Concrete poetry

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Concrete poetry ( Latin concretus 'dense, firm' ; Greek  ποίησις poiesis "poetry") describes a certain approach to language in poetry . Language no longer serves to describe a fact, a thought or a mood, but it becomes the purpose and object of the poem itself . The language thus represents itself. However, a lot of emphasis is placed on the design.

definition

Fisch Nachtgesang
( Christian Morgenstern )

-
‿ ‿
- - -
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
- - -
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
- - -
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
- - -
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
- - -
‿ ‿
- -

The concrete poetry uses the phonetic, visual and acoustic dimensions of language as a literary device. This form of literature would only like to refer to its own means: words, letters or punctuation marks are removed from the context of the language and appear "concrete" to the viewer, i. H. standing for itself, opposite. This linguistic demonstration is intended to counteract the linguistic overstimulation. Language no longer functions as a reference in the “concrete poem”. The method of concrete poetry is an antipoetic meditation on the condition of the possibility of poetic design. There is no “poem about”, but only a reality of the linguistic product itself.

history

The term Concrete Poetry comes from the visual arts , from Theo van Doesburg's magazine Art concret (1930), after which Concrete Art is named. As the concrete of a picture he called the picture elements point, line, surface, color. This definition of “concrete” was carried over to poetry and photography . Independently of this, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète . What all concrete art movements have in common is the removal of the (postulated) elements of the arts and their representation as a separate reality.

Eugen Gomringer's appeal from vers zur konstellation (1954) is considered to be the founding manifesto of concrete poetry, although the artist, art theorist and writer Öyvind Fahlström had already come across the term.

For Gomringer, the words are no longer carriers of meaning, but are used as visual (i.e. relating to sight) and phonetic design elements. The graphic arrangement of the text is intended to underline or ironize its meaning. The decisive poetic activity is the construction, the novel composition of the individual language elements. Gomringer calls his poems "constellations". This approach removes words, letters or punctuation marks from the context of the language.

Many German-speaking representatives of Concrete Poetry belonged to the circle of the Vienna group and the Stuttgart group / school around Max Bense .

Playing with the meaning of the content:

             cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud
          cloud
        cloud
           cloud
            cloud cloud
              B B
             L Lb
              I I l i t z
             T T i
              Z Z tz

Brazil

In São Paulo , Concrete Poetry emerged largely independently of European developments within the framework of the Noigandres artist group : Augusto de Campos , Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos , however, invoked the authority of the avant-garde from Mallarmé to James Joyce , Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings . The concrete painting, Piet Mondrian's boogie-woogie picture series and Alexander Calder's mobiles , Anton Webern's timbre melody and Ezra Pound's theory of the ideogram , with which he followed Ernest Fenollosa's daring theory of the Chinese character, were important. Max Bill received the International Prize at the first São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and was on the jury two years later. When designer Pignatari visited the Ulm School of Design in 1955 , he met Max Bill's secretary Eugen Gomringer.

In 1956/57 the first national exhibition of concrete art was shown in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In 1958 Noigandres published the manifesto Plano-piloto para poesia concreta . The word should no longer be perceived as a mere bearer of meaning, but in its entirety. It should become poetic as an artifact (the separation of the signified and the signified should be abolished in poetry).

Concrete poetry revolutionized Brazilian poetry. However, even in the run-up to the military dictatorship (1964–1985) there was criticism of its superficial indifference to social events, and the political left in particular called for a poem that draws attention to the social injustices in the country. Concrete poetry developed a great influence on the artists of tropicalismo ( Caetano Veloso , Gilberto Gil , Gal Costa , Chico Buarque , José Carlos Capinam , Jards Macalé and others) at the end of the 1960s. With the Tropicalismo one succeeded in overcoming the ideological trench warfare among the poets. At the same time, Concrete Poetry flowed into modern Brazilian music.

Especially since the 1970s, Brazilian concrete poetry has led to a graphic renewal of the word at all levels of society; its innovations have been used in advertising as well as in political propaganda. The influence of Concrete Poetry can still be felt today, with artists like Arnaldo Antunes continuing the tradition.

present

Poèmes à Lou
(Guillaume Apollinaire 1914)

Calligramme.jpg

 

The funnels
(Christian Morgenstern 1905)

Two funnels walk through the night.
Through its hull narrowed shaft
white moonlight flows
quietly and cheerful
on their
forest trail
us
w.

 
Apple

(Reinhard Döhl 1965)
Doehl apple.jpg

 
 
Idea of ​​the Döhl

(Joseph Felix Ernst 2011)

  
 
Freedom-democratic basic order

(Wolfgang Lauter 1978)
FdGrundordnung.gif

Groups or “representatives” of Concrete Poetry no longer exist today as they did in the last few decades. The groups have been replaced by very few individual representatives who - benefited by the development of the media and also advertising - have become bolder in their designs and works. In place of the rigid dogmas of this creative literature (e.g. Concrete Poetry only represents itself), the game with words and letters has taken place. It's all about

  • playing with meanings
  • playing with the spatial dimension of the font (e.g. different font sizes)
  • playing with the spatial positioning of letters / words

There is now also the term “word picture” as a term for this language product - alongside the term “visual” or “concrete” poetry. Gomringer has his museum, other representatives of this poetry have made well-known anthologies (see E. Williams), but the development of the visual aspect in written language continues. That speaks for its dynamism - even if it is almost ignored in the literature business. Concrete poetry is the passion of intellectuals among poets. The times when great anthologies of concrete poetry were published seem to be over for the time being.

