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And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the
familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is produced,
by différance, the economy of death.
--Jacques Derrida
Attired with stars we shall for ever sit Triumphing over Death,
and Chance, and thee, O Time.
--Milton For those who study the history of concrete poetry, the
often underrated role assigned to Öyvind Fahlström’s
"Manifesto for Concrete Poetry" in the broader context
of the concrete poetry movement remains puzzling. Granted, the manifesto
is often cited and quoted in anthologies and essays throughout the
world, and its groundbreaking status has been widely acknowledged;
but the way in which parts of the manifesto have been exhaustively
quoted suggests that the whole of Fahlström’s manifesto
has hardly been digested, and that his poetic vision has been understood
only partially. In fact, excerpts from the manifesto have often
been used to corroborate a perception of concrete poetry that is
utterly alien to Fahlström’s personal view. My contention
is that there is a schism at the core of concrete poetry, beginning
with the very definition, or assumption, of what the word "concrete"
should stand for. This schism is nowhere better illustrated than
in the theoretical works of Öyvind Fahlström and the Noigandres
Group in Brazil. This article is an attempt to address the schism
and the problems involved in the different approaches to the concept
of "concrete" as it was taken by Fahlström on the
one hand, and by the Brazilian poets on the other.
Before going any further, I should emphasize that the discrepancies
between Fahlström and the Noigandres poets (Augusto de Campos,
Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari) are easily minimized
or obscured by what they have in common. Indeed, there are many
aspects in which they all agree, and which they incorporated into
their practice. What I am after here, though, is the element that
has been less considered- the difference- which is something that
has enormous resonance. That difference, I will try to demonstrate,
resides in the rigid architectural metaphor embraced by the Noigandres
Group, as opposed to Fahlström’s musical approach-- and
it points to an essential question that pervades the concrete poetry
movement as a whole: writing versus sound, text versus performance.
The impact of modernist architecture on the Noigandres group
For the poets of the Noigandres group, the concept of "concrete"
was taken in an architectural sense: a structural material of "endless
expressive possibilities," the element that not only would
free architecture from the tyranny of beaux arts language, but also
would enable it to address pressing social needs. This close association
of concrete poetry with modernist architecture is revealing. The
movement so strongly identified itself with modernism that its own
modernity became obsolete; in other words, once the "concrete
lexicon" was exhausted, the Noigandres poets were unable to
develop their concrete project any further. Moreover, Brazilian
concrete poetry also shared with modern architecture ideas that
run from the broad social concerns of modernism-- such as utopia,
utilitarianism, and sanitation-- to technical and stylistic matters
involving structure, modules, form, and repetition.
To better evaluate the emphasis on architecture advocated by the
Noigandres Group, it is necessary to understand the impact that
modernist architecture had in Brazil in the 1930s and 40s. The radical
views on urban planning that swept Europe at the beginning of this
century seem to have encountered a sort of blank slate in a country
striving to overcome its colonial past. One needs only to be reminded
of two landmark projects to understand the visionary, if not messianic,
role ascribed to architecture at the time: LeCorbusier’s "corniche
extensions" proposal for Rio de Janeiro in 1930, and the construction
of Brasilia in the 1950s.
LeCorbusier’s proposal for Rio consisted of "a coastal
highway, some 6 kilometers in length, elevated 100 meters above
the ground and comprising fifteen floors of 'artificial sites' for
residential use stacked beneath its road surface."[1] The project
would simply and systematically erase four hundred years of culture
and history in a radical attempt to start from scratch. The "corniche
extensions" plan failed to leave the drawing board, but the
program for a revolutionary architecture was advanced further through
the foundation of Brasilia, the nation's capital, which was designed
by two of Le Corbusier's disciples and former collaborators, Oscar
Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. Once again, the scope was monumental and
geared toward bending history’s path. In this context, modernist
architecture was identified with social and political progress,
and "concrete," as building material and concept, became
the embodiment of a utopian promise: no more "empty words."
