Writing
as Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrière-Garde
In the spring of 2001, the
poet and intermedia artist Kenneth Goldsmith participated in a panel on
Brazilian Concrete Poetry with, among others, one of the movement’s
founders, Decio Pignatari.(1) Goldsmith recalls:
I was stunned.
Everything [Pignatari] was saying seemed to predict the
mechanics of the internet . . . delivery, content, interface,
distribution, multi-media, just to name a few. Suddenly
it made sense: like de Kooning’s famous statement: “History doesn’t
influence me. I influence it,” it’s taken
the web to make us see just how prescient concrete poetics was in
predicting its own lively reception half a century later.
I immediately understood that what had been missing from
concrete poetry was an appropriate environment in which it could
flourish. For many years, concrete poetry
has been in limbo: it’s been a displaced genre in search of a new
medium. And now it’s found one.(Goldsmith, 1)
The limbo Goldsmith refers to
was quite real: in the 1980s and 90s, the going view, especially in
Anglo-America, where concrete poetry had never really caught on, was
that the 1950s experiment in material poetics was ideologically
suspect—too “pretty,” too empty of “meaningful” content, too much like
advertising copy. In the university, this estimate still prevails. To
this day, one would be hard put to find an English or Comparative
Literature department that offers courses in concrete poetry. Doesn’t
the subject belong more properly, if at all, in the art department, my
colleagues ask, specifically in courses on graphic design?
Even books about
concrete poetry have raised this issue. Consider Caroline Bayard’s
sophisticated theoretical study The New Poetics in Canada
and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism (1989). Bayard begins
with a survey of the mid-century poetics of Oyvind Fahlström, Eugen
Gomringer, and Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, only to conclude that the
“fusion of expression and content” being advocated by the Concretists
was an instance of what Umberto Eco had termed the “iconic fallacy”—the
fallacy that “a sign has the same properties as its object and is
simultaneously similar to, analogous to, and motivated by its object.”(2) At its most naïve “naturalizing” level, the
iconic fallacy manifests itself, Bayard argues, in poems like
Gomringer’s Silencio [figure 1], where the empty
rectangle at the center of the composition is presented as the
equivalent to the “silence” conveyed by the verbal sign.
But even where the motivation is much subtler, as in Augusto de
Campos’s sem um numero (“Without a Number”), which
makes no reference to an external object but uses graphic space
structurally so as to dramatize the central o (“zero”)
status of the peasant [figure 2], concrete poetry, Bayard contends, is
bedeviled by a lingering Cratylism—the doctrine, put forward by Plato’s
Cratylus in the dialogue by that name, that the sound and visual
properties of a given word have mimetic value, and that, by extension,
concrete poetry equates “graphic-typographical form with semantic
function” (Bayard 23). This is, Bayard believes, a dangerous doctrine.
“Typographical and calligraphic aesthetics were most striking in the
1960s, but also the least durable. They corresponded to the Cratylian
phase of the experience, and while they inserted into texts typefaces
hitherto unknown to literature, the experiment was short-lived” (163).
For --and here ideology comes in--“changing the sign system does not in
any way imply that one is modifying the political system” (171). And
Bayard refers us to Herbert Marcuse’s argument that far from
representing a breakthrough, the innovative typographic devices of the
Concretists “dissolve the very structure of perception in order to make
room . . . for what?” (171).
This “for what?” functions as
a battle cry. Visual poetry, or, for that matter, sound poetry, as in
the case of Henri Chopin (Bayard 27-28), are thus judged to be
questionable practices. Indeed, Bayard argues, it was only when the
“form=content” assumption of Concretism was abandoned, as it was in the
1970s and 80s by poets like bpNichol, bill
bissett and Steve McCaffery, who turned their attention to the
anagrammatic and paragrammatic play inherent in language
rather than on such Concretist elements as font, color, and spacing,
that a more adequate poetics was born.
It is a compelling argument:
in my own Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of
Media, written in the late ‘80s, I was persuaded, as was Caroline
Bayard, that post-concrete poetics was providing a needed “corrective”
to the purported mimeticism and aestheticized composition of the
earlier work.(114-118) But now that, in Goldsmith’s words, “an
appropriate environment in which [concrete poetry] could flourish,” has
become available, the texts in question have recovered their place in
the larger poetic field. To understand how this process of recovery
works and how Concrete poetry itself perceived its role as the renewal
of the avant-garde practices of the early twentieth-century, it may be
useful to take up the concept of the arrière-garde,
now gaining currency.(3) We need, in other
words, to ground Concretism in its history, to understand, for example,
its relation to the two World Wars as well as to the varying cultures
that produced it. And further: from the
vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can begin to discriminate
between the various manifestations of what once seemed
to be a unified movement. Not all concretisms, after all, are equal. Bringing Up the
Rear As William Marx makes clear in
the Introduction to Les arrière-gardes au xxe
siècle, the concept of the avant-garde is inconceivable without its
opposite. In military terms, the rearguard of the army is the part that
protects and consolidates the troop movement in question; often the
army’s best generals are used for this purpose. When, in other words,
an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty, it is the role of the
arrière-garde to complete its mission, to insure its success. The term arrière-garde, then,
is synonymous neither with reaction nor with nostalgia for a lost and
more desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the “hidden face
of modernity” (Marx 6). As Antoine
Compagnon puts it in his study of Barthes in the Marx collection, the
role of the arrière garde is to save that which is
threatened. In Barthes’s own words, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir
ce qui est mort; être d’arrière garde, c’est l’aimer encore.”(4) The proposed dialectic is a
