Concrete

Before beginning to examine concrete poetry and its relation to digital poetry, I must get something out of the way. In the "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" by Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, they make several erroneous references to the Chinese language. I have already blogged about the concept of ideogram elsewhere. My beef is with the way they describe Chinese as an isolating language (as does Wikipedia) in that it offers a "pure relational syntax, based exclusively on word order."

This comes from an erroneous understanding of Chinese grammar, which, while it is far less inflected than English (and miles away from something like Russian), nonetheless relies on other grammatical markers to create syntax. Let's take classical Chinese because that's shown to be more isolating than modern Chinese. One of the first things a student of classical Chinese learns is the A B 也 [yě] pattern, which equates A with B. Definitions are written with this pattern, such as "孔人名也" [kóng rén míng yě], which translates as "Kong is the name of a person." The particle 也 is essential to the meaning of the sentence, not the word order. It's kind of surprising that they'd get this so wrong because Pignatari does make a correct reference to the Chinese character for sun, 日 [rì], in one of his concrete poems on the word LIFE.

With that monkey slain, I move on to the elephant in the room: concrete poetry. Let me begin by some remarks by Mary Ellen Solt from her introduction to Concrete Poetry: A World View. After admitting the difficulty of finding a unifying principle for concrete poets, she gives a few: "concentration upon the physical material from which the text is made," a focus on "reduced language," "making an object to be perceived rather than read," and a view that "the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time." Basically, concrete poetry marks a shift away from emotive and representational language, which it seems we've outgrown in this advanced day & age.

Let's look at two images of concrete poems to see how/if this plays out. The first is a page from Steve McCaffery's "Carnival." Here the emphasis is on overall visual design, produced by a typewriter. Letters appear in strings, clusters of various density, semicircles, etc. The emphasis appears to be away from representation, toward the raw materiality of the typewritten page (although we are viewing it on a computer screen). The design is quite beautiful, in fact: somewhere between a photograph of distant stars and the better kind of abstract painting.

However, then I notice that the big, falling letters on the right-hand side spell "PLUUUUUGE," with the last two U's turned upside-down to look like N's, thus reading "plunge." Now we have the word "plunge" representing its meaning (in a very emotive way, I might add). Also, I find on the right-hand side the "penetration to the white experience between the words." Ignoring the racial undertones, this is a very literal representation of what's going on in McCaffery's work.

The next image is from a work (or several works?) by Kitasono Katsue (北園 克衛)., Here, again, the emphasis is placed more heavily on the design aspect, with still a little bit of representation involved (such as with the "Siamese Twins" in the bottom right-hand corner or the "Egyptian Cross" in the bottom left-hand corner). Actually, these may be book covers he's designed (I just did a Google image search), but no matter: one thing we've established in class is that if you critique it as poetry, it is poetry.

What I've been wondering with regard to concrete poetry is what separates it from comics. Clearly, concrete poetry allows "non-linguistic material" in such works as "the 'Popcreto' of Augusto de Campos" and "the plastic poems of Kitasono Katsue" (to quote from Solt). It also allows some element of representation, as I've just demonstrated.

Case in point, a "Quimby the Mouse" comic by Chris Ware. (Parenthetical remark: Ware does all his artwork by hand, none by computer, although he obviously has to scan his work to reproduce it as a comic.) Here we have a slightly more representational use of both language and art. The sentence is coherent (if somewhat colloquial throughout and mirrored at one point) and the drawings clearly depict a mouse, a landscape, a cat head, etc. There's also an implied narrative on both the visual and verbal levels, which we have not found in any of the concrete poems viewed thus far.

However, much like concrete poetry, the emphasis is on design and on stretching the capabilities of word & image. The words are as visually significant as the images, and the images invite a "reading," as if they were words. Meaning emerges from the play between the two levels of artistry. To me, this sounds a lot like concrete poetry.

There's more to say on that, but I'd like to turn my attention to "Jabber," the Jabberwocky Engine created by Neil Hennessy. First of all, it eschews images to focus purely on the verbal level. Also, it seeks to be nonsensical, with meaning instead created from the concept.

And yet I find it full of representation still: the words move like "molecules," as his artist statement says, and combine to create "portmanteau words [sic]" in a way that sub-atomic particles combined to create new elements in the first stages of the universe.

