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ALICIA OSTRIKER
ever, the concreteness is obscured for all save the most sensitive readers
(other poets ) by their (cruder) meanings or messages, that whole
burden of ideas, emotions, references, images, symbols,
und so weiter,
which students paraphrase for term papers, and which provide an
honest livelihood for scholars and critics of literature. In other words,
semantics stomps all over mere sensation. We read, carefully, and
suppose that sufficient. We hear what we read, superficially and
clumsily. We see what we read, virtually not at all.
But how do you "read" this segment of Ronald Johnson's
"10
and the Ox-Eye Daisy," except as a moo in the moonlight? Or how
do you "read" Bory's vortex except in smooth echoing arcs?
Returning the word to its status as thing, and us to our senses,
is the project of Concrete Poetry as a movement.
It
parallels the re–
duction of painting to pigment on canvas, or music to tones and
silences. True, painting was pigment on canvas before the twentieth
century, and a few square inches of Rembrandt make as interesting
pure painting as a few square yards of Rothko, but who looks? Repre–
sentational/ emotional/ intellectual messages in the arts engage at–
tention and obscure the medium. Therefore, to maximize awareness
of medium and materials, minimize the message; in poetry, minimize
semantic freight. Place up front, where nobody can fail to appre–
hend, consonants and vowels. Appeal through typography and spac–
ing on page - not taking left-to-right for granted, taking nothing for
granted -
first of all
to eyes, ears, the kinetic sense of this momentous
act of turning the page. Capture the reader with simplicity and,
though one blush to say it, with beauty.
"The aim of the new poetry is to give poetry an organic func–
tion in society again, an.d in doing so to restate the position of poet
in society. . .. Concrete poetry is founded upon the contemporary
scientific-technical view of the world and will come into its own in
the synthetic-rationalistic world of tomorrow." So writes the Bolivian–
born Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, one of the movement's founders,
in the course of a complicated discussion of relations between modern
technology, modern developments in language, and the permanent
nature of art. For Pierre Garnier, a second-generation concrete poet,
the movement is a "metamorphosis that leads us beyond existential
fear . . . escape from the old social order and from the storehouse
of available ideas which has remained unchanged for thousands of
