Background
CONCRETE POETRY – DEFINITION
Concrete poetry is an experimental current in contemporary poetry whose fundamental premise is the emphasis on the autonomy and materiality of the linguistic sign. Concreteness implies self-communication, the elimination of external and contextual references of the sign, and, furthermore, the abandonment of the expressive and impressionistic function of speech. It does not describe reality; rather, it is metalinguistic in character, exploring its internal structures. Two principal varieties are distinguished: visual poetry (making use of the visual potential of the sign) and sound or phonic poetry (making use of its auditory potential).
In the case of visual concrete poetry – the variety practised by Stanisław Dróżdż – two modes of notation are possible: on a flat surface and in space, both of which may be either static or kinetic. Broadly understood concrete poetry allows, among other things, printing, sculptural forms, film recording, mechanical activation, or recording on disc. Works may be executed in paper, glass, metal or plastic, and in black and white or colour.
Attempts to define concrete poetry lead to methodological difficulties arising from two main sources. On the one hand, there is a tendency to assign it exclusively to a single field within the broad domain of art; on the other, there is a programmatic disregard for divisions between fields of creative practice. Some researchers treat it primarily as a linguistic experiment, others as a form of visual art, thereby reducing certain aspects of its aesthetic specificity. Some seek to overcome this impasse by emphasising its dual nature, drawing simultaneously on both languages. Finally, there are those who situate it within intermedia practices, where different materials and media combine to generate new qualities.
THE GENESIS OF THE PHENOMENON
Given its complex character, the search for the origins of concrete poetry is necessarily multi-layered and depends on the adopted research perspective. Three principal approaches may be distinguished. The first traces distant roots back to the earliest forms of human expression and to the long tradition of visual poetry, thereby emphasising the continuity of the phenomenon. The second stresses the difference between concrete poetry and earlier visual poetry, locating its origins in twentieth-century experimental practices across various artistic disciplines. The third underscores the absolute novelty of its solutions and its break with existing literary conventions, linked to the need to adapt artistic language to the conditions of modernity. Within each of these approaches, different arguments and corresponding examples may be proposed.
PROTO-SOURCES – VISUAL POETRY
It is difficult to speak about the beginnings of the visualisation of text. Giving form to concepts, letters and words is a complex and in many respects elusive process, and the earliest attempts to relate words to things can be traced back to Palaeolithic cave paintings. The invention of writing – initially pictographic and ideographic, and later alphabetic (and, subsequently, printing) – opened up an entirely new field of exploration.
Ancient cultures, fully aware of the pictorial dimension of writing, left behind numerous examples of visual texts. The earliest known literary example is Saggil-Kinam-Ubbib, a Babylonian acrostic dating from the end of the second millennium BC. Acrostics – poems in which the initial letters of successive verses form an additional meaning – also appear in the biblical Book of Psalms. As sophisticated combinations of graphic arrangement and text, they fulfilled not only poetic and decorative functions but also religious, mnemonic and magical ones (for example, the Sator Square from the 3rd century). Gradually, visual poetry emerged as a distinct category, belonging to so-called artificial poetry (poesis artificiosa).
During the Alexandrian period of Greek literature, technopaegnia (from techne – art and paegnion – play) developed: poems graphically shaped according to the object they described and most likely intended to be inscribed on specific objects. The three earliest examples are Wings, Axe and Egg by Simmias of Rhodes (c. 300 BC), followed by Theocritus’ Syrinx and two altar-shaped works by Dosiadas and Besantinus. These have survived in copies of the Greek Anthology from the 1st century BC, rediscovered and first published in the 15th century by Maximus Planudes, which significantly influenced the further development of the genre. Figural epigrams were created by inscribing poems of varying length within the outline of an object so that, once filled, the text formed its image, or simply by arranging words and verses into the shape of the object. This technique was adopted by Roman literature under the Latin name carmina figurata; the most numerous works of this kind were produced by Optatianus Porphyrius during the reign of Constantine the Great (4th century).
