C Concrete Poetry
by Eugen Gomringer
Concrete Poetry and ZERO [1979]
In the same period, with only a few years’ difference, concrete poetry emerged in Switzerland and Brazil, and ZERO in Düsseldorf. Concrete poetry is rightly numbered among the literary movements in poetry, yet it is inconceivable without its relation to Concrete Art, which in Switzerland existed through my encounter with the Galerie des Eaux Vives in Zurich in 1944, as well as partly through its roots in visual art, and in Swiss graphics and typography. Thus, ZERO’s philosophy, themes, and issues are by no means alien to the phenomenology of concrete poetry. On the contrary: shifts in boundaries and interactions soon resulted, which continue to bear fruit to this day [1979]. There is more than abundant evidence that both movements, without initially knowing much about each other, pursued similar goals and addressed similar topics.
In the first manifesto of concrete poetry, which I published exactly 25 years ago, in 1954, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (“From Verse to Constellation”), I described “constellation” as follows: “It encompasses a group of words — in the way that a group of stars becomes a constellation.” And on the function of this new poetry within society it says: “The contribution of poetry will be concentration, economy, and silence. Silence distinguishes the new poetry from individualistic poetry. For this it relies upon the word.” In later manifestos, the description of the “constellation” and the demand for silence as the starting points for creative work were increasingly accompanied by the issue of surface and space, not least because constellations of stars, as well as of words, owe their effectiveness to the wideness of space. Consequently, later Pierre Garnier in France later transformed concrete poetry into “spatialisme.” Almost all authors of the 1950s put their signatures to his manifesto.
It should also not be overlooked that concrete poetry presented its intentions in an emphatically positivistic manner, optimistic in mood and turned away from the “dark” forces, including the emotional ones. It was about the new poetry of a new world. The term “constellation” in its own way denotes that the gaze wanted to be oriented to the heavens, and that the constellation should be brought down from the skies to the earth.
In the catalog of the ZERO exhibition at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover in 1965, Wieland Schmied describes the term “ZERO”: “However, it did not stop at this ‘pointed’ conception of ZERO — as a starting point or as a zero point. Soon they were speaking of the ‘ZERO Zone,’ and in this zone of contemplation, of stillness, of reflection, the nought, the zero, certainly has its place as an object of meditation and concentration. ZERO was to Mack, Piene, Uecker, Holweck, and Goepfert an unoccupied zone, a space not yet entered, an area not yet occupied by ideas, theories, and failed realizations, an area from which everything is still possible, from which it is possible to begin without preconditions, without any onerous legacy, without the fetters of the past.”
The idea of a space not yet entered, a zone of contemplation, of stillness, or the idea of the zero as an object for meditation and concentration — these could just as well have been ideas of the early concrete poets. Both they and ZERO have the same starting point, reiterated again and again with the terms “concentration,” “silence,” and “space.” These are terms that belong to the first phase, in which the decision was taken in favor of a new, pure worldview. Yet there was not only kinship in their large-scale thinking: ZERO early on favored “nuances” — in contrast to “noisy shouting” and “maximum physical effort” (Otto Piene). Günther Uecker wrote in 1960: “The wind is the beauty of the ice, as the sun flies, I fly, it goes through me, as it goes through something and nothing, it has transformed itself and me. It is the new awareness of the elemental forces, indeed of a central force, of immediate experience. Likewise, in my earliest constellations, flying and the wind and the tree played a crucial role.”
Uecker gave a “Lecture on White” in 1961, which is in fact a song of praise of the white world:
“To get to my work,” he says at the end, “here you see a quiet staccato, a legible white zone, which in its freedom awakens our most sensitive feelings, which conveys to us a new world of small nuances, of silence, far away from all the noise.”
No need here to point out the parallels in concrete poetry, where ideograms seek to represent silence, or to provoke keeping silent. And likewise for the concrete poets white is a major, inspiring situation. For the poet the blank page is the white field on which every small character, every single word attains its full stature, attracts attention, is an action.
Both ZERO as well as concrete poetry have also pointed up numerous new paths in design. Unfortunately, in the case of concrete poetry, art critics have still not realized that its minimal positive designs — Dieter Rot [Karl-Dietrich Roth] was a great inspirer in this respect — are actually the precursors of the later Minimal Art. ZERO is recognized to have made groundbreaking achievements in the understanding of artistic structure. Uecker: “The exploration of present structures leads us into a new reality”; “I constructed my white structures, which I deliberately call objects because they differ from pictorial projections on a canvas, with prefabricated elements such as nails. In the beginning I used rigorously ordered rhythms, mathematical sequences, which later dissolved into a free rhythm.”
What Uecker achieved with nails, concrete poets designed with groups of letters and words. The concordance reached a new high point when Uecker stated that “current structural resources can be understood as the language of our spiritual existence.” But then it also becomes clear that the design options differ. An important concept for ZERO was “vibration” and “oscillation.” “For me,” Uecker said, “it is about using these means to achieve a vibration within their ordered relationship to one another, which disrupts their geometric order and is capable of irritating them.” In the second phase, the poems of concrete poetry were also set in motion. The crystals of the early phase, too, became irritating structures. The only difference to the creative artistic means of ZERO was that all linguistic means can never only be shapes and shells — they repeatedly proved to be semantic means as well, which, of course, enabled quite different kinds of irritations. Many of Ernst Jandl’s texts are based on irritations of this kind.
Today, when people are so fond of looking back, the realization might dawn that the two movements — the real avant-garde movements of the postwar period — certainly played their part superbly in the 1950s and 1960s, and that their creative and psychological potential reached far beyond a mere historical stylistic affiliation. To create poetry in the sense of concrete poetry means to work with the elements of language; that is, writing as well as speaking, to use them positively as elements of existential intellectual confrontation within the wider open structure. And the ZERO texts by Piene, Mack, and Uecker — who can claim that they can be fixed historically solely through their intelligent confrontation with the elementary feeling of life, and also with the larger open structure? Both movements have not yet been exhausted in terms of their insights, knowledge, and perceptions.
Reprint from “ZERO. Bildvorstellung einer europäischen Avantgarde 1958-1964”, ed. by Ursula Perucchi-Petri, exhib. cat. Kunsthaus Zurich 1979, pp. 37-39.
This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.
