As the above remarks imply, we are interpreting the term "concrete" in its broader meaning in this presentation of the new experimental poetry. But in doing so we do not wish to deemphasize the importance of its stricter definition, for what has mushroomed into a worldwide movement was founded in Europe by a single poet, Eugen Gomringer of Switzerland, who adheres to the strictest concrete practice, and almost simultaneously in Brazil by the Noigandres group--Haroldo de Campos, Decio Pignatari and Augusto de Campos--who derived their new concept of form from closest study of poets who preceded them. The Brazilians have on occasion abandoned words, but the signs or objects they have substituted function semantically. As we shall discover, other poets following World War II were beginning to make similar or related attempts. Carlo Belloli of Italy had made and exhibited "mural text-poems" as early as 1944. Oyvind Fahlström of Sweden was writing concrete poems by 1952. But when Gomringer published his first "constellations" in 1953 and his first manifesto "from line to constellation" in 1954, he was not aware of the existence of other poets who shared his concerns or that Fahlström had published a "Manifest for konkret poesie" in Swedish in 1953.

Gomringer came to concrete poetry by way of concrete art and as the result of dissatisfaction with the old way of writing poems. As a student in Berne, having denied himself the security of following in the footsteps of T. S. Eliot and Gottfried Benn, as was the fashion after the war, he became aware of Arno Holz, an east Prussian poet (1863-1929) who had tried to find a natural rhythm divorced from traditional meters, and of the Symbolists, particularly Mallarme. Holz impressed Gomringer because he assumed "the freedom to interfere with the arrangement of language, and even more so, that he concerned himself, like hardly any other German poet, with every minute particular both in the visual arrangement of script and in the organization of sound." Gomringer's own work "had reached the stage of the sonnet." He continued to write sonnets until 1950 when he reached a dead end. He realized that it was necessary to make a new start, but he was unable to write much for two years.

During this time when he was a student in Berne, Gomringer was in contact with painters involved with concrete art. He had become aware of concrete art as a child in Zurich and had begun to know concrete painters as early as 1942, but he did not always understand what he saw. What became "more and more obvious" was a "discordance" between his sonnets and "the direct method of Concrete Art, which offered a solution to unequivocal problems of line, surface and color." Gomringer wrote a favorable review for an exhibition of concrete painting in Berne in 1947; he saw the international exhibition of concrete art in Basel, organized by Max Bill, in 1944; and in 1944-45 he made the acquaintance of Bill, Lohse and Graeser at the Galerie des Eaux Vives in Zurich, a special gallery for concrete paintings. He did not, though, as we have said, give up writing sonnets until 1950.

Luckily during the unproductive period which followed, two friends of Gomringer in Berne, Diter Rot and Marcel Wyss, both graphic artists, had arrived at approximately the same place. But they were "certain something was about to happen." From 1951 on the three friends were in close daily contact. They decided to publish a magazine to be called SPIRALE, whose contents would "embrace poetry, the plastic arts, graphics, architecture, and industrial design." Gomringer was made literary editor. "It was my task," he writes, "to find a suitable form of poetry for our magazine, or myself to devise and produce one." This was not an easy assignment considering the fact that he had been unable to write for two years. He began by making "a lengthy investigation into the presentation of script on the page." When the first issue came out in 1953, he "wished to put forward programmatically a new type of poetry."

In 1951 Gomringer had tried to write a few poems of the kind he would later call "constellations." His first finished constellation, "avenidas" was written in 1952, a poem made from three nouns, the conjunction "and," and the indefinite article. Gomringer chose the name "constellations" rather than "concrete poetry" for his new kind of poem because he was thinking in terms of clusters of words coming together in response to a particular creative impulse. The concept of line requires unnecessary words to fill in the pattern. Naming "avenidas," "flores" and "mujeres" ("streets', "flowers," and "women,") they become beautiful simply because they are what they are. Comment would be superfluous and insulting. Gomringer considers the fact that he wrote his first finished constellation in Spanish to be of the utmost importance, for he was born in Bolivia and Spanish is his native tongue:

. . . Spanish words continually came into my head. Later I often conceded to myself that it was decisive that my second start in poetry was based on Spanish. Even today this seems to me proof that it was a question of really getting to grips with language on the most basic level.... Concrete Poetry is quite definitely a test of character. It is comparatively easy to experiment with letters and a few arrangements of words . . . But Concrete Poetry demands a deeper foundation. It must--in my opinion--be closely bound up with the challenge of individual existence: with the individual's 'Life with Language', 'Life with Words'.