In antiquity, three principal genres of visual poetry took shape. In addition to the figural technopaegnia of Greek origin, there were also schematic poems, including labyrinth poems and carmen cancellatum, both developed by Latin poets.
The earliest known labyrinth poems were written in Greek, owing to their thematic links with Homer’s Iliad, although they were composed in Rome during the reign of Augustus. These were compositions with a regular, rectangular structure resembling a chessboard, in whose fields the letters forming the text were inscribed. Depending on the arrangement of letters, the inscription was to be read either from the upper left corner of the rectangle or from the centre of the labyrinth; later variants assumed the form of a cross, circular layout, spiral and other configurations.
The Latin carmen cancellatum, also known as versus intextus, was likewise developed by Optatianus Porphyrius. These were works in which additional poems were woven into the main text. Such “poems within the poem” formed elaborate geometric shapes or symbols, such as the monogram of Christ. They became particularly numerous as court poetry during the Carolingian Renaissance (9th century), and their authors included leading intellectual figures of the period: Alcuin, adviser to Charlemagne, St Boniface, Venantius Fortunatus and, above all, Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz. Clergymen frequently used textual graphics to ideographically represent religious symbols.
Kabbalistic visual texts constitute another highly complex tradition. The earliest examples derive from Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia’s work The Life of the World to Come and take the form of mystical messages written as concentric circles. Kabbalistic texts were also composed in square arrangements using the technique known as notarikon, and such forms are likewise present in Baroque literature.
The presence of visual texts in Hebrew, Persian, Chinese and Indian literary traditions attests to the broad geographical range of this type of exploration.
Visual poetry flourished in the early modern period. Written both in Latin and in vernacular languages, it first appeared prominently in England (including the works of metaphysical poets such as George Herbert) and in France, from where it spread across Europe, reaching as far as Spain and the poetry of the Gongorists. The 17th century proved to be the most prolific in terms of formal diversity: it marked both the apogee and, simultaneously, the decline of visual poetry, owing to its mass, mechanical and often unreflective production, for example in the Nuremberg Meisterschule and its Figurengedichte. Poems were inscribed in the shapes of figures, crowns, pyramids, obelisks, monuments, cups or hearts, frequently decorating the pages of Baroque epitaphs. This development coincided with the flourishing of emblematic literature, in which acrostics, mesostics, telestics, chronograms, protean poems and palindromes intertwined.
Old Polish, more precisely Baroque, authors likewise employed the possibilities of visual poetry, adopting a repertoire of European forms. One of the earliest examples is Daniel Naborowski’s entry in Daniel Cromer’s album, composed in the shape of a chalice (1593). Visual forms can also be found in the works of Stanisław Niegoszewski, Adam Nieradzki (in the volume Kirys hartowany starożytnego żołnierza [The Tempered Cuirass of the Ancient Soldier]) and Wojciech Waśniowski (in the volume Wielkiego Boga Wielkiej Matki Ogródek [The Garden of the Great God of the Great Mother]). A unique example is the work of Jan Żabczyc, regarded as the oldest visual poem written in Polish, composed in the shape of a coat of arms.
The Enlightenment did not favour the development of picture poems. The publication of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön marked a decisive separation between literature and the visual arts and brought an end to the tolerance previously extended to visual poetry. In the 19th century it survived primarily in a trivialised form, often reduced to the domain of so-called newspaper poetry. It was revived, however, with renewed force in the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, and even already in poetry at the turn of the century.
The researchers exploration of the origins of concrete poetry in earlier visual poetry is therefore justified: both employ the materiality of the medium and operate as intermedial explorations situated between literature and the visual arts. The picture poem represents one of the first attempts to break with the linear notation – and thus the linear perception – of the literary work, signalling a shift from temporality to spatiality. Nevertheless, these are only initial stages in the visualisation of poetry, and any attempt to establish direct genealogical links must remain cautious. In this case, the differences are more significant than the similarities. Earlier visual poetry is mimetic and narrative, refers to the external world, and its fundamental function is expressiveness – condicionis sine qua non to the principles of concrete poetry. It is therefore essential to emphasise that any connection between concrete poetry and visual poetry can be drawn only within a narrow and precisely defined scope, and that the two concepts are not synonymous.
