Abstract Concrete

In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or evading language in order to access a space of objective communication. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and historical forms, from ritual chant-based practices to Dada performance, to the contemporaneous sound poetry of French ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs’s cut-ups, and auto-destructive art. The example of classical concrete poetry served more as a stylistic counterpoint than a direct influence. Cobbing’s practice was also centrally motivated by a counter-cultural belief that artistic forms which broke down boundaries between media could have more broadly, socially disruptive and revolutionary effects. The development of these sentiments is traced from Cobbing’s early production of duplicator prints during the 1940-50s to his non-semantic, performance-oriented concrete practice of the early 1970s, in which single visual poems become the basis for endless improvisatory reworking. At the close of the chapter, the non-linguistic quality of Cobbing’s work is considered as a manifestation of, and response to, broader tensions within the concrete style.

Apophasis

For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.

Off-Concrete

The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘off-concrete’ to describe one of his own concrete poems. In this chapter, the term is used to characterise his overall approach to the style, which expressed both a keen enthusiasm for the classical concrete poetry of the 1950s-60s and a pronounced scepticism regarding its formal and ideological limits. One of many styles with which Morgan experimented during the 1950s-70s – also including beat and sci-fi poetry – concrete poetry was a means both of expressing his opposition to the parochialism of Scottish literary modernist culture and of redefining that culture as internationalist and technologically oriented. At the same time, Morgan’s incorporation of narrative voices and specific thematic scenarios into the concrete poem – ranging from outer space to the animal kingdom, and periodically expressing Scottish-nationalist and anti-colonialist politics – reflects his desire to extend and subvert the grammars of concrete poetry. This dialectical movement propelled his concrete practice forwards from 1962 until around the close of the 1960s, by which time his engagement with the style was waning. However, by the 1970s, a new variant of concrete poetry, more responsive to sound poetry and new Scottish poetry in dialect, had begun to animate Morgan’s practice.

Order and Doubt

The Edinburgh-based poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was both the first publisher of concrete poetry and the first published concrete poet in Britain. But his interaction with the movement was relatively brief, beginning in the spring of 1962 when he discovered the international style through Edwin Morgan, and coming to an end by the late 1960s. Finlay initially seized on concrete poetry as a means of extending the dimensions of poetry beyond linear verse. He utilised concrete poetry’s capacity to combine linguistic and non-linguistic composition to establish or enrich metaphorical links between disparate objects, phenomena, and cultural contexts. This approach, indebted to classical concrete, reflected both his opposition to the restrictions of Scottish literary culture during the 1960s, and a sense of the value of aesthetic order which had ideological and biographical connotations. But his interaction with the concrete movement quickly became fraught, reflecting both the inbuilt constraints of the style and his opposition to its perceived co-option by the sixties counter-culture. Through his production of card and booklet-poems, followed by poems in glass, wood and stone, and finally, three-dimensional poems set in the landscape around his home at Little Sparta, Finlay moved gradually but decisively away from concrete practice.

?Concrete Poetry and After

Having considered concrete poetry in England and Scotland largely in relation to global trends, in the final chapter this text turns its attention to the binding characteristics of concrete poetry in those two nations. What unique features can be picked out which allow us to speak of ‘concrete poetry in England and Scotland’ as a distinct and coherent phenomenon? The argument is presented that, while concrete poetry in its initial, international guises often represented a response to modernist design aesthetics and semiotic theory, for poets in England and Scotland it was more likely to be placed in creative proximity to Anglo-American modernist poetry. In this sense, concrete poetry in England and Scotland can be considered one aspect of what Eric Mottram called ‘The British Poetry Revival’, that period during the 1950s-70s when a range of British poets began to reincorporate modernist forms and themes into their work. This occurred partly in response to a range of shifting social and economic circumstances, including the emergence of a global imaginative culture through the development of international markets, the space race, and the nuclear arms race of the post-war period, and the emergence of state-funded artistic and literary culture within Britain.

Concrete Poetry/Konkrete Poesie/Poesia Concreta

This chapter provides an overview of the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s, which frames the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland. Concrete poetry first emerged in West Germany and Brazil in the early-to-mid 1950s, largely through the endeavours of Eugen Gomringer and the Noigandres poetry group. The earliest concrete poetry, defined in this text as ‘classical concrete’, was rooted in the aesthetics of constructivism, concrete art, modernist architecture, and literary modernism, as well as an interest in simplifying and clarifying language systems which was often connected to semiotics, especially information theory. A key impulse was the desire to develop transnational systems of linguistic communication, as the basis for post-war international dialogue. By the close of the 1960s, however, a different definition of concrete poetry, more connected to Dada, Futurism, and intermedia art, had taken hold worldwide. This variant of concrete was associated with the sixties counter-culture, and with a desire to tear down existing social institutions, expressed through non-linguistic or anti-linguistic impulses. To some extent this global narrative mirrors the story of concrete poetry’s development in England and Scotland, and can be traced by assessing the work of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard and Cobbing in turn.

Introduction

This chapter presents the critical context and overarching narrative of the text. Concrete poetry has not been subject to extensive literary-critical attention, particularly in a British context, partly because of the very diversity of thematic associations it is able to support, which makes it difficult to process conceptually in retrospect. To bring some clarity to current thinking around concrete poetry, and in response to some recent critical revaluations of the style, this text posits that the style represented an ongoing exploration of the legacy and relevance of early-twentieth-century vanguard activity during the 1950s-70s, especially the interplay between broadly constructivist and neo-dada tendencies in international literary and artistic culture during those decades. In England and Scotland, where the style emerged simultaneously during the early 1960s, the development of concrete poetry – and criticism around it – reflected these competing positions but also became bound up with questions of nationalism and national identity, particularly in Scotland. This chapter deals with those themes while also contextualising some gaps in the remit of the text, including the geographical restrictions placed around the subject-matter, and the relative absence of women poets from the scenes surveyed.