Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950-2010 9781474474627

Citation preview

Material Poetics in Hemispheric America

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For MTS

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America Words and Objects 1950–2010

Rebecca Kosick

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Rebecca Kosick, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 7460 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7462 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 7463 4 (epub) The right of Rebecca Kosick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: How Poetry Matters

vi viii 1

1. The Autonomous Object of Concrete Poetry

28

2. Sensation, Relation and Neoconcrete Poetics

62

3. Assembling La nueva novela: Juan Luis Martínez and a Material Poetics of Relation

100

4. Concrete USA: Building Ronald Johnson’s ARK

136

5. Lyrical Matters and Posthuman Poetics in Anne Carson’s Nox

171

Coda: The Subject of the Material Poem

201

Bibliography Index

206 217

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Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

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Décio Pignatari, ‘LIFE’ Guillaume Apollinaire, from ‘Paysage’ Décio Pignatari, ‘terra’ Haroldo de Campos, from ‘o âmago do ômega’ Haroldo de Campos, ‘nasce morre’ Ferreira Gullar, O Formigueiro Ferreira Gullar, O Formigueiro Ferreira Gullar, diagram of ‘Livro-poema no 3’ Hélio Oiticica, B50 Bólide Saco 2 ‘Olfático’ Hélio Oiticica, from Poética secreta Hélio Oiticica, B30 Bólide-caixa 17 variação do B1, caixa-poema 1: do meu sangue/do meu suor/este amor viverá Lygia Pape, Livro-poema Lygia Pape, from Livro da criação Lygia Pape, Poemas visuais: Língua apunhalada Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 48 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, unpaginated preface Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 75 (detail) Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 26 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, cover Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 80 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 82 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 139

35 41 43 45 50 73 73 75 81 83

84 89 92 94 102 107 108 111 114 117 117 119

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Figures

3.9 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 93 3.10 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 75 3.11 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 18 3.12 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 61 3.13 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 99 4.1 Charles Olson, from ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, The Maximus Poems, 150 4.2 Charles Olson, from The Maximus Poems, 498–9 4.3 Charles Olson, from ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, The Maximus Poems, 156 4.4 Ronald Johnson, from ‘Io and the Ox-Eye-Daisy’ 4.5 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 17–18 4.6 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 68 4.7 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 49 5.1 Gaius Valerius Catullus, ‘CI’ in Anne Carson, Nox, unpaginated 5.2 Anne Carson, translation of Catullus 101, Nox, unpaginated 5.3 Anne Carson, definition for ‘mortis’, Nox, unpaginated 5.4 Anne Carson, illegible translation of Catullus 101, Nox, unpaginated 5.5 Anne Carson, ‘prowling the meanings . . .’, Nox, unpaginated 5.6 Anne Carson, ‘if I wanted to fill . . .’, Nox, unpaginated 5.7 Anne Carson, ‘my brother’s widow says . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

vii

122 127 128 130 131 141 142 143 151 159 161 164 179 180 183 185 191 192 195

Colour Plates 1 2 3

4

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Augusto de Campos, ‘dias dias dias’ Ferreira Gullar, reconstruction of ‘Noite’ Hélio Oiticica, B33 Bólide-caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo, caixa-poema 2: aqui está/e aqui ficará./ Contemplai/seu silêncio heróico Anne Carson, ‘if you are writing an elegy . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this book was generously supported by friends, colleagues, strangers, organisations and funding bodies to whom I owe my thanks. At Cornell University, I am grateful for a Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant and for a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities that helped shape this project as it was coming together. I am also grateful for the ongoing support and guidance of Pedro Erber, Bruno Bosteels and Jonathan Culler. In addition, I thank the Art Institute of Chicago and the Daniel Clarke Johnson Memorial Scholarship which provided me with the opportunity to research relational poetics with Jemima Wyman and Anna Mayer at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. At the University of Bristol, the completion of this book was aided by the Arts Faculty Research Fund, by a University Research Fellowship and by a range of other practical and collegial supports. The final revisions of this book also benefited from a Visiting Fellowship at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies. I am grateful for the support of my wonderful editors at Edinburgh University Press, Michelle Houston and Ersev Ersoy. Some materials contained here first appeared in other publications. An earlier version of Chapter 3 first appeared as a stand-alone article in the Latin American Research Review 52, no. 5 (2017): 854–73. A portion of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘On the Matter of the Concept: Ferreira Gullar’s Relational Poetics’, Luso-Brazilian Review 54, no. 2 (2017): 108–28, © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press, this article has been significantly revised and expanded upon here. I am grateful to both publications for their early support of this project, and to the anonymous peer reviewers all along the way for their generosity, time and advice. Conversations with numerous interlocutors helped make this book possible, and better. I am thankful for the chance to participate in the ACLA seminar ‘Concretism: A Global Dialogue’ organised

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Acknowledgements

ix

by Odile Cisneros and Patrick Greaney, and for the discussions that took place over those three days, and since. I am grateful to Isabel Gómez, Vinícius Carneiro, Bécquer Seguín, Keiji Kunigami and Janet Hendrickson for pushing and sharpening my thinking here and elsewhere. Thanks to Bronaċ Ferran and Greg Thomas for their encouragement and feedback on this project and for the energy they bring to concrete and post-concrete studies in the UK. I am grateful to my colleagues Laura Jansen and Genevieve Liveley for their feedback and for our discussions of Anne Carson’s work and its relationship to antiquity. Thanks to William Wootten, Madhu Krishnan, Craig Savage, Rhiannon Daniels and colleagues at the Bristol Poetry Institute and Centre for Material Texts for their dedication to poetry and interdisciplinary enquiry. Thanks, also, to Carol O’Sullivan for her guidance of this and other endeavours since I arrived at Bristol. I want to express my deep gratitude to the various poets whose work is addressed here, as well as to their families, executors, archives and foundations, including Augusto de Campos, Anne Carson, Ivan P. de Arruda Campos, Diniz Pignatari, Alita Martínez, Ariane Figueiredo, César Oiticica, as well as the families of Ferreira Gullar and Lygia Pape. Thanks also to Peter O’Leary and Special Collections at the University of Connecticut Library. Thanks, especially, to my family.

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Introduction

How Poetry Matters

In the mid-1960s, a one-word poem – ‘lighght’ – by US poet Aram Saroyan became something of a lighghting rod in Congress. As Ian Daly describes: A year after ‘lighght’ appeared in The Chicago Review, George Plimpton decided to include it in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, which he was editing for the National Endowment for the Arts, then barely five years old. Under the NEA’s newly established Literature Program, every author featured in the anthology received a cash award. Plimpton picked Saroyan’s ‘lighght’, so the NEA cut him a check for $750 – the same as all the other authors in the anthology.1

As Plimpton explains in his introduction to a 1981 essay Saroyan penned, ‘when the poem appeared in American Literary Anthology II’, Iowa Republican William Scherle ‘took a surprised and pleased look at this single word settled into the middle of a page and he had a field day with it’.2 As Saroyan recounts, the representative ‘brought the poem up on the floor of Congress in 1970 and denounced it as a misuse of public money at the rate of $107 per letter’. After this, the press, the public and eventually Ronald Reagan got wind of the poem, and as Plimpton describes ‘Reagan now [in 1981] produces the Saroyan poem – in what is close to a knee-jerk response – in answer to questions about the need for dismembering the National Endowment’.3 In Reagan’s hands, Saroyan writes, the poem was in fact used to justify ‘slashes involving millions upon millions of dollars’ to the NEA.4 The extended political turmoil set off by this poem and its volatile reception is somewhat surprising given the relative lack of prominence of this kind of poetry in the United States. Poems like Saroyan’s belong to a related set of poetic types, sometimes grouped as visual, minimal, pattern, concrete – or, in this book, ‘material’ – poetry. Such poems have been accused of politically vacant formalist play and have been

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characterised as marginal to the mainstream of late twentieth-century US poetry. That context is admittedly vast and encompasses a range of poetic practices, but at the end of the twentieth century it was possible to identify a mainstream preference for confessional lyrics that, as Bob Perelman has written, tended to be ‘short, narrative’, and to ‘focus on small or large moments of crisis or optimism’.5 Saroyan’s poem is certainly short, but it’s hard to align it with the other features Perelman identifies. In fact, a narrative recounting of events external to the poem is counter to much of what matters for the poetry addressed in this study. But the set of poetic preferences Perelman describes is also relatively unique to the United States. From that vantage point, Dick Higgins could characterise the history of pattern poetry as one constantly beset by antagonisms, arguing that ‘the history of any poetry is always to some extent the history of responses to it’.6 Hemispherically speaking, though, concrete poetry and allied practices represent a strong – even, in some places, dominant – tradition of American poetry. In the modern and contemporary period, this tradition can be traced to the São Paulo-based Noigandres group who wrote poetry and extensively theorised its object and material nature beginning in the 1950s. I will argue that practices in a more broadly construed material poetics are legible in North America as well throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but it was in the 1960s that the United States first saw the arrival of Brazilian-inspired concrete poetry being practised by poets like Saroyan, Mary Ellen Solt, N. H. Pritchard, Emmett Williams and Ronald Johnson, among others. As Christian Moraru points out, this historical moment may have proved poor soil for a thriving US practice in material poetics. He writes that, in a time of change, when poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s were taking up narrative form, everyday vocabulary and straightforward expression to set forth a clearer moral and political meaning, Concrete techniques were probably perceived primarily as artifice indulging the same – already ‘old’ – formalist self-sufficiency and obscurity of modernism.7

Concrete and similar poetries’ political potential as Moraru notes, ‘was downplayed if not utterly ignored by Allen Ginsberg and his generation’.8 Yet as Daly writes, playful experimentation with concrete and allied techniques was alive and well in the era, when many poets tried out the practice that was ‘as much about the arrangement of words as about what they say’.9 Daly describes how these poets were

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‘influenced by the Dadaists and the poet Robert Creeley’10 in addition to the Latin American poets addressed in this study. Influences can also be traced to other historical avant-gardes and to the typographic experiments of Stéphane Mallarmé. In spite of this genealogy, though, Johanna Drucker has argued that concrete poetry ‘was less integrated into the mainstream of literature’ than the symbolist poet and that ‘concrete poetry, and its sibling, sound poetry, [became] specialized domains of literary activity, ghettoized by their distinguishing characteristics and encountering significant prejudice on that account’.11 According to Drucker, concrete poetry is ‘the “other” of post-war writing, treated as a curiosity and novelty’.12 This is not quite the story concrete poet and anthologist Mary Ellen Solt tells. Instead of ghettoised, she understands concrete techniques as distributed throughout US poetry of the post-war period, albeit without a rigid coherence. For example, in her anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View, Solt argues that along with poets more overtly interested in the form, Creeley can be can be seen as drawing on techniques that share a concern for the ‘visual succession’ of the poem.13 A kindred relationship with concrete poetry can also be identified, according to Solt, in the projective verse of Charles Olson, and in the work of Louis Zukofsky, which ‘concentrates upon the musical value of the syllable as the repository of sight, sound and intellection’ and ‘presents a preoccupation with language as material’.14 She makes a similar argument about William Carlos Williams as well, who insisted, she writes, ‘that a poem is made of words not of ideas; that it is a construction of language – a made object – a thing in its own right’.15 These kinds of features are identifiable in certain corners of later twentieth-century US poetry as well. As Alan Golding points out, ‘one well-known feature of the writing produced by poets associated with the Language school is the redirection of readerly attention to the materiality of the word’.16 Bill Brown addresses this as well, describing how ‘the Language poets in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada’ prioritised ‘the materiality of language – the thing-character of language – by retarding or congesting or displacing language (what we understand as the communicative function of language) with work made from fragments, syllables, letters, &c’.17 Though Solt’s anthology was released several years prior to the early rumblings of the Language school, it already identified a large range of concrete-adjacent characteristics in US poetry. She writes that ‘the impetus towards concretization has been strong in American poetry since Whitman began to make his long catalogues to name the objects in his New World, leaving the rose for Gertrude Stein’.18 But

