Art-o-Gram – Concrete Poetry: The old and the new wordplay art for language nerds

The article about the artist Dieter Roth , for whom linguistic juggling was an important part of artistic creation, mentioned the art and literary genre “Concrete Poetry” .

Time and occasion to take a closer look at what the concrete poets produced in a kind of tightrope walk between art and literature – also because “concrete poetry” can be seen as a counterpoint to linguistic overstimulation, certainly not uninteresting for our present and future:

A pointless game with poetry?

Concrete poetry is poetry in its probably most concrete form: not the word as symbol and bearer of meaning is processed with the intention of presenting a work of artistic value, but language itself becomes the “star of the performance”.

The concrete poet does not revel in the particularly successful symbol he creates by stringing together words that are becoming words, but approaches the construct of “language” quite directly.

Language originates from words, words are written down as words, words are composed of letters, letters consist of lines that are combined in ever different ways.

Are words written down as words?

Yes, and with that we would already be in the middle of the “craft” of concrete poetry, for which the distinction between words and words is essential.

All words are words, but not all words are words, or as the German Academy for Language and Literature explains:

That was the beginning of the explanation; the difference is explained in about 30 more sentences, which can be read at: deutscheakademie.de/ .

This can be expressed more concisely and clearly, as e.g. in the magazine Spiegel, Zwiebelfisch-Abc: Words/Words ( spiegel.de ):

Words are made of letters, words are made of thoughts.

Concrete poetry is interested in words, letters, and punctuation marks, specifically in their graphic form ; this is the actual subject of the poem.

You can do a lot with this graphic shape, for example describe a thunderstorm in just a few words:

cloud cloud
cloudcloudcloudcloud
cloudcloudcloudcloud
cloudcloudcloudcloud
cloud cloud
BB
L Lb
II litz
TT i
ZZ tz

Concrete poets rarely give much thought to the words and their meaning, and when they do, these thoughts are often extremely concrete.

For example, it may be about balancing the line spacing between two or more rows of “poetic characters” in such a way that optical perfection is achieved in printing and delivery.

Which brings us directly to one of the most important works of art in Concrete Poetry (which many people know, just not in this context):

Profound songs

The masterpiece of non-word poems was written by the king of truly only superficially meaningless poetry:
“Fische’s Night Song” by Christian Morgenstern, also known as the “deepest German poem” .

“Fish’s Night Song” has occupied many, many recitation artists and driven some of them to despair; reciting nothing but lines and arcs requires high art , creativity , and flexibility.

There are plenty of examples of the recitation of the deepest German poem

1. A suggestion for the correct presentation in school, presumably from a hardworking educator:

2. How to make more of it was demonstrated by Burgtheater actor Hans Dieter Knebel in 2005 at the Vienna Burgtheater :

3. “Fish's Night Song” as a black and white performance with atmospheric music:

4. Opulent night songs for synesthetes:

5. A huge orchestra for a non-singing fish:

6. Fisches Nachtgesang 2004 live in Hangö, the southernmost city in Finland:

7. The fish animated by AeffchenYoko sings:

8. Set to music by Dipl.-Ing. Martin Evanzin (Institute for Sensor and Actuator Systems, Vienna University of Technology), performed by the University Choir of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf:

9. This video is posted online by the creator AntiAnonym without any further editing. Quote from AntiAnonym: “Just accept it as it is and don’t look for a deeper meaning… I haven’t found it, so you won’t either.”

10. “Fish Night Song” as chamber music:

11. Dirtysanchez/ickemaAnders couldn't warm to the original text:

12. A delicately played night song at the recital evening with students of the MS Carlzeller:

The original, absolutely must-see, “Christian Morgenstern: Morgenstern in the Evening. Gert Fröbe recites Christian Morgenstern” , is unfortunately only available on a CD for purchase… As consolation, you can listen to Gert Fröbe's visually stunning recitation of Morgenstern's Wind Conversation:

A dizzying feeling of life in 20 words

When a poem of concrete poetry has a meaning and purpose that goes beyond visual perception (content to be conveyed through language, from the depiction of a mood to a call to action), this is often presented surprisingly precisely and yet comprehensively precisely through the scarcity of means.

For example, Eugen Gomringer's poem “avenidas”.

Eugen Gomringer was the writer among a number of artists (e.g., painter, architect and sculptor Theo van Doesburg, engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer) who, in the mid-20th century, strove for the idea of ​​a “Concrete Art” , which understood the elements of artistic creation and the respective mode of representation as a reality in their own right and wanted to extract them from the context of the finished work.

