Speaking about Genre: The Case of Concrete Poetry Victoria Pineda (bio) Assessing the question of genre with the help of a particular example, and not from a strictly theoretical point of view, proves to be a multifarious task. The generic “question” thus becomes a constellation of generic “questions.” This paper will try to analyze some specific problems that arise from the concept of genre when studying the case of concrete poetry: from its beginnings to its development, production, and transmission; from its interpretation to its relation with traditional forms, and finally, in the context of what this paper calls the “intervention of other systems.” In the first place, it might be necessary to justify the use of the term “genre” when applied to concrete poetry. Apart from obvious reasons of methodological convenience, at least two theoretical frameworks (Mignolo’s and Fowler’s) would most likely endorse the identification of concrete poetry as a genre. According to Walter Mignolo, a genre is identified as a set of ideas linked to a particular label, and associated with a sufficient number of metatexts that account for it. 1 In Alastair Fowler’s system, based on the categories of kind, subgenre, and mode, concrete poetry would be a “historical kind,” not a “subgenre” (since it does not display the “same external characteristics with the corresponding kind, together with additional specification of content”), nor a “mode” (which is a “selection or abstraction from kind”). 2 I. Birth of a Genre: Polygenesis In the origins of concrete poetry as a literary genre we find a paradigmatic example of the process that Fowler categorizes under the name of polygenesis. In dealing with the formation of genres, Fowler analyzes different possibilities. Monogenesis would explain how the start [End Page 379] of a new genre is related to the achievements of particular writers, for “it remains true that a single writer’s creativity can play a decisive part in originating a new kind.” However, “in considering individual origins we also have to allow for the possibility of polygenesis,” since “comparative studies have steered toward the conclusion that original creativity is often doubled, even in other literatures with their own independent lines of development” (KL 154). This kind of polygenesis precisely explains the case of concrete poetry. In concrete poetry, however, polygenesis does not refer to two individual writers, as in Fowler’s definition, but rather to one author on the one hand, and to a group of three on the other. 3 The one writer is the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer who in the early fifties was in Switzerland working on a project he called “constellations” in the wake of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés. Meanwhile, in 1954 Décio Pignatari and the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos put together in Brazil a group they called “Noigandres,” following in the steps of Ezra Pound. When the two parties met a few years later, they both realized that the forms they were developing were about the same. They were all engaged in experimenting with “verbovocovisual” (a term dating back to Joyce) values of the text, which partake “of the advantages of non-verbal communication, without renouncing the virtuality of the word” in literature. 4 For his own work Gomringer accepted and assimilated the new nomination “concrete poetry,” that the Brazilian group had adopted from Kandinsky, who had used it a few years earlier to refer to pictorial objects that were not an abstraction of something figurative. As we can see from these facts, the creation of the new genre is quite clearly determined in both time and space. Obviously the birth of concrete poetry did not happen ex nihilo, and even the “creators” of the genre acknowledged their “predecessors”: Mallarmé, Pound, Joyce, Cummings, and Apollinaire from literature; Mondrian and Max Bill from painting; Eisenstein from cinema; Webern from music. We are not dealing, however, with any of the processes described by Fowler (KL 171) as combination, aggregation (“several complete short works . . . grouped in an ordered collection”), inclusion (“a literary work may enclose another within it”), or generic mixture. In concrete poetry, instead, different elements are taken from different systems and incorporated into a completely new experience. Some of...