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Experimental Visual Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. K. David Jackson et al., eds. Amsterdam/Atlanta. Rodopi.1996. 442 pages, ill. 55 fl./$34. ISBN 90-5183-9596 (941-3 paper).
Based on the 1995 Yale "synphosophia," a three-day critical-performative symposium which brought together poets, artists, and theorists from North America (Charles Bernstein, Jackson Mac Low, Steve McCaffery, Marjorie Perloff, Wladimir Krysinski), Brazil (Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos), Cuba (Severo Sarduy), Portugal (Ana Hatherly, E. M. de Melo e Castro), Germany (Elisabeth Walther-Bense), Sweden (Susanne Jorn, Amelie Bjorck), Italy (Enzo Minarelli, Lambert Pignotti, William Anselmi), England (Mary Ellen Solt), and so on, Experimental Visual Concrete reviews half a century of international experimental poetry. The editors themselves bring different theoretical and artistic perspectives to bear on the subject: those of the European avant-garde (Eric Vos), of American poetic/visual experiments (Johanna Drucker), and of the Brazilian concretist movement (K. David Jackson).
While the title narrows in on visual and concrete poetry, defined by Johanna Drucker as "all manner of shaped, typographically complex, visually self-conscious poetic works," the discussions bring up also examples of "postpolygraphic" innovative poetry developed in the 1960s and 1970s: "action poetrY," "sound poetry," "holopoetry," language and video images. Common to them all is an effort to reconfigure the material and conceptual reality of poetry, "confronting the verbal with the non-verbal, the symbol with the icon, time with space, alphabetic writing with the ideogram, the dressing with words of ideas and feelings with the nakedness of the stuff language is made of" (E. M. de Melo e Castro). As several contributors insist, experimental poetry is a "poetic conception," not a formal device (E. M. de Melo e Castro), "a model, not an image or a metaphor" (Eric Vos) but a model which "has no [single] essence, [being] structurally defined by its difference from the safe, the predictable, and the orderly" (Harry Polkinhorn). Eclectic in its manifestations and roots (its most often mentioned sources are Mallarme, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, Dada, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, Chinese ideograms, and cubist painting), "verbivocovisual" poetry...