Concrete poetry creates meaning not just by using words but the ways it is represented in the 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional surfaces. Unlike traditional poetry, the space in which the poetry is written also matters. In simplest definition it uses the grammar of typography as a main tool to create meaning to the reader. It is different from visual poetry. In visual poetry the importance of images and illustration is evident. But in concrete poetry the letters, words and the way the words are arranged in given space makes meaning. The main typographic elements like style, size, weight, width, format and even the way it is printed can generate meaning. . It generates meaning through connotation and the hidden messages which exist in culture and context. It is perceived and creates meaning as whole.
Concrete poetry like a painting is an ‘open work’ in which the reader has his own role to interpret the poem. The concrete poet is a combination of writer and graphic designer. The poet creates a spatial experience for the reader. It is completed by the presence of the reader. The main feature of concrete poetry is that the reader has the freedom to enter the poem from anywhere. That is why concrete poetry generates different meaning to different reader. It is highly influenced by the ability of the reader to interpret the poem.
Concrete poetry does not always follow a linear pattern. It over comes the traditional way of poems which is read from left to right with a specific word spacing and letter spacing. In fact it plays with this normality of typography and makes us aware of the space around the words without loosing the semantic meaning of the poem. It makes typography visible. Although like traditional poetry concrete poets use rhyme sounds its also exploits the visual rhyme by repetition of same word or visually similar words.
Concrete poetry rejects the idea of the reading lot. It is more of reading between the limited lines. McLuhan in his book “medium is massage” said that the printing detribalized the men and stopped the multisensory ability of humankind. According to him the linearity in text which is first created by the limitation of printing and which is maintained till now gave birth to ‘age of reasoning’. In a way Concrete poetry can be said to be one of the movement which retain this multisensory capability of humankind. The movement like sound poetry, visual poverty and concrete poetry which gave importance to space than just linear reading of words can be the manifestation of McLuhan’s expectation and exploration of re-triblaiztion or new triblazation of humankind.
Concrete poetry can be said to emerge from the universal desire to communicate more in less language. This universal desire to abbreviate and reduce language is what highly used by the graphic design and advertising world. At this age of hypertext and computers where humankind is redeveloping his multisensory capabilities, concrete poetry is changing its definition. For new media trends like motion graphics and kinetic typography concrete poetry is an inspiration. It is concrete poetry with virtual space and time. And when we talk about information graphics and environmental graphics the same is applicable to certain extended. When a person enters a shopping mall or an exhibition space, the signs shown in that space creates a link and when he/she go through each signs and uses according to his needs, he/she is creating his own experience of space. And when a person surfs through the information in a website he/she is given freedom to choose his root for the site.This space for the reader or user is a basic feature which is celebrated as an art in concrete poetry.
Concrete poetry is in the stage of evolution. The code of concrete poetry is used in many graphic design fields directly or indirectly. As a graphic design student I thought it is appropriate for me to study the concrete poetry as my elective. It is very interesting to study how the code of typography and concrete poetry communicate with us and how it is in seen in bits and piece in different field of graphic design. It is interesting to know how the philosophy of concrete poetry becomes a base inspiration for different trends seen in current graphic design.
Origin of concrete poetry
Ancient poetry was meant to be heard. Ancient people chanted of the deeds of heroic ancestors and of heroic fights of their own times. Before the days of writing and manuscripts, oral poetry was the only way in which traditions could be handed on. In late middle ages, tales were still chanted to the accompaniment of some musical instrument or read aloud before a group of hearers. Poetry was still the dominant art form. It maintained its ascendance in the sixteenth century, a great poetic period, and it was mainly directed to the ear. Drama was then in poetic form. Plays were composed to be heard, not for circulation in printed form. Though reading was there, the importance for heard poetry still existed in seventeenth century. Major shift was seen by eighteenth century when the great poetic literature is replaced by novels and short stories .By twentieth century the tradition of saying stories in poetic way declined due to the popularization of reading newspapers, biographies, autobiographies, travelogues, and other miscellaneous political and sociological books. The electronic age almost saw the end of poetry for reading. The movement like concrete poetry, visual poetry and sound poetry emerged according to the changing attitudes of the society. Simplicity, clarity, transparency, was the dominated features of print culture. But the twentieth century saw several movements in art and literature that questioned this, using typography itself as a medium for meaning, preventing people from looking "through" words and forcing readers to look "at" them.