useful corrective, I think, to the usual conceptions of the
avant-garde, either as one-time rupture with the bourgeois art market,
a rupture that could never be repeated—the Peter Bürger thesis--or as a
series of ruptures, each one breaking decisively with the one before,
as in textbook accounts of avant-gardes from Futurism to Dada to
Surrealism to Fluxus, to Minimalism, Conceptualism, and so on. This
second or progress narrative, ironically, continues to haunt the
academy even when the avant-garde is by no means at issue: I am
referring to the unstated premise of critical theory that the
perspective of enlightened globalists, post-colonialists, or
multiculturalists on a given art work or movement is inherently more
“advanced” than what came before. But, as Haroldo de Campos points out
in a blistering attack on Third World studies, it is
condescending—indeed, as he says, overaltern, to
assume, as does, for example, Fredric Jameson in his “theory of a
cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature,” that subaltern
fiction, “having as a necessary goal the achievement of a ‘national
allegory,’ will not offer the satisfaction of a Proust or Joyce.” At the current stage of development, Jameson
posits, a given novel—his example is Guimarães Rosa’s Grande
Sertão: Veredas-- may be understood as “a high literary
variant of the Western.” To which Haroldo
responds: The first thing that occurs to
me, before a somewhat deprecating label like this one, is that the
author of The Political Unconscious ignores the
Brazilian Portuguese language and has built a fake, oversimplified
image of the complex Faustian, metaphysical struggle between God and
Devil embedded in the deep structure of Rosa’s masterpiece. . . . the
Anglophone master’s discourse of the overaltern “salvationist” critics
works as a rhetorical by-product of unconscious imperialism by effacing
the subaltern “minor” languages and by underrating
their creative verbal power.”(11-13) The “new realism,” Haroldo
insists, has not shed the language of Joyce and Borges as readily as it
might seem. This commentary provides us
with a useful entry into the discourse of the Concretism of the 1950s. In 1953, the Brazilian-born
Swedish poet Oyvind Fahlström published a “Manifesto for Concrete
Poetry” under the title Hipy papy bithithdthuthda bthuthdy,
a version of “Happy Birthday” he took from A. A. Milne’s Winne-the-Pooh.(8)
The second epigraph for
this manifesto—the first announces that Fahlström has shifted from
“normal” writing to the creating of worlets (words,
letters)—is in French and declares, “Remplacer la
psychologie de l’homme par L’OBSESSION LYRIQUE DE LA MATIERE.” The citation is from Marinetti’s Technical
Manifesto of Literature (1912)—the famous manifesto, first printed
as a leaflet in French and Italian, supposedly spoken by the propeller
of the airplane in which Marinetti finds himself. The Technical
Manifesto calls for the destruction of syntax, of adjectives,
adverbs, and all verbs forms except the infinitive, and of punctuation,
in favor of “tight networks of analogies” between disparate images,” as
in “trench”=”orchestra” or “machine gun =femme fatale.” Such strings of
unrelated nouns—what Marinetti called parole in libertà—would
replace the tedious lyric “I,” which is to say all psychology: “The man
who is damaged beyond redemption by the library and the museum, who is
in thrall to a fearful logic and wisdom, offers absolutely nothing that
is any longer of any interest.” For psychology, Marinetti insisted, we
must substitute matter, specifically such categories
as noise, weight, and smell. And Marinetti exemplifies this “new”
poetry by reciting from his onomatopoeic battle poem Zang
tumb tuuum with its cataloguing of such items as “lead + lava + 300
stinks + 50 sweet smells paving mattress debris horseshot carrion flickflack piling up camels donkeys
tumb tuuum.”(9) Like Marinetti, Fahlström has
little time for the conventional pieties of his day: his manifesto
begins with a satiric thrust at the Sigtuna lake-front art colony
(rather like our Yadoo or McDowell summer colonies), whose cultural
hero was the neo-Romantic poet Bo Setterlind, the author of a long poem
called Mooncradle. Like Marinetti, Falhström senses
that words “have lost their luster from constant rubbing on the
washboard” (110) and believes that “changing the word order is not
enough; one must knead the entire clause structure. Because thought
processes are dependent on language, every attack on prevailing
linguistic forms ultimately enriches worn-out modes of thought” (117).
And just as Marinetti dismisses ego psychology, Falströhm dismisses the
fixation on “content,” as the chief “unifying element”
of the poetic text: The situation is this: e v e r s I n c e t h e War, [
there has been] a l o n g,
a b j e t, d o o m s d a y m o o d, a feeling that all experimental
extremes have been exhausted. For those of us unwilling to drift into
the world of alcoholic or heavenly sustenance, all that remains is to
use what means we have at our disposal to Analyse analyse analyse our wretched
predicament. Today with laboured symbolic
cryptograms, silly romantic effusions or desperate grimaces outside the
church gate being propounded, as the only healthy options, the concrete
alternative must also be presented. (110-11) But, as the reference above to
the postwar doomsday mood makes clear, there are, of course, also
enormous differences between the avant-guerre Futurist Marinetti, and
the post-World War II Fahlströhm—differences that similarly define the
relationship of Pound and Joyce to the Noigandres
group. The Utopian avant-garde, of which Marinetti was very much of a
representative, believed in definitive rupture with the stultifying
past. “A roaring motorcar,” Marinetti declared famously in the First
Manifesto (1909), “is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of
Samothrace” (Marinetti 13). And one of his best-known manifestos is Contra Venezia Passatista (1910), which insists, partly
tongue-in-cheek, that the famed Venetian canals should be drained and
filled with cement so that factories might rise up to replace the
“dead’ museum culture of this passéist city, whose abject citizens are
little better than cicerones, guiding the wealthy
foreign tourists from one museum or church to another. Or again, there is the
manifesto called Down with Tango and Parsifal, with
its diatribe against Wagner and those who dance like “hallucinated
dentists.” For the Italian Futurists, as for their Russian counterpart
and the Cabaret Voltaire, the past is not only dead but deadly.
