The Autonomous Object of Concrete Poetry

In the concrete poem, language is not a representation of extra-poetic objects, feelings or ideas but an object all its own. In this chapter, Brazilian concrete poetry by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari is compared with other analogous forms – from Hellenistic pattern poems to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and Louis Zukofsky’s objectivism – to emphasise that what’s unique about Brazilian concrete poetry has to do with an insistence on the object as resistant to relation. In critical conversation with object-oriented ontology, this chapter shows that Brazilian concrete poetry manages to think the object’s resistance by thinking language. Without renouncing language’s ‘virtuality’ – its ability to mean – early concrete poetry stakes out a space for the poem-object to achieve a mode of autonomy akin to what theorists like Graham Harman describe. Though the poem relates by nature to the things it represents and to its writer and reader, this chapter explores concrete poetry’s self-theorisation and practical realisation as a form capable of existing autonomously from its representation of external objects. Ultimately concrete poetry even finds ways of existing apart from an authorial or reading subject when the poem, and its materiality, creates itself and determines its own readability.

Lyrical Matters and Posthuman Poetics in Anne Carson’s Nox

Focused on Anne Carson’s Nox, this chapter address the relationships between lyric and matter, person and poem. It argues that Nox, an accordion-fold book in a box composed as an elegy to the poet’s brother Michael, constitutes a materialisation of the famous Roman lyric, Catullus 101. Rather than antagonising or excising the lyric, as prior approaches to material poetics had done, Nox turns 101’s described relations into material ones. The poem and its translations join with the textual remnants left behind by Carson’s brother – letters, photographs, recounted speech – to constitute a posthuman elegy, made from the matters of lyric and life. This chapter argues that contemporary material poetry, as Nox represents it, counters the assumption that practices akin to concrete poetry died after the mid-twentieth century, or were resurrected solely as a reaction to the digital age. As the examples in this book show, practices in material poetry continued steadily through the decades and went on to demonstrate elasticity and endurance. Nox, in particular, exhibits an ability to materially incorporate apparently antagonistic poetic types as the very matter of its poetics.

Assembling La nueva novela: Juan Luis Martínez and a Material Poetics of Relation

Chapter 3 examines the material poetics of relation that contribute to the Juan Luis Martínez-assembled 1970s artist’s book La nueva novela. It is constructed from such diverse parts as: visual maths problems in which, for example, a painting of Rimbaud and a military jacket minus a shoe, a boot and a sock equals suspenders, a spat and a sock; metal fishhooks taped to a page; riddles and circular problems of logic; other people’s poems; musical scores; drawings, for example, of a pipe split in half (titled ‘Meditations on René Magritte’ and dedicated to Foucault); among many other things. This chapter turns to Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of ‘assemblage theory’. By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this chapter demonstrates poetry’s condition of being is as a ‘multiplicity’, one that, as Martínez says, ‘operate[s] permanently in every direction’. By comparing how the book’s contents work to both bind it together as a whole and unbind it into a near-infinite network of pieces that can and do belong to other assemblages, this chapter makes a case for understanding books and their contents as bound by relations of exteriority.

The Subject of the Material Poem

While this book takes the poetic object as its primary concern, the conclusions it draws point toward new possibilities for theorizing subjectivity as well. Many practices of material poetry reject the notion of the lyrical subject. This is true to one degree or another for each of the objects examined in this study. This chapter reflects on the status of subjectivity for such objects and points to an emerging framework for understanding the subject in the context of material language. This conclusion revisits the notion of author intentionality, whose presence in this project marks a specific sort of critical formalism it is interested in resurrecting. This book’s approach attends to experimental poetic form while also registering a commitment to the complex theoretical projects its poet subjects hoped to materialize in their poetic objects.

How Poetry Matters

This chapter opens a discussion of how language’s vitality registers in and as material. It assesses the reception of material poetics in late twentieth century North America and compares the examples featured in this book with other investments in poetic materiality. The chapter offers a discussion of the term ‘concrete poetry’ which has lost some of the contextual specificity that historically adhered to it. This history is proved as a way of situating Brazilian concretism and as a way of distinguishing the term’s use from other names for sympathetic forms such as ‘visual poetry’. This chapter makes the case for the term ‘material poetics’ and demonstrates how many of the hybrid linguistic-material practices in the Americas built on early theorisations of language’s matter, which were undertaken with notable depth by the so-called ‘noigandres’ group of Brazilian concrete poets. Literary studies’ adoption of theories of objects and matter are explored along with debates within literary studies that investigate how we read. The introduction takes this book’s featured artists and poets to be its primary theorists and works to test and reframe contemporary thinking on objects by positing the matter of language as its object of study.

Sensation, Relation and Neoconcrete Poetics

Chapter 2 discusses the 1960s interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretism. It argues for a relational poetics in which language is plastic and what’s plastic is language. Analysing examples of poetry and art that either calls itself poetry or makes use of the book form – including poet Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’ (an underground poem-room that invites the ‘reader’ to enter), artist Lygia Pape’s Book of Creation (a language without words which the ‘reader’ can order) and artist Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics (a lyric that stills the sensible for the ‘reader’ to perceive) – this chapter shows that language powerfully shapes the history of what neoconcrete artist Lygia Clark calls the ‘relational object’. Not just a score which would guide, from the outside, the co-creation of an object, language, in a relational poetics, joins the creator and participant in becoming the object created. This conclusion also points towards one way in which avant-garde experimentation (often accused of being apolitical) can engage the political sphere – by creating the opportunity for an engagé poetics that takes shape inside sensory engagement itself.

Concrete USA: Building Ronald Johnson’s ARK

Chapter 4 argues that Ronald Johnson’s ARK, written over a period of twenty years from the 1970s to the 1990s, represents a future of concrete poetry. This chapter shows how ARK carried the practice of concrete poetry into North America at the end of the twentieth century, and it examines the changes the practice undergoes as a result. ARK, a 300-page long poem, also incorporates modern and postmodern experiments with the epic form (such as Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems). This chapter interrogates ARK’s approach to poetic time. ARK rejects history, as well the instantaneous time of earlier, more dogmatic versions of concrete poetry, where a small poem can be apprehended in what feels like an instant. Rather than linearity or instantaneity, this chapter argues that ARK constructs a circular time, which is itself interrupted by many circular eddies that wind the reader back through concrete poetry even as the book continues to move ‘forward’. This, in turn, leads towards a theory of the linguistic object which, in contradiction to many theories that take the object as already itself and finished, shows the object in-process, an ark-itecture in the making.