It should also be noted that the visual poetry movement re-emerged in the 1970s, with its most active centre in Italy, where it became known as poesia visiva. To a much greater extent, it belongs to the visual arts: “many works consist of photographs of people carrying words or even letters, while others depict processes affecting words or letters, such as erasure, metamorphosis, decay or reconstruction.” Dick Higgins argued that it is not possible to draw a strict boundary between contemporary concrete poetry and visual poetry, even though he himself attempted to establish such distinctions. The absence of a clear demarcation does not mean that such a distinction cannot potentially exist; however, introducing rigid divisions many years after the emergence of the phenomenon could prove problematic, as it might significantly alter the status of particular works or artists.
ROOTS – TWENTIETH-CENTURY AVANT-GARDES
In twentieth-century literature, the sources of concrete poetry are sought in the works of numerous authors; it is also emphasised that the phenomenon draws upon a range of artistic experiences.
The undisputed precursor of modern visual literature was the symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, author of the 1869 poem Un coup de dés [A Roll of the Dice]. This text brought about a revolution in typography: it disrupted the linear order of expression, diversified typeface and font size, and endowed blank spaces with semantic value (in Polish poetry, the first attempts in this direction were made by Cyprian Kamil Norwid), thereby spatialising poetry. Mallarmé rejected mimesis and asserted the primacy of internal textual relations over external references. The starting point for his poetics was Edgar Allan Poe’s theory of pure poetry – poetry understood as an absolute, liberated from intellectual and emotional content and utilitarian values, created with a minimum of words and a maximum of interrelations.
Another milestone was achieved by Guillaume Apollinaire with his calligrams, published in 1918 (from the Greek kallos – beauty and gramma – letter, inscription, writing, book). In total, he produced around 160 works of this kind in various forms. The etymology refers back to the Greek idea of technopaegnia, often continued in calligrams. Yet some of Apollinaire’s works display a higher degree of complexity, such as Lettre-Océan [Oceanic Letter], through the abandonment of unidirectionality, the use of fragmented statements and unconventional textual arrangement.
The next stage was marked by the contribution of radical avant-garde movements, which programmatically broke with established habits of reception. Italian Futurism introduced Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s concept of parole in libertà, emphasising the role of words freed from logical-syntactic dependencies and grammatical categories, privileging nouns and infinitives, and rejecting mimetic description of the world. Russian Cubo-Futurists, in turn, sought a language beyond reason (zaum), considered most suitable for expressing their experiences; they created poetic utterances from combinations of sound and rhythmic elements devoid of lexical meaning, merely suggesting a theme or emotional aura. The essence of this experiment lay in the attempt to discover the roots of language and to restore meaning to the written word. The Dadaists, while rejecting syntactic rules and combining fragments of words or isolated letters, blurred the boundaries between the arts, yet did so in an atmosphere of provocation, spontaneity, improvisation, chance and playfulness, thus consciously disregarding system and order.
After the Second World War, in 1946, Isidore Isou inaugurated Lettrism in Paris, proposing a radical revolution in poetry based on the reduction of its material to linguistic “molecules,” that is, sequences of abstract sounds accessible to direct, non-intellectual perception. Shortly thereafter, concrete poetry emerged.