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in a strange way, her own assessment that ‘we were too close to concrete poetry to require a “movement”’ may also have limited the visibility of material poetics in the United States.19 She writes that ‘with very little effort one can find concrete poems written by distinguished American poets simply included in their collections without its having occurred to anyone to attach a new label’.20 This lack of labelling, which Solt too shies away from, may have contributed to an enduring impression that such practices in the US context were momentary deviations from an otherwise lyrical norm. Saroyan did not initially attach the label of concrete, but as he recounts, ‘lighght’ was a product of its context in the 1960s United States. He writes that, as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, we found ourselves polarized into a genuine counterculture. We dropped out, grew our hair long and lived communally. We smoked marijuana and experimented with LSD. We created ‘Beatlemania’. All this, for better or for worse, or more than likely, for both, was in full swing the evening I wrote the poem.21

Saroyan ties this context in with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of ‘the electric-television era of communication [which] has three fundamental characteristics: (1) It is instant. (2) It is simultaneous. (3) It is multiple.’22 These features, Saroyan writes, are also features of his poem, one that can be read ‘instantaneously’ like a photograph and one that, ‘having a double gh creates a structure both multiple and simultaneous’.23 As this book will demonstrate, these features can be seen in other practices in material poetics, notably the concrete poetry of 1950s Brazil. But, tracing the development of related practices through the Americas and into the twenty-first century, I argue for an elastic understanding of material poetry that, in addition to Saroyan’s framework, can just as easily construct itself as enduring, asynchronous and singular. Examining key American examples of poetry that aspire to be material objects, I demonstrate that poetics of this kind can thrive in quite distinct political and historical circumstances, including in the lead up to, and under, dictatorships in Brazil and Chile and amid the development of the transnational digital age. Specifically as poetry (material and otherwise) moved into the digital age, scholars began to address the ways it either intersected with or intentionally anachronised advances in digital technology. As discussed in further detail in Chapter 5, Liedeke Plate describes a commonly held view that Anne Carson’s facsimile scrapbook from 2010, Nox, is one among ‘such works [that] present a reflection on the book and on the

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act of reading in the digital age’.24 Alternately, the troubled US movement in conceptual writing, which links its origins to the emergence of the internet, has suggested that conceptual writing and concrete poetry can be understood in their resistance to reading.25 Conceptual writing positioned itself as a digital age answer to concrete poetry, which it understood as a ‘dead end’26 in need of ‘an appropriate environment in which it could flourish’.27 While it’s true that the Brazilian concrete poets were early adopters of computer poetry, the suggestion that the form was not able to fully come into its own prior to the saturation of the digital environment is misguided. The fact is that concrete poetry was already flourishing, in Brazil and globally, prior to this moment. Though the United States may have underappreciated concrete poetry during its heyday, the Brazilian group in particular can be understood as ahead of the United States in many regards. As this book addresses, current concerns of poetry and literary studies – related to so-called ‘new’ materialisms and what Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and others have called ‘the material turn in comparative literature’28 – can be informed by meeting concrete poetry on its own terms and learning from the considerable body of related writing produced in Latin America more than half a century ago. Digital questions may be motivating the rise in scholarly interest in the material aspects of literature and poetry, but my study points towards a longer arc of material poetry that shows itself to be responsive to a number of distinct geographic temporalities and socio-cultural contexts. In Brazil, which came under dictatorship in 1964, Eduardo Ledesma describes how ‘the concrete poets’ position shifted over time toward a stance increasingly critical of the state’, and argues that ‘the radical shift in notions of poetry, reading, and viewing brought about by the concretists was linked to other emancipatory changes that took place within Latin American society as it was swept by anti-imperialist fever’.29 This is a different account of material poetry’s interaction with state-level politics than Saroyan’s, and it helps to reveal how such a poetic approach can be at once (ex) portable30 and in dialogue with uniquely national and local concerns. Material poetics can capably respond to and reflect specific contextual circumstances, though at the same time as it can be said to occupy a portable form of international vanguardism. Addressing this feature of concrete poetry specifically, Jacques Derrida writes that such a form is ‘at once on the side of the universal and nonetheless on the side of the most irreducible uniqueness of the idiom’.31 This is because even if the approach could be taken up, as it has been, by any number of languages and contexts, what happens inside poetry

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of this sort is also particular to its exact language, its exact words, its exact letters. To this end, this book takes for granted that concrete and other material poetics constitute a varied, but prominently enduring part of the landscape of hemispheric American poetry. It examines five case studies from two continents, and in three languages, as a way of teasing out an ‘irreducible uniqueness’ that unites poetic play across this transnational landscape. Only recently has US scholarship of ‘American’ literature begun to recognise American traditions outside the borders of the United States. This has been a welcome shift, and one important to this book. My study doesn’t take Latin American poetic practice to be a supplement to the North American practice, but it works to show how Latin America helped shape what we can understand – in the broadest sense – as American poetry. This book is thus part of a series of recent investigations in which scholars of American literature and poetry have begun to invoke a more hemispheric orientation. Harris Feinsod, for example, writes about ‘the idea of a poetry of the Americas’ that ‘motivated a great many poems and poets of both the United States and Latin America, cohering resiliently across the twentieth century, despite how frequently efforts toward a robust cultural hemispherism were scuttled by patterns of US intervention and imperial expansion’.32 What my book addresses is not so much an idea as a set of material investments grounded in Latin American poetic traditions that show themselves to be adaptable across a range of American contexts that have not always been discussed in relation to one another. These material investments pose challenges to how American poetry is understood. Against the dominance of the lyric (which I address in further detail in Chapter 5), this book claims that by turning towards a hemispheric orientation, American poetry shows itself to be much more materially experimental than it is usually given credit for. While material poems may be considered brief experimental irruptions within US poetry of the twentieth century, my investigation argues that, by reframing American poetry through a transnational, continent-spanning lens, it’s possible to see a prominent emphasis on poetic materiality – one that radiates northwards from its roots in Latin America.

The Matter of Poetry An important component of this study is thus to centre the matter of poetry within the discourse of American poetics. Though materially

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experimental poetry has been granted a marginal status within US letters, this is not the case in other American locales. Chilean poetry, for example, has a strong tradition of combining word and image. Vicente Huidobro’s painted poems are an early twentieth-century example, and today artist/poets like Cecilia Vicuña are continuing the tradition. In Brazil, concrete poetry became canonical and led to a number of related subsequent developments. Neoconcrete poetry, discussed here, is one example, and the poema/processo movement, with which poets/artists including Wlademir Dias-Pino and Paulo Bruscky were affiliated, is another example of the poetic-plastic confluence that is a hallmark of the twentieth-century Brazilian cultural landscape. Within Latin American studies, there have been a number of investigations into the relationship between such examples of materially experimental poetry and literature broadly construed. Adam Shellhorse writes about concrete poetry and the ‘need to create a new typology of the text and methodology of reading as a verbal, vocal, and visual complex of perception that structurally dialogues with other media and marginalized social groups’.33 Shellhorse uses the framework of ‘anti-literature’ to motivate such revisions of text and reading, drawing on concrete poetry and related forms in Latin American literature. I share Shellhorse’s transnational frame, as well as his investment in re-examining both the nature of the literary (or here, poetic) text, and the manner with which it is, or can be, perceived. Anti-literary gestures can be identified in the works discussed here, but my aim is to place these works squarely in the centre of poetry, enabling their mutations of (primarily US) lyrical presumptions to shift our understanding of what counts as American poetry, and how it matters. Here, I argue that poetic language is matter and explore the theoretical and practical consequences of apprehending the poem, primarily, as a material object. I call the examples considered in this book ‘material poetries’ and the theories that undergird them ‘material poetics’. I am not the first to use this terminology. Kristen Kreider writes that a material poetics involves both ‘accounting for the material aspects of language’ and ‘the reciprocal embodied acts that perform a verbal message’.34 Caren Florance, Philip Gross, Sarah Rice and Melinda Smith indicate that ‘material poetics describes the intersection of poetic expression with the use of material media’.35 Nathan Brown refers to a materialist poetics in which ‘poetry, as making is a practice of material construction’.36 While the uses vary, all of these ways of understanding material poetics, as well as my own, recognise the interlocking nature of the verbal and the material for poetry. I

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am drawn to this term for its ability to gather a disparate set of practices under its umbrella, though in this book I focus on five particular models: autonomous, relational, assembled, architectural, and posthuman. All take shape in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with examples drawn from Brazil, Chile, the United States and Canada. Recent studies of literary objects and materiality include within their ambit the ways literature registers the extra-literary material world in language. Bill Brown, for example, writes of poems that ‘begin with things and with the senses by which we apprehend them’.37 But unlike the poems Brown describes that are about things, objects or matter, the poems addressed in this study insist on their being matter, on par with other kinds of material objects. Sometimes this takes the form of drawing attention to the material texture of language itself – the ways it looks or sounds, or the ways it imprints on the page. In other instances, poetry takes on the characteristics that are more frequently considered to be those of objects of plastic or visual art, in that the poem becomes a three-dimensional structure that breaks with the page and the book entirely. Or, the book comes to be a physical holding place for extra-poetic objects and materials that, along with language, assemble the poem. Still other examples include books of poetry that are both about sensation and are themselves sensible objects, or books that address, in subject and object matter, the material substance of lyrical endurance. Among other poems discussed there, Décio Pignatari’s ‘LIFE’ is illustrative of concrete poetry’s interest in forefronting the material aspects of language, sometimes more than its meaningful or referential capabilities. Each of the poem’s capitalised, sans serif letters represents an individual frame or page of the poem. The first page shows the single stroke of the ‘I’, and additional lines are added with each page that follows. On the second page, a line extends from the bottom of the ‘I’ to make an ‘L’ and the poem continues in this manner, forming each of the word’s letters until they collapse into a tall, rectangular shape with a line horizontally crossing its middle. This shape contains all the individual strokes of the word’s letters. Finally, these letters separate back out into the word ‘LIFE’. The poem emphasises its real material construction as visual marks on the page, and resists many of the most basic premises of reading. It does this by writing its letters out of order and including a non-semantic shape on equal footing with the symbols that, elsewhere, would contribute to the production of meaning. Its extremely limited word count also suggests that unlike lyrical musings on life, this poem offers no such

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meditation. It seeks not to be a poetry about objects, but ‘an object in and of itself’.38 Poetry which, like Pignatari’s, makes use of the material elements of text has broadly been called ‘concrete’. Though I do use the term here, it is with a narrower remit. I prefer the broad terms of ‘material poetry’ and ‘material poetics’ because they offer the benefits of breadth and an emphasis on matter. ‘Concrete poetry’ in Brazil, which the first chapter of this book considers, referred to very specific set of strategies. The term was not then, as it often is now, a catch-all that widely encapsulated poetry’s move from the textual to the visual – although, that was part of it. My use of ‘material poetry’ thus also works to uphold the specificity of the term ‘concrete’, which has suffered from dilution at best, and dismissal at worst, in the years since its introduction in Brazil. Liz Kotz, for example, has written that ‘a reliance on rather quaint illustrational or pictorial modes – as in poems that take the shape of their subjects – left much concrete poetry out of touch with changing paradigms in the visual arts and the wider conditions of language in modernity’.39 This perspective encapsulates a general impression – especially in the United States – of the form as simplistic or even silly. My claim throughout this book is that concrete poetry was neither and that, as a philosophy of language that is also a philosophy of objects, concrete poetry is relevant to the precise paradigm shift the humanities are currently undergoing as they navigate between the discursive and material turns. In recent years, other scholars of Latin American literature have made productive use of the broader possibilities of the term ‘concrete’. Rachel Price, for example, explores what she deems ‘concretude’ in her book, The Object of the Atlantic. There, concretude includes an emphasis on the materiality of language, but also encompasses commodities, products and the everyday remnants of material culture, among other things. I have chosen here to hew more closely to the Brazilian concrete poets’ narrower definition of the concrete by emphasising the materiality and object-being of language. I have intentionally bracketed from this definition those objects (commercial, natural or otherwise) that language depicts. This is in solidarity with concrete poetry’s attempt to grant language a kind of representational autonomy that places it beside other such objects, as one among many. I also use the term concrete in Chapter 4, when discussing Ronald Johnson’s ARK, because Johnson was involved with the international practice of concrete poetry that grew out of conversations between the Brazilian concretists and like-minded poets such as Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland and Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland (among others).