The Noigandres Group was formed concomitantly with the construction
of Brasilia, and the impact of that major architectural event in
shaping the group’s views can be measured by a close reading
of their manifesto, published in 1957. Beginning with its title,
"Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta,"[2] the manifesto
is written in a highly controlled style, reminiscent of architectural
jargon, which renders the whole text utterly impersonal. The poet
is "elevated" to the position of an architect or an engineer:
"João Cabral de Melo Neto— o engenheiro e a psicologia
da composição mais anti-ode: linguagem direta, economia
e arquitetura funcional do verso."[3] The overall tone is extremely
dry and cryptic, and the reader goes through sentence after sentence
without identifying an "author" (a personal voice), or
even feeling assured that the text is directed to him or her. This
sense of disorientation, or alienation, in concrete poetry, which
I will discuss in detail farther on, is of an essentially architectural
nature. "Concrete poetry: the product of a critical evolution
of forms," begins the manifesto, celebrating in its epigrammatic
style its bond with modernist architecture through the reduction
of the poem to a "product," and "by the recognition
of the graphic space as a cultural agent" —"o poema-produto:
objeto útil."
In 1957, a year before the publication of the "Plano-Piloto"
manifesto, Décio Pignatari published an article in the magazine
"Arquitetura e Decoração" titled "Forma,
Função e Projeto Geral." The article doesn’t
concentrate specifically on poetry, but it gives a glimpse into
the original ideas that were to be developed more fully in the manifesto.
Pignatari ponders the dichotomy of "form and function in the
new world of serial industrial production." Handmade production,
he writes, "has been thrown out of circulation," and the
"new consumer is a consumer of physical design." The concept
of a "consumer of physical design."[4] is a direct reference
to Richard Neutra, which Pignatari uses to combat the Dadaist approach
of Picabia and his "beautiful useless machines." - the
new art, and the new poem, should be instead a "beautiful useful
machine" The "machine" here is meant in an architectural
way, and is inspired by the "reductivist approach" of
Neue Sachlichkeit architects such as Ernst May and Hannes Meyer,
to whom a house should "function" as a "machine,"
or car. "In the formal approach of the new reality," Pignatari
concludes, "it was evident that architecture and urbanism ...
should lead to the proposition and solution of great and small problems
of modern art ."[5] Thus we have concrete poetry’s production
system thoroughly exposed: the poet as the architect or designer,
and the reader as the "consumer of physical design." This
system, we shall see farther on, is completely opposed to Fahlström’s.
How architectural ideas were absorbed into poetry
Modernist architecture’s attack on the old eclectic architecture
preexisting in Brazil-- a mixture of colonial-baroque, French neoclassicism,
and Beaux Arts-- was paralleled by the Noigandres Group’s attack
on the Portuguese language. One could say that concretism’s
impact on language was as drastic as LeCorbusier’s plan for
Rio, or Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasilia. The Portuguese language
is as ornate as any other of Latin origin, and its excesses were
not compatible with a "concrete’" approach to language.
It is revealing to read the theoretical texts produced by Noigandres’
members for the ciphered style; in those texts the writing became
extremely economic, avoiding redundant stylistic elements and grammatical
conventions: "concrete poetry aims at the lowest common denominator
of language, thus its tendency to ‘substantification’
(nouns) and ‘verbification.’ ... Hence its affinities
with the so-called ‘isolating-languages’ such as Chinese."[6]
Isolation, claimed as a goal to be achieved in language, was also
pursued by modernist architects, either through the final product--
the building itself-- or its basic components, or modules. Isolation
as a goal in poetry might be imputed to Brazil’s repressive
political atmosphere, for the era of development of concrete poetry
is situated right between the end of the dictatorship of Getúlio
Vargas[7] and the takeover by a military junta in 1964. This environment
was responsible for an epigrammatic style that pervaded all cultural
areas. It is not surprising then that this approach led the Noigandres
Group to a creative cul-de-sac in the space of a decade.