In Poland as well, researchers have sought precursors of concrete poetry by identifying successive attempts to visualise literature. Tytus Czyżewski – a painter and poet associated with several artistic movements – created visual poems such as Poznanie [Cognition], Mechaniczny ogród [Mechanical Garden], Płomień i studnia [Flame and Well], Hymn do maszyny mego ciała [Hymn to the Machine of My Body], Hamlet, and W piwnicy [In the Cellar], employing a typographic repertoire alongside drawn motifs. A genuine revolution in Polish typography, however, was brought about by artists: Mieczysław Szczuka, who worked on the typographic design of Anatol Stern’s poem Europa (1929), and Władysław Strzemiński, an advocate of modern printing, for example in the typographic layout of Julian Przyboś’s volume Z ponad [From Above] (1930). Critics sometimes indicate connections between concrete poetry and the ideas of the Kraków avant-garde, especially those of Tadeusz Peiper – anti-emotionalism, the postulate of rigour and purposiveness of construction – while at the same time overlooking such aspects as metaphor, the polysemy of words, the emphasis on poetic syntax, the primacy of the sentence over the single word, and the creation of “maximum imaginative allusions with a minimum of words.” The search for the origins of concrete poetry in this context is probably linked to the revival of the ideals of Zwrotnica and their reinterpretation after 1956.
At the same time, it should be emphasised that situating concrete poetry within the developmental sequence of the interwar avant-garde often serves primarily to underline its avant-garde character. The identification of common features results from this convergence and from the avant-garde’s shared repertoire of formal solutions. Nevertheless, the connections with certain tendencies appear closer, while with others they seem less justified.
It should also be noted that the sources of inspiration for concrete poetry were not exclusively literary; they also derived to a significant extent from the visual arts, and occasionally from music.
INNOVATION
Another approach to the origins of concrete poetry essentially abandons genealogical searches and instead stresses the absolute innovativeness of the movement. In this view, concrete poetry is understood as the result of transformations in the contemporary world and as an attempt to adapt the language and forms of poetry to present-day conditions and to the perceptual preferences of the audience. As Wojciech Pogonowski observed, “It seems to be a valuable direction, perhaps even the most appropriate one for expressing the contemporary world. […] [Its] origins should be sought not in literary tradition but in the broadly understood scientific and technological revolution.” Concrete poetry indeed possesses a certain differentia specifica that distinguishes it from a number of related phenomena, arising from its particular ideological assumptions and formal solutions. Yet it is not the first avant-garde movement, and it cannot be considered in isolation. The various approaches discussed above demonstrate that its contextual framework may be interpreted in multiple ways.
In this respect, Eugen Gomringer most clearly formulated the theoretical justification for the break with the traditional mode of writing poetry in his manifesto Vom Vers zur Konstellation [From Verse to Constellation]. He diagnosed the contemporary communicative situation as oriented towards brevity, economy of expression, condensation of meaning and an accelerated pace of communication. The traditional concept of the poem, requiring an extensive verbal structure in order to sustain a rhythmic pattern, no longer corresponded to contemporary modes of speech. Concrete poetry was thus proposed as a response, intended to restore an organic link between poetry and social life. The communicative situation has continued to evolve in the direction indicated by Gomringer; today one may add the pervasive presence of the language of advertising and the growing dominance of the visual element in communication.
HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE MOVEMENT
Concrete poetry has several “founding fathers” who worked almost simultaneously and independently in three geographically distant centres. They were Öyvind Fahlström in Sweden, Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland, and Décio Pignatari together with the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos of the Brazilian poetry group Noigandres. Its symbolic “baptism” and naming took place at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm in 1955 during a meeting between Eugen Gomringer and Décio Pignatari. This date is commonly accepted as the birth of a new movement – significantly, one that was international from the outset. It is also characteristic that poets, musicians, playwrights, professors of literature, painters and architects were involved in its formation; such an integration of creative disciplines is comparable perhaps only to Dadaism and may indicate a universal need for this kind of artistic synthesis.