Gomringer's manifesto “vom vers zur konstellation. zweck und form einer neuen dichtung” (published in 1954 in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” and later in several revised printed versions) became the founding manifesto of concrete poetry, shortly after the artist, art theorist and writer Öyvind Fahlström the term “Concrete Poetry ” with his work “Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben: manifest för konkret poesi (here in the northwestern region; a movement of concrete art and poetry arose simultaneously in Brazil).

“avenidas” won the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize 2011 and was given by Gomringer to the prize-giving Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin (University of Applied Sciences for Social Work, Health, Education and Training) for the design of the university's outer wall.

This is what it looks like today: idw-online.de/de/newsimage?id=154590&size=screen ; hardly any admirer has ever sketched the seductive urban summer lifestyle around the avenidas (streets), flores (flowers) and mujeres (women) in a more beautiful and, above all, shorter and more condensed way…

The downfall of free democracy in 29 lines

“Concrete poetry” is occasionally accused of political indifference because poetry also always has the task of drawing attention to the social injustices in a society.

That is certainly true, but concrete poetry can also hold its own in this respect – the “reduction to graphics” can even make statements particularly wickedly clear, as in the “Free and Democratic Basic Order” by graphic designer and photographic artist Wolfgang Lauter (1978):

Almost four decades old, and yet incredibly relevant again. We are once again experiencing times of terrorist threat, in which the (secret to security) order threatens to devour freedom and democracy in some places.

A single sheet of paper, just 29 lines, is all it takes for order to devour freedom and democracy. And yet, in Lauter's masterfully staged, line-by-line, incrementally but inexorably progressing destruction of the most fundamental values ​​of peaceful societies, all the dangers posed by the preponderance of "order and security" over "freedom and democracy" :

The threat to individual freedom posed by the increased level of order, which is supposedly due to the fight against terror – whereby rulers with dictatorial tendencies regularly exploit this “necessity to create order” to restrict the freedom of their citizens recklessly and excessively.

The freedom of entire societies is threatened because fearful and frightened narrow-minded people always tend to follow right-wing populists or other political egoists with simplistic answers. In their yearning for power, they usually act brazenly and stupidly, are completely unable to cope with the complexity of the world, at the very least make everything worse, and ultimately, when it comes to maintaining power, destroy long-negotiated and established balances of power.

The threat to democracy posed by this very terror and by these very right-wing populists.

The threat to creative individuals in society posed by the leveling effect of efforts to establish order.

In 1978, when the “free democratic basic order” was established, and before that, concrete poetry was not practiced exclusively by artists who paid homage to it, but was a rather secondary “artistic game” for many artists with completely different ideas and designs.

The famous French poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire novels and short stories such as “The Murdered Poet” (short stories. Wolke Publishing House, Hofheim 1985, ISBN 3-923997-08-6) and non-fiction books such as “The Painters of Cubism.” (Arche Publishing House, Zurich 1973), but also delighted in using concrete poetry to paint with words in the truest sense of the word (Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes. Foreword by Michel Butor. Éditions Gallimard 1995, ISBN 2-07-030008-0).

The Canadian poet and performance artist Bill Bissett busy as a painter, editor of the literary magazine blewointment

earthearthearthearthearthearth

This makes language junkies' brains and keyboard fingers itch; besides "hear" "the" "art" and "hear the art(!)", there are likely to be a few more words and phrases to be found... (Bill Bissett, Liberating skies, 1968).

The Catalan poet, writer, playwright, graphic and sculptor Joan Brossa i Cuervo is “by profession” the most representative Catalan avant-garde author of the 20th century and has also significantly advanced concrete poetry:

He honored the written language in a grand and physical way [1], truly created an “Eternal A” in the world [2] and finally created a poem that one can simply walk through (in three lines) [3].