A year later, in 1953, Gomringer published his first book of CONSTELLATIONS. By then he was able to make poems using only one word. He found it "wonderful" that he could "say so much with a single word" since it had been his inclination "to express all thoughts in a short form" and he had "always taken pleasure in algebraic equations." Also he was beginning to use graphic space, as an element of structure (meaning). "silencio," "wind," and "o" are spatially structured poems. had been unable to write for two years. He began by making "a lengthy investigation into the presentation of script on the page." When the first issue came out in 1953, he "wished to put forward programmatically a new type of poetry."

Notice that these poems can almost be read backwards. "Inversion I consider as probably my most important contribution to Concrete Poetry," Gomringer states. He arrived at this new tension possibility for the poem when he discovered that the message conveyed by the "single word did not always appear sufficient," particularly "because we have the habit of reading only in one direction, from left to right." Had he simply printed the word "wind" in the center of the page, it would simply have sat there. Arranging it spatially so that we can read the word in four directions, he is able to introduce an element of play into the "reading" of the poem that captures the nature of the wind far more truly than a longer poetic statement of many words. The letters actually seem to float as if the wind were acting upon them. (The subtlety of the typography is, of course, a contributing factor.) Inversion for Gomringer "intimates that every message, be it ever so slight, is aligned in one direction, even if it is examined in an inverted order." And he has "related this phenomenon--inversion--to one of the intellectual principles of existence"--"thesis-antithesis." The principle thesis-antithesis is particularly clear in "ping pong" in which we find not only inversion but a movement of alternation in the syllables of the word. The essence of the game ping pong is expressed by the word. The spatial grouping of the syllables, which resembles line breaks in more traditional poetry, is of the utmost importance. In the "o" poem we find not only remarkably achieved inversion but thesis-antithesis in the use of space: for the words are printed in the negative areas between large white O's of space.

Using words with the utmost precision, subtlety and restraint, Gomringer achieves the simplicity and purity of concrete art. His poems remind us of the works of Hans Arp. Arp characterized concrete art as "an elemental, natural, healthy art, which causes stars of peace, love and poetry to grow in the head and the heart." And he made many constellations. But it is a mistake to assume the direct influence of Arp in Gomringer's constellations, for Gomringer states that he was acquainted only with Arp's Dada pieces when he made the first constellations and that he "always hated Dada." Later he became acquainted with Arp. The term "constellations" he took from Mallarme. The method of composition in the constellations is constructivist. Everything comes from the material: a design (or system) organic to the word as a material object, its inherent message, and the space it occupies, which can be utilized as semantic content. In "silencio", for example, the message conveyed by the word emerges from the white space in the center of the word design and to a lesser degree from the white space of the page which surrounds the poem. Few concrete poets can achieve or remain with the austerity of the pure concrete of Gomringer. But the principles of concrete art made manifest in his work underlie much of the work now being done. The ideogram ("silencio"), the spatial structure, the serial poem, the kinetic book can all be found in his works. Actually Gomringer seems to be somewhat amazed by the extent to which concrete poetry has in a little more than ten years become a movement of global proportions. And he seems to feel uneasy about the effects of certain developments:

Today I am anxious in case Concrete Poetry is accepted purely as a separate genus of poetry. For me it is an important, perhaps the most important aspect of the poetry of our time, and it should nor develop into a form of poetry set apart from the main tradition . . . since our Concrete Poetry should actually be a genuine constituent of contemporary literature and contemporary thought, it is important that it should not become merely playful, that the element of play which we advocate, should not result in a facetious kind of poetry. Concrete Poetry has nothing to do with comic strips. In my view it is fitted to make just as momentous statements about human existence in our times and about our mental attitudes, as other forms of poetry did in previous periods. It would be unfortunate if it were to become an empty entertainment for the typographer.

