A Fortnightly Review.

Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology
By Nancy Perloff

Reaktion | 224pp | £18.o5 $23.43

By SIMON COLLINGS.

Nancy Perloff’s Concrete Poetry: A 21^st-Century Anthology offers a present-day perspective on the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s through to the 1970s. The curator takes us back to that defining period, which most scholars identify as the heyday of concretism, with the aim of establishing a sort of ‘canon’ of the most interesting and enduring contributors to the movement. Here is a body of work, Perloff argues, which deserves a wider audience and greater critical attention.

The book grew out of an exhibition Perloff organised for the Getty Research Institute in 2017. Responses to that show persuaded her that concrete poetry ‘remains largely unknown’. The major anthologies of the movement were all published more than 50 years ago and have long been out of print.¹ Perloff fills the gap by showcasing around 140 key works by 40 different artists, including brief critical commentaries on each entry.

As an interdisciplinary form, concrete poetry inevitably shares territory with other contemporary practices in the visual arts and music. Any attempt at defining concrete poetry is therefore hedged with difficulty. Many of the key figures who produced concrete poems also made visual art, composed music, performed sound poetry, and/or presented gallery-based work using a range of media. The poetry was one aspect of a broader practice.² Perloff focuses primarily on work in which semantic meaning, visual design and sonorous effects have equal weight – characteristics which, she says, distinguish true concrete poetry from, say, visual poetry or conceptual art. Preoccupations with formal simplification and reduction, and with the materiality of language, are also core characteristics of this work.

Fig 1. Gappmeyr: ‘sind’. Click images to enlarge.

Heinz Gappmayer’s ‘sind’ from 1964 exemplifies the type of poetry in which Perloff is interested (Fig.1).  The poem consists of the single word ‘sind’ (German for ‘are’ as in ‘we are’ or ‘they are’) repeated many times in a staggered pattern across the page. The number of times the word is repeated decreases down the page, and the lower section of the page is blank. The spacing of the letters reveals other words – ‘sin’, ‘in’ –and strands individual letters like ‘s’ and ‘d’. The form of the poem suggests various possible readings, perhaps the interconnectedness of those who ‘are’, the jostling of a crowd, or the individuality of people in a group. Voicing the text confronts the performer with a challenge, there being no ‘right’ way to read this aloud. How do you vocalise a letter which is typed above the line? Do you pronounce ‘sin’ with an English accent? The work seems simple but expands in complexity with repeated viewing.

Fig. 2. Edwin Morgan: ‘French Persian Cats Having a Ball’.

There are many poems in the anthology which exhibit similar ‘verbivocovisual’ qualities (Joyce’s word) – well-known pieces by Ernst Gomringer and Ian Hamilton Finlay for example, both important figures in the movement. Other examples of texts which retain some element of semantic sense include bpNichol’s ‘love’, in which the word love is printed left to right, back to front, vertically and upside down to generate a rising diagonal line of ‘e’s expressive of exhilaration, and Emmett Williams’ ‘sweethearts’, a kind of erasure poem in which repeating ‘sweethearts’ six times but with different letters deleted spells out ‘he/seats/her/at/the/sea’. Edwin Morgan’s amusing piece ‘French Persian Cats Having a Ball’ (Fig.2) plays on the similarities in pronunciation between Shah and the French ‘chat’ (cat), as contrasted with ‘chachacha’. Verbally and visually the piece imitates the changing moves of a dance.

Fig. 3. Mary Ellen Solt: ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’

Other works in the anthology, however, depart from this ‘verbivocovisual’ formula. Some rely mainly on visual appeal while others attend primarily to sound effects. Mary Ellen Solt’s ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’ (Fig.3) uses no words or letters. Instead, she copies the framing symbols used by scientists to mark the first photos of the moon, arranging these in a pattern which mimics the form of a sonnet.

Fig. 4. Kitasono Katue: ‘A portrait of a poet’.

Augusto de Campos’ tower of eyes, mouths and road signs, collaged from magazine clippings, and Kitasono Katue’s use of the camera to produce images of ‘pieces of paper scraps, boards, glasses, etc’ (Fig.4), also lean heavily towards purely visual effect.

NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click ‘full screen’ option. ‘Esc’ returns you here.

