Chapter Title: INFORMATION IN FORM: “THE TENSION OF THINGS-WORDS IN SPACE- TIME” Book Title: Designed Words for a Designed World Book Subtitle: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971 Book Author(s): JAMIE HILDER Published by: McGill-Queen's University Press. (2016) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1d988xz.9 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms McGill-Queen's University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Designed Words for a Designed World This content downloaded from 192.246.229.127 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:29:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 5 INFORMATION IN FORM: “THE TENSION OF THINGS-WORDS IN SPACE-TIME” Spaces of Concrete In 1955, the Swiss artist and poet Andre Thomkins began collecting words that carried meaning in two or more of the German, French, and English languages. A member of the Darmstadt Circle of experimental poets and artists, a group that included the American Emmett Williams, the Icelandic Dieter Roth, the German Claus Bremer, and the Romanian Daniel Spoerri, Thomkins was used to operating in a polylinguistic environment. Much in the same way that Augusto de Campos, in his “City Poem” (1963; see fig. 3.5), took up the Latin roots shared by words in English, French, and Portuguese that can be completed with the suffixes “city / cidade / and cité,” Thomkins implemented the list as form, and used words that infiltrate and occupy different national languages, though with different pronunciations and meanings, as a way to address both the impediments and opportunities created by an increasingly connected international cultural sphere. The poem appears in Williams’s anthology as a simple list of words, six per This content downloaded from 192.246.229.127 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:29:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 188 | InFoRMATIon In FoRM line, but Williams’s gloss describes a different form: “‘Dogmat-Mot’ is a mobile composition of 120 words arranged on mobile discs which present the reader with ever-changing phrases” (n. pag.). The poem-as-object, a triangular arrangement of ten hexagons with words printed around their edges and trisectionally, all of which hinge on a central pivot, allows readers to operate the poem as program, and to speak and read “several languages simultaneously – with all the attendant ambiguities” (Williams n. pag.) (see fig. 5.1). Thomkins’s poem-object is evidence that the combinatorial and permutational approach to language as material that operates across borders was a concern of concrete poetry from its earliest days. I have already pointed to similar concerns in the work of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos as well as that of Eugen Gomringer and Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová. In relating concrete poetry to its historical position within the emergence of a technologically produced global imaginary, I have connected permutational and polylinguistic compositions to the feelings, both optimistic and anxious, stemming from the mechanical approach to language, specifically how it developed out of Alan Turing and other mathematicians’ code-breaking efforts duringWWII . What is especially interesting about Thomkin’s poem- object, then, is less the poetry of it than its objectness. Williams says that it was “published” by Galerie der Spiegel in Cologne in 1965, but is published the correct term? The poem is not on a page, or at least a page as it is conventionally understood. Nor is it a book, though an argument could be made that the structure contains the potential for various poetic permutations, and is therefore more like a book than a page. Should it be framed? Should it be shelved? The lesson I want to draw from Thomkins’s piece, to which I will return later, is that concrete poetry operates within a space that is particularly difficult to locate. Its poetic form is inextricable from its distributive form, and its method of circulation is by no means homogenous: it manifests as sculpture, as painting, as poster; as handwritten, mechanical, or photo- printed; on pages of mass-printed editions and small-press books, folios, and ephemera. It is certainly true that previous poetic movements, specifically the historical avant-gardes, also challenged standard disciplinary categories, but not to the extent of concrete poetry. The Dada poets were close associates of the Dada painters, but the poetry of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Kurt Schwitters was designed to function on a page or a stage. The Futurists’ words were liberated from the line but not the page, even if that page was not always a standard size. The Surrealists, as well, though experimental with images and This content downloaded from 192.246.229.127 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:29:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Figure 5.1 Andre Thomkins. “Dogmat Mot” This content downloaded from 192.246.229.127 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:29:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 190 | InFoRMATIon In FoRM psychology, were less so with form. Isidore Isou’s Lettristes might come closer to concrete poetry’s elusive distributive form, as they branch into painting and film, but the Lettriste movement was not a poetic movement as much as it was a self-consciously avant-garde project. The concrete poets, however – perhaps because their experience of space in the second half of the twentieth century had shifted so far from that of the poets and artists of the first – slide between the gallery and the book, the poster and the page, the mass-printed anthology and the fine-art press edition. The tension between the word and the image, and the possibilities for distribution that each historically adopts, is part of what has kept concrete poetry out of dominant cultural discourse for so long, but is also a large part of what makes it so significant as a twentieth- century poetic experiment. By looking specifically at the shift within the work from an aesthetics of production to one of distribution and reception, I argue that it enacts an understanding of space that has implications for poetry, visual art, and culture on a global scale within its period and beyond. Concrete poetry’s dispersed geography, although paradoxically inte- gral to its cohesion as an international movement, sometimes accentuates its incongruities and makes mapping the work difficult. The movement’s chronological development is also an impediment; the period between 1955 and 1971 provides a convenient bracket, but it is a considerable span, and encompasses the transformation of the work from an early orthodoxy to a more experimental practice. The period and movement also occupies a precarious historical position on the hinge between modernism and post- modernism and as such demands to be read against the spatial characteris- tics of both. Traditionally, approaching the concept of space within literature evokes Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, the eighteenth-century essay which attempts to outline the formal imperatives of literary and visual representation. Literature, Lessing argues, operates temporally, through narrative. The plastic arts operate spatially, as there is no order in visual representation: foreground and background function in simultaneous relation to each other. It is with reference to this text that the literary critic Joseph Frank opens his 1945 essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which deals with how modernist writers attempted to refute Lessing’s criteria by forcing their readers to experience texts outside of the temporality of narrative. Frank deals with the major modernist authors – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gustav Flaubert, Ezra Pound – and outlines how their practice of shifting narration and disjointed syntax attempted to spatialize literature, disrupting This content downloaded from 192.246.229.127 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:29:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 191 | DESIGnED WoRDS FoR A DESIGnED WoRLD the idea of a narrative linearity. He positions the techniques and concerns of the Imagists in opposition to the verbiage of the Victorian era, and locates a possible explanation for such a shift in the work of the early twentieth- century German critic Wilhelm Worringer, who theorized that the spiritual stability of an era can be determined by the degree to which its cultural production adheres to naturalistic representation. Worringer’s argument, although reductive, posits that naturalistic representation, particularly in the plastic arts, arises from cultures that have a harmonized relationship with the cosmos, and thus delight in representing the order they find themselves in. Example periods cited are ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Non-naturalistic representation, conversely, springs from cultures with a confused relationship to the cosmos, and who thus delight in the transformation of nature into lines and planes; simplified, if not scientific, representation allows them an escape from the external world. Examples of art from these perturbed periods are Egyptian monumental sculpture, Byzantine art, and most of the work produced during the twentieth century. Naturalistic style is characterized by perspective and depth; non-naturalistic style is characterized by shifting vantage points and surface (Frank 71). Geoffrey Cook makes a similar point when he argues that examples of visual poetry throughout history seem to arrive on the cusp of an episteme (141).