Partly on the strength of his book, the CONSTELLATIONS of 1953, Gomringer was offered the position of secretary to Max Bill at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung at Ulm in 1954. That year he also published his first manifesto: "from line to constellation." We have already discussed the concept of the constellation as a form that "encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster." What remains to be made clear is Gomringer's argument for breaking so radically with the old way of writing poems. Fundamentally it is the realization that the usages of language in poetry of the traditional type are not keeping pace with live processes of language and rapid methods of communication at work in our contemporary world. Further it is the realization that these processes of language and communication rather than constituting a threat to poetry contain within themselves the essential qualities of poetic statement: "concentration and simplification." Contemporary languages exhibit the following tendencies, according to Gomringer: a move toward "formal simplification," abbreviated statement on all levels of communication from the headline, the advertising slogan, to the scientific formula--the quick, concentrated visual message, in other words.

Gomringer's bias lies in the direction of the visual concrete poem, which we should be able to perceive "as a whole as well as in its parts." As an object the visual poem is "memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture." Viewing it we are permitted to participate in the "play activity" of its linguistic elements by means of which it arrives at concrete realization. This element of "play activity" within the concrete structure, which is highly serious in the best concrete poems, Gomringer sees as psychologically beneficial to contemporary man and to "ordinary language," which will be affected by the poet's "exemplary use of the rules of the game."

Gomringer also observed in contemporary usages of language a significant move toward fewer languages and global communication. The following assertion appeared in French and German in each issue of a series of booklets KONKRETE POESIE/POESIA CONCRETA published irregularly by Gomringer beginning 1960:

la poésie concrète est le chapitre esthétique de la formulation linguistique universelle de notre epoque.

More and more, Gomringer observes, "thought structures . . . are decisive." The concrete poem which, as a construction of word materials contains thought, belongs to this trend. The conviction that the poem must remain within the sphere of word-sign communication permits it to play its role as a functional object. Language "even in its most primitive usage . . . serves a spiritual use," Gomringer reminds us, "so long as it is a language of words." Conceived in this context, the concrete poem fulfills Max Bill's requirement for concrete art: "production of the esthetic object for spiritual use." And it can function organically in society again, so that the poet need no longer feel compelled to continue the self-annihilating practice of addressing himself "exclusively to other poets to experience a new view of the world and new techniques." For the content of the concrete poem is nonliterary. Basically it is a question of the poet's positive attitudes towards life and his ability to achieve enough distance from the subjective-emotional elements of his materials to permit him to arrive at a rational synthesis. Concrete poetry, then, relates "less to 'literature' and more to earlier developments in the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial design--in other words to developments whose basis is critical but positively-defined thinking." Concrete poetry is in step with the new directions in which our society is moving because it evolves from "the contemporary scientific technical view of the world." Gomringer is confident that it "will come into its own in the synthetic rationalistic world of tomorrow." A universal poetry: international, supranational.

Gomringer's vision of a universal poetry appears to be becoming increasingly a reality even though in most instances the concrete poets are not well-known in their own countries. The concrete poet may find himself in the strange situation of having acquired an international reputation among concrete poets and none to speak of on home territory. But the fact is that even in this rather large selection we have not been able to present all the poets working along concrete lines in each country. And new movements in additional countries are sure to have emerged before these pages reach the reader. The new movement in Holland, for instance, which we learned about too late to include. The need for the concrete poem is making itself felt throughout the world. It was anticipated following the First World War in the second DE STIJL manifesto of 1920:

THE WORD IS DEAD...

THE WORD IS IMPOTENT

asthmatic and sentimental poetry the "me" and "it"

which is still in common use everywhere. . .

is influenced by an individualism fearful of space

the dregs of an exhausted era. . .

psychological analysis

and clumsy rhetoric

have KILLED THE MEANING OF THE WORD . . .

the word must be reconstructed

to follow the SOUND as well as

the IDEA

if in the old poetry

by the dominance of relative

and subjective feelings

the intrinsic meaning of the word is destroyed

we want by all possible means

syntax

prosody

typography

arithmetic

orthography

to give new meaning to the word and new force to expression

the duality between prose and poetry can no longer

be maintained.

the duality between form and content can no longer

be maintained

Thus for the modern writer form will have a directly

spiritual meaning

it will not describe events

it will not describe at all

but ESCRIBE

it will recreate in the word the common meaning of

events

a constructive unity of form and content. . .

Leiden, Holland, April 1920.

Theo van Doesburg

Pier .Mondrian

Anthony Kok

Eight years later in THE NEW VISION (1928), Lázló Moholy-Nagy noted "a similar quest for expression by subduing or lightening the material" in sculpture, painting, music, architecture and poetry. In poetry this would be accomplished by moving away "from syntax and grammar to relations of single words."

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