Poems which use sound as a major component include graphic texts by Bob Cobbing which functioned as performance scores, in one case patterns of repeated ‘j’s’ and ‘f’s printed at various angles creating a figure which seems to dance on the page. As Perloff notes, Cobbing was interested in ‘complex bodily movements and mobile vocal-body sounds in space’ and the form of the piece seems to invite that kind of response in performance.

Emmett Williams’ ‘Alphabet Symphony’ consists of a column of letters on a long scroll. Williams assigned each letter of the alphabet to a different object. During the performance of the piece Williams read out the letters while his fellow artist Dick Higgins pulled the relevant objects out of a bag. The emphasis here seems more about questioning the referentiality of language than the sounds generating any semantic sense. Williams and Higgins were both active members of Fluxus, an international network of artists whose practice overlapped with conceptual art, much of the impact of the work residing in the idea, with the skill in execution being secondary or even irrelevant.

The concrete poetry movement emerged in several countries contemporaneously in the 1950s – Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil, Austria, Japan. Nancy Perloff pays particular attention to groups such as the Viennese and the Japanese whose contributions to the movement have received less attention historically. Even in Japan the VOU group, founded by Kitasono Katue, is known today only to specialists.³ The Wiener Gruppe, led by Rühm, for whom texts were ‘intended to be heard, to activate musical parameters of language’, is largely unknown in the Anglophone world, Perloff says. The anthology’s attention to these groups is one of the book’s strengths.

Perloff highlights two significant factors driving the emergence of these groups in the post-war period: a desire to re-connect with the historical avant-garde of the ’20s, and the search for a transnational poetry as a reaction against nationalism. Young artists cut off by World War II from the radical art movements of the earlier part of the century were re-discovering those traditions. At the same time, these artists saw their work as creating a basis for global connection and communication through, to quote Rühm, ‘a simplified world language’. These artists were responding to international developments in technology, media, advertising, and graphic design.⁴

Perloff’s commentaries on the individual poems are another valuable element of the book. Non-English words are translated, and the reader’s attention is directed to significant features of the work. One might question some of the individual readings, but that’s perhaps inevitable, especially where translation is involved. In Edgard Braga’s ‘um lume vaga’ – which plays on the Portuguese word for firefly (vagalume) – the sense of ‘vaga’ as ‘wanders’ seems to me critical to the humour of the piece. Perloff prefers ‘flies’ as the translation for ‘vaga’, maintaining the integrity with ‘fireflies’ but losing the sense of how the text wanders across the page.

The final section of the anthology, ‘Postlude’, includes four ‘contemporary poets who represent the varied legacies of the concrete movement’: Derek Beaulieu, Susan Howe, Cia Rinne and André Vallias. As Perloff says, given there are so many fine post-concrete poets who merit consideration, any selection will inevitably be arbitrary. I would have liked a larger selection of contemporary work to have been included, and for the introduction to have said more about concrete poetry now. Howe is a poet I greatly admire, but she is not exactly ‘unknown’. She’s also a contemporary of many of the key figures in concretism — she was born in 1937.

Howe’s use of collaged, fragmented text relates strongly to her interest in archival sources, damaged historical text, and the task of recovering lost voices from between the lines of surviving testimonies and records. While sharing some similarities with concrete poetry, her work seems to me to arise from a very different set of impulses. Her ‘concrete’ texts typically appear as part of larger works including essay material and poetry — as for example the inclusion of ‘Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpoint Edwards’ in Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007). An image of a fragment from the dress is followed by thirteen collaged texts, some scarcely legible. Sound is also important to Howe, who has recorded a performance of Frolic Architecture (2011) with an accompanying soundscape improvised by composer David Grubb.

All four of the poets selected by Nancy Perloff for her ‘Postlude’, and indeed many other poets she includes in her survey, feature in another recent anthology: The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21^st Century, edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe. This overlap is hardly surprising in that some of the founding figures of the moment are still alive and working. The New Concrete is a good place to go if you want an overview of the contemporary scene, and its continuities with the past. The mixing of ‘concrete’ and ‘visual’ in the anthology’s title is a deliberate signaling by the editors of the current inter-changeability of these terms.

The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith, in his introduction to this volume, provides a useful summary of the evolution of concrete poetry following its re-birth after the 1970s ‘as a digital phoenix in the computer age’. Goldsmith describes this history as a microcosm of wider cultural changes, a transition from ‘the utopian to the dystopian’. By the late 1960s many poets were moving away from the clean designs of the early concrete works in favour of ‘dirty-concrete’, works which exploited the qualities of the typewriter and duplicator to underscore the role of the machine in artistic production. This shift was politically motivated, abandoning the aesthetic disengagement of pure modernism for the democratic struggle on the street, often merging with other practices such as mail and graffiti art, e.g. in the work of Williams, Higgins and Cobbing.

