Eugen Gomringer - father of concrete poetry

Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours and Constellations [PDF] , Something Else? Press, 1968




Silence! - A meditation of the 1950s poem ‘silencio’ by Eugen Gomringer
            silence silence silence
            silence silence silence
            silence             silence
            silence silence silence
            silence silence silence
It’s rather like an abstract painting, a Mondrian, except that it is a word, a word that we know. Silence! A word we can feel. And we can feel the space left in the middle of the poem, a space which conveys the poem’s message, its essence. We can feel the silence. There’s space on both sides of the poem as well, space above and space below, that space which haiku both seeks and creates. The concrete poem asks the same thing of the reader as does the haiku – to complete it. Fill in the silence. With our own silence.
Concrete poetry was all the rage in the fifties, in Switzerland, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere. Strange that it didn’t make an impact on poetry in Irish (or English) in Ireland, given our love of words. Some of the most famous concrete poems are no more than a word. Concrete words, so to speak. I’ve been promising myself for nearly forty years to have a crack at the genre and maybe I will.
As far back as 1953, Gomringer sensed that words were changing, the world was changing, languages were changing and prolixity had had its day. Did he see the coming of tabloids – not to mention twitter? Such changes would not pose a danger to poetry, he believed. There was nothing wrong with headlines, mantras, slogans, abbreviations. Concrete poetry would be an international language, beyond the notion of the national, and as graspable as a road sign or a popular scientific formula. You could say he saw the rise of the USA and the IRA, the ESB and – OMG – the EU.  He probably saw texting as inevitable.
He was a Bolivian, living in Switzerland, and was familiar with many languages, Spanish and German among them. He saw the coming of globalisation and the death of languages which this would bring (as it has). He was quite serious about his work, playful though it may seem to some of us. He insisted on our engagement with the word (as opposed to grammar, style, voice, idiom and all the rest of it).
Among the many writers influenced by Gomringer and the Concrete Poetry Movement was the curious Dane, Vagn Steen. He had this idea of publishing books with perforated pages so that you could easily tear out the poems you didn’t like. Irish publishers (in both languages) could take a leaf from his book. Write it Yourself was one of his classics. It consisted of blank pages and was an overnight success. Back to Gomringer’s classic again, this time in German:
                                   schweigen schweigen schweigen
                                   schweigen schweigen schweigen
                                   schweigen                 schweigen
                                   schweigen schweigen schweigen
                                   schweigen schweigen schweigen
It works on many levels, including the spiritual. Does it bring us back to our tender years when so much had to be learned by rote, repetition of the ABC and numbers and syllables that may not have meant all that much to us at the time, Church Latin, riddles, rhymes and prayers? CIÚNAS! SILENCE! How often did we hear that at home or at school?
Our deepest selves are in that white space in the middle of the poem, our core and our mystery – not so much a part of us (as words are part of us, say) but the totality. Gomringer believed that a concrete poem was a poem in itself not a poem about something. Agreed. - Gabriel Rosenstock


Concrete poetry, poetry in which the poet’s intent is conveyed by graphic patterns of letters, words, or symbols rather than by the meaning of words in conventional arrangement. The writer of concrete poetry uses typeface and other typographical elements in such a way that chosen units—letter fragments, punctuation marks, graphemes (letters), morphemes (any meaningful linguistic unit), syllables, or words (usually used in a graphic rather than denotative sense)—and graphic spaces form an evocative picture.
The origins of concrete poetry are roughly contemporary with those of musique concrète, an experimental technique of musical composition. Max Bill and Eugen Gomringer were among the early practitioners of concrete poetry. The Vienna Group of Hans Carl Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, and Konrad Bayer also promoted concrete poetry, as did Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker. The movement drew inspiration from Dada, Surrealism, and other nonrational 20th-century movements. Concrete poetry has an extreme visual bias and in this way is usually distinguished from pattern poetry. It attempts to move away from a purely verbal concept of verse toward what its proponents call “verbivocovisual expression,” incorporating geometric and graphic elements into the poetic act or process. It often cannot be read aloud to any effect, and its essence lies in its appearance on the page, not in the words or typographic units that form it. At the turn of the 20th century, concrete poetry continued to be produced in many countries. Notable contemporary concrete poets include the brothers Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos. Many contemporary examples of animated concrete poetry can be found on the Internet. - www.britannica.com/art/concrete-poetry#ref132933