Visual Text: concrete poetry, hyperfiction and the future of the narrative form

In 1953, the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer published a collection of his works, each only one word in length. He referred to them as constellations and insisted that it was the positioning of the word on the page that was of more importance than the meaning of the word itself. In that same year, in Sweden, Oyvind Fahlstrom wrote a Concrete Poetry Manifesto, however he apparently had no knowledge of Gomringer's work. Simultaneously and similarly oblivious to the new style emerging in Europe, a group of Brazilian poets, the Noigrandres, were experimenting with poetry as a visual medium, using the object form of the ideogram and would later name this style Poesia Concreta. It was a time of great coincidence , given the contemporaneous experiments with structure and form in the fields of music and painting, and the recurring use of the word 'concrete'. More than that, however, it signalled a global desire to progress beyond traditional linear representation and start manipulating the very substances out of which art is made. This timely and apparently universal need for the new form may well have inspired such endeavours, yet the concept at the heart of it all, the word as visual image, was far from new. In the early 20 th century, Guillaume Apollinaire constructed complex visual collages from letters, words and phrases in Calligrammes, exploring spatial relationships and offering multiple non-linear readings of the text. Similarly at that time, the Futurists, Dadaists and Cubists emphasised semiotics and materiality. Earlier still, the optical poems of the Baroque period made visual forms, such as a labyrinth, from lines of text. [image 1] An example from 1637 presents an early form of interactive writing. A wedding poem, whose lines take the form of a drinking goblet requires the reader to turn either the paper or their head around in order to follow the text, the resultant dizzy feeling recalling the sensation of having drunk a goblet of wine. In concrete poetry, however, rather than the visual element being illustrative or incidental, the physicality of language instructs and indeed constitutes the structural form. Linearity was rejected in favour of just about anything else. Poets would actively communicate the space between words and letters, manipulate typography, and introduce design elements borrowed from popular culture. Concrete poetry by necessity involves a reduction of language. Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials here and so it …