As Goldsmith says, many of the principles of concretism re-emerge in the digital sphere. The aspiration for a universal language of images exists today in the quest for commonly understood symbols, icons and emojis. Text has become a physical object we now drag, drop and manipulate. This applies to any digital file: sound, image, words. ‘Concrete poetry’s great gift,’ says Goldsmith, ‘was to demonstrate the multi-dimensionality of language, showing us that words are more than just words. What seemed like a marginal and boutique support in the twentieth century has turned out to be prophetic in the twenty-first.’

In making her case for concrete poetry, Nancy Perloff makes a number of assertions. ‘The best concrete poems,’ she says, ‘are visually and sonically compelling – indeed, difficult and complex and hence requiring close and careful reading.’ Kenneth Goldsmith, on the other hand, argues that concrete poetry has always been ‘fast’ and is ‘resistant to close reading’. Is Perloff over-claiming in arguing for a complexity that some of the poetry at least doesn’t possess, or even aspire to? Is Goldsmith being too hasty in emphasising slickness and opacity? Or do these views reflect different aspects of a highly disparate body of work which resists easy generalisations? Some possible ways of coming at this question are offered by recent work by Nancy Perloff’s mother, the literary critic Marjorie Perloff. Perloff senior, according to the acknowledgements in Concrete Poetry, ‘encouraged the anthology from the beginning’, and took the curator to task ‘when an analysis fell short’. Clearly the mother’s influence looms large in the anthology.

It’s not surprising then to find that Marjorie Perloff’s most recent volume of essays, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics,⁵ includes a discussion of two concrete poets who feature in the Concrete Poetry anthology – Ian Hamilton Finlay and Haroldo de Campos. Discussion of Finlay’s work arises in a chapter where Perloff demonstrates the importance of elaborate patterns of sound in Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ in creating the poetic character of that work. She argues that Eliot’s attentions to the physical properties of the language anticipate the work of Finlay and other concrete poets, even if they themselves may not have seen a connection. Poetic lineages are not as straightforward as we’re often asked to believe, Perloff argues, and demand periodically to be rethought.

Tracing a connection between Eliot’s high modernism and Finlay’s radically different work involves something of a conceptual leap but it’s not as farfetched as one might think. We know the Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poets drew on Pound’s use of the ideogram as a model for poetic composition. In the original Pilot Plan for Noigandres 4,⁶ Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, along with Décio Pignatari, declared:

Concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space–time structure instead of mere linear–temporal development. Hence the importance of the ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax or in the specific sense (Fenollosa/Pound) as a method of composition based on direct – analogical, not logical-discursive – juxtaposition of elements.

In Infrathin, Perloff shows how the Brazilian concrete poets kept faith with Pound’s sense of spatial syntax in ways which Olson, with his looser free-verse compositional method, did not. Her readings of Olson here are compelling. Through condensation, concrete poetry is capable of generating semantic depth and complexity, Perloff argues.  ‘It was in the work of the Brazilian concrete poets from the mid-century to the present,’ she says, ‘that the condensation and “high temperature” of the Poundian Canto complex was carried to its logical conclusion.’

These juxtapositions of the works of concrete poets alongside major figures of European modernism are clearly consistent with the claims for concrete poetry being advanced in the daughter’s anthology. The emphasis on ‘close reading’ by both women is also consistent across that approach. An earlier collection of essays, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, offers further lines of enquiry. This earlier volume, The Sound of Poetry: The Poetry of Sound, sets out to address the issue of why sound in poetry is such a neglected subject in contemporary critical discourse. In pursuing this question many contributors reference issues which engaged the concrete movement.

The book features essays by 21 contributors, including the editors, and many touch on concrete and sound poetry. Joanna Drucker’s observation that visual and auditory experiences involve different interpretative codes and therefore demand discrete and appropriate types of analysis is a useful reminder of the limits of a purely literary ‘close reading’. For Brian M. Reed, what exactly a ‘poem’ is – given that it can be heard, performed, read silently on the page – remains ‘a fundamental ambiguity in the field of poetics’. He questions conventional ideas of the printed poem being a kind of ur-text or score from which readers seek to perform an ideal version. Under this view, he says, the poem as text becomes a quasi-transcendental entity accessible more to the intellect than to the five senses, an idea clearly antithetical to concretism.

