UbuWeb | UbuWeb Papers | Concrete Poetry: A World View Austria Mary Ellen Solt From Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968, Indiana University Press)
Concrete poetry began to appear in
Austria in the early fifties in the work of a few poets, known
as "The Vienna Group," who had begun experimenting with
visual and phonetic forms: Gerhard Rühm, a composer; Friedrich
Achleitner, an architect; Oswald Wiener, a jazz musician; and
the poets H. C. Artman and Konrad Bayer. The work of Rühm,
who has experimented with a variety of forms--constellations and
ideograms, phonetic and counting poems, montage, photographic
and other types of visual texts--is the most widely known. In
"die blume" he has achieved a constellation of high
Iyric quality in which the technique of repetition is skillfully
used both as basic pattern and as variation in the permutational
words "blüht" ("blooms") and "welkt"
( "withers" ) to set up the meaning tension thesis-antithesis
required of the form as defined by Gomringer. The shift from dark
to bright vowel sound in "die blume blüht" ("the
flower blooms") further intensifies the meaning, as does
the shape of the poem, which suggests flower and stem.
Rühm has been most concerned
with maintaining an organic relationship between the visual and
the conceptual as can be clearly seen in the graphic text "bleiben"
("to stay"). The act of writing the word by hand beside
a fine white line on a solid black page conveys the message "stick
with it" far more profoundly than any number of ordinary
sermons on the subject of following your own little beam of light.
In "und zerbrechen" ("and something breaks"),
the breaking apart of the word after a series of monotonous "unds"
creates an ideogram with psychological, sociological and formal
implications. "I have avoided being purely illustrative in
the graphic presentation of concepts," Rühm states.
"Rather I try to establish a tension relationship between
both dimensions (the graphic and the conceptual), so that one
dimension does not simply support the other but completes it,
or the optical form fixes a definite aspect of the concept."
Ernst Jandl, also of Vienna, began
to write experimental poems in 1955 "as an act of protest
against . . . traditionalism." The first poems "that
may be called 'concrete'" were written in 1956. Jandl states
that he had read "a few things by Gertrude Stein, Joyce,
Stramm, Dadaists, [Hans Arp] and knew two poems by Gomringer."
He made contact with the Vienna Group and found the work of Rühm
and Artman "most inspiring," mostly because of "the
amount of freedom they had achieved." Jandl had had "several
years' practice in writing plain, unadorned, straightforward poems."
The members of the Vienna Group were not interested in doing "the
same, or very similar things" but in getting "as much
freedom as possible" whether they were writing poems, prose,
plays, whatever. Their aim was "to move as far as possible
from traditional poetry," to write their "own things,
unhampered, yet with a sense of form."
Jandl's traditional background enabled
him to try "to combine old and new elements" in his
experimental poems. "Manipulating linguistic material became
an absorbing end in itself." He tried his hand at the sound
poem, which was "suggested by Schwitters, and the Dadaists"
and which had been tried by Rühm." He tried to "modify"
it by "using words rather than pure sounds" though he
wrote some "pure sound poems too." He called these poems
SPRECHGEDICTHE (POEMS TO BE SPOKEN). Schtzngrmm", made from
intensifications of most of the sounds in the German word for
"trench" ("schützengraben"), has probably
not been surpassed as a war poem, especially as it is read by
the poet.
Jandl believes that "the most
successful methods" of writing experimental poems "are
those which can only be used once, for then the result is a poem
identified with the method in which it was made." The complete
identification of poem and method is strikingly apparent in "erschaffung
der eve" ( "creation of eve") in which a portion
of the alphabet is used structurally from "o", the central
letter in the word "gott', through "v", the central
letter of "eva." The poet himself thinks of "o"
as the mouth of God "from which vertically downward issues
God's breath, alphabetically." Notice that the words "rippe"
and "adam" on the left disappear through a process of
reduction until "e", the last letter of "rippe,"
becomes the first letter of "eve" and the word "adam',
is created again on the right side from the "a" of "eva."
According to Jandl, the disappearance of the word "adam"
on the left signifies "man living alone" and its reappearance
in a larger form on the right signifies "man joined to woman.''
Pulverization of the word only to put it back together again in
a fresh new context is characteristic of the kind of linguistic
feat Jandl is able to accomplish again and again with a variety
of methods.
Heinz Gappmayr, of Innsbruck rather
than Vienna, considers "the connection between notion and
sign" to be one of the principal clarifications accomplished
by concrete poetry. "Visual figures, straight and crooked
lines, drawing with ink or pencil mediate thoughts and sensations
.... it is not indifferent for the meaning of a notion whether,
for example, the sign stands on the top or on the bottom of a
page, whether the signs of a word are quite or only partly visible.
The form of the signs gives the meaning of a notion a peculiar
shade.... Only the reader [who sees] the difference caused by
the form of the signs will understand ... concrete poetry....
For example . . . in . . . concrete poetry the notion in this
form: light [is] not the same as l i g h t." In our text
from Gappmayr we can see that he relies on geometric shapes as
"signs" to convey "notions." Perhaps this
is because he is a designer. He has other poems which convey their
message by means of a black square, but he also uses words apart
from geometric design. To him "'concrete' means all conditions
of language."
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