The pursuit of space and form in poetry had been inspired by the
"typographical agraphia" of Stéphane Mallarmé,
whom Roland Barthes describes as "the Hamlet of literature,"
representing "this precarious moment of History in which literary
language persists only the better to sing the necessity of its death."[8]
Barthes’ commentary on Mallarmé acquires a prophetic
dimension when we consider the later development of the Noigandres
Group, for although the belief in language's power to influence
or inform history had ultimately rescued concrete poetry from becoming
a mere formalistic exercise, the overwhelming threat of being embraced
by academia abruptly impelled the movement into a position that
mistook death for freedom. "This art has the very structure
of suicide," Barthes suggested, "in it silence is a homogeneous
poetic time which traps the word between two layers and sets it
off less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as a light, a void,
a murder, a freedom."[9]
This "silence," though, can be considered "strategic"
-- a ruse to expose absence in language and an intentional manipulation
of space, thus constituting itself as eminently architectural. Mark
Wigley has explored the structure of architectural metaphor in the
discourse of Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book The Architecture of
Deconstruction. In a chapter dedicated to "space" and
"silence," Wigley refers to "strategic silence,"
pointing out that architecture is "routinely constructed by
certain silences that constitute rather than interrupt discourse,
silences whose ongoing violence can only be addressed obliquely."[10]
This "architectural silence" thus works like a barricade,
at once and alternately void and object, Heideggerian abyss and
thing.
"Concrete poetry: tension of words-things in space-time"
the "Plano-Piloto" manifesto proclaims, and in their most
successful poems the Noigandres poets repeatedly reasserted their
belief in "silence" as a determinant of space and time.
This silence ultimately enabled the Noigandres group to address
critical questions inherent to language’s architectural nature,
such as "ornament," "structure," and "foundation."
In a poem of 1957, "uma vez, uma vala," by Augusto de
Campos, we see all these issues addressed at once:
uma vez
uma vala
uma foz
uma vez uma bala
uma fala uma voz
uma foz uma vala
uma bala uma vez
uma voz
uma vala
uma vez
The poem’s design resembles a modernistic mosaic pattern or
a spiral staircase, and as we read it we go down into the abyss,
which is here the theme of the poem itself. The words evoke time
(uma vez: once upon), abyss (vala: ditch), death (bala: bullet),
and word (voz: voice, speech) and its repetitive structure, much
in the manner of architectural modules, keeps moving the reader
endlessly back and forth from one idea (word) to another. Silence
here creates space, an acoustic space that makes the isolated words
reverberate in a ghostly way, creating the sensation of an abandoned
house. This is a poem not meant to be read aloud, but rather to
be inhabited. Reading it will only dissipate its spatial boundaries;
the reading should be done only by the eye, and the sound created
only in the reader’s mind.
Organic architecture
"Any house," wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in 1931, "is
a far too complicated clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the
human body... The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts
to digest objects.... The whole life of the average house, it seems,
is a sort of indigestion."[11] Wright’s organic approach
to architecture is closer to Fahlström’s structural vision,
for although "The Manifesto for Concrete Poetry" also
makes use of architectural metaphor, the rigidity of this language
is ultimately balanced by organic concerns. Furthermore, Wright’s
reference to the stomach uncannily brings to mind Fahlström’s
scatological bent, evidenced in poems such as "The March of
the Borborygms" or "Müüüm and the Megaphones."