1. Joan Brossa: Honorary gift for the book, Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona

2. Joan Brossa: Reclining A with fish, Town Hall of Mollet del Vallès

3. Joan Brossa: Walk-in visual poem in three times, Velodrome, Barcelona

And so on and so forth, in no time at all a list of about two dozen well-known artists and scientists is compiled who also deal with, but by no means exclusively with, concrete poetry:

Architect Friedrich Achleitner, poet H.C. Artmann, philosopher Max Bense, linguist Chris Bezzel, artist Ivar Breitenmoser, dramaturge Claus Bremer, sound artist Henri Chopin, avant-garde artist Carlfriedrich Claus, artist Caterina Davinio, painter Paul de Vree, literary and media scholar Reinhard Döhl, artist Öyvind Fahlström, garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay, poet Ferreira Gullar, critic Helmut Heißenbüttel, artist Jiří Kolář, composer Jackson Mac Low, literary scholar Kurt A. Mautz, printer and publisher Hansjörg Mayer, literary critic Edwin Morgan, action and object artist Dieter Roth , composer Gerhard Rühm, psychiatrist Konrad Balder Schäuffelen, philosopher Siegfried J. Schmidt, painter Kurt Schwitters, painter André Thomkins, artist Timm Ulrichs, and performance artist Emmett Williams.

Or rather, have been occupied with it, because:

The demise of concrete poetry in advertising

Both Old World and Brazilian Concrete Poetry took the same obvious path into the future: Concrete Poetry, to put it somewhat more simply, is ideally suited to a) evoking attention in the viewer and b) precisely those emotions that discourage thoughtful decisions – and which are therefore so urgently needed to be generated by advertising.

Because if advertising only showed us what we wanted to know (what distinguishes a product from others, what its advantages and disadvantages are), there would be no need for large advertising agencies. The manufacturer could tell us that; they know their product best. For a well-paid industry to emerge, it had to create added value.

If the added value isn't so easy to find in the product itself, the commissioning entrepreneur pays his brilliant advertising agency for a different added value: influencing customers beyond the factual level = higher sales of products that are not actually better.

Much of what was once created in playful, artistic, and extravagantly processed words, words, and images to amuse and excite viewers, to draw attention to threats and injustices (and did exactly that), has now been absorbed by advertising and instrumentalized for purposes unrelated to art.

And many newly established artists were happy to be taken in this way, since a lucrative commission from an advertising agency is considerably more lucrative than the meager artist's salary typically earned before fame..

The determined poets of Concrete Poetry have therefore become rare today; only a few individual representatives still hold the banner of wordplay high. With bold designs and finally free from the once rigid dogmas (Concrete Poetry exclusively represents itself, etc.), the play with words and letters enters a new phase, as a play with meanings, typographic dimensions (e.g., font sizes), and spatial arrangement. This is largely happening in an entirely new medium: as a representation on the screen…

The era of beautifully bound volumes of concrete poetry may be over (for now, books are too beautiful to disappear), but concrete poetry has the best chances for the future right now:

The future: More concrete poetry for everyone!

Concrete poetry has also been classified as the “passion of intellectuals among poets ,” and passions have the pleasing tendency to ultimately remain with us.

Just as the computer nerd masters the computer inside, out, and between the lines of code, the language nerd masters a language down to its meta-level – and the path to such a secure mastery of language is practical thinking training that will never disappear in civilized societies.

When computer nerds and language nerds work together on the characters on a screen surface, the result is concrete poetry of the finest kind.

And: Today, this practical thinking training is open to everyone ; they can participate passively and very actively, meaning we can expect an explosion of concrete poetry on our screens in the future… we could expect an explosion of concrete poetry on our screens if people reclaim the internet from the corporations.

But even though using one of the programs suitable for creating the most outlandish works of concrete poetry generally means relinquishing all copyrights to the artworks created with this (free?) (online?) program, you can still create concrete poetry on a computer. To play with language, a blank Word document is sufficient, and if necessary, even a notepad will do.

All you need is imagination for the endless possibilities:

Wolfgang Lauter 's " free and democratic basic order" can be recreated using many other terms. Perhaps in an algorithm for a long sentence that then takes 50,732 lines to process...

Learning vocabulary is much more fun when there's something exciting to translate:

Poèmes à Lou (Guillaume Apollinaire 1914)

For the sake of completeness, here is the text, which is not so easy to decipher:

Or, to put it another way, those who write not only stay in the loop, but above all learn best:

That concludes the suggestions; the aim is to stimulate the imagination, not overwhelm it. Finally, here's another linguistic treat from Gert Fröbe , with Christian Morgenstern's "Conversation of a House Snail with Itself" :

…and here, for the sake of completeness, is the text that is not so easy to understand:

(The snail gets caught up in its own thoughts, or rather, these thoughts run so wild with it that it has to postpone making a further decision on the question)