Giving importance to typography as a separate entity was started by late Victorian era. The
movements like art and craft and art nouveau gave importance to the arrangement of text in book. The movements like Expressionism, Plakatstil, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Destjil, Constructivism, and Bauhaus had a lot of impact in typography. The Italian Futurists, for example, led by F. T. Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, began to reject traditional expressions of art and literature. Marinetti attacks the entire literate conception of humankind." Marinetti began experimenting with unusual typography, creating poems that were simultaneously textual and visual, such as the 1919 work "SCRABrrRrraaNNG." Also a rebellion against traditional art forms, Dadaists were concerned with spontaneity, automatic writing, and chance operations. Collage became an important element in both art and poetry, as did typography. Dadaist Tristan Tzara urged poets to cut words out of newspapers, while artist Kurt Schwitters designed poems with anthropomorphic letters—the character "B" with feet and arms, for example. Dadaists were also interested in poems that were ephemeral and erasable, such as poems written in sand or on a blackboard. The movements like Bauhaus and new typography gave importance to simple and asymmetrical layouts with different type sizes. By then giving importance to function became the prominent trend. Even though the term concrete poetry has been termed in 1950,s the idea of arranging letters to enhance meaning of poem is old. The religious text in both ancient western and eastern culture has decorated their scriptures with decorative letters. The calligraphy has been highly practiced and thought to have spiritual qualities. Typography based poetry can be seen first in Greek Alexandria during third and second B. C. E. The poets like Simias and Theocritus, the creators of Greek Bucolic poetry has tried visual decoration in their poetry. The other noted early examples are the ‘Easter Wings’ from George Herbert (1593 – 1633) and ‘Mouse Tail’ by Lewis Carol in Alice in Wonderland. In ‘Easter Wings’ the shape of the poem is like a wing which is the subject of the poem and Lewis Carol describes the tail of a mouse as a curved paragraph which similar to a mouse tail. Concrete poetry is often mistaken for Calligrammes of Apollinaire. Although he was successful in creating spatial experience and visual humor, it merely became figurative representation of themes. Cummings, the American, saw Apollinaire's mistake. He escaped from the calligram and succeeded in achieving real ideograms, using the best of typographic resources.
The typography based experiment in poetry retuned by 1950 and 1960s. One of the major movements called Fluxus emerged mainly as an opposition to tradition and professionalism in arts of that time. The movement’s style reduces gestures and mixes the ideals of the Dada, Bauhaus, and Zen movements. The Fluxus artists sought to presume that all media and artistic discipline was ‘fair game’ in terms of combinations and fusions of different styles. Their main focus was not on the work of the artist but the opinion and statement of the artist made through the work. The Fluxus artists explored different media ranging from performance art to poetry to experimental music to film. Fluxus is intermedia. They use everyday objects, sound and text to create new objects, sound and text. Creative forms like collage, sound art, music, video and poetry, especially concrete poetry and visual poetry has been seen through out the Fluxus movement. Fluxus encouraged simplicity and reduction of text, performance and art something that is frequently seen in concrete poems. The correct definition of concrete poetry is seen in Eugen Gomringer collection ‘Constellation’. In 1953, the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer published a collection of his works, each only one word in length. In same year in Sweden, Oyvind Fahlstrom wrote a Concrete Poetry Manifesto. Simultaneously, a similarly new style was emerging in Europe, a group of Brazilian poets, the Noigrandres, were experimenting with poetry as a visual medium, using the object form of the ideogram and later named this style Poesia Concreta. Well known poem ‘Silence’ by Eugen Gomringer is a perfect example. Fourteen words are arranged in rows to make block with a white space in between which gives feeling of silence. Other example of his poem is the one which starts from the letter ‘O’ transforms into the word flow then it branches upward to grow which again branches into the word show and then to blow. The poem can be extended into any where making it a continuous process. The poem can of course be given some sort of crude explanation such as : the seed of life “o” begins its radical “ flow, “pushing up a shoot which reveals itself as a plant that we see “ grow,” and from its stem develops the “ show” of its blossom which returns to seed that the wind comes to “ blow” away.