Eugen Gomringer, a Swiss born in Bolivia, in 1954–58 served as secretary to Max Bill – a Swiss painter, sculptor and architect, a Bauhaus student (1919–1934) and a member of the circle associated with the magazine Abstraction-Création (1932–1936). It was Bill who formulated the programme of concrete art, organised the exhibition Abstrakt/Konkret in Basel in 1944, and, after the Second World War, sought to continue the Bauhaus tradition as a designer and rector of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. The idea itself – and even the name – had earlier precedents, for example in the work of Theo van Doesburg, who maintained contacts with the Bauhaus, collaborated with Abstraction-Création, and in 1930 began publishing the journal Art-Concret while announcing the manifesto Base de la peinture concrète [The Basis of Concrete Painting] as an expression of the material qualities of art and the concreteness of life. Gomringer himself explained the dependence of his ideas on Bill’s work in the 1958 text max bill und die konkrete dichtung.
Gomringer, initially a writer of sonnets, established contacts with concrete painters and in 1952 became the literary editor of the international art journal Spirale. Aware of the transformations taking place in contemporary art, he sought poetic forms adequate to these changes. As a result, he wrote the first concrete poem, avenidas, referring to his works as constellations (although he was already considering the term concrete poetry; in Brazil the term “ideograms” was used at that time). In 1953 the first issue of Spirale appeared in Bern, while Spiral Press simultaneously published the volume konstellationen. The response to this publication led to Gomringer being offered the position of secretary to Max Bill. In the second issue of the journal Augenblick (1955), he published his manifesto vom vers zur konstellation. zweck und form einer neuen dichtung [from verse to constellation purpose and form of a new poetry]. The constellation, the fundamental category of his concept, was defined as “the simplest possibility of shaping poetry based on words; it comprises a group of words and becomes a constellation; in a constellation, words are arranged next to each other or one below the other.” Gomringer, who founded his own publishing house (Eugen Gomringer Press) in Frauenfeld in 1960 and issued the international journal Konkrete Poesie / Poesia Concreta (1960–1965), bringing together concretists from around the world, later summarised these activities in the book manifeste und darstellungen der konkreten poesie 1954–1966 [manifestos and presentations of concrete poetry 1954–1966] (1966).
Décio Pignatari, a photographer and visual artist, introduced the ideas of concretism from Brazil, where in São Paulo, in 1952, together with brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, he founded the Noigandres group (the mysterious Provençal word taken from the poetry of Arnaut Daniel and cited by Ezra Pound in Canto XX). The group promoted visual poetry, employing coloured typography and reducing poems to individual word-molecules. Augusto de Campos’s first collection, Poetamenos [Poet-minus] (1953), was published in issue 2 of Noigandres in 1955. The author pointed to Anton Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie as a source of inspiration. The ideograms from Poetamenos – apart from the introduction of colour typography – differ only slightly from Gomringer’s constellations. By abandoning inflectional and syntactic structures, the poem limited itself to the presentation of pure relations between individual words; reduced language thus became the basis of poetic expression. Both poets employed almost identical techniques and similar programme assumptions, as if the result of parallel reflection, although their inspirations derived from different artistic fields: Gomringer from painting and de Campos from music.
Another member of the Noigandres group, Décio Pignatari, published the so-called “other book” LIFE, consisting of six pages: the first four displayed the letters of the word, the fifth presented a sign resembling two vertically connected squares (formed by superimposing all the letters), and the final page contained the complete word. The most important programmatic statement of the Brazilian concretists is generally considered to be the manifesto Plano-pilôto para poesia concreta [Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry], printed in the 1958 volume of Noigandres and later known in Europe through its German translation. The text listed numerous precursors of concretism – film-makers (S. Eisenstein), painters (M. Bill, J. Albers), poets (G. Apollinaire, S. Mallarmé, E. Pound, J. Joyce, E. E. Cummings, O. de Andrade) and composers (A. Webern, P. Boulez, K. Stockhausen) – and offered definitions in various stylistic and conceptual variants: “concrete poetry: word-objects arranged in a space-time structure; a concrete poem is a message of its own structure; a creation employing a phonetic system and an analogous syntax of a specific ‘verbal-vocal-visual’ linguistic image,” etc.