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Johnson considered himself to be a concrete poet and describes ARK as an ‘epic’ concrete poem that ‘took it way beyond’40 concrete poetry. With this in mind, I’m interested in exploring the ways his long poem can be called concrete despite breaking with many of the tenets of the original movement and embracing the modernist and postmodernist invocation of the epic. That twentieth-century epic tradition would include works by Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, among others. While the term ‘concrete poetry’ does expand in this chapter, it is with the intention of exploring the specific changes to the form introduced by Johnson in the years that followed the Brazilian concretists’ launch. Overall, though, I gather ARK and all the other examples in this book as ‘material’. I find ‘material poetry’ effective, also, as an alternative to the term ‘visual poetry’ (also known as Vispo), whose name emphasises visual material over other kinds of poetic materiality. While this term has come to signify a broad range of practices that certainly would include much of the poetry examined here, my study intends to prioritise more than the visual aspects of poetry and its apprehension. In Chapter 1, for example, I discuss the relationship between visual and sonic material, as well as the relationship between text and performance-based poetry within a broader consideration of Augusto de Campos’s musical collaborations with Tropicália-associated artist Caetano Veloso and the poet’s son, Cid Campos. My discussion of neoconcrete poetry considers the relational give and take between poetic object and participating subject when that same subject is both physically immersed in the poem and contributing to its very constitution. The books of Anne Carson and Juan Luis Martínez discussed here – Nox and La nueva novela – both forefront tactile engagement as one sensory process among others that can reinform our understanding of what the body does when it reads. And Johnson’s ARK, while a typical bound book in many senses, is also a synesthetic re-elaboration of the Brazilian concretists’ ‘verbivocovisual’ notion of poetry’s tripartite materiality. Choosing ‘material’ enables a stress on the diverse matters and the materiality of these poetries and also marks their distinction from various iterations of conceptualism. Chapter 2, on neoconcrete poetics, in part takes up the question of whether these practices can be categorised as conceptual art or material poetry. While they can in fact be considered both, the interdisciplinary neoconcrete movement has been largely discussed within the context of art history, and in part received under the framework of ‘global conceptualism’.41 My argument throughout this book is that the material

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matters, and considering how these works can be received within the framework of poetry helps to demonstrate how. Even when conceptually informed, works discussed in this investigation show that poetic matter is never a mere conduit on the way to conceptual, representational or meaningful ends. This differs from both the language-infused practices of conceptual art in which ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’42 and from conceptual writing that is ‘not predicated upon knowing a language, as much as it is upon knowing a concept’.43 Here, language is matter and matter is language. Yet, the move towards materiality does not necessarily come at the expense of the concept, or the poem’s ability to ‘mean’. As opposed to certain practices of visual poetry which sought to interrupt signification altogether – such as the post-semiotic poetry translation ‘Sharp Facts’ by Canadian poet bpNichol that runs a poem ‘through a Sharpfax copier until the lexical properties of the poem disappear’44 – the poems addressed here remain open to meaning. In many cases, matter itself is invited to participate in the meaningful outcomes of the poem. In other instances, meaning is poetic material on par with the ways language looks and sounds. In all cases, though, concepts, meanings and represented content do not take precedence over the material modes of their conveyance.

Reading Material Poetry Reading takes on new meaning in the examples this book studies. That said, reading isn’t consistent across these chapters, or even from one example to the next. Part of the claim I make is that these poetries reshape the reading experience. For example, in La nueva novela some of the poetic materials that construct the Juan Luis Martínezassembled poem actually stick out from the page and invite the reader’s touch. While Anne Carson’s Nox is a facsimile that only suggests the tactility of the paint, staples or tape visible in the poem, the book’s non-codexical structure also prominently exposes the book as an object that can only be apprehended, awkwardly, with the hands. Going further, neoconcrete poetry includes full immersion of the ‘reader’, whose body not only partakes of the ‘reading’ process but, at times, constitutes another of the poem’s material components. The works examined in this book reveal and make consequential aspects of reading that might otherwise be overlooked. This, then, is one way in which these poetries can be considered ‘visual’. They

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stop us from overlooking and make the hidden aspects of reading visible. It can be objected that what these poetries do isn’t really new. Reading, of course, always involves physically handling the pages of the book. And the book was always (until recently, it might be said) a material object. These things are true, and though the various poetic manifestos that appear in this book do, at times, make the argument for a whole new way of doing poetry, that’s not entirely the case. What is revolutionary about these forms is their ability to make readers notice anew the ways in which text is material, or the book is material, or the ways in which material objects can signify, or the way material language can enable, block or obscure signification. In large part, what all these examples require is a type of reading in which perception of the poem’s material qualities is at least on par with, sometimes outweighing, interpretation. As such, the type of reading these poetries demand shares an affinity with ‘surface reading’ and ‘new formalisms’ in which poetry ‘insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’.45 In essence, this insistence is the demand of concrete poetry. And the material poetic practices that follow it all, to a certain degree, share this demand. Even Johnson’s ARK, though it maintains a steadfast reliance on metaphor, finds ways of resisting the reader’s easy passage from word to referent. For example, it makes frequent use of the homophonic pun of ‘I’ and ‘eye’, preventing readers from ever really ‘seeing’ through to what either of these words could be said, stably, to mean. In general, all the material poetries I examine here share an affinity for showing themselves as they are. This is sometimes why early concrete poetry, in particular, is dismissed as being too simple or obvious to bother with. Without some deeper meaning to uncover, many readers who were trained in hermeneutic approaches to reading find there’s not much for them to do. Concrete poetry doesn’t just resist the notion that meaning is ‘hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter’.46 In concrete poetry, there’s nowhere for anything to hide in the first place. So few words are used that, when a reader looks at a concrete poem, nearly everything is manifestly there for perception. But, simplicity is not always the outcome of this strategy, which is common to all the poetries discussed in this book. La nueva novela, for example, shows itself to be exactly as it is, but exactly what it is, is a materialisation of an incredibly dense thicket of relations. Nearly every page is dedicated to some other author or borrows materials from some other person or object. The reader can see it all there, but that doesn’t make it anymore easily

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understandable. A similar claim can be made about Carson’s Nox, which works to materialise the poet’s lost brother by assembling the textual and material remnants of his life in book form. All the while, though, the book acknowledges that none of the materials it displays ultimately amounts to a knowable whole. Comparing her own work with that of Herodotus, ‘the first historian’, Carson speaks of ‘history as all these chips of data that don’t make sense. He collects them and hands them over.’47 So does she. An important part of my critical approach is to take poets at their word and try to work out the theoretical consequences of their specific poetic practices for the reception and understanding of poetry as a whole. This aligns with what Heather Love calls ‘the possibility of an alternative ethics, one grounded in documentation and description’.48 I do not wish to treat the poets I write about as hostile witnesses, nor as voices that must always stand for a chorus of extrapoetic testimony. Instead, I choose to believe that what the poets say they are up to is what they are really up to. I realise this information is not always available or reliable, and this is not a manifesto about how we all ought to do (or not do) criticism now. But, in the case of the poets this book considers, especially the Brazilian groups, a great deal of theoretical and poetics-interested writing is available to supplement the poems themselves. I find it productive to read their poetry as a genuine attempt to work out the ideas they describe in their poetics, even when they might seem improbable My hope is that this book will encourage readers to follow these poets and poems towards alternate kinds of reading. This means coming to a material poem ready to perceive whatever the poem is and working against the assumption that, first of all, language means to mean. I also hope that what these poetries contribute to reading as a practice in perception can extend beyond the poems themselves. In this way, I aim to respond to a purported limitation of the reading of material poetry: that the type of reading you do when reading a materially experimental poem can only happen when you’re reading such a poem. This is an idea concrete poet Augusto de Campos hopes to counter when he claims that concrete poetry intends to ‘influence discourse, in the manner in which it can revivify and dynamise its dead cells, impeding the atrophy of a common organism: language’.49 I am sympathetic to the suggestion that these poetries can enable a method of reading capable of extending to other forms, genres and objects. This is the case I make for Ferreira Gullar’s impact on the North American reception of neoconcretism. Though the interdisciplinary movement has mostly been received in the context

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of the visual arts, Gullar has consistently stated that his practice – which has much in common with the practice of artists in the group including Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape – was poetry. His ‘Buried Poem’ stands out in poetry because poems are generally not underground rooms. Poems don’t generally have doors or floors or antechambers or walls or boxes or jasmine or human bodies in them. These material aspects of the ‘Buried Poem’ register for the ‘reader’ precisely because they are not expected from the genre. The ‘Buried Poem’ trains us to perceive these features of the ‘text’ and gives way to newly shaped reading practices that might allow us to assimilate what are sometimes ‘paratextual’ features of a poem into its very core. A similar gesture is made by Martínez’s La nueva novela which unsettles the distinction between text and paratext. As I note in Chapter 3, the image of a fox terrier that appears on the title page and following the colophon on the final page is also a recurring feature within the text (if we can make that distinction) and a key component of a sometimes deliberately nonsensical network of signification that turns negatives into positives and ‘logos’ into ‘Sogol’ (the dog’s name). Recognising the interaction between those features of poetry considered properly poetic and those considered extra-poetic can yield productive possibilities even for lyrical and other non-explicitly material forms of poetry as well. Readers of all poetry can benefit from spending more time with the material features of poetry, rather than overlooking them in favour of a focus on meaning or representation. Beyond this study, we might take as one example New Direction’s The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems.50 That book, which reproduces in facsimile Dickinson’s fragments as they were written on envelopes, represents a gesture kindred to Gullar’s and Martínez’s – one that suggests that the material support or ‘container’ of a poem is also the poem.

That Poetry Matters Focusing on how poetry matters does not discard the question of if, or whether, poetry matters or is ‘alive today’. Readers of any kind of poetry today have no doubt come into contact with the vast archive of articles that ask this question in one form or another. Does poetry matter? Is poetry dead? Is there, as Ben Lerner has proposed, a ‘hatred of poetry’?51 Or alternately, articles which announce that: poetry may not be dead after all. A number of these appeared around

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2016, for example, The Atlantic’s ‘Still, Poetry Will Rise’.52 A reference to Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’, the Atlantic’s headline implies poetry’s power to resist oppression and announces poetry’s own rise from a perceived death into newly vital virality in an age of political turmoil. Like Heather Milne writes, I understand poetry as advancing ‘complex forms of critique not just at the level of content, but also through its form and compositional strategy’.53 This stance is especially useful in light of the poetries considered here, as ‘content’ is often reciprocally linked with form or substance. The question of how poetry can matter, or come alive, in the political sphere is addressed prominently here in the chapter on Brazilian neoconcretism, a movement that is often considered to have come to an abrupt end with the beginning of the country’s military dictatorship in 1964. I argue there that the group’s experiments with subjectobject relations in fact carried over into the dictatorship period and provided essential material possibilities for an expressly political poetics. Politics is important to Chapter 3’s discussion of Martínez’s La nueva novela as well. The book was initially assembled just before the Chilean golpe de estado that established Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1973. It later appeared in its published forms during the dictatorship. Its components include politically suggestive and referential words, images and things. The title for the book’s final section, ‘Epígrafe para un libro condenado: La política’ (Epigraph for a Condemned Book: Politics), is also the title of the Spanish translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Épigraphe pour un livre condamné’ which was planned for the second edition of Les fleurs du mal, after portions of the first were condemned for obscenity. Just prior to a fragile paper Chilean flag which opens this epigraph, there is a copy of Ezra Pound’s letter to the censors during his internment in Pisa. Portraits of Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud appear pasted into a wanted poster. These features point to a link between radical politics and poetics and underscore the difficulty of publishing during the repressive regime. But as this chapter shows, La nueva novela’s political components are just part of a vast and complicated assemblage that cannot be reduced only to political allegory or to its ability to stand in for, or stand up in, the political arena. The question of how poetry matters here thus is and is not just a question of poetic commitment. Asking how poetry matters takes for granted that poetry matters and then asks what poetic matter is and can be. While my primary focus has not been to mark a distinction between living and dead matter, this question is also important to the

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examples this book presents, and one that, for material poetics, is bound up in the matter of poetry. For instance, Anne Carson’s Nox, seeks in poetry a posthuman form for the poet’s brother Michael, who died following a long period of estrangement from his sister and family. The live-ness of poetry is also the implicit claim of Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’. When the ‘reader’ descends into its underground room and uncovers the word ‘rejuvenesça’ (rejuvenate), metaphors of life, afterlife and enlivening are prominent components of the work’s suggestive possibilities. Though Chapter 2 prioritises the ways the ‘Buried Poem’ stages a relational exchange between subject and object, another way of reading the ‘Buried Poem’ is as a tomb in which poetry itself is born anew. This gesture is also identifiable in Juan Luis Martínez’s book La poesía chilena which, among other things, contains copies of the death certificates for poets Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo de Rokha and Pablo Neruda. For the examples in this book, poetry comes alive in and as material. It comes alive not by being an intangible truth, a muse-inspired musing, or a virtual record of an extra-poetic real. Poetry, here, is already its own object, whose evidence that it is alive is the evidence that it is materialised. Poetry matters because it’s matter.