Avant-garde means to make it new. Accordingly,
there is no homage to the poets and artists of the preceding century. The 1912 manifesto Slap in the
Face of Public Taste (signed by David Burliuk, Khlebnikov,
Kruschonykh, and Mayakovsky) declared that “The past is too tight. The
Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphs,” and
exhorted fellow poets to “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.,
etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”( Burliuk 51-51) The new technology, it seems,
has changed everything. “If all artists were to see the crossroads of
these heavenly paths,” says Malevich, referring in 1915 to the
“brilliance of electric lights” and “growling of propellers” of the
modern city, “if they were to comprehend these monstrous runways and
intersections of our bodies with the clouds in the heavens, then they
would not paint chrysanthemums.”(116-135) Who was it that did paint
chrysanthemums? Monet for one, Renoir for another: artists of the great
Impressionist movement who were now considered passéist.
Indeed, Duchamp went further and rejected retinal art tout court—dismissing Courbet, not to mention the
Impressionists, as devoid of any real ideas. The arrière-garde, in
contrast, treats the propositions of the earlier avant-garde with
respect bordering on veneration. One can’t imagine Marinetti or
Malevich using the words of their nineteenth-century precursors as
epigraphs, but Fahlström certainly does so. And the Brazilian Noigandres group specifically derives
its names from a passage in Pound’s Cantos. Thus
Concretism, cutting-edge (literally!) as this arrière-garde was
vis-à-vis the normative verse or painting of its own day, transformed
the Utopian optimism and energy of the pre-World War I years into a
more reflective, self-conscious, and complex project of recovery. When, for example, Fahlströhm
makes his case for the equivalence of form and content, his argument is
less Marinettian than Khlebnikovian, amalgamating concepts developed by
the French lettristes, who were his contemporaries.
The basic principle, developed by Khlebnikov in his studies of
etymologies, is that, as Fahlströhm put it, “l
I k e – s o u n d i n g w o r d s
b e l o n
g t
o g e t h
e r” (115).
“Myths,”
for example, “have been explained in this way: when Deukalion and
Pyrrha wanted to create new human beings after
the Flood, they threw stones and men and women grew from them: the word for stone was ‘laas,’ for people ‘ Here is the Cratylian or
iconic “fallacy” so regularly called into question by critics of
Concretism. From an arrière-garde perspective, however, there is an
important precedent for Fahlström’s formulation, which also covers
rhythm (“metrical rhythms, rhythmic word order, rhythmic empty
spaces”), homonyms, syllepsis, which “unites words, sentences, and
paragraphs” (114-15), anagram, paragram, and the “arbitrary attribution
of new meanings to letters, words, sentences, or paragraphs.” “We
might,” for example, “decide that all ‘i’s in a given worlet signify
‘sickness’. The more there are, the more serious the illness” (116). Khlebnikov, whom Roman
Jakobson considered the great poet of the twentieth century, expended
much labor on tracing the relationships of meanings produced by such
words and syllables. In a short essay (1913) on cognates of the word solntse (sun), Khlebnikov observes: Here is the way the syllable so [with] is a field that encompasses son
[sleep], solntse [sun], sila
[strength]], solod [malt], slovo [Word],
sladkii [sweet], soi [caln: Macedonian
dialect], sad [garden], selo
[settlement], sol’ [salt], slyt’ [to
be reputed], syn [son].(272-273) And to make the relationships
more vivid, Khlebnikov sketches them as the rays of a sun bearing the
key word “SO.” Logically, the relationship between these verbal units
is largely arbitrary—what does salt have to do with sun?— but
poetically, Khlebnikov shows, they can made to inhabit the same
universe: Although the refined tastes of
our time distinguish what is solenyi [salty] from what
is sladkii [sweet], back in the days when salt was as
valuable as precious stones, both salt and salted things were
considered sweet; solod [malt] and sol’ [salt]
are as close linguistically as golod [hunger] and gol]
[the destitute] (Khlebnikov 272). And the analysis continues in
this vein. Khlebnikov’s poetic
etymologies recall Plato’s Cratylus, where, despite
Socrates’ arguments against the representability of the sign, he is the
one to come up with ingenious meanings for letters and syllables. The
noun for truth, alhqeia (aletheia) is shown to be an
“agglomeration of qeia alh (thea alé, divine
wandering), implying the divine motion of existence.” Or again, Yeudos (pseudos) is “the opposite of motion;
here is another ill name given by the legislator to stagnation and
forced inaction, which he compares to sleep (eudein, eudein), but the original meaning of
he word is disguised by the addition of y (ps).” If, as
Rosmarie Waldrop put it neatly, “concrete poetry is first of all a
revolt against the transparency of the word,” making “the sound and
shape of words its explicit field of investigation,”(57) the Plato of
the Cratylus, and Khlebnikov after him, are certainly
involved with concrete poetry. For the link between stagnation and
sleep or between truth and a divine wandering are precisely the links
that intrigue poets. There was a Renaissance around 1910 in which the
nature of all the arts changed. By 1916
this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of
which cannot be overestimated. Nor can any understanding be achieved of
twentieth-century art if the work under consideration is not kept
against the background of the war which extinguished European culture.
. . . Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say
nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in
twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. Charles Ives had
written his best music by then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound,
Pound; Joyce, Joyce. Except for individual talents,
already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the
century was over in its sixteenth year. Because of this collapse
(which may yet prove to be a long interruption), the architectonic
masters of our time have suffered critical neglect or abuse, and if
admired are admired for anything but the structural innovations of
their work.(314, my emphasis) Extreme
though The
interwar years witnessed the refinement of these early innovations —El
Lissitsky’s of Malevich’s abstractions, Duchamp’s incorporation of his
readymades into the Large Glass, Gertrude Stein’s
permutations in How To Write of
her early prose technique—but the rupture that caused such widespread
shock and consternation in art circles had already occurred. And in the 1930s and 40s, as socialist-realist
writing came to the fore, avant-garde innovation was considered
suspect. When revival came after World War II, it occurred, not in
Paris, where the postwar ethos was one of existentialist introspection
as to how France had made such a terribly wrong turn in the pre-Hitler
years, and certainly not in the war capitals—Berlin, Rome, Moscow-- but
on the periphery: in Sweden (Fahlström),
Switzerland (Eugen Gomringer), Austria (Ernst Jandl), Scotland (Ian
Hamilton Finlay), and especially in São Paulo, Brazil. The
periphery, as we have seen in Fahlströhm’s case, defined itself by its
resistance to the dominant aesthetic of its day, turning instead to the
avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. But
the rear flank of the army can’t protect the troops without
understanding the moves the front-runners have made—a situation that
makes arrière-garde activity much more than mere repetition. Eugen
Gomringer, generally considered the father of concrete poetry,(7)
is a case in point. Gomringer differed from Fahlströhm, as from the At
the same time, he had a taste for poetry, having begun, as a student,
to write sonnets and related lyric forms in
the tradition of Rilke and George, many of them on classical subjects
like the dramatic monologue “Antinous” (1949), or the Petrarchan sonnet
“Paestum which begins:
Läßt sich von kleinen Händen nichts bewegen,
Da scheinen Sonne, Mond und fallen Regen
Und Winde wehn im alten Maß der Zeit. (Schnauber 7)
On the
shore in the loneliness of the dunes
Nothing can be moved by small hands,
Here shines the sun, the moon, and rain falls
And winds blow, as they did in ancient times.