The group soon expanded to include new members such as H. L. Grünewald, P. Xisto, F. Gullar and E. Braga, and between 1962 and 1967 it published the journal Invenção as a continuation of Noigandres (five volumes between 1952 and 1962). Their theoretical texts and manifestos were summarised in the book by the de Campos brothers and Pignatari, Teoria da poesia concreta (textos críticos e manifestos) 1950–1960, published in São Paulo in 1965. Notably, and quite exceptionally, Brazilian concrete poetry received support from official institutions, which resulted in funding for its development and considerable popularity in Brazil.
At the same time, in the early 1950s, the Swedish painter Öyvind Fahlström – an artist with wide-ranging interests, including literature – used the term “concrete poetry” in his programmatic text Manifest för konkret poesi [Manifesto of Concrete Poetry], published in Stockholm in 1953. As leader of the Stockholm group Fylkingen, active in the 1960s, and author of the collection Bord-dikter 1952–1955 [Table Poems] (1966), he, like the Lettrists and the Brazilians, drew inspiration from contemporary musical experiments (Boulez, Stockhausen, Webern and Schaeffer, who from 1948 introduced real sounds of the street, nature and speech into musical material, referring to these practices as “concrete music”).
Subsequent concrete artists based their practice on these canonical texts, especially the Brazilian manifesto. Over time, numerous synonymous or related terms were coined to describe this type of art: elementary, abstract, absolute, material, visual, figurative, evident, spatial, typographic and structural. Nevertheless, the term “poetry” was consistently retained, which proved controversial for critics but was intended to emphasise the literary roots and orientation of the movement.
In the 1950s new poetic circles also emerged that, drawing on the legacy of the historical avant-garde – particularly Dadaism (Kurt Schwitters) and surrealist strategies – developed the ideas of concretism. Chronologically, mention should be made of the Vienna Group (Die Wiener Gruppe), active between 1952 and 1964 and engaged in explorations of both phonic (combinations of different sound variants) and visual concrete poetry. The group included artists of diverse backgrounds: Gerhard Rühm (composer), Friedrich Achleitner (architect), Oswald Wiener (jazz musician), and the poets H. C. Artmann and Konrad Bayer. Ernst Jandl, a leading representative of Austrian concrete poetry, also collaborated with them for a period. Characteristically, the movement was from the outset dominated by poets from the German-speaking sphere, and by the mid-1960s the centre of European concrete poetry had largely shifted to Germany.
Next were the founders of the Darmstadt Circle (Darmstädter Kreis), an international group including Claus Bremer – a playwright, Daniel Spoerri – a painter, Carlo Belloli and Emmett Williams, who between 1957 and 1960 promoted concretism in the journal Das neue Forum (1957–1961) and in the series Material (1957–1960), publishing authors from various countries.
Equally important was the circle of artists and theorists known as the Stuttgart Group (Stuttgarter Gruppe) or Stuttgart School (Stuttgarter Schule), which issued the journal Augenblick (1955–1961) edited by Max Bense, with contributors including Helmut Heißenbüttel, Reinhard Döhl and Ludwig Harig. Bense, a lecturer in philosophy at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and in aesthetics at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (1953–1958), where he met Gomringer and Bill, played a crucial role in the aesthetic constitution of the movement by inscribing its practices within the latest developments in the humanities at the time – cybernetics, information theory, the philosophy of signs and semiotics. In Bense’s 1969 definition, associated with so-called information or abstract aesthetics, we read: “what is at stake here is a poetry that reduces language almost entirely to structural and semiotic moments, that is, to the direct material functions of speech and linguistic data; in its ideal form, concrete texts use language not only as a carrier of meaning but also, and perhaps above all, as a vocal and visual act […] The context of a concrete text is simultaneously semantic, visual and phonic.”
