It just goes to show, poetry beats bad weather! Curt, Bennett, June, John, Doug and Delaney
all read and recited wonderfully last night.
There was passion, clarity, projection, confidence, and, as always, high
quality poetry. I thought the second
half was every bit as engaging, and was pleased to see how many in the audience
stayed for the conversation. You all
gave valuable insight into what makes you tick as writers of poetry.
So, now it’s on to the end of the year and a look ahead to
2019 . . . let’s begin with next week’s project: concrete poetry. I have some thoughts about it, of course.
The first is to ask the inevitable question, Is concrete
poetry poetry? I think of poetry in
kinship with music and thus a medium of sound.
But because poetry involves language, words which bear meaning for us,
this sound component becomes complicated; in fact, poetry-as-sound cannot be merely
poetry as sound. If I extend the thought, there can be no such thing as the pure
verbal icon, for once a word is introduced into the equation, the verbal
artifact refers. What do I mean
by this? Its words point to something—an
object, an idea, a feeling, or as W. C. Williams expressed it, a thing—that
inevitably lies outside the artifact itself.
The language refers you elsewhere.
But I am wandering off topic here. Concrete poetry is not the same thing,
exactly, as concreteness in or of a poem.
You are familiar with the notion of the concrete image or “concrete
language” in a poem. This kind of
concreteness has to do with clarity of expression and reference. Concrete poetry is a formal idea, just
as the sonnet is a formal idea, or the rhymed couplet, or the Alexandrine
line. Concrete poetry makes the
materiality of words evident in the most technical sense. (A sidebar here: poetry qua poetry is the business of making the materiality of language
evident, of lifting language out of the quotidian and into the world of
artifact, of making words sensual.)
Concrete poetry treats language with a machine-like precision; it treats
words as malleable material that can be shaped: chopped up, literally bent,
jammed together, misplaced in a Cubist sense, enlarged, shrunk, condensed,
expanded, given a font treatment of one kind or another, and so on. Obviously, there is a strong visual component
to this, made possible by print technology and, in the past generation or two,
even more possible by digital print technology. This link takes you to three examples in Spanish. You’ll be able to make out words, but will be
less likely to “see through” them to their referents.
“Swan” is a poem by John Hollander (d. 2013), the Yale poet
and scholar. He published Types of Shape in 1969, which contains
the above concrete poem, which Hollander referred to as “graphemic”
poetry. Now you might reasonably ask the
question, “Why go to so much trouble?
Why not simply write the poem more straightforwardly and let he reader
imagine the image?” And one answer to
your question might be, “Why NOT go to such trouble? Isn’t that what art is all about, going to
the trouble?” Or you might rejoin with,
“Isn’t ALL poetry concrete in this way?
What is a line, after all, but a visual formal decision made by the
author, a visual marker for the reader?”
But there is a second kind of concrete poetry that bears
thinking about here: soundscape poetry.
Hip-hop falls into this category.
Tom Waits’ songs often toy with being soundscape poems. Soundscape poetry deals in . . . sound, yes .
. . but also in the tactile aspect of sending and receiving a sound—how it
forms on the tongue or flows from the lungs or bursts forth from the lips and
then goes into an ear. What could be more concrete than the air pressure of a
spoken word/syllable/phoneme vibrating the eardrum? Try intoning this poem aloud to get a sense
of concrete sound . . .
Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son
Honk¶ clatter.
Wheeze-n-cough. Click, chirp, buzz, hum. ZZZT. La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA.
Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Whoosh! Wint. Scrape-to-shfff. Shhhhhhhhh . . .
Pank/dink/rheum. Click, dink, honk→scrape.
Whoosh! Wint. Da-dum-da-dee. Da-dee-da-dum. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Fft. Hump.
Hump. Tweet-few-tweet. Whomp.Whoosh! Honk.
La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA. Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Tweet-few-tweet. Dink/rheum.
ZZZT. Ding. Ding. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Bong-ng-ng-ng.
Bong-ng-ng-ng. Bong-ng-ng-ng. ZZZT. Honk.
ZZZT
¶ Komposition 8, 1923, Vasily Kandinsky. Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
For Wednesday, then.
Let’s concentrate on concrete poetry.
NOT, mind you, on concreteness in poems, but on the formal idea
itself. Make a poem that looks like
something on the page, or, alternatively, make a poem that emphasizes sound
above sense. P.S.: I’ll explain the
secret to “Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son” on Wednesday.
Clark
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