(my translation) The
poem moves through neatly rhyming quatrains and sestet, tracking the
poet’s contemplation of the stones of The
turn to concrete poetry, based on the abstract art (called “concrete”
because of its emphasis on the materials themselves) exhibited in the
avenidas
avenidas y flores
flores
flores y mujeres
avenidas
avenidas y mujeres
avenidas
y flores y mujeres y
un
admirador This
minimalist poem, divided into four couplets, repeats the three nouns
for avenues, flowers, and women
with six repetitions of the conjunction “and” (“y’), in the following
pattern--a, a + b; b, b + c; a, a + c; a + b + c +;
the final line introduces a fourth noun modified by an
indefinite article—un admirador—thus bringing the poet,
discreetly referred to in the third person, into the picture. Structurally,
Avenidas thus is not yet a “concrete” poem: the stanza
breaks, for example, could be elided and the spacing between couplets
could be changed without appreciably altering the lyric’s meaning.
Within the year, however, Gomringer had written silencio [see
figure 1], ping pong, wind, and the “o” poem [figures 6-8], poems whose typography is clearly
constitutive of their meaning.(9) The motivation of these
“constellations,” as Gomringer called them, was closely related to the
situation of But
such globalism was not without its problems. From his first manifesto,
“From Line to Constellation”(1954), Gomringer emphasized the need for
reduction, concentration, and simplification as “the very essence of
poetry.” “Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters,” he wrote,
“give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting
to be taken up for meaningful use” (see Solt 67). The
“new poem” should be “simple” and could be perceived “visually as a
whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object . . . its concern
is with brevity and conciseness.” Such a poem is called a
“constellation,” in that “it encloses a group of words as if it were
drawing stars together to form a cluster” (67). Reduction,
compression, simplicity, objecthood: note that these are not equivalent
to Fahlströhm’s call for verbivocovisual language and para-grammicity.
In his second major statement on the subject in 1956, Gomringer
declared that “Concrete poetry is founded upon the contemporary
scientific-technical view of the world and will come into its own in
the synthetic-rationalistic world of tomorrow” (Solt 68). This
functional definition of a “universal poetry” brings concretism
dangerously close to industrial design and conformity to the
political-ideological status quo. And indeed, by 1958, in “The Poem as
Functional Object,” Gomringer is talking about “reduced language” as
necessary to “the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of
communication.” “The resulting poems,” he wrote, “should be, if possible, as easily understood as signs in
airports and traffic signs” (Solt 69—70, my emphasis). But what happens when the
identity of poem and industrial sign is complete? How, then, is art
different from commerce, poetry from good design? In 1967, Gomringer
took on the position of chief design consultant for Rosenthal, the
famous china and glass manufacturer, and increasingly his work became
that of consolidation rather than innovation. Perhaps the difficulty
was that his concept of poeticity set itself against the traditional
model of Goethean—or Rilkean—lyric without absorbing the Italian parole in libertà and Russian zaum works
that had performed such a similar role. He had, in other words, no
useful paradigm to revive and adjust, believing that his “simple” and
“direct” constellations were something entirely new. Thus when, in his
last major poem, with its Rilkean title das stundenbuch (“the book of hours”) of 1965, Gomringer
turned from visual “constellation” to the normal page, producing
fifty-eight pages, primarily of five couplets each, containing
permutations of twenty-four short conceptual nouns (e.g. Geist,
Wort, Frage, Antwort; mind, word,
question, answer), each modified by Mein and Dein (“mine” and “yours’’) in
what is a latter-day book of hours, a meditation on the relationship of
life to death, the role of graphic space becomes much less significant,
although verbal repetition in poetry always has a visual as well as an
aural and semantic function. Iconicity, anagram, paranomasia— these now
give way to the accessibility of the sign: Gomringer’s is a poem
readable with a minimum of German. True, the elegantly produced 1980
edition provides, not only the text but also four complete
translations, into English (Jerome Rothenberg), French (Pierre
Garnier), Spanish (Jaime Romagosa), and Norwegian (Jan Östergren)
respectively. But the very fact that stundenbuch
translates so nicely shows that the materiality of the signifier no
longer plays the central role in the poem’s production. The lines deine frage / mein wort inevitably become
your question / my word: the translator need only follow the score. Pós-Tudo, Pós-Utopico
The Brazilian Concretists, to
whom I now turn, had a close relationship to Gomringer at the inception
of the movement, but their work soon took a different direction. The
very name Noigandres, chosen by the For our purposes here, it
matters less what the word noigandres actually means
than that the Brazilian Concretists took a word of complex etymology
from Pound’s Cantos so as to name their movement and
journal. This was an unusual move: in the Why, then, The
Cantos and Joyce’s controversial Finnegans Wake rather
than models closer to home? As Augusto explained it in a 1993 interview
with me: In the fifties . . . there was
a very important demand for change, for the recovery of the avant-garde
movements. We had had two great wars that marginalized, put side for
many many years, the things that interested us. You see, the music of
Webern, Schoenberg and Alan Berg, for example, was not played because
it was condemned both in The war, Augusto observes, put
all artistic experiment on hold, “it was a traumatic situation . . .