"The possibilities are endless," Fahlstrom writes; "In
poetry there can be fractured stanzas with vertical parallelism,
so that the content provides the form by the fact that when a word
is repeated, it must be placed exactly under the last occurrence
of the same word, or vice versa, so that when part of a line is
put vertically in parallel with one above, it brings with it the
meaning of the line above.... The profusion of possibilities enables
us to achieve a greater complexity and functional differentiation,
in which each of the various parts of the content of a work acquires
its own form."[12] To this gridlike view of poetic space, so
akin to Bauhaus architecture, Fahlström juxtaposes "contrapuntal
music" and atonal music: "Thus, for example, I can construct
a series of twelve vowels in a certain order and make my worlets
out of them, even though a twelve-vowel series as such does not
have the same conventional justification as a series of the twelve
tones of the chromatic scale."[13] Although other architectural
metaphors (verbs such as "construct" and "function")
occasionally threaten to influence his writing, the final outcome
of the manifesto is a vigorous defense of music’s primacy over
poetry. The last paragraph of the manifesto begins "When I
have used the word ‘concrete’ ... it has a stronger association
with concrete music than with visual concretism in a narrow sense."[14]
"Concretism" for Fahlström is thus less related to
the béton-armé of modernist architecture than to the
belief that words carry meaning. In 1973 he wrote, "Like many
people, I began to understand during the late ‘60s that words
like ‘capitalism,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘alienation,’
were not mere ideas or political slogans, but stood for terrifying,
absurd, and inhumane conditions in the world."[15] This, one
might add, was the culmination, radical and politicized, of a process
initiated in the early 1950s-- a process of analyzing, understanding,
"concretizing." Concrete poetry is an instrument, as he
puts it, "to analyze our wretched human condition," and
the human element is translated into language through an organic
relationship to reality: "The concrete reality of my worlets
is not at all in opposition to the reality of their surroundings:
they are neither dream-sublimation nor futuristic fantasy, but an
organic part of reality I am living in although with their own principles
for life and development."
One shouldn’t overlook in this passage such words as "reality,"
"organic," or "life and development," for they
also hint at the core of Fahlström’s idea of "concrete"--
the systematic as organic and the organic as a system. "Müüüm
och Megafonerna" admirably demonstrates this equation: a surrealist
tale written in the style of Rimbaud’s "Illuminations,"
it betrays Fahlström’s interest in "the logic of
primitive people, of children, or the mentally ill." Its scatological
account of the voice apparatus is made to resemble the systematic
organization of a primitive society, and the poem is thus presented
to the reader as a myth, a given, a "concrete" concept.
"Müüüm och Megafonerna" is also revealing
in its chosen subject matter: the voice apparatus.
An unpublished manuscript from 1962 titled "Project for Dine’s
Home" (fig.1) gives a clear measure of what the "animistic"
tendency in Fahlström’s poetry involved. The work, meant
as an homage to Jim Dine’s 1963 series of works on house appliances
and compartments, is laid out as the floor plan of a house, with
each of its rooms translated into "bird-language." Fahlström
writes in his notes concerning "bird-language" that one
of the methods to achieve the translation of an English word into
"Birdo" is through "kneading," that is, through
the manual work of a plastic, "claylike material." "Project
for Dine’s Home" is thus revealing in that it points to
both the architectural and organic concerns in Fahlström’s
poetry. Moreover, shaping words through "kneading" hints
at the scatological dimension of his systematic view, an (architectural)
structure infused with life—pulsating, secretory, always evolving.
The voice as organic counterpart of language
The political dimension in Fahlström’s work demanded a
"voice" to make its message thoroughly understood. This
is clear from works such as the "Ade-Ledic-Nander" series,
in which "painting" didn’t seem to be a medium sufficiently
adequate to transmit the whole message. Painting in this case worked
as an appendix, or merely a prop of a performance, in which the
"voice" and the "presence" of its author were
the indispensable elements. The "voice" and "presence"
of the author are a complicated matter that shouldn’t occupy
our attention at this moment, but they refer to the tradition of
the rhapsodes that is central to Fahlström’s approach
to poetry, and in a way diametrically opposed to the Noigandres
group. Fahlström seemed to be more interested in the conflagration
of an event, an action, a performance, whereas the Noigandres group
kept close to the constructive properties of poetry. In a "Notation"
of 1974 Fahlström wrote, "Those who view the musical and
poetic dimension of my work as an evasion, or as an opportunistic
sugarcoating of serious conditions, I would remind of the scene
in ‘Tosca’ where torture goes on offstage. Meanwhile,
onstage, Puccini’s belcanto flows."[16]
It is fair to emphasize that music, or sound, is only mentioned
in the Noigandres texts for its secondary values. Pignatari suggests,
for instance, that "the new music (electronic) has already
been introduced in the cinema, television and radio as sound effects."[17]
In the "Plano Piloto" manifesto, we find a direct reference
to music in poetry: "Rhythm: relational force. A concrete poem,
using the phonetic system and an analogic syntax, creates a specific
linguistic area-- ‘verbivocovisual’-- that benefits from
the advantages of the nonverbal communication, without abdicating
the word’s virtues."[18] Elsewhere in the same text, a
reference to music is merely for historical effect, that is, an
attempt to link concrete poetry to Webern by way of Boulez and Stockhausen.