Poets of Concrete Poetry (selection)

Exhibitions

See also

literature

Anthologies (selection)

  • Stephen Bann (Ed.): Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology . London Magazine Editions, London 1967 * Max Bense, Elisabeth Walther (ed.): Concrete poetry international . rot, No. 21, Stuttgart 1965. A second volume appeared: rot, No. 41, Stuttgart 1970
  • Beloit Poetry Journal , Vol. 17, No. 1, 1966
  • Jean Francois Bory (ed.): Bientot . 1967. English translation: Once Again , New Directions 1968
  • Eugene Wildman (Ed.): An Anthology of Concretism . Chicago Review , Vol. 19, No. 4, September 1967
  • Emmett Williams (ed.): An Anthology of Concrete Poetry , edition hansjörg mayer, Stuttgart and Something Else Press , New York, Villefranche, Frankfurt, 1967 (one of the best anthologies of concrete poetry, of international relevance). Without ISBN.
  • Mary Ellen Solt (Ed.): Concrete Poetry: A World View . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1968, ISBN 978-0-253-11300-9 . New edition as paperback 1970, ISBN 978-0-253-11301-6 . Text as html on UbuWeb
  • Liesbeth Crommelin (Ed.): Klankteksten / concrete poezie / visual teksten . Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1970
  • John J. Sharkey: Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry . Lorrimer Pub. Ltd., London 1971
  • Eugen Gomringer (ed.): Concrete poetry: German-speaking authors . Reclam, Stuttgart 1972. New edition 2001. ISBN 978-3-15-009350-4
  • John Jessop (Ed.): International Anthology of Concrete Poetry . Missing Link Press, Poetry Toronto Books, Toronto 1978
  • Safiye Can , Jürgen Krätzer (Ed.): Take the word at its word. Concrete and other forms of play of poetry 1 that listen. Journal for Literature, Art and Criticism, Vol. 271, Göttingen 2018
  • Safiye Can , Jürgen Krätzer (Ed.): Take the word at its word. Concrete and other forms of poetry 2 that listen. Journal for Literature, Art and Criticism, Vol. 272, Göttingen 2018

Secondary literature

  • Per Bäckström : “Words as things. Concrete Poetry in Scandinavia ” , 'Cahiers de la nouvelle Europe' ': special issue' 'Transfers, Appropriations and Functions of Avant-Garde in Central and Northern Europe, 1909–1989' ', Paris: L'Harmattan, 2012.
  • Augusto de Campos, Décio Pinatari, Haroldo de Campos: Theoria da poesia concreta. Textos críticos e manifestos 1950–1960. Edições Invenção, 1965.
  • David William Seaman: French Concrete Poetry: The Development of a Poetic Form from the Origins to the Present Day . Stanford 1970
  • Text & Criticism , Nos. 25, 30: Konkrete Poesie , 2 volumes, Munich 1970/71.
  • Thomas Kopferman (ed.): Theoretical positions on concrete poetry. Texts and bibliography . Tuebingen 1974
  • Harald Hartung: Experimental literature and concrete poetry , Göttingen 1975
  • Liselotte Gimpel: 'Concrete' Poetry from East and West Germany: the Language of Exemplarism and Experimentalism . Yale University Press, New Haven 1976
  • Dieter Kessler: Studies on Concrete Poetry: Preforms, Theories, Texts . Meisenheim am Glan 1976.
  • Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer: Concerning Concrete Poetry . Writers Forum, London 1978
  • Thomas Kopferman: Concrete Poetry: Fundamental Poetics and Textual Practice of a Neo-Avant-Garde . Lang, Frankfurt / Main, Bern 1981.
  • Jeremy Adler , Ulrich Ernst: Text as a figure. Visual poetry from ancient times to modern times . ( Exhibition catalogs of the Herzog August Library , No. 56). Weinheim 1987
  • Michael Glasmeier: literally literally literally literally . Berlin 1987.
  • Ulrich Ernst: Concrete poetry. Innovation and tradition. Catalog for the exhibition in the Wuppertal University Library , Wuppertal 1991.
  • Michael Fisch : Concrete poetry: beginning and end of an extraordinary art form. - About examples and patterns of Concrete Poetry and about the limits and possibilities of experimental writing styles. In: Sixty Years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Research contributions by Tunisian and German Germanists. Academium, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-89129-987-6 , pp. 77-101.
  • Klaus Peter Dencker, Optical Poetry. From the prehistoric characters to the digital experiments of the present. Berlin, New York 2011 (Concrete Poetry, p. 312 ff)

bibliography

  • Kathleen McCullough: Concrete Poetry; An Annotated International Bibliography, with an Index of Poets and Poems . Whitston Publishing, Troy NY, 1989

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 1, 1954
  2. ^ Öyvind Fahlström: Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben: Manifesto for concrete poetry . In: Odyssé , No. 3–4, 1954. Written in 1953. On Fahlström's website the title is translated as follows: Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy: Manifesto for Concrete Poetry
  3. ^ 1. Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta , Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 4. – 18. December 1956, Ministry of Culture and Education, Rio de Janeiro, February 1958. The Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo opened in 1948, the city's art museum in 1947.
  4. ↑ Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos: Plano-piloto para poesia concreta . In: Noigandres , No. 4, March 1958. The first number of the magazine, with poems in verse, appeared in 1952. The second edition of February 1955 brought the more radical Poetamenos poems (written from January to July 1953) and theoretical articles in which the expression Concrete poetry is used for the first time.
  5. ↑ letters to pictures . In: FAZ , March 1, 2016, p. 13