[in] all the arts. Duchamp was rediscovered in the sixties by the Pop
movement and by Cage, and then he balanced the influence of Picasso. .
. . There was a great movement in music, in Europe as in the Here is the important
distinction between avant-and arrière-garde. The original avant-garde
was committed not to recovery but discovery, and it insisted that the
aesthetic of its predecessors—say, of the poets and artists of the
1890s—was “finished.” But by mid-century, the situation was very
different. Because the original avant-gardes had never really been
absorbed into the artistic and literary mainstream, the “postmodern”
demand for total rupture was always illusory. Haroldo,
following Augusto’s lead, explains that the Concrete movement began as
rebellion—“We wanted to free poetry from subjectivism and the
expressionistic vehicle” of the then-dominant poetic mode (173). But it
is also important to appreciate continuity. Thus Haroldo praises Paul
Celan’s work, which has “the contemporaneity of concrete poetry. He was
a poet who was . . . influenced by the syntax of Hölderlin, by some
devices of Trakl, but on the other side, there are visual elements in
his poetry, there is a reduction and fragmentation of language typical
of concrete poetry.” Indeed, the “German tradition” in concrete poetry
is criticized for being “much less interested in the field of semantics
than, for instance, Brazilian poetry.” “The Gomringer poetry,” Haroldo
adds, “is very interesting, but very limited” ( What about surrealism? For the
Brazilian arrière-garde, as for Oyvind Fahlströhm, surrealism was
distraction rather than breakthrough. In The point here is that,
whereas the Surrealists were concerned with “new” artistic
content—dreamwork, fantasy, the unconscious, political revolution—the
Concrete movement always emphasized the transformation of materiality
itself. Hence the chosen pantheon included Futurist artworks and Finnegans Wake, Joaquim de Sousandrade’s pre-Modernist
collage masterpiece The Inferno of Wall Street (1877),
and the musical compositions of Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Cage. How, then, did this recovery
project work in practice? The concrete poems in Augusto’s first book Poetamenos (Poetminus), were,
interestingly, not iconic at all but fused Mallarméan spacing, Joycean
pun and paragram, and the Poundian ideogram, with Webern’s notion (in Klangfarbenmelodie) that musical notes have their own
colors. Here, from Poetamenos (1953), is the third
color poem Lygia [figure 9] (12) This love poem juxtaposes the
“red” title word with green, yellow, blue, and purple word groups to
create a dense set of repetitions with variations and contrasts. The
need for translation is minor here, since Augusto himself has invented
a multilingual poetics that oddly anticipates what is sometimes known
in poetry circles today as “The New Mongrelisme.” Lygia
contains English, Italian, German, and Latin words and phrases,
bristling with puns and double entendres. Thus finge
(“feints” or “tricks”) in line 1 becomes finge/rs
(line 2). Do Lygia’s fingers play tricks? The
third and fourth lines confirm this possibility with the anagram digital and dedat illa[grypho]. As Sergio Bessa has explained, in lines
3-4, Augusto deconstructs the Portuguese verb datilografar
(“typewriting”) in order to insert his beloved’s name into the
scene of writing: grypho, moreover, can be read both as
”glyph” and “griffin.” By the time we reach line 5, Lygia has morphed
into a lynx, a feline creature (felyna), but also a daughter figure (figlia),
who makes, in a shift from Italian to Latin, me felix (“me happy”). Note
too that Lygia contains as paragram the suffix -ly
(repeated five times, twice color coded so as to stand out from the
word in which it is embedded)—a suffix that functions as teaser here,
given that the adjective it modifies (happily? deceptively? treacherously? generously?) is wholly
indeterminate. The German phrase so lange so in line 8, puns on Solange Sohl,
whose name Augusto, as he tells it, had come across in a newspaper poem
and had celebrated as the ideal beloved in the Provençal manner ses vezer (“without seeing her”) in his 1950 poem O Sol por Natural.(13) In line 10, the second
syllable of Lygia morphs into Italian to give us gia la
sera sorella—“already evening, sister,” where sorella
may be addressee or an epithet for sera, the
longed-for evening. The poem then
concludes with the English words so only lonely tt-
and then the solitary red letter l, recapitulating the
address to Lygia, but this time reduced to the whisper
or tap of tt and a single liquid sound. To recapitulate: concrete
poetry, as represented by Lygia and its neighboring
constellations in Poetamenos, is less a matter of
iconicity or even spatial design, striking as that design is, than it
is conceived as verbivocovisual composition, all of whose materials
have a signifying function. Pound’s
familiar distinction between melopoeia, phanopoeia, and
logopoeia is applicable here, but note that phanopoeia
is transferred from the realm of representation (e.g., the word or word
group as effective “image” of X or Y) to that of the materiality of the
poem: its sound (emphasized by color) and its visual appearance on the
page. Logopoeia, the dance
of the intellect among words, occurs throughout, and it is melopoeia
that dominates: I have already talked of the lygia—finge—digital—illa
gryphe—lynx lynx—figlia thread; consider also the echo of so lange so in sorella and then in so only
lonely, the spacing further drawing out these word-notes. “Lygia”
thus emerges as a troubadour lyric made new: the
time frame of the aubade or planh
gives way to the spatial-aural construct of this amorous
Klangfarbenmelodie. The love song, moreover, nicelyi ronizes its
conventional subject matter: Lygia, both lynx and digital, has her own
tricks and, in any case, the figure of Solange Sohl looms in the
background. The next step—and we find it
in the work both of Augusto and Haroldo-- was the large-scale
translation, more properly, in Haroldo’s words, transcreation
(see Jackson 9) that included works from the Iliad (Haroldo)
and Arnaut Daniel (Augusto), from Goethe and Hölderlin to August Stramm
and Kurt Schwitters (Haroldo and Augusto), to Rimbaud [Augusto, figure
10], Hopkins, and e. e. cummings (Augusto), from essays on Hegel,
Christian Morgenstern, and Bertolt Brecht (Haroldo) to the “rhythmic
criticism,” as Augusto calls it, the
“ventilated prose” or prosa porosa used in Augusto’s riffs on Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein,
Duchamp, and John Cage in O Anticritico (1986).