Stuttgart and its academic institutions thus became one of the most important centres of European concretism: Haroldo de Campos attended lectures there in 1964, visiting other centres of concrete poetry from Prague to Paris; it was there that the journals Futura and rot were published from 1961 onwards, and that key theoretical statements of the movement were formulated. The achievements of the group were recorded in the anthology edited by Walther and Harig, Muster möglicher Welten [Models of Possible Worlds], and later by Gomringer in konkrete poesie. deutschsprachige autoren (1972). In Augenblick, where Bense published his studies on classification, text theory and concrete poetry, Gomringer’s first manifesto also appeared.
Concrete poetry achieved particular prominence in England, where, according to researchers, more than twenty journals devoted to concretism were published in the 1960s, accompanied by numerous international exhibitions and a significant expansion of the formal possibilities of the movement. British artists were directly inspired by the experiments of the Noigandres group, which were discussed in lectures by Edwin Morgan at the University of Glasgow. The Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay initially created traditional concrete texts and later situated them in three-dimensional space as so-called standing poems, arranging words on wooden boards and fragments of stone within the environment of a garden. Dom Sylvester Houédard employed mobiles and balloons bearing words moved by currents of air, thus producing a form of kinetic poetry. Bob Cobbing experimented with phonic poetry, while John Sharkey and others also used film in their explorations. English achievements were documented in Emmett Williams’s An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967).
Through the activities of its promoters, the idea of concrete poetry spread into many other literatures of the 1960s in Europe. These included, among others, the Slovenian group OHO; the Serbian poet and graphic artist Miroljub Todorović, founder of Signalism; the Czech artists Jiří Kolář, Jiří Valoch and Ladislav Novák; and the editors of the anthology Slovo, písmo, akce, hlas [Word, Writing, Action, Voice] (1967), Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová, who also jointly published experimental poetry volumes with theoretical texts such as JOB-BOJ (1968), alongside the activity of Polish artists.
French artists also merit separate attention, including Pierre Garnier, the originator of spatialism, a national variant of concretism emphasising the relationship between letter, word, geometric figure and space, and author of the programmatic books Manifest pour une poésie nouvelle, visuelle et phonique [Manifesto of a New, Visual and Phonic Poetry] (1963) and Spatialisme et poésie concrète [Spatialism and Concrete Poetry] (1968), as well as Henri Chopin, a leading figure in phonetic and sound poetry.
By the 1960s the movement had assumed a genuinely international character. The First International Exhibition of Concrete Poetry was held in 1964 in Cambridge, followed a year later by the Second in Oxford at St Catherine’s College. The years 1964–1970 constituted a period of exceptional activity, with chronicles recording more than sixty major exhibitions. Publishing activity was equally intense: by 1970 nearly one hundred journals and magazines devoted to concrete poetry had appeared in nineteen countries. It is often assumed that the rapid development of the movement reached its culmination with the world exhibition Klankteksten – Konkrete Poëzie – Visuele Teksten [Sound Texts – Concrete Poetry – Visual Texts], organised by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1970, which summarised its history and achievements.
Nevertheless, concrete art remains a living phenomenon, as evidenced by its continued presence in digital publications and online archives documenting the achievements of concrete, visual and sound poetry across different epochs and cultures. Alongside works by historical authors, new pieces continue to appear, and contemporary multimedia tools associated with computers and the internet make it possible to create animated versions of canonical works from the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly dynamic and creative in this respect are the Brazilian and Argentine communities.
Just as Stanisław Dróżdż remained an active concrete poet in Poland, several concrete poets continue to work internationally. Among the most active was Eugen Gomringer, who published another anthology of concrete poetry in 1996 and continued to collect, edit and disseminate works belonging to this tradition until the end of his life.