Locating a Theory of Material Poetry To explore this claim, I’ve chosen to examine five kinds of material poetry from the Americas constructed during the second half of the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first. Not all of what I might characterise as material poetry aspires to become material objects, but that is the case with the examples discussed in this book. Overviews of similar poetry often display a tendency towards worlding – Solt’s World View is one example among many that groups globally allied practices by national context. These practices were an international form, so it makes sense, for example, that when discussing Brazilian concrete poetry scholars also address the concrete poetry of Bolivian-Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, Swedish poet Öyvind Fahlström, or any number of other poets who corresponded with or appeared alongside one another in internationally circulating volumes at the time. Following the mid-century, this trend continued for similar reasons. The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008, published in 2012, for example, contains a final ‘Index of Poets’ that lists its global contributors by name and nation.54 I see no problem with this grouping for poetic anthologies, but it can be

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a challenge for scholarly investigations as it is difficult to address in depth the massive proliferation of poetic types that explore the visual and material potential of poetry. I have had to make a cut. Where and how to make this cut is a tension felt by many scholars of the poetry here addressed. On the one hand, global accounts of concrete and visual poetry, such as Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement 1955–1971, give the lie to the notion that such poetry is marginal. They also highlight the ways in which, as Hilder writes, concrete-adjacent poetry often ‘circumvents the national critics’ to instead ‘emphasize its fluid geographies and internationalist concerns’.55 On the other hand, more regionally focused studies of concrete poetry have also emerged in recent years, such as Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland. Thomas’s book, in part, argues that concrete poetry is ‘inextricably bound up with questions of nationalism and national identity’ in England and Scotland.56 Such contextual factors, in these and other locales, can be obscured in broad transnational snapshots of the form. What the tension between the global and the local might reveal, though, is the extent to which the field of concrete studies has grown in the anglophone academy in recent years. These years have seen the mounting of major exhibitions such as The Getty Research Institute’s ‘Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space’ in 2017 and the re-emergence of important concrete anthologies such as Emmett Williams’s An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, reprinted in 2013 by Primary Information (originally published in 1967 by Something Else Press). A growing interest in Brazilian concrete poetry within the anglophone academy also owes its thanks to the 2007 publication of Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Odile Cisneros and Antonio Sergio Bessa, which made available an enormous range of Haroldo de Campos’s critical and poetic writings in English translation. Still, the pressure which editors or scholars of this poetry feel to include the full global spectrum of examples in a given scholarly text may be proof of an enduring impression of the form’s marginality. No one would demand that any address of lyrical poetry attend to each international instance of the form. That this is often an expectation of work engaging concrete, visual or material poetry demonstrates the perception that a full account could be possible. That such an account is elusive reveals the degree to which such poetic practices have proliferated and demands new ways (plural) of theorising what we understand as poetry. This is one attempt.

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The five American case studies in this book were chosen for a shared set of theoretical and practical investments, not because they share an immediate genealogical connection. While concrete and neoconcrete poetry certainly share such a relation, Ronald Johnson’s concretism is not always connected to the Brazilian groups’. The US poet came to concrete poetry via his connection to Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and less through a direct inter-American connection. Yet his ARK displays an overlapping attempt to create a poem that is also a material object and offers a productive lens through which to consider concrete poetry’s legacy in the Americas. Likewise, in spite of a shared poetic methodology displayed in Nox and La nueva novela, Juan Luis Martínez and Anne Carson have not been connected with one another, and there is room for further exploration of their links with like-minded poetry in the hemisphere. From the vast array of poets who could be brought together under the umbrella of visual or concrete poetry, I have brought these poets together as a way of provoking their belonging to a network of American poetic practice that theorises and attempts to manifest poems that are themselves material objects. This is where my study of material poetics intersects with objectoriented ontologies and new materialisms. In that intersection, I don’t draw from a single theory of what the object is, but, rather, allow the particular approaches of each poetic example to guide me towards a theory of the object the poem itself works to establish. In doing this, I have found certain affinities, for example, between Brazilian concrete poetry’s interest in becoming an autonomous object and the object as it is described in Graham Harman’s Towards Speculative Realism. For Harman, the object is ‘that which has a unified and autonomous life apart from its relations, accidents, qualities, and moments’.57 He has criticised literary adoptions of object-oriented ontology, which he says have taken up the field’s enthusiasm for objects without seriously investigating its emphasis on the ‘deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things’.58 As a resistance to certain forms of relation was central to the concerns of early concrete poetry, Chapter 1 demonstrates the relevance of this poetic approach to literary studies’ engagement with objects. At the same time, it proposes that concrete poetry offers an alternative to the split between philosophies of language and philosophies of objects that proponents of the material turn have helped to encourage. Concrete poetry is both at once. While Chapter 1 does work with concrete poetry to examine the possibilities for a non-relational poetics, elsewhere this book examines the kinds of relations other forms of material poetry can bring

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about. La nueva novela, made, as its ‘author’ says, of ‘little pieces that connect’,59 shares affinities with Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of the assemblage, which, in conversation with Deleuze and Guattari, he characterises by its ‘relations of exteriority’. Materialising these relations is an important goal of Martínez’s poetics broadly speaking, and of La nueva novela in particular, which works simultaneously to bind and unbind its disparate parts into a poetic assemblage that has no more claim on their belonging than any other assemblage to which these components might also be bound. While my discussion of neoconcretism turns towards twentiethcentury theories of phenomenology (particularly Merleau-Ponty), the discussion of Johnson’s ARK examines contemporary considerations of the time of objects. It joins this discussion with more long-standing considerations of literature as a temporal (as opposed to spatial) art form. I show that ARK’s time consists of a series of circular eddies that wind the reader back through and around concrete poetry even as the book continues to progress. In this, it is distinguished from a linear model of literature as ‘a succession of words proceeding through time’60 and from the pausing of time associated with ekphrasis. As a literature which describes an architectural object and constitutes one, ARK also resists a tendency to take objects as already finished and themselves. Tim Ingold characterises this tendency as one where ‘we commonly describe materials as “raw” but never “cooked” – for by the time they have congealed into objects they have already disappeared’.61 ARK, on the other hand, is persistent in showing itself as an object under construction, made of sensible materials that do not disappear upon the appearance of the object that is the poem. Addressing Carson’s Nox, I discuss a nonbinary mode of being. While the neoconcretists also sought to dissolve binaries, particularly between subject and object, Nox can be understood as allied with new materialist proposals that seek to undo the binary between the given and constructed, human and not. Nox also turns its nonbinary proposal back onto poetry by incorporating, rather than opposing, the lyric, and by materially erasing the distinction between source and target text in its inclusion and translations of Catullus 101. Each of these monisms, I argue, is entwined in turn with questions of death and the posthuman. The book constitutes itself as a poetic object in which death, to borrow from Rosi Braidotti, ‘is not transcendence, but radical empirical immanence’.62 Though in dialogue with a broad spectrum of contemporary theories of the object, I argue that poetic theories of the object can help

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question or recast some of the assumptions of the material or objectoriented turn. I see an affinity with contemporary studies of objects because they share with these poetries a dedication to taking material objects seriously – beginning from the assumption that matter matters. As is clear, I share that assumption, but this book diverges from the great majority of object studies by taking poetry as its exemplar object. And by this I don’t mean, as I have stressed, the objects that appear in poetry – objects that language is capable of naming – but poetry itself, the object that is the poem, or poetic language. My project works to test some of the tenets of object-oriented thinking by substituting the poetic object for the objects more typically referenced in these discussions, which vary greatly – from billiard balls to political assemblages – but aren’t typically poetry. I insist that, if an advantage of a flat ontology is that one might begin with anything, then poetry ought to be as good a thing as any. In addition to thinking through what it means for poetry to be an object, and the consequences that has for subjectivity and meaning, another major node of theoretical interest grows from questions surrounding relationality. At the far end of the spectrum is concrete poetry, which represents the only attempt, in these chapters, to create a poetic object that favours autonomy over relationality. Alternately, La nueva novela and the examples of neoconcrete poetry I look at are both explicitly engaged in theorising relationality, though in quite different ways. In neoconcrete poetry, the relational field is much smaller than the one La nueva novela reveals itself to be a part of. While La nueva novela shows itself to be in relation to a vast library of other texts, objects and people, neoconcrete works spur relations only with those participants actively engaged in their handling. I have called neoconcrete poetics a ‘relational poetics’ as a way of emphasising that poetry emerges from the relation the object creates with its participating subject. And, I have called La nueva novela a ‘material poetics of relation’ as a way of stressing that the book turns relation into a material poetics by showing itself to be constructed in and as a complex relational assemblage. ARK is interested in relation too, but it’s more interested in blurring the lines that might divide any one sense, genre or dimension from another. If La nueva novela is a rhizomatic network, ARK is more like liquid cement – everything all stirred up together, ready to build something new. Finally, Nox maintains a prominent interest in relation, specifically those relations that constitute themselves between, and within, poetry, life and death. It also shows how poetry can materialise, not just depict, relations among and between people and things.

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Though philosophies of objects are likely to agree that language, words and poems can be called objects, additional metareflection about the consequences of such a proposal are called for. Philosophies of objects write about objects in language. And the philosophers of objects are authors and subjects who, by bracketing the achievements of the philosophies of language, implicitly make the arguments that, first, what they mean to say is what they say, second, that human language is able to account for objects (albeit speculatively), and third, that the translation of objects into language doesn’t require an accompanying interrogation. For the most part, my method includes taking for granted the first two of these arguments. The third implicit argument I refer to above is foregrounded here: this book is constantly working at and trying to expose the many ways objects and language can come together, or can come to be the other. Literary studies and the philosophies of language have a long history of thinking about the relationship between words and things. This thinking can be reinvigorated in light of recent developments in the theories of the object. I’ve contributed one approach which, rather than working at the ways language names objects, thinks about the object-conditions of language – poetic language – itself. There are numerous ways in which this thinking can be materialised and I have tried not to collapse the distinctions among the various material poetries examined here. Instead, I have worked to provide five different accounts for what a material poetics of the object might look (and sound and feel) like. My aim has been to show both how widespread and how differentiated material poetry of the American hemisphere is. In my project, I propose five paradigms for the poetic object: autonomous, relational, assembled, architectural, and posthuman. In addition to questions about how poetry can manage to become these kinds of objects, this book asks fundamental questions about what poetry is, what it’s made of, how it’s read and who writes it. I have tried not to work from the category of poetry down, but rather from the examples of what I call poetry here, up.