Other noted concrete poets are Ian Hamilton, Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Franz Mon, John Furnival, Pierre Gamier, Mary Ellen Solt, Hans-jorg Mayer, Dieter Rot, and Dom Sylvester Houedard.
Graphic Authorship
When we look into the history of word ‘author’ we can understand that in ancient text where authorless but still considered authentic. But by eighteenth century the name of author in literature and art became a sign of authenticity. We all know that graphic design is a combination of text and image. So it is very difficult to define an author in graphic design because he/she is merely trying to communicate the text, where the typography, images and materials he/she using becomes an extension of the text. Most of the time he/she is trying to enhance the meaning generated by the words which are used to communicate a specific messages with commercial task.
Concrete poetry is a major area where the term graphic authorship gets it recognition. The graphic works like artist book, activist book with no commercial purposes serves the definition of graphic authorship where the images, words, space, structure and material are used in certain way to communicate the personal opinion or self expression of the author/designer. Here the whole language of graphic design changes into a medium like painting, music, literature and films where the creator is recognized for his work. The art movement like Fluxus highly appreciated this kind of self expressive graphic art. But most of the time graphic designers are paid to convey certain emotions and ideas. And at this age of electronic the design is an outcome of a group of people in design studio. This situation again makes it impossible to recognize a particular author for graphic works. May be graphic author is more suitable for the writers or publishers who writes about the design. Where designers write, edit and design the book. In other publication like children’s book and graphic novel the designer is also acting like a director of film where he/she decides the mood and narrative of the whole book.
Typography and concrete poetry
When we try to define the form of letters we understand that there is no visual model for letters. When an artist does a portrait, he/she has a visual model of a human. But the visual model for letters is imaginary and arbitrary. The (Phonetic) letters are abstract presentation of sounds which is evolved thorough ages and agreed by a large mass of people. For a long time, after the development of printing the printers tried to copy the hand written words. But by the industrial revolution the standardization of letter forms happened. The development of printing has eventually helped in the popularization of these abstract symbols. Printing and easy availability of printed materials some what stopped the evolution or farther major change in basic form of letters. Abstract forms called letters join to make a word. When we look into the nature to of words we understand that meaning is not intrinsic to words. It is arbitrary and depends entirely on the understanding of the reader. According to Saussure’s work on linguistic, word is sign. Letters then are open to interpretation in much the same way as words and the way letters are treated creates a double level of signification. A publisher may chose the typeface that he/she feels best emphasizes and lays out the meaning of the words, that typeface may impose his/her interpretation of the text upon the reader, but it may also create quite a different impression upon our mind depending upon our associations with that particular typeface. According to Roland Barthes a word is in the primary semiological system is the sign which is full of meaning and when the word is reduced again to become a signifier then typography impose a new signification. Like spoken word cannot exist without the speaker, typography doesn’t exist without the 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional written or printed words. Even though there is an argument that typography will not create a meaning by itself and it is an extension of word, typographic elements are complex signs which comprise various semiotic layers, each capable of independently conveying meaning. The typography can drain the existing meaning of the word and can relate to another concept or signification. According to Roland Barthes ‘Myth’ theory typography can be a myth maker. This kind of myth making is majorly seen in identity design where the typographical features starts representing the value of an organization. For example logotypes like coca cola, IBM etc. The grammer of typography works in four dimensions according to Harmut Stockl (a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistic at the Institute of Media Communication and Intercultural Communication, Chemnitz University, Germany) ‘Micorotypography’ which refers to fonts and individual letters. ‘Mesotypography’ concerns with configuration of typographic signs in lines and text blocks, Crototypography which deals with graphic structure of the overall document and Paratypogarphy is devoted to typographic media i.e. surface material and instruments for producing typographic signs. As a writer picks up the words and phases to convey a meaning a typographer or designer can play with the above mentioned dimensions by choosing the shapes and position to convey the meaning. Typography usually works very close to the meaning of text but calculated contrast and other semantic relations are also possible between the text and typography. He borrows meaning from the text and creates a visual experience by using the space so that the meaning is reached to the reader in lesser time.
A written or printed word cannot escape typographic arrangement. Even the illegibility of a word in a particular space generates connotative meaning. A good designer understands this basic language of typography so that he/she can play with this according to his/her will to convey intended meaning clearly.
