes an explanatory note for each poem. These notes offer glosses or translations of non-English texts, provide contextual information, outline influences behind the work, and suggest illuminating readings of poems which some readers might otherwise dismiss after a brief glance. The anthology also includes biographical notes on each poet. There are some enjoyable surprises in the selection, such as John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’, which shares with concrete poetry a commitment to manipulating typography and the page’s white space; Cage might best be described as a fellow traveller, rather than a card-carrying member, of the concrete movement. At times readers familiar with how concrete poetics moved off the page and into three-dimensional contexts may be left wanting more: there is no space, for example, for photographs of Finlay’s poetry garden Little Sparta, in which the physical situation of textual works in relation to each other and the wider garden space is an essential aspect of their meanings. But this is an excellent, visually pleasing selection which has the potential to bring concrete poetry to a new audience both within and outside the academy.

Forgotten: an autoethnographic exploration of belonging through Graphic Design

This article presents a practice-led artistic research project that asks: How to represent an international Chinese student’s sense of belonging (or not belonging) through the aesthetics of visual poetry? The project looked into concrete poetry as a visual strategy to develop a design outcome consisting of two publications using an experimental typographic layout and two corresponding posters. This research employs autoethnography and heuristic inquiry as a methodological approach to the creative process to achieve high levels of originality. Based on personal experience, this research project explores the lack of sense of belonging faced by a Chinese student in an unfamiliar place when initially studying in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a design response to this temporary loss of belonging, the project investigated profiled individuals to analyse two specific negative emotions: restless and lonely. In addition, the study applies poetic writing to self-narrative to enhance the potential of personal expression, metaphorically telling stories while creating a visual typographic artefact that breaks with the traditional written prose form. The project is a retrospective of the self, graphically articulating two unforgettable emotions arising from two of the most profound periods affecting the researcher. On the one hand, the project takes a further step towards self-understanding and helps the viewer understand the issues of belonging experienced by Chinese students in a foreign country. On the other hand, it contributes to the discussion of autoethnography and heuristic inquiry to achieve originality in graphic design.

¡No Vengan! Immigration Art in the Post-Trump Era

¡No Vengan! Immigration Art in the Post-Trump Era Maria Liliana Ramirez (bio) ¡No Vengan!, Sergio de la Torre, July 20–October 17, 2021, Santa Ana Exhibitions, Santa Ana, California. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sergio de la Torre, ¡No Vengan! Santa Ana Exhibitions Gallery, Santa Ana, California, 2021. [End Page 177] On June 7, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on her first international visit to Guatemala. There, she warned undocumented Guatemalan migrants: "do not come" to the United States, or you will be turned away at the border. Accompanying her warning, Harris also encouraged migrants to find alternative legal pathways for migration.1 Her speech was a jarring contrast to President Joseph Biden's presidential campaign, which had promised to provide a path to citizenship in order to undo the harsh border practices implemented under the Trump administration and to reshape the US as a nation welcoming to immigrants. Throughout her speech Harris tapped into xenophobic ideologies that criminalized undocumented immigrants in contrast to immigrants who enter the US through legal pathways, a foreshadowing of the Biden administration's discriminatory political strategies toward undocumented immigration at the US/Mexico border. Over a year since Harris's speech, there continues to be no legal pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, as many refugees remain "stuck" in Tijuana hoping for asylum, deportation centers operate at full capacity, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) is on the brink of being terminated. This review analyzes Sergio de la Torre's ¡No Vengan! at Santa Ana Exhibitions (S/A/E) in the national context of political uncertainty regarding undocumented immigration in the US and histories of belonging for undocumented communities in Santa Ana, California. I argue that ¡No Vengan! provides a space for political critique toward the Biden administration and the larger Democratic Party, which is typically viewed as pro-immigrant. However, this opportunity was cut short by the paucity of public events and interactions with visitors in the gallery. Moving forward, the gallery needs sustained efforts in community collaboration in order to successfully present the next exhibition. For those who did make it into the gallery, more robust interpretive text would have helped situate the visitor in the posture of truly engaging with the work. In response to Harris's speech, de la Torre's ¡No Vengan! ("Do Not Come!") shares the disillusionment felt by undocumented immigrants and ally activists alike toward the Biden administration's handling of immigration. De la Torre is a Mexican photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist based in San Francisco, California, whose work has centered on issues of migration. In 2007, he cofounded, with Chris Treggiari, Sanctuary City Project at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where he asked participants to answer the following questions: "What is a Sanctuary? What would you tell an immigrant?" Over the past five years, Sanctuary City Project has posed the same questions in a series of exhibitions and presentations at schools throughout California, [End Page 178] receiving over three thousand responses from a diverse array of the state's population. De la Torre along with Treggiari then transformed these responses from diverse audiences into large-scale posters. Inspired by concrete poetry,2 which plays with the arrangement and typographical effect of words to create graphic patterns, de la Torre brings art and ideas into public spaces across San Francisco and in ways that can travel easily across borders at a faster pace than he or his collaborator can. In addition to exhibiting the posters in museum spaces, Sanctuary City Project has engaged the public beyond museum spaces by taking a bicycle print cart, and displaying billboards and banners across the city. De la Torre brought in selected pieces from Sanctuary City Project into ¡No Vengan!, a move that should have been the first thing that caught people's eyes because they are colorful and corresponded with the major themes of the exhibition. Yet, what immediately tapped into the city's national and local histories of displacement and belonging was the title of the exhibition boldly displayed on the windows of S/A/E. It is important to note that S/A/E opened its doors...