Overview This book opens in 1950s Brazil, where concrete poets – Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, and Augusto de Campos – argued that the poem was an autonomous object made of what they called, after James Joyce, ‘verbivocovisual’ materials. These materials included the poem’s meaning, as well as its sound and look. In the concrete

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poem, language is not a representation of extra-poetic objects, feelings or ideas but an object all its own. In this chapter, I compare Brazilian concrete poetry with other analogous forms – from Hellenistic pattern poems to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and Louis Zukofsky’s objectivism – to emphasise that what’s unique about Brazilian concrete poetry has to do with that exact feature of objectoriented ontology that has been most criticised, and least taken up, by literary studies: an insistence on the object as resistant to relation. I put my study of concrete poetry into conversation with Harman’s definition of the object as ‘unified and autonomous’.63 While objectoriented ontology would distinguish its project from philosophies of language, I show how Brazilian concrete poetry manages to think the object’s resistance precisely by thinking language. Without renouncing language’s ‘virtuality’ – its ability to mean – early concrete poetry stakes out a space for the poem-object to achieve a mode of autonomy akin to what Harman describes. Though the poem relates by nature to the things it represents and to its writer and reader, this chapter explores concrete poetry’s self-theorisation and practical realisation as a form capable of existing autonomously from its representation of external objects. Ultimately, I show, concrete poetry even finds ways of existing apart from an authorial or reading subject when the poem, and its materiality, creates itself and determines its own readability. Chapter 2 takes up the 1960s interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretism, which shared concrete poetry’s investment in creating objects that stood for nothing but themselves. But, as I show, the neoconcrete work comes into being precisely in the encounter between a relational object and its participating subjects. Though neoconcretism’s relational practices have primarily been thought of as belonging to the visual arts, my project uncovers a relational poetics in which language is plastic and what’s plastic is language. Analysing examples of poetry and art that either calls itself poetry or makes use of the book form – including poet Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’ (an underground poem-room that invites the ‘reader’ to enter), artist Lygia Pape’s Book of Creation (a language without words which the ‘reader’ can order) and artist Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics (a lyric that stills the sensible for the ‘reader’ to perceive) – I show that language powerfully shapes the history of what neoconcrete artist Lygia Clark calls the ‘relational object’. By tracing Gullar’s reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I demonstrate not only that the relational object can be ‘transparent to phenomenological understanding’,64 but that language partakes of this process from its

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most intimate insides. Not just a score which would guide, from the outside, the co-creation of an object, language, in a relational poetics, joins the creator and participant in becoming the object created. This conclusion also points towards one way in which avant-garde experimentation (often accused of being apolitical) can engage the political sphere – by creating the opportunity for an engagé poetics that takes shape inside sensory engagement itself. Chapter 3 examines another approach towards poetic relationality in the Juan Luis Martínez–assembled La nueva novela. Despite its title, this ‘novela’ is not, by most measures, a novel. However, there is little doubt that this 1970s artist’s book is novel in its construction, assembling itself as, and from, such diverse parts as: visual maths problems in which, for example, a painting of Rimbaud and a military jacket minus a shoe, a boot and a sock equals suspenders, a spat and a sock; metal fishhooks taped to a page; riddles and circular problems of logic; other people’s poems; musical scores; drawings, for example, of a pipe split in half (titled ‘Meditations on René Magritte’ and dedicated to Foucault); among many other things. In this chapter, I turn from a relational poetics to Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of ‘assemblage theory’. By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, I demonstrate poetry’s condition of being is as a ‘multiplicity’, one that, as Martínez says, ‘operate[s] permanently in every direction’.65 By comparing the ways the book’s contents work to both bind it together as a whole and unbind it into a near-infinite network of pieces that can and do belong to other assemblages, this chapter makes a case for understanding books and their contents as bound by relations of exteriority. With this claim in mind, this chapter explores broader questions related to what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus describe as ‘surface reading’.66 It examines the methodological consequences which arise when reading is a multi-sensory operation informed by matter as much as, or more than, meaning. I argue in Chapter 4 that Ronald Johnson’s ARK, written over a period of twenty years from the 1970s to the 1990s, represents a future of concrete poetry. In this chapter, I show how ARK carried the practice of concrete poetry into North America at the end of the twentieth century, and I examine the changes the practice undergoes as a result. I describe how ARK, a 300-page long poem, also incorporates modern and postmodern experiments with the epic form (such as Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems). I interrogate ARK’s approach to poetic time. ARK rejects history, as well the instantaneous

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time of earlier, more dogmatic versions of concrete poetry, where a small poem can be apprehended in what feels like an instant. Rather than linearity or instantaneity, I argue that ARK constructs a circular time, which is itself interrupted by many circular eddies that wind the reader back through concrete poetry even as the book continues to move ‘forward’. This, in turn, leads towards a theory of the linguistic object which, in contradiction to many theories that take the object as already itself and finished, shows the object in-process, an ark-itecture in the making. In addition, though the United States is often described as not having a concrete poetry movement analogous to Brazil or other parts of the Americas and Europe, this chapter describes the important influence materiality had on North American poetics in the late twentieth century. In the final chapter, focused on Anne Carson’s Nox, I address the relationships between lyric and matter, person and poem. I argue there that Nox, an accordion-fold book in a box composed as an elegy to the poet’s brother Michael, constitutes a materialisation of the famous Roman lyric, Catullus 101. The poem appears in several forms in Nox: in its original Latin, in Carson’s English translation, and as the source text for a dictionary that defines each word of the original poem on the left-hand ‘pages’ of the book. Rather than antagonising or excising the lyric, as prior approaches to material poetics had done, Nox turns 101’s described relations into material ones. The poem and its translations join with the textual remnants left behind by Carson’s brother – letters, photographs, recounted speech – to constitute a posthuman elegy, made from the matters of lyric and life. In this chapter, I argue that contemporary material poetry, as Nox represents it, counters the assumption that practices akin to concrete poetry died after the mid-twentieth century, or were resurrected solely as a reaction to the digital age. As the examples in this book show, practices in material poetry continued steadily through the decades and went on to demonstrate elasticity and endurance. As I argue, Nox, in particular, exhibits an ability to materially incorporate apparently antagonistic poetic types as the very matter of its poetics. These chapters explore the opportunities that await us when we begin to sensitise our understanding of American poetics to the rich and varied tradition of material experimentation that stretches through the hemisphere. In closing, then, I would like to take this moment to list some of the characteristics of the material poetries discussed in this book. As concrete poetry first teaches us here, poetry is something that takes up space. It’s something that can be

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apprehended with the eyes, with the ears, and with the mind. Neoconcretism adds that poetry is something that can be touched. It can be recorded in a book, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be recorded on a page, but it doesn’t have to be. Neoconcretism also tells us that poetry doesn’t need to be made of language. Poetry can be an object – a photograph, a painting, a person. This is one of things we can also learn from La nueva novela, where poetry is words but is also pieces of plastic, fishhooks and tape. Poetry can make use of metaphor but can also turn metaphor literal, as ARK does. As ARK points out, too, poetry takes time. In ARK it’s long. In the concrete poetry of this book’s first chapter, it’s almost instantaneous. Nox proposes that material poetry is also monistic, and is capable of absorbing the antagonisms that might otherwise appear between lyric and matter, life and death. Material poetry, Nox demonstrates, continues to thrive in the contemporary. Most of all, though, what we can learn from this poetry is that poetry matters.

Notes 1. Ian Daly, ‘You Call That Poetry?!’ Poetry Foundation, accessed 6 October 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68913 2. Aram Saroyan, ‘The Most Expensive Word in History’, Mother Jones, August 1981, 36. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 38. 5. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 12. 6. Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry, 13. 7. Christian Moraru, ‘“Topos/typos/tropos”’, 253. 8. Ibid. 9. Daly, ‘You Call That Poetry?!’ 10. Ibid. 11. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word, 226–7. 12. Ibid. 227. 13. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry, 49. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 48. 16. Alan Golding, ‘Language Writing, Digital Poetics, and Transitional Materialities’, in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 251. 17. Bill Brown, ‘[Concept/Object] [Text/Event]’, 524. 18. Solt, Concrete Poetry, 47. This characterisation of ‘concretization’ in Whitman is surprising. As Solt would have been aware, a catalogue

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America poem of this sort is in many ways counter to a model of strictly practised concrete poetry, which rather than a transparent rendering of extra-poetic objects, sought the status of object for the poem itself. Ibid. Ibid. Saroyan, ‘The Most Expensive Word in History’, 38. Ibid. Ibid. Liedeke Plate, ‘How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age’, 95. Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Conceptual Writing’, Harriet, 30 April 2012, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/conceptual-writinga-worldview. I have doubts about the suggestion that concrete poetry does not need to be read and suspect that some assertions of this sort may veil an unwillingness to engage with the Portuguese language. Katharine Elaine Sanders and Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘So What Exactly Is Conceptual Writing’. Kenneth Goldsmith in Marjorie Perloff, ‘Writing as Re-Writing’. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, ‘The Material Turn in Comparative Literature’. Eduardo Ledesma, Radical Poetry, 248. Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden. Jacques Derrida, ‘Coasts, Third Banks, Encounters’, in Haroldo de Campos in Conversation: In Memoriam 1929–2003, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Else R. P. Vieira (London: Zoilus Press, 2009), 305. Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas, 2. Adam Shellhorse, Anti-Literature. Kristen Kreider, Poetics and Place, 21. Caren Florance et al., ‘Material Poetics Panel—Revisited’. Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication, 11. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 2. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. Liz Kotz, Words To Be Looked At, 138. Peter O’Leary and Ronald Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 33. Mari Carmen Ramírez, ‘Tactics for Thriving on Adversity’. Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 12. Goldsmith, ‘Conceptual Writing’. Joe Milutis, ‘Uncopiable Copies and bpNichol’s Machine Translation’. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, 9. Ibid. 1. Eleanor Wachtel and Anne Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. Heather Love, ‘Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History 41 (2010), 375. Augusto de Campos, ‘A moeda concreta da fala’, 113. Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: FSG Originals, 2016).

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52. Megan Garber, ‘Still, Poetry Will Rise’, The Atlantic, 10 November 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/stillpoetry-will-rise/507266/ 53. Heather Milne, Poetry Matters, 5. 54. Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis, The Last Vispo Anthology, 332. 55. Jamie Hilder, Designed Words for a Designed World , 82. 56. Greg Thomas, Border Blurs, 2. 57. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 199. 58. Graham Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’, 187. 59. Juan Luis Martínez and Félix Guattari, ‘Félix Guattari: Conversación con Juan Luis Martínez’, Revista Matadero, July/August, 2000. 60. Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: Part I’, 223. 61. Tim Ingold, ‘Materials Against Materiality’, 9. 62. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 136. 63. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 199. 64. Ferreira Gullar, ‘Teoria Do Não-Objeto’, 1. 65. Juan Luis Martínez, ‘Juanluismartinez.cl’, accessed 13 March 2013. 66. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, 18.

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Chapter 1

The Autonomous Object of Concrete Poetry

An increased preoccupation with the nature of objects and matter has marked the last decade-plus of scholarly enquiry in the humanities. This turn cuts across disciplines, including those already object-oriented such as art history and anthropology, as well as fields like literary studies whose objects are often cultural and linguistic in nature. Though theorists and critics of literature have welcomed the ‘material turn’, its arrival has also been marked by tensions. In an address of ‘objectoriented literary criticism’ Graham Harman writes that ‘most recent advances in the humanities pride themselves on having abandoned the notion of stale autonomous substances or individual human subjects in favor of networks, negotiations, relations, interactions, and dynamic fluctuations’ and acknowledges that the ‘deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things [that] is the heart of object-oriented philosophy’ will ‘sound deeply reactionary’ in such a context.1 Harman and other proponents of object-oriented thought have also criticised philosophies of language – which have so long been kindred to and animating for literary studies – for stalely centring the human in what is now a posthuman paradigm. Meanwhile, literary critics point out that theorists of objects are comfortable speaking for objects (in language) without substantial metareflection on that process and ‘despite’, as Andrew Cole writes, ‘the new rule that we cannot think of objects as being-for-us’.2 The examples discussed in this book are drawn from a wide (if admittedly not encyclopaedic) array of American poetries that understand themselves in one way or another as objects. While, from the perspective of the United States, poetry’s dominant form has been the lyric, this book frames an alternate group of practices that prioritise the object-nature and material qualities of poetry. To begin, this chapter focuses on Brazil’s Noigandres group,3 whose members constituted the mid-century founders of American concrete poetry.