The absence of sound -- the silence -- in the poetry of the Noigandres
Group is thus paradoxical, for their interest in popular music is
well known. The musical element in their poetry has been internalized,
bringing it close to a silent experience. Reading a Noigandres poem,
one is caught in a mental web of associations and references that
are of a thoroughly visual nature. This approach to reading completely
denies performance: it is more about the writing than about the
utterance. Some poems, such as Décio Pignatari's "beba
coca cola," with its repetitive bilabial and palatal sounds,
do invite some musical performance. But this aspect is entirely
secondary or even gratuitous, for Pignatari’s main interest
here seems to be the deconstruction of an advertising icon (Coca
Cola), its debasement through scatology, and ultimately the "construction"
of a little monument (or tomb): a spiral in the shape of the letter
"c".
beba coca cola
babe cola
beba coca
babe cola caco
caco
cola
cloaca
Last(ing) words
Whereas the concrete poetry of the Noigandres group worked towards
the dilapidation (with all its sculptural implications) of the Portuguese
language, Fahlström seems to have worked in the opposite direction—
to add more complexity to Swedish, and, in the case of "Birdo"
and "Whammo," to the English language. Physical space
was not constricting to his practice, and he rarely submitted to
the tyranny of the page’s format. His poems are rarely short,
and when they are, the writing is still spread out and complicated,
often undermining the simplicity of design. "Den Svåra
Resan" for example, was printed in the Bonniers edition divided
into five stanzas, but it is more likely that Fahlström intended
it to be in an extended horizontal shape, like a sheet of music.
This lack of visual rigor is in opposition to the highly "engineered"
poems by the Noigandres group, and is the ultimate evidence of Fahlström’s
personal take on concretism: "concrete" as the organic
component in language, which confers a web of significations onto
a word.
The impact of this particular concept of "concrete" theory,
the one was first formulated by Pierre Schaffer and later embraced
and expanded by Öyvind Fahlström, in present-day culture
is signaled by events as distant in the cultural spectrum as, on
the one hand, rap music‘s "sampling" techniques and,
on the other, scientific experiments in "cloning." These
two examples point to the intrinsic problem in "concretism,"
namely the outward cultural impulse and its inward organic counterpart.
Never one to underestimate the power of popular culture, Fahlström,
whose 1967 film "U-Barn" already pondered the effects
of chemically synthesized drugs on the development of language skills
in children, would certainly have a word or two to say on these
subjects.
© 1997 A.S. Bessa
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Notes on the Text
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[1] Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, A Critical History (London:
Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1985), 181.
[2] “Plano Piloto,” literally “Pilot Plan,”
was the title of Niemeier and Costa’s proposal for Brasilia.
Their design has an airplane shape with the administrative section
spread through the “body” of the airplane, whereas the
residential areas are located in the two “wings.”
[3] João Cabral de Melo Neto-- composition’s engineer
and psychologist, plus anti-ode: direct language, economy, and functional
architecture of verse.
[4] Aracy Amaral, Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte (1950-1962).
(Rio de Janeiro: MEC - FUNARTE, 1977), 76-77.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, 78-79.
[7] Getúlio Vargas (1883-1954), four times Brazilian president,
first came to power in1930 as the “chief of the provisory government.”
In 1934 he was “constitutionally elected” by the Congress
to remain in power until 1937. From 1937 to 1945 he ruled as dictator,
and was finally elected by overwhelming majority in a democratic
election in 1950. In 1954, while still in office, he commited suicide.
[8] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York, The Noonday Press,
1993), 75-76.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Mark Wigley, The Architecture od Deconstruction, Derrida’s
Haunt (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1993), 202-204.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Öyvind Fahlström, Öyvind Fahlström (New
York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1982), 26-29.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Öyvind Fahlström, Fahlström (Milan, Multhipla
Edizioni,
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