HISTORY OF POLISH CONCRETISM
In Poland, the concretist movement was inaugurated in 1967 through the work of Stanisław Dróżdż. To a considerable extent, the history of Polish concrete art is inseparable from the history of his artistic practice and his promotional activity. The “farewell” exhibition in Amsterdam in 1970 was among the first exhibitions in which he participated, so the delay in relation to the international movement was therefore substantial. While in the West exhibitions and publications were already assuming a retrospective and summarising character, in Poland the movement was only beginning to take shape.
Among earlier innovations were the “picture” texts by Marian Grześczak, included in his 1967 poetry collection Naczynie poważne [A Serious Vessel], as well as the experiments of Roman Gorzelski.
After Dróżdż’s first presentation and his initial isolation within this new area of practice, other authors began to take an interest in concrete poetry from 1971 onwards (Marianna Bocian). A circle gradually formed around him, comprising individuals who also began to create in accordance with the principles of concrete poetics. Wrocław became the most important centre of concrete poetry in Poland: most artists were associated with the city, and events crucial to the development of the movement took place there, monitored and in most cases organised by Dróżdż. The first presentation of concrete poetry was held in 1973 at the Piwnica Świdnicka Gallery in Wrocław, followed by modest exhibition organised in 1975 by the Polish Language Circle operating at the University of Warsaw.
The Wrocław community – or more broadly, the Lower Silesian milieu – had the opportunity to present its achievements through regular exhibitions at the Jatki Gallery between 1976 and 1978. Following presentations of selected artists, three collective exhibitions of Wrocław concrete poetry were held: two in 1978 in Wrocław and one in 1981 in Dąbrowa Górnicza.
At the same time, six nationwide exhibitions were organised, presenting the work of authors from outside the Wrocław circle. The first took place at the Kłodzko Cultural Centre in 1976 and included the Wrocław artists Marianna Bocian, Michał Bieganowski, Stanisław Dróżdż and Wojciech Sztukowski; the Lower Silesian artists Bogusław Michnik and Jerzy Przytocki; Roman Gorzelski from Łódź; Bogusław Rostworowski from Kraków; and Marian Grześczak and Leszek Szaruga from Warsaw. The second national presentation was held in 1978 simultaneously in Wrocław and Oleśnica. Three further exhibitions were organised in 1979 – in Wrocław, Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz – and the final one took place a year later in Łomża. In that same year, Kłodzko hosted the International Presentation of Visual Poetry. These exhibitions testified to the vitality of the movement: after its tentative beginnings in 1971, it gathered momentum around 1976, reaching a peak in 1978–1979.
Alongside exhibitions, the movement was accompanied by the anthology of Polish concrete poetry compiled by Dróżdż and published in 1978, documenting the achievements of twenty-two authors: Piotr Bernacki, Michał Bieganowski, Marianna Bocian, Artur Tomasz Bok, Stanisław Dróżdż, Roman Gorzelski, Józef Andrzej Grochowina, Marian Grześczak, Zbigniew Jeż, Grzegorz Kolasiński, Marzenna Kosińska, Barbara Kozłowska, Zbigniew Makarewicz, Bogusław Michnik, Andrzej Partum, Wojciech Pogonowski, Jerzy Przytocki, Bogusław Rostworowski, Aleksander Rozenfeld, Krzysztof Soliński, Leszek Szaruga and Wojciech Sztukowski.
In 1979, two theoretical sessions devoted to concrete poetry were held, in Wrocław and Bydgoszcz; a third followed in 1981 in Dąbrowa Górnicza and was, notably, devoted to Wrocław concrete poetry.
Martial law interrupted the natural continuity and activity of the movement. After its abolition, a fourth session on concrete poetry was organised in Wrocław, yet for many reasons it proved impossible to reactivate the creative community. The extent to which participation in this experimental movement shaped the later work of the poets involved remains insufficiently explored.
The movement, active in Poland in the decade 1971–1981, ceased its intensive activity; however, its most important representative remained present on the artistic scene. Stanisław Dróżdż began alone and continued: even when other artists abandoned this practice, he consistently produced new concrete texts.