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Together, Décio Pignatari and brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos established one of the most rigorous poetic programmes of the twentieth century that included extended theoretical reflections on the object of poetry and a long catalogue of poetry that materialises and advances these theories. Concrete poetry asserted that the poem would not be ‘the interpreter of exterior objects’ but ‘an object in and of itself’.4 As such, this poetry – grounded in a philosophy of objects that is also a philosophy of poetic language – can offer a series of productive complications to contemporary concerns with matter and objects. The term ‘concrete poetry’ is sometimes used as a catch-all for poems that stray from verse towards visual experimentation. I’ll take up the expansion of the term further in Chapter 4, but for its São Paulo-based coiners, ‘concrete poetry’ referred to a specific set of poetic theories and approaches that understood the poem as a multiply material object that was resistant to transparent representation and discursive communication. Concrete poetry begins, as the group writes in their ‘pilot plan for concrete poetry’ ‘by being aware of graphic space as structural agent’ and, from there, creates what they call ‘a verbivocovisual’ linguistic area.5 That the concrete poem is material in this tripartite sense – at once a verbal, meaningful object, as well as a sonic and visual one – is one way in which the form speaks to contemporary debates about objects and matter. Another is the concrete poem’s insistence on the object-nature of the poem, and the words from which it is composed. In an essay called simply ‘Concrete Poetry’, August de Campos describes how a concrete poem’s words ‘act as autonomous objects’.6 He writes, with reference to Sartre, that ‘poetry distinguishes itself from prose in that for prose, words are signs, whereas for poetry words are things’.7 In the case of concrete poetry, he goes on to say, this proposition becomes ‘more acute and literal’.8 That concrete poetry would be a thing or an object is also complex. As Rachel Price discusses, concrete poetry’s understanding of objects includes at least three layers: ‘On the one hand’, she writes, ‘an object was a thing, an autonomous creation with a material, formal quality’. As she goes on to say, the concrete poem was also ‘objective, which is to say mathematical, scientific, and nonsubjective’. Finally, ‘the concrete poem was objectal: a thing in itself whose noumenal qualities meant that it was not representation but manifestation’.9 That the concrete poem is a non-subjective, autonomous object resistant to representation resonates with Harman’s definition of the object as ‘that which has a unified and autonomous

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life apart from its relations, accidents, qualities, and moments’.10 In part, this resonance motivates this chapter, but rather than seeing object-oriented ontology as the key to unlocking concrete poetry, I want to propose that concrete poetry can help us think through a thorny set of challenges confronting literary studies’ relationship with studies of the object. These include questions having to do with the (non) relationality of objects, the (non) coincidence of words and things, and the (non) overlap of subjects and objects. The specificity of Brazilian concrete poetry’s original project has been somewhat eroded over the years, thanks to the global proliferation of allied practices and concrete poetry’s own internationally ready status as what Christopher Dunn calls ‘poetry for export’.11 Though Brazilian concrete poetry was in part established in local opposition to Brazil’s symbolism-inspired Generation of ’45, publications of concrete poetry that circulated internationally in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the impression that the form belonged everywhere and nowhere. It was frequently anthologised, and the concrete poetry emerging from Brazil was collated with other materially and/or visually emphatic poetries from all over the world. Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View, is a notable example of the form. Published in the United States in 1968, it includes a broad snapshot of poetic examples as well as an encyclopaedic introduction that situates these examples in their (inter)national contexts, including such places as Switzerland, Scotland and Spain. Published in 1968, the book’s opening lines admit that the term ‘concrete poetry’ is now being used to refer to a variety of innovations and experiments following World War II which are revolutionizing the art of the poem on a global scale and enlarging its possibilities for expression and communication. There are now so many kinds of experimental poetry being labeled ‘concrete’ that it is difficult to say what the word means.12

Despite what Solt here charts as a forward-looking revolution, concrete poetry has been characterised within recent US scholarship as somewhat backward looking. Deeming the practice ‘arrière-garde’, Marjorie Perloff describes how concrete poetry (in the 1950s and 1960s) ‘transformed the Utopian optimism and energy of the pre-World War I years into a more reflective, self-conscious, and complex project of recovery’.13 As opposed to an earlier avantgarde that ‘insisted that the aesthetic of its predecessors – say, of the poets and artists of the 1890s – was “finished”’,14 concrete

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poetry, for Perloff, involved recuperating the vanguard strategies of the recent past. The concrete poets do prominently cite their influences, which include figures such as Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, e. e. cummings, James Joyce, and others. Yet, As Dunn points out, concrete poetry was both self-consciously heir to the international avant-garde they cited and translated and ‘on the cutting edge of formal experimentation’15 worldwide, at the time. This enabled the concrete poets to stake out a prominent space for a relatively disempowered country within the global experimentalisms of the twentieth century. Furthermore, for the concerns of this chapter, it’s important to note that concrete poetry was not simply a reiteration of EuroUS experimentation, but also generative of a particularly original strain of thought as it related to poetic objecthood. This thinking, rather than arriving late, arrives early to many of the questions now being confronted as the humanities orient themselves towards objects.

The Object of Poetry As this chapter will show, Brazilian concrete poetry was already exploring many of the questions about matter, language, objects (and poetry) that arrived decades later in the context of literary and object studies ongoing in the Global North. Brazilian concrete poetry’s formal poetic programme, which does not just, as is commonly thought, consist of ‘poems that take on the shape of their subjects’,16 foregrounds the materiality of language. Though they sometimes do, concrete poems often don’t visually depict what they verbally refer to, and the poetry’s emphasis on its material, object-nature, includes a revision of differentiated subjects (as both what a poem represents and the ‘I’ it proceeds from). In seeking to be an object, concrete poetry’s ambitions predated many of the contemporary philosophical arguments that resist subject-object binaries in favour of broadly conceptualising objecthood. Concrete poetry also poses challenges to how these philosophies and literature relate language to objects. When objects enter into literature, it’s usually from the outside, as images, symbols or ekphrasis – as things to be invoked, approached or described. For concrete poetry, this way of relating words and objects contributes to solidifying a stubborn horizon, where the harder language works to find the world of objects, the more ‘it finds in it[self] a barrier to

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accessing’ that world.17 Concrete poetry, rather, puts itself ‘at the service of an unexpected goal: the creation of its own object’.18 This poetry proposes to cross the divide between language and object not by achieving the perfect description nor by finding its way back to what Barbara Johnson calls the ‘perfectly referential’ language that ‘brought the world out of the void in the act of speaking’,19 but by pointing out that ‘for the first time, it no longer matters if a word is not a given object, since, in reality, it will always be, in the special domain of the poem, the object given’.20 In this, the concrete poem becomes capable of creating ‘out of its own material, a new form, or rather, an entire parallel world of things – the poem’.21 Both in practice and in its accompanying theoretical writing, concrete poetry proposes that the opposition between language and objects doesn’t hold, and demands that, in light of their shared place in the ‘world of things’, language and objects be understood together. This presents an alternative to the purported split between the ‘linguistic turn’ of the twentieth century and more recent enquiries into the object and its ontology. Harman, for example, establishes his proposal for a ‘speculative realism’ in contrast to ‘the view that the great philosophical achievement of [the twentieth] century lies in its “linguistic turn”’.22 He writes that: The ostensibly revolutionary transition from consciousness to language still leaves humans in absolute command at the center of philosophy. All that happens is that the lucid, squeaky-clean ego of phenomenology is replaced by a more troubled figure: a drifter determined by his context, unable to fully transcend the structure of his environment. In both cases the inanimate world is left by the wayside, treated as little better than dust or rubble . . . Philosophy has gradually renounced its claim to have anything to do with the world itself.23

Though Harman opposes philosophies of objects and philosophies of language, concrete poetry philosophises objects as it philosophises language. It is also a practice in this philosophy – an attempt to realise poetically the proposal that language and objects have a shared place in the world. In this, the concrete poem disrupts the supposedly radical break between these two regimes, and, some fifty-odd years prior to this purported divorce, begins to map out the potential for its mending. Concrete poetry proposes that language can play an important role in theories of the object. But it doesn’t entirely contrast with Harman’s thinking. For example, especially during its most dogmatic

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period at the end of the 1950s, concrete poetry shared Harman’s determination to get the human out of the way so to speak, and to uncover a material language that existed apart from its relations to the poet or the signified. Likewise, though concrete poetry retained an interest in the internal relations of the poem, it also sought a mode of autonomous poem-being that shared Harman’s understanding of objects as not not having relations, but as having an existence outside of them too. Still, concrete poetry’s object aspirations also differ from the aims of object-oriented ontologies in notable ways. First, concrete poetry, unlike Harman’s speculative realism, is primarily concerned with language. Object-oriented ontology doesn’t disagree that language, words or poems can be objects, but neither does it generally take these as its paradigmatic objects. In Harman’s texts, we see things like billiard balls, submarines, mushrooms and, especially, the hammer. The hammer – specifically Heidegger’s hammer – is a particular fascination for Harman. He sees in Heidegger’s tool analysis ‘a genuine taste of the real world lying beyond the intentional sphere’ and the promise of a kind of object-being that recedes ‘from direct human access’.24 As I’ve noted, concrete poetry seeks to interrupt certain human-inflected relations, especially the automatic relation between language and the object signified (what the concrete poets call the external or exterior object). It also proposes to displace the primacy of the human agent by demonstrating that poetry can be made from, and determined by, the existing matter of language. However, concrete poetry also maintains an emphasis on language’s ‘verbivocovisual’ materials – its meaningful, sonic and visual qualities. And each of these remains somewhat bound to human perception and understanding. This is another way in which substituting the poetic object as exemplar in an object-oriented discourse complicates some of the assumptions that might be better illustrated with nonlinguistic objects. Harman writes, for example: a rock is neither downwardly reducible to quarks and electrons nor upwardly reducible to its role in stoning the Interior Ministry. The rock has rock properties not found in its tiny inner components, and also has rock properties not exhausted by its uses. The rock is not affected when a few of its protons are destroyed by cosmic rays, and by the same token it is never exhaustively deployed in its current use or in all possible uses. The rock does not exist because it can be used, but can be used because it exists. If this severing of a thing from its surroundings above and below can be called ‘formalism’, this is not because the rock is just a form in

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America our minds, but because it is a real form outside our minds. It is what the medieval philosophers called a substantial form: the reality of an individual object over and above its matter, and under and beneath its apprehension by the mind.25

In this address of speculative realism’s applications in the field of literary studies, Harman suggests the rock can help explain his proposal of an object-oriented countermethod. ‘Instead of dissolving a text upward into its readings or downward into its cultural elements’, he argues, this countermethod ‘should focus specifically on how it resists such dissolution’.26 Using the rock as a metaphor here to make a claim about literature is telling. For one thing, it demonstrates how any approach towards objects can’t but rely on opportunities made possible by language – and, here, the exemplary literary technique that is metaphor. Also, slipping from text to rock allows Harman to make an argument that is, in fact, a different kind of argument than the one he later makes about literature, which has less to do with the matter of literature than with its context and reception. The rock argument centres a kind of object that is more constitutive of his philosophy. I would argue that, in comparison with literature, a rock more evidently carves out some kind of existence for itself that is reducible neither to its components nor to its uses or relations. On the other hand, texts, and the language they are made from, are a trickier proposition – a rock may continue being a rock whether we’re tossing it into a pond or not, but without an at least somewhat differentiated human subject to write, perceive or understand it, can the same be said of literature? Pignatari’s poem ‘LIFE’ begins to point us towards the ways in which concrete poetry attempts answer that question. ‘LIFE’ forefronts its constructive material. Unlike poetry in verse, ‘LIFE’ isn’t separated into lines of verse, and its meaning doesn’t unfold via ‘a succession of words proceeding through time’.27 Rather, it is lines. It is a ‘space-time structure’,28 where each of the squares shown in Figure 1.1 is an individual page of the poem. The first page shows the single stroke of the ‘I’, and additional pages add additional lines, forming the shape that can be seen on the fifth page, before separating back out into ‘LIFE’. This poem was published in the fourth issue of the group’s journal, Noigandres, in 1958. Charles Perrone describes how, in this so-called ‘heroic phase’ [of concrete poetry] (1956–1960) – the echoes of modernismo are intentional – manifestos were issued and the

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Figure 1.1 Décio Pignatari, ‘LIFE’, 1958

theory of concrete poetry evolved significantly. This period saw the making of ‘classical’, ‘high’, or ‘orthodox’ concrete poetry, texts composed according to rational, ‘mathematical’ principles.29