Also, after letting the engine run for about 20 seconds, I exported the word list, which read:

horaderl
humaryin
ancaluai
arne
depeacor
clinenia
araporte
adsly
graeli
beet
sutbos
clest
menticie
chessin
dortesto
ende
ottooentsk
fins
quis
ions
orplorn
itee

Of these "fake" words, the Oxford English dictionary recognizes six as real words:

arne - obsolete word for adler tree (last usage date: 1830s)
beet - root vegetable
ende - obsolete word for a duck (last usage date: 1430s)
fins - fish appendages
quis - school slang for who (from Latin - last usage date: 1998)
ions - charged particles

And, though unintentional, what could be more representational than the word "ions" appearing in a neo-concrete digital poem in which new words are created by letters moving about like molecules?

Daddy Dada ("Ironic")

Let letters loose! lay language loose like leis

Or line-like lie, yet let 'er lay a loom

That she should weave a word within a haze

Lest we would leave the world within a tomb.

-Ben Adam

A bit of doggerel to kick off today's post. This week we examined the roots of certain digital poetries in Dada. As BP Nicholls has it, Dada would "redefine antagonism as a form of absolute skepticism," this in opposition to Futurism's violent attack on history which yet maintained a surprisingly naive faith in the future. In early forms of Dada, too (such as Hugo Ball's "mystical" "affirmative" "buffoonery"), we find this faith still in operation: Dada would become a kind of stripping away of the artifice of signification to lay bare a field of primitive play. It would take Tristan Tzara to bring Dada's irony to its logical (non-)conclusion.

What Tzara realized is what Paul de Man would later articulate in The Rhetoric of Temporality: irony is an essentially destructive force, a process that, once put in motion, must progress infinitely. De Man will call it "a relationship, within consciousness, between two selves." When the consciousness divides into two selves, the "ironic" one then laughs at the "mystified"/"authentic" one (here he cites Baudelaire on dedoublement).

Is the ironic self, then, demystified? Do we then reach Duchamp's "meta-irony" that "destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative"?

The answer is no, because as soon as one's self claims an affirmative stance, it opens itself up to irony once again. The ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then, the second-level ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then the third-, fourth-, fifth-levels, etc. Go as far down the rabbit hole as you'd like, you'll never reach the end.

Case in point: the stanza I wrote at the beginning of this post, about Joerg Piringer's wir alle, which I attributed to "Ben Adam" (a name meaning "son of man" in Hebrew). To what extent is it genuine? Obviously, a certain amount of effort was put into the puns and alliteration of the first two lines, yet they're definitely overwrought and the last two lines end somewhat lamely. Also, it's written in ABAB rhyme, iambic meter, a form that went out of style somewhere around Swineburne's time.

Then, perhaps, my derogatory comment about it being "doggerel" should be ironized. Do I really mean it? Am I in fact proud of my few quickly written rhymes?

And that last paragraph: are my questions disingenuous? Are they rhetorical? Shouldn't it be ironized, too?

Etc.

How I

now lie.

Future! Future! Future!

Scorn for the past! Though never fully justified - for a valorization of the future at the expense of the past is just as absurd as its converse - it brings about a certain liberating quality. What's important is your work, here & now, alive, changing.

What I'd like to note today are two vastly different ways of shucking off the past (both of which, ironically, have become canonized). The first comes from F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. [trans. not listed]
    

Here, a dismissal of the past is the only way to innovate the present. What's past is dead, and we must actively toss aside its stinking corpse.

Here, on the other hand, we find a passage from the Taoist 莊子 (Zhuangzi or Chuang-Tzu):

Duke Huan was reading in his hall. Wheelwright Bian, who was cutting a wheel just outside the hall, put aside his hammer and chisel and went in. There he asked Duke Huan, "What do those books you are reading say?"

The duke answered, "These are the words of the Sages."

The wheelwright said, "Are the Sages still around?"

And the duke answered, "They're dead."

Then the wheelwright said, "Well, what you're reading then is no more than the dregs of the ancients."

The duke: "When I, a prince, read, how is it that a wheelwright dares come and dispute with me! If you have an explanation, fine. If you don't have an explanation, you die!"