Aniana del Mar Jumps In by Jasminne Mendez

Reviewed by: Aniana del Mar Jumps In by Jasminne Mendez Danica Ronquillo Mendez, Jasminne Aniana del Mar Jumps In. Dial, 2023 [384p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593531815 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593531822 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 6-8 Twelve-year-old Dominican American Aniana cannot imagine her life without swimming in the water: “I’m a dolphin,/and my only home/is the water.” While her Mami forbids her to swim due to a tragic family past, her Papi takes Aniana to swim practice in secret. But when Aniana starts developing aches and pains all over her body, she’s forced to tell her Mami, who predictably feels betrayed and becomes even more protective when Aniana is diagnosed with Juvenile Arthritis. Aniana is forbidden by her mother to swim (despite the doctor’s orders to help manage the disease) and is forced to attend a religious youth group, losing her freedom to do what she wants. Nevertheless, Aniana tries to be hopeful that she can swim again, even if things will be different from now on. Mendez’s novel beautifully crafts a first-person narrative with concrete poetry, forming shapes of teardrops, sea creatures, and storms to capture the physical and emotional journey of Aniana’s desire to return to the water and navigate her newly diagnosed disability. Stanzas with English and Spanish dialogue, repetition, and spacing visually add to the tension and distance Aniana experiences with her family and friends, especially her strained relationship with her Mami. The historical descriptions of Dominican revolutionists help Aniana find independence and make her own life choices. Includes author’s note and a poetic glossary. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Digital Archives, Digital Cultures: An Opportunity for German Studies

Digital Archives, Digital Cultures:An Opportunity for German Studies Thorsten Ries (bio) "die geräte klüger als ihre besitzer / rechnen sich bis zu programnmen und knälen vor." This text fragment was located between other born-digital drafts in a digital [End Page 136] document file, which the author preserved in his personal born-digital archive. In this draft of the poem ausfahrt st nazaire, which was partially inspired by 9/11, Speier also experimented with concepts of concrete poetry and this draft's digital materiality: he integrated automatically generated HTML and CSS code into his poetic draft and rewrote the code into verse. "the devices smarter than their owners / <DIV><STRONG>wer berechnet seine Stille</STRONG></DIV>"—Speier's tentative code scriptum continues the long negotiation and renegotiation of poetic agency between the writer and their tool, writing scene, and its context that scholars have followed through Klopstock's Arbeitstagebuch,1 Hölderlin's manuscripts, Nietzsche's typescripts ("unser schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren gedanken"),2 and which is continued in the unease some authors feel about the limitations of their graphical writing interfaces,3 as well as in the form of digital literature, digitally generated literature ("Schreibenlassen"), and code poetry.4 Research on personal born-digital archives, preserved according to forensic standards, could be described as a continuation of the philological program, analytic bibliography, scholarly editing, and the critique génétique with digital forensic means in the digital age: the recovery of born-digital drafts, draft fragments, corrupted data, and other traces of the writing process from hard drives, storage media, and even the cloud, serves the purpose of the philological reconstruction of the literary writing process. Although media-specific analysis of historical digital materiality is highly specific, the reconstruction of traces of the writing process from Michael Speier's, Thomas Kling's,5 and other authors' hard drives6 at the same time sheds light on the authors' hybrid writing practices between analogue and digital, as well as on a new type of material digital record: paragenetic traces of the word processor.7 Depending on the specific historical design of the system's ensemble of hardware, operating system, and application, crashes of the word processor system can actually lead to retention and preservation of draft text material. Literary production has changed its shape in the digital age, and recent studies on the hybrid materiality of some of the earliest born-digital literary and cultural code works, such as Lutz's Stochastische Texte, and Weizenbaum's ELIZA,8 demonstrate that literary archives are collecting and preserving born-digitals as well as digital literature beyond hypertext. Without stepping into complications associated with the term "media archaeology," one could draw a line from Friedrich Kittler's reading of hard- and software architectures as a technological document of historical dispositives and cultural technological history9 to Jean-Francois Blanchette's multilayered design histories of hard- and software architectures10 and to Matthew Kirschenbaum's "forensic materiality" of digital media.11 The digital forensic perspective on born-digital has not only an archival and literary dimension for German studies and its integration with Digital Humanities research methods and methodology. Under a digital culture perspective, the German USENET [End Page 137] and early web history still require scholarly investigation as cultural spaces and its preservation is materially precarious. First attempts have been made to tackle conceptual and practical issues of the preservation of German "diskmag" culture.12 But if we consider taking digital German culture studies seriously as part of German studies, we might have to include the Chaos Computer Club's Hackerbibel, the texts and code by the German feminist hackers around Rena Tangens (codename Haecksen), and nerd pop culture products like the German Perry Rhodan sci-fi series in our canon, next to Elfriede Jelinek's Ich Ding der Unmöglichkeit and Sibylle Berg's Nerds retten die Welt. A digital forensic perspective would also be applied, under a broader digital history and digital cultures perspective, in research projects on German polarized political discourse and misinformation in online and social media networks. Thorsten Ries thorsten ries (thorsten.ries@austin.utexas.edu) an assistant professor at the Department of Germanic...