Together, Haroldo and Augusto have given us an artist’s book called Panaroma do Finnegans Wake, which contains translations
of selected fragments from the Wake, together with
critical and scholarly commentary, and art work.(14) The poetics of such
“translation” has been described by Haroldo as follows: Writing today in the The texts that come out of
this program are very much artworks in their own right. The Panaroma, for example, takes
as one of its epigraph’s the phrase “to beg for a bite in our bark
Noisdanger” from the Wake, and thus finds a hidden
link between Joyce and the Pound of noigandres. The
translated fragments, many of them quite short, emphasize the
linguistic and poetic side of Joyce’s work, at the expense of its
narrative, mythic analogues. And the illustrations sprinkled throughout
the text are themselves like abstractions from concrete poems, letters
and ideograms arranged in new ways [figure 11]. As a result, Panaroma is less a translation of Joyce
than it is a found text, a transposition taking on its own life.
Indeed, from here, it is a short step to Haroldo’s own Galaxias. Another example of such
transcreation may be found in Augusto’s version of Gertrude Stein’s Porta-Retratos (Santa Catarina: Editora Noa Noa, 1989).
The portrait on the cover (and reprinted as the frontispiece), uma Meanwhile—and this is another
form of transcreation—Haroldo was engaging in theoretical projects that
similarly consolidated the position of the arrière-garde. In Ideograma, a book that has gone through three editions
since its first appearance in 1977, Haroldo gives us a translation of
Ernest Fenollosa’s famous “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry,” which had such a decisive influence on Ezra Pound.
Haroldo’s purpose, however, is not merely to reproduce or enlarge on
Fenollosa’s argument but, on the contrary, to submit it to theoretical
scrutiny. Indeed, his own long chapter, “Poetic Function and the
Ideogram,” is perhaps a more cogent critique than any we have to date
in English, of the notion that Pound himself accepted at face value:
namely, that in the Chinese language, words are much closer to things
than in English, that the “pictorial appeal” of the ideogram makes
Chinese a more “poetic” language than the Western ones, characterized
as they are by a high degree of abstraction. Haroldo counters that, first
of all, “in ordinary use Chinese readers treat ideograms in the same
way as users of alphabetical languages treat script, as
conventionalized symbols, without any longer seeing in them the visual
metaphor—the visible etymology—which so impressed Fenollosa.” More
important, “The Chinese Written Character” displays an improper
understanding of what Roman Jakobson called the poetic
function: Whereas for the referential
use of language it makes no difference whether the word astre
(“star”) can be found within the adjective desastreux
(“disastrous”) or the noun desastre (“disaster”) . . .
. for the poet this kind of “discovery” is of prime relevance. In
poetry, warns Jakobson, any phonological coincidence is
felt to mean semantic kinship. . . .in an overall fecundating
process of pseudo-etymology or poetic etymology. . . . What the Chinese
example enhanced for Fenollosa was the homological and homologizing
virtue of the poetic function. (15) Haroldo will
later complicate his theory of meaning by incorporating Charles Peirce
and Derrida, but for our purposes here, the Jakobson reference is
central for an understanding, not only of Fenollosa but of concrete
poetry itself. The Cratylian argument, we can now see, is not a
“fallacy” in the sense Caroline Bayard took it to be one, for the whole
point is that poetry is that discourse in which astre and desastre do belong together
even if, in ordinary discourse, there is no meaningful relationship
between the two. Both Augusto and Haroldo, like Oyvind Fahlstrohm and
such other Concretists as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ernst Jandl,
understood this distinction. The iconic
aspect of Concrete Poetry, emphasized in the early stages by Gomringer
and Max Bense was always subordinate to the necessity for relational
structure, whereby, to enlarge on Jakobson’s thesis,
any phonological or visual coincidence is felt to mean semantic
kinship. In this sense the material is the meaning. Fenollosa, as
Haroldo recognizes, was on to something important, but by naturalizing
the ideogram (just as Pound naturalized the Image), he assumed that
word and thing can be one. Haroldo’s “rear-guard”
operation vis-à-vis the early twentieth-century avant-garde is thus
pivotal. For years, Pound’s comments on the “ideogrammic method” were
taken at face value and used as entries into The Cantos.