As ‘an object in and of itself, not the interpreter of exterior objects’,30 the composition of this poem limits the potential utility of a hermeneutic approach to its reading and shifts attention to the component material parts of the word ‘LIFE’. That those parts represent the idea of life is not immaterial to the poem, but neither is it a message the poem, or its author, communicates in a discursive way. Rather, ‘the concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content’31 such that the letters that make up ‘LIFE’, and their particular material properties, are what construct this poem. Part of this structure-content includes, thanks to a shared typeface, a visual reference to Life magazine, resulting in what Greg Thomas calls an ‘oblique cultural critique’ and ‘reaction against US imperialism’ identifiable in other of Pignatari’s poems, notably ‘Beba Coca Cola’.32 But this comes not by way of the word’s ability to communicate discursively. Rather, the critique legible here arises from the word’s visual properties, which are not an inconsequentially material container for the idea the word might be said to represent. Concrete poetry, then, shares with object-oriented ontology a resistance to language’s dissolution by its relations. But, differently

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from Harman’s discussion of the rock, concrete poetry does not seek to uncover its reality ‘over and above its matter’. Rather, it seeks to uncover its reality as matter, as a way of resisting language’s dilution into discourse. This differs from the argument Harman makes about rock-being, but it also differs from the one he makes about literary texts. Where a rock’s irreducibility is to its matter or its uses, a text is irreducible, according to Harman, to its readings and ‘cultural elements’, an idea he borrows from Charles Altieri. Notable in the case of the literary text, neither of the irreducibilities he describes have to do with matter, which suggests that the literary text, for Harman, is already differentiated from other kinds of objects. That said, concrete poetry can sometimes be understood as resistant to cultural context.33 In this case, Pignatari’s poem is written in English, with a font imported from North American media, and the poem’s emphasis on the matter of language itself leaves few interpretive clues that would connect this poem to the context of its production in Brazil. These features contributed to concrete poetry’s exportability and eventual dilution in the international arena. Early concrete poems contained very few words, and were written in Portuguese, but also English, Spanish, or whatever language provided the material opportunities the poem sought to exploit. The concrete poets did not altogether disregard meaning, though the poems were often more prominently apprehensible as visual-material (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, sonic) objects than as texts that demanded close reading and considered understanding. US poet Charles Bernstein even suggests that, ‘you can look at a concrete poem and get the sense you understand it, without knowing Portuguese or anything about Brazil, or, indeed, anything about the author’.34 Though concrete poems have been translated, there is also a fundamental sense in which many do not require it, as Bernstein argues. Their passage through national borders – both linguistic and actual – was eased thanks to this fact. However, it should be acknowledged that many concrete poems do specifically reference their production in mid-twentieth-century Brazil, including by way of the Portuguese language. The group’s later ‘participatory leap’ and orientation towards politics in the 1960s, coinciding with the onset of military dictatorship in 1964, also moved the form away from the stricter dogmatism of its early years. But, what Harman calls ‘cultural elements’ register in concrete poetry in a way that is not often subordinate to the poems’ other material features. It follows that concrete poetry’s ability to establish its autonomy in the face of external relations has specifically to do

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with its being matter. And this, for concrete poetry, is what links the object that is the poem to other kinds of objects. These objects are material and perceptible but deprioritise the representative function of language and resist discursive communication.

Object-Oriented Poetries The remainder of this chapter will look further into how this works and what it means for our understanding of poetry, language and objects. But first, I want to want to take a look back and offer a brief comparison of concrete poetry with earlier examples of more broadly understood material or object-oriented poetics (comparisons with later examples follow in subsequent chapters). In the North American context, the modernist ‘movement’35 known as objectivism proposed an approach to poetry that overlaps in a number of ways with concrete poetry’s stated aspirations. For the 1931 edition of Poetry magazine guest edited by Louis Zukofsky, the poet describes writing ‘which is an object or affects the mind as such’ and, later, argues that ‘humans live alongside of objects, and those interested assume poems are such’.36 For Zukofsky ‘objectification’ is a matter of finding language capable of achieving what he refers to as a ‘rested totality’ – a structure ‘to which the mind does not wish to add’.37 In the essay for Poetry, Zukofsky offers examples that, in his view, achieve ‘objectification’. These include select lines from Charles Reznikoff. Deeming only some of Reznikoff’s work objectivist, Zukofsky, in one such case, points to the purposeful crudity of the first line as against the quantitative (not necessarily classic) hexameter measures of the others, the use of words of two syllables (greeted, picture, slightly, etc.) with suitable variations of words of four and three (barbarian, beautiful); the majority of the words accented on the first syllable.

Later, objectification ‘is attained in the balance of the first two lines; the third line adds the grace of ornament in a simile, as might the design painted around a simple bowl’.38 Achieving objectification is a rare occurrence according to Zukofsky and his theory is somewhat beholden to his own judgement about what constitutes ‘the totality of perfect rest’,39 but it differs substantially from concrete poetry in result if not in proposal. For one thing, all of the examples Zukofsky cites contain significantly more words than are

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typical for a concrete poem. They are also referential of other objects, make use of traditional literary techniques such as simile, and distribute themselves into lines of verse. None of these features is essential to concrete poetry and while referentiality is not entirely excluded from the concrete poem, simile and the verse line generally are. Objectivism, according to Eleanor Berry, tended ‘to use language more literally than figuratively, presenting concrete objects for themselves rather than as embodiments of abstract ideas’.40 Concrete poetry likewise rejected figurative language, but its literalness is altogether different. Concrete poetry did not seek, for example, the perfect or total representation in language of some kind of object external to the poem. It sought ways of making language itself the object of the poem. In this way, though objectivism, like concrete poetry, can be said to be ‘searching for an instrument capable of bringing language closer to things’,41 the means by which the two ‘movements’ sought this instrument differed in notable ways. That said, Zukofsky’s objectivism and concrete poetry shared an important touchstone in Ezra Pound, whose writing was influential for both approaches. Zukofsky writes that ‘the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectification to a most constant degree’42 and Pound – especially his work with the ideogram – helped inspire concrete poetry’s ‘appeal to nonverbal communication’.43 In addition to Pound, the concrete poets cite other influences, including Stéphane Mallarmé and e. e. cummings, in whose poetry they appreciated ‘typographical devices as substantive elements of composition’ and ‘physiognomic typography’, respectively.44 Other touchstones include Guillaume Apollinaire and (much earlier) Simias of Rhodes. In addition, concrete poetry was also eventually absorbed into an international practice that shared some, though not all, of the original precepts of the movement as elaborated in Brazil. These prominently included the concrete poetry of the Bolivian-born Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer whose allied work coincided with that of the São Paulo-based poets.45 Haroldo notes that the poetry of Gomringer and the Noigandres group were initially established outside of mutual awareness. Though Brazilian concrete poetry, as Haroldo writes, ‘reached its first systematic achievement in Augusto de Campos’s series Poetamenos’ in 1953, it wasn’t until two years after that that Pignatari, ‘by chance and without any previous contact or knowledge’46 met Gomringer. As Haroldo goes on to describe, Gomringer ‘acknowledged a list of basic authors almost identical to that of the Brazilians’ and shared with the group a practice of ‘extremely concise poetry, with a rigorous and orthogonal construction’.47

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Gomringer called his poems ‘constellations’, though Haroldo notes that, ‘in a letter to Pignatari dated 30 August 1956, Gomringer had already accepted the name “concrete poetry”, suggested by the Brazilians, as a general label for the movement, while still keeping the term “constellations”’.48 Johanna Drucker has pointed out that the two groups both attempted ‘to make poetic meaning isomorphic with its visual structure’,49 but Haroldo claims that the Brazilian variant was ‘more complex’ than Gomringer’s in that ‘it employed, instead of a two dimensional (orthogonal) construction, a multidimensional, less concentrated one’.50 With references all the way back to the technopaegnia of Ancient Greece, though, it’s clear that concrete poetry understood itself as part of a longer history of related practices, even as it carved a specific theoretical ravine in this terrain. Part of the specificity of concrete poetry’s approach has to do with its treatment of objects. Objects are certainly not absent from this long history of material poetry, but key to the São Paulo-based group is the non-submission of the poetic object to the signified or represented object. While the specificity of Brazilian concrete poetry has suffered from its apparent similarity to what amounts to an enormous ahistorical archive of related practices, concrete poetry’s particular resistance to the extrapoetic object is what sets it apart. As a brief comparison, we might take a look at two further examples. Hellenistic poet Simias of Rhodes is credited with three surviving pattern poems in the shape of an axe, an egg, and wings. In the case of the axe, most manuscripts in which it appears include a handle that extends down the middle and two metal blades framing it on each side. As early US publisher of concrete poetry and Fluxus member Dick Higgins notes in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, the poem ‘reads in a chiastic fashion, that is, first line, last line, next to first line, next to last line, and so forth’,51 ending in the middle. The poem, which is about the axe that helped build the Trojan Horse, represents visually what it represents textually – the external object that is the axe. This was not the aim of Brazilian concrete poetry. Object-oriented philosophies claim to stake out a new kind of realism outside of the human, and, by extension, language. Interestingly for the axe, the axe poem is the only ‘real’ object to be identified. Harman writes that for his colleague Manuel ‘DeLanda,52 “realism” means at the very least that reality has a certain autonomy from the human mind’.53 The axe that’s represented in this poem – verbally and visually – has difficulty claiming that autonomy because it is a

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mythical axe, imagined and represented by human minds and words. As Luis Guichard argues about Simias’s pattern poems, ‘the different layouts preserved in the manuscripts’ suggest that the poems can be understood as ‘purely literary pieces’, not ‘conceived to be inscribed on real objects’.54 Décio Pignatari writes about another of Simias’s pattern poems in an essay called ‘Ovo novo no velho’ (New Egg in the Old). In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to the US critic Charles Boultenhouse who likens Simias’s egg to Mallarmé’s and Apollinaire’s poetry,55 Pignatari writes that the egg, which reads in the same order as the axe, ‘disrupts the linear succession of verse, just like the master behind Un coup de des would do (which decisive consequences for poetry) 23 centuries later’.56 But while Pignatari is interested in and sympathetic to Simias’s work – and while, as he acknowledges, Augusto de Campos’s own ‘Ovo novelo’ (New Egg) overlaps in form and content with the ancient egg – Pignatari notes an important distinction: ‘concrete poetry is not just or necessarily poetry in the form of ’.57 And whether material or mythical, concrete poetry is less interested in the representation of an object external to itself than other kinds of shaped, visual or pattern poetry may have been. A similar comparison might be drawn with Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. As Claus Clüver notes, the concrete poets ‘exalted Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (the few that the group could access in the 1950s) as a concept, but not for their realisation’.58 Like Simias’s egg poem, Apollinaire’s calligrams are, in Pignatari’s words, ‘in the form of’ and the priority they give to the representation of external objects marks a contrast between this approach and that of the Brazilian trio. Augusto notes this distinction in his essay ‘Pontos – Periferia – Poesia Concreta’ (Points – Peripheries – Concrete Poetry), writing that the Calligrammes ‘condemn’ the poem to ‘mere figurative representation of the theme’.59 In a selection from Apollinaire’s ‘Paysage’, translated by Anne Hyde Greet as ‘THIS LITTLE TREE BEGINNING TO BEAR FRUIT RESEMBLES YOU’60 (Figure 1.2), an external object is represented, and the text’s message points directly to this fact. The ‘you’ the poem resembles can be read as equal to the external referent for the words ‘little tree’. In other words, ‘little tree’ resembles a little tree. At the same time, the word ‘this’ turns the poem back on itself to mean ‘this little representation of a tree . . .’, which, while suggesting the poem’s own object-likeness, serves to underscore the link between the poemas-representation and the external object that is represented.