Another important issue raised in the Perloff and Dworkin collection concerns the conventional notion of ‘musicality’ in verse. Traditionally critics have used this term in the sense of a melodic, harmonious sound which is pleasing to the ear. But, as the editors point out: ‘In the age of John Cage or Iannis Xenakis, lyric, with its traditional connotations of “melodic,” may […] no longer be the best term to use in our discourse about poetry. Indeed, from Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns,  available both as printed text and as CD performance, to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poem-sculptures at Little Sparta (Scotland), to Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias,  written in a highly stylized “musical” prose, the term poetry  has come to be understood less as the lyric genre than as a distinctive way of  organizing language — which is to say, the language  art.’

These critiques of the assumptions employed in mainstream literary criticism open up fruitful ways of understanding and appreciating non-traditional poetic practices, including the work of concrete poets. While some of the work featured in Nancy Perloff’s anthology can demonstrate affinities with canonical literary works, or at least with elements of traditional technique, much of the work deliberately challenges ideas of value in literary discourse, often as part of a wider social critique. Some of the concrete poems in the Nancy Perloff book (and indeed in the Bean and McCabe volume) are relatively complex and capable of sustaining repeated viewing/reading. But others are much simpler and even deliberately ephemeral. Nancy Perloff acknowledges this in comments on individual poems. Writing about a poem by Henri Chopin, she says: ‘In “il patuage”, we see only the repeated nonsense syllables flic, flac, floc – onomatopoeic for splashing water. Chopin’s design of an instantly recognizable human form pokes fun at the nonreferential or ambiguous tendencies of concrete poetry.’ This doesn’t diminish the interest of these pieces, but such work does need to be understood in its historical context and should ideally be viewed alongside other work by the artists, including work in other media.

♦

SIMON COLLINGS lives in Oxford. His poetry, short fiction, translations, reviews and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines including Stride, Fortnightly Review, Café Irreal, Litter, International Times, Junction Box, The Long Poem Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, PN Review and Journal of Poetics Research. Why are you here?, a collection of his prose poems and short fiction, was published by Odd Volumes in November 2020. His third chapbook, Sanchez Ventura, was published by Leafe Press in spring 2021. He is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. For more information, visit his webpage.

NOTES.

1. Stephen Bann, Concrete Poetry, An International Anthology, London Magazine Editions (1967); Emmett Williams,  An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Something Else Press (1967); Eugene Wildman, Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism, Swallow Press (1967, revised edition 1971); and Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View, Indiana University Press (1971).
2. An essay by the influential British critic Eric Mottram, ‘Towards Design in Poetry’, originally published in 1977, provides a useful contemporary perspective on these activities. Mottram writes: ‘Concrete poetry is part of the developments in conceptual, visual and sculptural art, and in music; the essential interfacial nature of these developments has been clear for some years now…Within this sphere of action the poem is more clearly than ever materials for performance. The poetic event is not the text on the page, to be subject to academic analysis as if it were complete.’ Eric Mottram, Towards Design in Poetry, Veer Books, 2004.
3. Kitasono, who founded the VOU group in Tokyo in 1935, was a major influence on a group of artists, some of whom are still active today. Many group members used the camera to create work, while others explored graphic design and collage, incorporating Japanese ideograms and European words and letters in their output. There’s a fascinating recent anthology of work by this group: VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978, edited by Taylor Mignon, Tokyo: Isobar Press, 2022.
4. Jamie Hilder has argued persuasively that ‘contemporaneous social and technological shifts’ directly influenced the strategies of this group of poets whose aim was ‘to transform poetry’s communicative power in a rapidly shifting media environment.’ Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971, Jamie Hilder, PhD Thesis submitted to University of British Columbia (Vancouver), 2010.
5. The essays in this collection pay close attention to sound patterning and visual presentation in poetry based on Marcel Duchamp’s notion of ‘inframince’, an idea which Duchamp said could not be defined, only illustrated. Examples include the subtle differences between two objects made from the same mould, and the warmth of a recently vacated chair. Perloff appropriates the term and re-fashions it to signify a super-close reading of a text. The chapter on the relationship between Duchamp and Gertrude Stein is particularly interesting.
6. See Claus Clüver, ‘The Noigandres Poets and Concrete Art‘ in Ciberletras (SUNY).