bpNichol

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by way of introduction let me simply say that this... is best described by the term dom sylvester houedard coined BORDERBLUR       everything presented here comes from that point where language &/or the image blur together into the inbetween & become concrete objects to be understood as such.

— bpNichol, "some afterwords" for the Canadian Conrete poetry anthology

he edited, the cosmic chef: an evening of concrete  (1970).

 

What is concrete poetry?

 

Concrete poetry, as its name implies, is a poetry of the material.

 

The fundamental requirement of concretism is to focus on the physical material from which the poem or text is made. Emotions or ideas are not the physical materials of poetry; the fundamental material of poetry is language itself.

 

In concrete poetry, poets reduce language/words to their elemental parts: letters (to see) and syllables (to hear). The degree of this reduction varies from poet to poet and from poem to poem. In some cases, non-linguistic material is used in place of language, and these materials function in a manner related to the semantic character of words.

 

The concrete poet is concerned with making an object that will be perceived rather than read. There are three different types of concrete poetry: visual, sound, and kinetic (moving in a visual succession).The visual poem is intended to be seen like a painting; the sound poem is composed to be listened to like music. Concrete poets are united in their efforts to make objects or compositions of sounds from physical materials; however they are disunited on the question of semantics: some insist that poetry remain within the communicative realm of sematics, others argue that poetry is capable of transmitting purely aesthetic information.

 

But what all concrete poets have in common is the belief that the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to convey and communicate advanced thought in modern times. Concrete poetry aims to relieve the poem of centuries of expectation and the burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion and emotional content; in this way, poetry becomes an object in and of itself. This notion challenges "the reader" to perceive the poem as an object and participate in the poet's act of creating it, for the concrete poem communicates first and foremost its structure; so much so that the concretist asks his "reader" to stand on his head if necessary to read it.

 

The poet becomes united with his poem in a way that has not been since the troubadors. For now the poem is closer than ever to the poet's pure imagination; as bpNichol said: "these are acts of giving. the poet allowing you into the flow of his mind, into the creation of poetry. accept them in the spirit they are given and so much could be learned." [1]

 

That is where concrete poetry is at—making things conform to the human imagination.

 

Concrete poetry as an international movement

 

Concrete poetry as a movement has its origins in visual poetry, a poetic form with a history that arguably stretches back to at least 1700 B.C.E., and truly came of age with the work of French surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, his Dadaist contemporary, Tristan Tzara, and the Italian Futurist, F.T. Marinetti. It wasn't until the 1950s that the Concrete poetry movement achieved international status and recognition. Concrete poetry was simultaneously developed in three places: Sweden, Switzerland, and Brazil.

 

There are three major anthologies that reflect this period: Emmett William's An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), Stephen Bann's Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967), and Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). bpNichol was included in three influential international anthologies even before he became well known in Canada: Hansjörg Mayer, ed., concrete poetry great britain canada united states (Stuttgart: Bath Academy of Art, 1966); and in both Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams' anthologies.

 

Despite concrete poetry's obvious flirtations with both language and visual art, it has largely been ignored by the mainstreams of the literary and visual arts. It rests in an awkward place between disciplines, and has been regarded as “little more than the bastard child of a brief and embarrassingly unfortunate transdisciplinary fling.” This was not always so and visual artists in the early 1960s and 1970s made attempts to embrace the visual things that literary artists were doing (for example, the Fluxist artists were quite interested in concrete poetry as a form of intermedia--a concept similar to bpNichol's BORDERBLUR); however this window of cross-disciplinary opportunity narrowed. Visual poetry would become marginalized as a sub-culture within the literary world, and has been almost completely ignored by Art History.

 

Sound poetry on the other hand has been seen as the "poor cousin" of visual poetry. Most of the attention during the 1960s was on visual poetry, which was easier to reproduce and publish. Yet it was recognized that the same principles that were applied to visual concrete poems could be applied to sound. There was also an aural precedent in the work of the Dada sound poets, such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters from the 1910s-1920s (click here to listen to exmaples of sound poems by Hausmann and Schwitters). There are also earlier instances of sound poetry, especially in the zaum experiments of the Russian Furturists like Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, and the Italian Furturist, F.T. Marinetti.

 

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging together literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values. By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance either live or through a recording. Sound poetry places a fundamental insistence on the aural quality of poetry which opens up a number of options for the poet, including: recognizable words, chant, repetition, or multi-voice counterpoint to extend, emphasize, distort, or obliterate meaning; sub- or pre-verbal vocal sounds; performances that are rehearsed or improvized; the use of a microphone/tape-recorder or the use of the unaided human voice.

 

It wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that sound poetry began to develop and garner attention in North America. Concrete poets in Canada and the United States have tended to pursue a non-specialist line, and have integrated sound poetry into their more conventional concerns in a horizontal fashion. In Canada, sound poetry began with the Montreal Automatiste Claude Gavreau in the 1950s; anglophone sound poetry didn't surface until the 1960s in the work of bill bissett and bpNichol. bpNichol was also a part of the first sound poetry groups in existence, The Four Horsemen.

 

As a unified and coherent movement, concrete poetry was short-lived. What is considered to be "classical" concrete poetry originated sometime between 1955 and 1970. After this period, many concrete poets, like bpNichol, developed their own personal styles in directions that were suggested or opened up by their work in concrete poetry. There were some poets who adamant adherents to the "classical" style; however bpNichol took a more post-concrete point of view and commented that

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] bpNichol. "An Introduction" to Earle Birney's Phomes, Jukollages + Other Stunzas, 1969.

 

[2] bpNichol quoted in Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol. ed. Roy Miki. p 30.