Then Wheelwright Bian said, "I tend to look at it in terms of my own work: when you cut a wheel, if you go too slowly, it slides and doesn't stick fast; if you go too quickly, it jumps and doesn't go in. Neither too slowly nor too quickly - you achieve it in your hands, and those respond to the mind. I can't put it into words, but there is some fixed principle there. I can't teach it to my son, and my son can't get instruction in it from me. I've gone on this way for seventy years and have grown old in cutting wheels. The ancients have died and, along with them, that which cannot be transmitted. Therefore what you are reading is nothing more than the dregs of the ancients." [trans. Stephen Owen]

Taoism, too, finds in the words of the past nothing but "dregs." However, was posited instead is far less violent than the quasi-fascism of the Italian Futurists; Taoism instead cleaves to the paradox of 無為 (wu-wei, i.e. non-action or not doing). Because the wisdom of the past cannot be taught, it is only through the cessation of striving after it that it can be attained. Activity is the attempt to impose an order; what is needed is to allow things to proceed according to their nature (自然 zi-ran in Chinese, literally "what is so of itself").

Let these be put side by side and each person choose according to her/his fancy.

Readers, Subjects, Reductionisms, & Deconstructionisms

For the sake of time, I must be brief. The articles this week bring up huge topics footnoted by libraries of commentary. My thoughts, too, abound. If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Now brevity is the soul of wit. "Condense eternity," as Hart Crane writes.

The articles by McGann and Michaels both attempt to posit a method against a hard-nosed deconstruction. McGann wants to focus on what he calls "textuality," the material and cultural conditions of a text (as demonstrated in editions, notebooks, book prices, marginalia, etc.). The problem with "theory" is that it focuses on semantic meaning to the exclusion of external conditions. These, too, he argues, are very much a part of textual intepretation.

Michaels rightly takes this notion to task. Citing de Man. Derrida, and S. Howe on "the mark," he shows that materiality, too, is unstable. Focus on materiality, and you exclude anything remotely related to authorial intent, to semantic meaning, and to the poetic work itself. Shifting interpratation to the material actually heightens the undecidability of the text. Skepticism reigns on this level, too.

Yet Michaels is not satisfied with simply stating this attack and siding with the deconstructive heroes. Instead, he aligns a poststructuralist view with a reader's subjective interpretation of a text. Because the text has no inherent, fixed meaning, the only possible meaning is to be posited by the reader (or viewer or gamer or whatever). And this, indeed, is what many interactive digital works try to emphasize: it's all up to you.

However, Michaels's attack is upon a straw man (or maybe Stanley Fish - basically the same thing). The hard-line deconstructionists such as Derrida and de Man would disagree with the idea that meaning lies with the reader. Meaning, they would say, lies within the text, but it's no longer single - it's undecidably multiple. But that's not all. It's impossible, they'd go on, to decide whether or not there is meaning at all. This is a feature of language, not the subjectivity of the reader (cf. Derrida on differance).

How this relates to digital poetry is something I'll demonstrate by looking at Joerg Piringer's "Spambot" sound poem, the second part of his Metaisms trilogy. "Spambot" is very much materially oriented - it fully acknowledges being on the web by its multiple sound clips and video link beneath its artist statement, which tells us that it "will deal with the language in propaganda, commercials in tv and radio and internet-spam" and that "spambot is the attempt to liberate poetry from the pages of books and perform it live through image and sound."

The sound clips themselves consist of what appears to be advertisements manipulated beyond recognition. However, because they've been manipulated beyond recognition, I must trust that they really did start out as advertisements. I have no way of knowing and must consequently put my faith in Joerg Piringer's artist statement. Thus, the focus on materiality present in "Spambot" actually does not break down any binary between the subjectivity of the reader and authorial intent. In fact, it reasserts authorial intent more strongly because I must rely on Piringer's artist statement to make any "sense" of the piece, much like illiterate churchgoers once had to rely on clerics to interpret the Latin scriptures to them.

While I agree that a focus on materiality does put to the forefront certain cultural questions that have previously been ignored (and that this focus is a good thing), we must not suppose that this focus in any way solves the problems deconstruction has posed. In translation studies, no one claims to have solved the problem of the untranslatability of literature. The way we proceed forward is by recognizing translations happen in spite of this theoretical issue and go from there. In other words, we simply recognize the problems inherent in interpretation, agree to bracket them, and then dig in. McGann and Michaels make the naive mistake of assuming they have solved something that is by nature unsolvable.