Project 7 — Voicing the Concrete

Detail from "White Pages" by Martín Gubbins.

Concrete poetry is, on the face of things, about as far as we can get from audiopoetics: often interchangeably called "visual poetry," it's by and large a typographical form rendered largely ineffable precisely because of the mechanisms of its creation. That is, it's for the eye, not the ear.

And yet that's not necessarily the case. As you will see, while concrete poetry is very much a product of the page that doesn't mean that there's not a considerable amount of attention to sound within the form, whether playing with unpronounceability, making homophonic puns, engaging in wordplay between different languages, etc. We'll draw our examples for this week's project from a landmark collection for the genre: Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967) [PDF]

In the linked excerpts you'll find work from a wide array of poets — including Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Findlay, Aram Saroyan, Brion Gysin, Eugen Gomringer, Reinhard Döhl, Ronaldo Azeredo, Maurizio Nannucci, bpNichol, and Williams himself — that span continents and generations. If you'd like another more contemporary set of examples to browse, feel free to take a look at Nico Vassilakis' "Antología Poesía Visual" (a selection of Chilean visual poetry), which Jacket2 published in 2014.

Your primary assignment here will be to create your own work of concrete or visual poetry. In conjunction with our workshopping of individual poems, however, everyone will have a chance to treat their peers' work as a performance score and record the results. We'll have two performers for each piece being workshopped and we'll listen to their recordings as part of each day's workshop process.

Your initial responses should be in either Word, PDF, or JPG format and should be e-mailed to the group no later than Saturday, October 24th. Here's our randomly-assigned schedule for the Week 10 workshops, along with the assigned interpreters for each poet's piece (in parentheses after each name):

• Monday, Oct. 26: Hardcastle (Scheifele, Edgar), Roller (Hardcastle, Nelson), Hoffman (Haig, Baxter)
• Wednesday, Oct. 28: Nelson (Haig, Hoffman), Scheifele (Nelson, Roller), Haig (Pieper, Baxter)
• Friday, Oct. 30: Pieper (Roller, Edgar), Baxter (Scheifele, Hoffman), Edgar (Pieper, Hardcastle)