UbuWeb | UbuWeb Papers | Concrete Poetry: A World View Introduction Mary Ellen Solt From Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968, Indiana University Press)
The term "concrete poetry"
is now being used to refer to a variety of innovations and experiments
following World War II which are revolutionizing the art of the
poem on a global scale and enlarging its possibilities for expression
and communication. There are now so many kinds of experimental
poetry being labeled "concrete" that it is difficult
to say what the word means. In an article in THE LUGANO REVIEW
(1966), the English critic Mike Weaver, who organized The First
International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry in Cambridge
in 1964, distinguishes three types of concrete poetry: visual
(or optic), phonetic (or sound) and kinetic (moving in a visual
succession). And he sees individual poems within these three classifications
as related to either the constructivist or the expressionist tradition
in art. The constructivist poem results from an arrangement of
materials according to a scheme or system set up by the poet which
must be adhered to on its own terms (permutational poems). In
the expressionist poem the poet arranges his material according
to an intuitive structure. Weaver's definitions and classifications
are most clarifying when applied generally; but when we are confronted
with the particular text or poem, we often find that it is both
visual and phonetic, or that it is expressionistic as well as
constructivist. It is easier to classify the kinetic poem because
it incorporates movement, usually a succession of pages; but it
is essentially a visual poem, and its words are, of course, made
up of sounds. We need only to look at Emmett Williams kinetic
book SWEETHEARTS to see that it is possible to incorporate everything
we have said about concrete poetry in this paragraph in one poem.
Often concrete poems can only be classified in terms of their
predominating characteristics.
The situation is such that the poets
themselves are often reluctant to make the unqualified statement:
"I am a concrete poet." In most cases they will say:
"It depends upon what you mean by 'concrete'." The poets
presented in this selection will for the most part accept the
label "concrete" in its broad definition, very few in
its narrow. Usually they prefer to find another name for their
particular experiments. Often they speak simply of visual or sound
poetry.
Despite the confusion in terminology,
though, there is a fundamental requirement which the various kinds
of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material
from which the poem or text is made. Emotions and ideas are not
the physical materials of poetry. If the artist were not a poet
he might be moved by the same emotions and ideas to make a painting
(if he were a painter), a piece of sculpture (if he were a sculptor),
a musical composition (if he were a composer). Generally speaking
the material of the concrete poem is language: words reduced to
their elements of letters (to see) syllables (to hear). Some concrete
poets stay with whole words. Others find fragments of letters
or individual speech sounds more suited to their needs. The essential
is reduced language. The degree of reduction varies from
poet to poet, from poem to poem. In some cases non-linguistic
material is used in place of language, in the plastic poems of
Kitasono Katue, for instance, or in the "Popcreto" of
Augusto de Campos, which is a Tower of Babel of eyes. But the
non-linguistic objects presented function in a manner related
to the semantic character of words. In addition to his preoccupation
with the reduction of language, the concrete poet is concerned
with establishing his linguistic materials in a new relationship
to space (the page or its equivalent) and/or to time (abandoning
the old linear measure). Put another way this means the concrete
poet is concerned with making an object to be perceived rather
than read. The visual poem is intended to be seen like a painting;
the sound poem is composed to be listened to like music. Concrete
poets, then, are united in their efforts to make objects or compositions
of sounds from particular materials. They are disunited on the
question of semantics: some insisting upon the necessity for poetry
to remain within the communication area of semantics, others convinced
that poetry is capable of transmitting new and other kinds of
information--purely esthetic information.
But no matter where the concrete poet
stands with respect to semantics, he invariably came to concrete
poetry holding the conviction that the old grammatical-syntactical
structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought
and communication in our time. In other words the concrete poet
seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of
ideas, symbolic reference, allusion and repetitious emotional
content; of its servitude to disciplines outside itself as an
object in its own right for its own sake. This, of course, asks
a great deal of what used to be called the reader. He must now
perceive the poem as an object and participate in the poet's act
of creating it, for the concrete poem communicates first and foremost
its structure.
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