More important, Haroldo’s understanding of how the materiality of the
signifier really could work in the new poetics made it possible for him
to write his great poetic prose text Galaxias. There
are a number of detailed analyses of Galaxias in
David Jackson’s collection (including The preface, called Sables, syllabes (“Sand, Syllables”), is itself a prose
poem, beginning, like Blaise Cendrars’s “Prose du Transsibérien” with
the words, “En ce temps-là” and permutating a set of phrases in a
series of strophes so as to convey the image of Haroldo the traveller,
debarking, now and again, among “les ancient parapets d’europe” (the
allusion is to Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre) so as to
rediscover les lieux Poundiens les revisiter les investir
de ses syllables de ses reflexions les prendre au miroir de ses
syllables de ses ideogrammes de sa barbe de ses cheveux “(the
Poundian places to revisit them to invest them with his syllables his
reflections to put them in the mirror of his syllables of his ideograms
of his beard and his hair”). And Roubaud piles infinitive on infinitive
to produce a highly stylized series of strophes commemorating the days
when he himself and Haroldo shared their first loves (the troubadour
cantos and the poetry of ancient commencer et recommencer à
nous inquiéter nous révulser nous enthousiasmer nous décourager nous
stimuler nous replonger dans l’écume indéfiniment émiettée dans les
grains de sable innombrablement énumérés de la lumière quand tout cela
je me souviens et me ressouviens et retrouve ce moment inoubliable ce
moment de poésie d’il y a vingt-cinq ans où j’ai vu sur la page et
commencé le commencement de lire les premières syllabes les premières
lignes immenses et longues et serrées des GALAXIES. Begin and rebegin to worry
ourselves, to disgust ourselves, to excite ourselves, to discourage
ourselves, to stimulate ourselves, to plunge ourselves again into the
foam indefinitely crumbling the grains of sand innumerably enumerated
in the light when I remember all this and remember again and rediscover
the unforgettable moment the moment of poetry of twenty-five years ago
in which I saw on the page and began the beginning of reading the first
syllables the first lines immense and long and twisted of GALAXIES.(16) Le forgeron de syllables, Roubaud
calls Haroldo, “the blacksmith of syllables..” Roubaud’s own word and
syllable play is rather different, rule-based and numerically organized
as it is, but the basic thrust—against ego psychology, expressiveness,
the communication of preformed “meanings”—is similar, as is the poets’
genealogy from Provençal lyric to Mallarméan language and Modernist
music. The elaborate verbal play of Galaxias is one direction the Concretist arrière-guerre
has taken. The other—and I come back
now to my beginning—is the digital. In 1997, when digital poetry was
still in its infancy, Augusto began to produce, for the Casa das Rosas
in São Pãolo, electronic constellations in which meaning is produced
both spatially and temporally, both kinetically and musically. The most
elaborate of these is probably SOS, his 1983 expoema now set, so to speak, to digital music. In his Anthologie despoesia, Jacques Donguy has produced the
1983 text in both Portuguese and French [see figure 14] and provided a
transcription of the Portuguese, which I give here in English:
I ego eu ya ich io je yo
I
ego eu ya ich io je yo
sós pós nós
alone
after we que faremos apos?
what will we do afterwards? sem soi
sem mãe sem pai
without
sun without mother without father a noite que anoitece
in the night that becomes night
vagaremos sem voz
we will go roaming without voice silencioso
silently SOS
SOS
Augusto’s note reads, “A
centripetal voyage toward the dark hole of the unknown. From the
ego-trip (the personal pronoun of the first person singular in
different languages) to the SOS-trip. To
the enigma of the after- life” (Donguy 118). The stationery concrete poem
is extremely effective as the eye moves from the outer circle of those
first-person pronouns into the eye of the storm SOS. But it cannot compare to the electronic
version [figure 15], in which the words first appear as stars in the
black night, against the background of discordant noise, and then
disappear again as the poet declaims the words, bringing in, in time
for the third circle, a second reader, the two voices producing a kind
of counterpoint in a series of verbal rounds of repetition and
variation as the wheel of words starts turning, circle by circle. The
sounds become more and more ominous until, in the final moment of SOS, the “bomb” explodes in the center, the yellow circle
spreads out to the margins, SOS appearing in huge
black letters on yellow ground. Quickly, the
image bursts and dissolves into a black hole. What will we, who are
alone, do afterward? As an electronic poem, SOS,
like such related works as cidade-city-cité and ininstante (both 1999), can obviously be faulted for
committing the iconic fallacy. The spinning circles of words represent
the planets spinning out of control as doomsday nears. But the poem’s
iconicity would not add up to much were it not for that central pun on SOS—at once the classic distress symbol as relayed in
Morse Code as well as, with an accent over the o, the
Portuguese adjective, in plural form, for only or alone. Sós, moreover, rhymes
with pós (after). The black hole that awaits us in
Augusto’s poem is a terrifying image, especially in its verbivocovisual
dimension. But Augusto’s Expoemas
also anticipate a more recent trend in digital poetics—the
conceptualism that characterizes such texts as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, a book-length writing produced by copying a single
day’s New York Times in linear progression from its
first word to its last in what is an astonishing defamiliarization of
our daily reading practices. One of Augusto’s pieces is called REVER
[figure 16], but, far from containing dream imagery, visual or verbal,
it consists of no more than the word REVER itself
alternately silhouetted in black against a double blue and green band
and a larger red and green one.. The red and green bands move to fill
the whole screen, first one then the other, but the word REVER shoots
out like a noisy rocket, one letter at a time, repeatedly demanding our
attention. As such, the piece continues
indefinitely until the reader clicks it to stop. No
undisturbed sleep, it seems, for the viewer, who is forced to watch the
formation of the single word REVER. No escape from the eternal WORD,
noisily intruding on our contemplation of “pure” color. REVER: will it NEVER go away, will
it play out for-EVER? A Cratylist, moreover, could hardly help noticing
the presence of EVE in the poet’s green garden. In dreams begin
responsibilities. REVER positions itself against all
those avant-garde dream poems from Le Bateau ivre to
John Berryman’s Dream Songs, abjuring the semantic
density of these lyrics even as it slyly spins out its own. In the new digital environment, as Goldsmith
has suggested, such arrière-garde “concretism” takes
on a new life. Notes (1). The
program (6 March 2001), held at the Society of the Americas on Park
Avenue, also included K. David Jackson, A. S. Bessa, and Claus Clüver,
all speaking on the Noigandres poets. (2). Caroline
Bayard, The New Poetics in (3). See
especially William Marx (ed.), Les arrière-gardes au xxe
siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). Translations from this text are my own. (4). Antoine
Compagnon, “L’arrière-garde, de Péguy à Paulhan et Barthes,” in Marx,
93-101. The references is to Roland
Barthes, Oeuvres completes, III, p. 1038 (“Reponses,
1971): “To be avant-garde
is to know that which has died. To be
arrière-garde, is to continue to love it.” (5). Oyvind
Fahlstrom, Hipy papy. . ., in
Teddy Hultberg, Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating
the World. Bilingual text ( (6). F. T.
Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” Critical
Writings, New Edition, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson ( (7). See, for
example, Solt, Concrete Poetry, 8. (8). See Cornelius Schnauber,
“Einleutung,” Deine Träume, Mein Gedicht: Eugen Gomringer
und die Konkrete Poesie (Nördlingen: Greno, 1989), 5-6. (9). In the o poem, the title’s circle becomes a negative presence,
the two circle halves outlined by 4 triangles made of the container
words: show, flow, blow, grow. (10). See
Kurt Marti, “Zu Eugen Gomringers ‘Konstellationen’,” and Peter Demetz,
“Eugen Gomringer und die Entwicklung der Konkreten Poesie,” in
Schnauber, 88-94, 151-respectively. (11). In the
preface to his French translation of Augusto de Campos, Anthologie
despoesia, (Romainville: Al Dante, 2002), 7-8, Jacques Donguy has a
long scholarly footnote explaining the etymology of Noigandres. See also Hugh Kenner, The
Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1971), 116. In an email to the
author, 26 June 2002, Augusto de Campos provides further information
about the term, describing his own consultation of the 4-volume Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch (1904), where he
found additional etymological data on Arnaut Daniel’s use of the word. But Augusto is skeptical about the sexual
theme put forward, Donguy tells, by Provençalists like Julien Blaine. (12). Augusto de Campos, Lygia, from Poetamenos (1953), reproduced in many of Augusto’s
volumes—for example Poesia 1949-1979 (São Paulo:
Atelier Editorial, 2001)—is most easily accessible on line at http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/home.htm/ and in Donguy, Anthologie
déspoesia, pp. 22-23. I have relied
in large part on Donguy’s excellent note on p. 22.
(13). See
Donguy 22 and email to the author 26 June 2002, Augusto recalls how he
first saw the name Solange Sohl in 1949 “signing a very beautiful poem
in a newspaper,” and then learned this name was a pseudonym of Patricia
Galvao (“Pagu’), the former wife of Oswald de Andade, political
activist, and first translator of Joyce’s Ulysses into
Portuguese. In 1983, Augusto published a
an edition of her work under the title .PAGU: VIDA-OBRA . (14).
In
the order cited: Haroldo de Campos, os nomes e os navios: Homero, Ilîada, II (Rio de
Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1999); Augusto de Campos, Mais
Provençais (Säo Paulo, Capnhia das lettras, 1987);
Augusto de Campos, Irmaos Germanos (Santa Caterina: Editions Noa
Noa, 1992); Augusto de Campos, Rimbaud livre (São Paulo:
Editora perspectiva, 1992); Augusto, Hopkins A Beleza Difiicil
(Editora perspectiva, 1997); Augusto, e.e. cummings 40
POEM(A)S (Editora Brasiliense, 1987); Haroldo de campos, O Arco-Iris Branco (Rio di Janeiro, Imago, 1997);
Augusto, O anticritico (São Paulo: Companhia des
letters, 1986). (15). Haroldo de
Campos, Ideograma, 3d. ed. (São Paulo: USPED, 1994),
47-48. My translation is based on that of
Maria Lucia Santaelle Braga, in “Poetic Function and Ideogram: The
Sinological Argument,” Dispositio: Revista Hispánica de
Semiotica Literaria, 6, no. 17-18 (1981): 9-39.
This
translation refers to the first edition of Ideograma. In the third, Haroldo has added a section on
Charles Peirce and Derrida, which complicates the issue further.
“Poetic Function and the Ideogram,” in a revised translation, is
published in S. A. Bessa and Odile Cisneros, Novas:
Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos ( (16). Jacques
Roubaud, "Sables, syllabes: Préface", in Galaxies, traduit, Inés
Oseki-Dépré & l'auteur (Paris: La Main courante, 1998) unpaginated.
For the original,
see Haroldo de Campos, Galáxias (Sao Paulo: Editora ex Libris,
1984). English translation is mine. Bibliography Bessa,
Sergio.“The Image of Voice in Augusto de Campos’s Poetamenos,”
unpub. paper. Brazilian
Concrete Poetry: How it Looks Today: Harold and Augusto de Campos
interviewed by Marjorie Perloff,” Arshile, 1994; rpt.
in Jackson, Haroldo de Campos: 165-79. Burliuk,
David et.al., Slap in the Face of Public Taste, in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos 1912-1928. ed.
Anna Lawton. Davenport,
Guy. «Narrative Time and Form,» The Geography of the
Imagination. Goldsmith,
Kenneth. Day (Great ----.
“From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation,” Ubuweb Papers http://www.ubu/com/papers/goldsmith_command.html.
Gomringer,
Eugene. das stundenbuch, the book of hours, le livre
d’heures, el libro de las horas, timebook. 1965; Stamberg: Joseph
Keller Verlag, 1980. Khlebnikov,
Velimir. Collected Works. 3
vols. Letters and Theoretical Writings, ed. Charlotte
Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt. Malevich,
Kasimir. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New
Painterly Realism (1915), in Russian Art of the
Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism 902-1934. ed. and trans. John E.
Bowlt. Marx, William. (ed.) Les arrière-gardes au xxe siècle. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Pound,
Ezra. The Cantos. Perloff,
Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of
Media. Waldrop,
Rosmarie. “A Basis of Concrete Poetry” (1977), in Dissonance
(if you are interested).
In its inattention to sound and syntax,
Fahlstrom implies, surrealism should be understood as a deviation from
the true avant-garde path. The new poetics thus positions itself
elsewhere—as the arrière garde of Italian and Russian Futurism, of the
“destruction of syntax” (Marinetti) and the “word set free”
(Khlebnikov). The question remains why such Concretism as Fahlströhm’s,
with its marvelous recovery of zaum,
sound poetry, innovative
typography, and appropriated text, came into being when and where it
did. And what did the two World Wars have to do with it?
The Gomringer
Variant
In The
Geography of the Imagination (1981),
Guy Davenport made a comment that sheds much light on the relation of
concrete poetry to the avant-gardes of the early century:
Our
age is unlike any other in that its greatest works of art were
constructed in one spirit and received in another.
Am