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Figure 1.2 Guillaume Apollinaire, from ‘Paysage’, 1918

Drucker describes how calligrams like this one are ‘essentially mimetic, and it is this imitative naturalism which is considered most limiting and thus least useful to the concrete poets of the 1950s’.61 Such imitation was fundamentally at odds with concrete poetry’s wish to instantiate poems as objects in their own right. As W. J. T. Mitchell writes about George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ – perhaps the most famous ‘shaped’ poem in the anglophone tradition which similarly imitates the look of its subject matter – ‘the space of artistic representation in this poem is the utopia of its desire for speech to become actual’.62 ‘This little tree’ points to this same desire – for the tree that is external to the poem to converge with the tree that is the poem. When the shape of the poem is not able to accomplish that merge, its failure serves to reestablish the very split it hopes to overcome. By contrast, the concrete poem comes into being as an object not by way of a doomed aspiration to become the object it represents but by being an object already. Brazilian concrete poetry’s dilution into a less rigorously defined poetry has meant that this important aspect of its theory is sometimes overlooked, which, in turn, has led to concrete poetry itself being overlooked, especially in the United States. There, where no major concrete poetry movement is said to have taken hold, the style has been subject to a ‘catalogue of slights and slander’, as Jaime Hilder describes.63 This, he argues was due to a ‘wilful misunderstanding of the form’ (particularly by conceptual artists in the Global North) that took concrete poetry to be visually representative of its verbal subject.64 Concrete poetry, as it was established in Brazil, was not

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interested in such a mimetic approach. Working in the United States, Solt, who anthologised concrete poetry but was also a poet herself, did create a series entitled ‘Flowers in Concrete’, which includes ‘attempts to relate the visual properties of the word to the shape of the flower’,65 but the Brazilian concrete poets were less interested in materialising these kinds of extra-poetic connections than they were in using the visual, sonic and meaningful components of language as constructive matter for the object that would be the poem.

Matter and Meaning If poems like Apollinaire’s are representative of an external object – whether visually or verbally or both – then they necessarily exist in relation to that object. Concrete poetry, on the other hand, sought ways of materialising the poetic object without resorting to representation or mimesis. Still, concrete poetry, despite its nominal ties to concrete music and art, ‘which referred to abstract, nonrepresentational practices’,66 did not seek to eliminate language’s referential capacity. As Perrone argues, ‘concrete poetry was founded on literary language and is often about words’.67 Upholding the referentiality of language poses some challenges to understanding the poetic object alongside the kinds of objects Harman describes. If language is by nature referential, then it would seem to have little chance at the kind of ‘autonomous life’ Harman suggests that objects, in general, have. These, he argues, exist outside of their uses – referential or otherwise. On the other hand, it could be said that language stops being language if it severs its ties to what it represents or means. Concrete poetry seeks its version of the object without altogether eliminating language’s relation to the things it names. Though the approach resists discursive modes of communication, words go on having meaning in concrete poetry. This approach is somewhat distinguishing for concrete poetry. Instead of an objectivist approach that seeks to totally and unornamentally capture external objects in language, or a calligrammatic approach that is visually/verbally imitative of an extra-poetic object, concrete poetry uses meaning as constructive material in its aim of materialising itself. In some ways, this parallels Harman’s depiction of objects that don’t not enter into relations, but also are not reducible to them. The poem, ‘terra’ by Pignatari helps demonstrate some of concrete poetry’s complicated proposals (Figure 1.3). Composed from a single word – ‘terra’ (earth) – and its parts, this poem isn’t so much

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Figure 1.3 Décio Pignatari, ‘terra’, 1958

a representation of the extra-poetic earth but a ‘content-structure’68 that builds itself out of the materials its word makes available. That word naturally inspires some meaningful associations and readers are likely, after looking at it, to find in the poem visual references to plots of land, cultivated fields, city blocks, and so on. But, unlike the axe, for example, the poem isn’t clearly a representation of any of those things and the directionality of such references is reversed. Rather than bringing an external object into the poem as a represented one, Pignatari’s poem ‘creates in the spatial field a movement all its own, supported by elements of proximity and similarity’,69 out of which readers may make their own associations. Notably, though, they don’t have to. The poem ‘terra’ shows that, in the process becoming-object, concrete poetry does not deny the ‘virtuality’70 of the word – its ability to mean, refer to, or stand in for. But, the meaning that might be taken from a concrete poem of this sort is diffuse and lacks the kind of specificity discursive context might otherwise provide. The word is not emptied of its meaning, but neither does meaning prevail over the material sign. Still, the maintenance of meaning is an important distinction that separates concrete poetry’s understanding of the poetic object

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from other ways of conceptualising language in terms of objects. For example, Maurice Blanchot writes, a name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language, abandoning the sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, tries to become senseless. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of the ink, the book. Yes, happily language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.71

Here, language becomes matter when it ‘tries to become senseless’. But the object of concrete poetry does not come to be sensible only when it stops making sense. ‘Concrete poetry’s function’, as Haroldo writes, ‘is not, as one would imagine, to empty the word of its charge of content but rather to utilize this charge as working material in equal conditions with all other material that is available to it’.72 For concrete poetry, this material is ‘verbivocovisual’.73 And the verbal portion of its material (its meaning) is equally important as the poem’s sound and look. Here then, a poem’s objecthood comes about neither by shedding its ability to mean, nor in spite of its meaning. Instead, concrete poetry asks us to recognise that meaning matters as much as language’s visuality or vocality. It’s possible that this fact of concrete poetry has been overlooked in part because of its international circulation. When anthologised with like practices written in a number of the world’s languages, concrete poetry often confronted readers who were unable to access the poems’ meaning. While the enthusiasm those readers regardless maintained for the form is demonstrative of concrete poetry’s appeal outside of its ability to mean, it does not mean the poems foreclose meaning altogether. The entanglement of meaning and matter (and the ways matter partakes of meaning) is evident in Haroldo de Campos’s ‘o âmago do ômega’ (in the core of omega) from 1956 (Figure 1.4). Though not straightforwardly, the poem does convey meaning, and the words it uses do name extra-poetic objects – ‘olho’ (eye), ‘ouro’ (gold), ‘osso’ (bone), and so on. The poem is not, however, mimetically representative of those objects, and it does not mean at the expense of its matter. Instead, the poem constructs itself from the materials its words make available – their look, their sound and their meaning. The poem happens not just because ‘olho’ points out to those eyes external to the poem, but in the fact of that word’s place in the poem,

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Figure 1.4 Haroldo de Campos, from ‘no âmago do ômega’, 1956

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which plays visually and sonically with the other two similar looking and sounding words in its sequence. What matters for ‘olho’, is not just that it means eye, but also that it looks and sounds very much like ‘ouro’ and ‘osso’. As Perloff writes about concrete poetry’s relationship to Jakobson’s poetic function, in this poem ‘phonological or visual coincidence is felt to mean semantic kinship’74 – another way of saying materiality matters. But the material proximity of these words, and the relationships that that proximity engenders, simultaneously highlights the words’ non-coincidence, underscoring the gap not just between language and the material objects to which can refer, but between the matters of language itself. Rachel Price has pointed to the importance of a gap, or void, for this poem, writing that the poem ‘focuses on the essence within the letter “O”, or the sign 0 (zero): in other words, it centers around a void, conceptually and visually’.75 She suggests that this feature is ‘synonymous with the modern thing’s Ding, per Lacan: that which animates the power of thingliness but which, truly sublime, escapes it’.76 The void and its other are, as Price suggests, prominent themes of the poem. But its matter can also be read for contradictorily meaningful results. For example, the work is printed on black paper. And while it’s possible that black, in general, can be read as absence, space, etc., in the context of the book, it’s white space that typically does this. Black, for books, is not generally blank, but the material imprint of ink on the page. That said, the blank space itself introduces a complication in the case of concrete poetry. Blank space – what Mallarmé calls ‘the very silence of the poem’77 – is not nothingness for the concrete poets, but is additional material to be utilised, as they write, ‘in the way that Calder used air’.78 So neither the black page nor the blank page function fully as absence. When the poem verbally refers to hollowness with the word ‘osso’, it simultaneously prevents that reference from transparently suggesting nothingness by filling, with dark, black ink, the apparently empty space inside the ‘O’. In the opposite direction, treating the whiteness of the ‘O’ as itself a lack, we come back to idea that white space, for the concrete poets, was never nothing in the first place. Similarly, by arranging the ‘Zero ao Zenit’ (Zero to Zenith) in such a way that the zenith appears in the position opposite its meaning – below the zero – the poem again calls into question the priority of either position. Though this arrangement might be read as zero-ing out the zenith, it also conversely zeniths the zero. Furthermore, by using the words’ spatial arrangement to express the opposite of the

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words’ meaning, the very possibility of trusting their verbal allusions is called into question. Here, the verbal and visual are not paired in a straightforward isomorphism, but act as a ‘tension of word-things’79 in black, not blank, space. The meanings which become available to readers of this poem increase when the poetic features being evaluated are not just verbal allusions, but also visual and vocal materials. By using all these poetic materials, the poem demonstrates that meaning remains an important feature of language, but also suggests that verbal meaning is just one portion of what matters in understanding the poem. At the same time, visual and sonic materials contribute here as well – not just to the physical construction of the poem but to its meaningful possibilities. Though the material can be meaningful for concrete poetry, the inverse – that meaning can matter – is somewhat more difficult to conceptualise. This is further complicated by the fact that the concrete poets refer to verbal meaning as the word’s ‘virtuality’. This term, linked to immateriality, exacerbates the problem of understanding meaning alongside the more apparently material conditions of being visual or of making sound. Meaning does not seem to be a sensible aspect of the poem/object in the way that sound or sight is. And, in general, this would imply, as Saussure claims, that the linguistic signifier is ‘incorporeal – constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others’.80 To return to the difference between ‘olho’ and ‘osso’, this would mean that the two words have the potential to signify not because of their vocovisuality but because their vocovisuality differs. But, though the difference in look and sound between the two words is what allows their meaning to be understood, it’s not the case that these signifiers are, here, incorporeal. It is precisely their material substance that makes the poem happen – especially the shape of the repeating letter ‘O’, inside which so much of the poem’s meaningful play with substance and absence materialises.

Meaningful Matter vs. Discursive Propositions Meaning does count as material for concrete poetry, in that, like the look and sound of words, it defines and delimits the poem’s possibilities for self-construction. Yet meaning’s role in concrete poetry differs from its function in other language conditions, even other poetic ones. First, the so-called virtuality of the word comes to share in its

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materiality. Second, as a counter to mimetic approaches to visual poetry, the concrete poem, while made of words that do refer to external objects, does not function merely by way of its (visual or verbal) representation of them. Finally, though the concrete poem makes use of meaning, it is not a form of discourse. Frequently cited by the concrete poets, Susanne K. Langer writes about poetry’s relationship to discourse, arguing, were poetry essentially a means of stating discursive ideas, whether directly or by implication, it would be more nearly related to metaphysics, logic, and mathematics than to any of the arts. But propositions – the basic structures of discourse, which formulate and convey true or false beliefs ‘discursively’ – are only materials of poetry.81

For Langer discourse is, at its base, equal to the ideas or beliefs it communicates. But poetry, in general, does more than communicate. As she writes, ‘the poet uses discourse to create an illusion, a pure appearance, which is a non-discursive symbolic form’.82 Her emphasis on the symbolic form that might be nondiscursive is resonant with concrete poetry but its ‘use’ of discourse still differs from that of other poetries. As just one example among many that could be brought in for comparison, we might look at Oswald de Andrade’s little poem, ‘3 de maio’ (3 May),83 to see this difference: Aprendi com meu filho de dez anos Que a poesia é a descoberta Das coisas que eu nunca vi84

Here, discourse is put to use ironically. In English, these lines might read: I learned from my ten-year-old son That poetry is the discovery Of the things I’ve never seen

By suggesting that the poet can learn about poetry from his ten-yearold son, this poem upends the notion that it might, in Langer’s terms, convey a ‘true or false belief’, and opts, instead, to portray a scene in which our likely beliefs about who creates poetry (poets) are rendered false. Oswald’s poem, then, uses discourse as a tool for its ironic undoing.

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Concrete poetry does not use discourse in this way, and if we think about discourse on Langer’s terms – as communicating a proposition – then it does not use discourse at all. Rather, concrete poetry uses discourse’s constitutive, material parts. In other words, it uses the same base material as discourse – language – but it does not use language to communicate discursively. It doesn’t even always use whole words, as individual letters or their combination can be as important in concrete poetry as words and phrases. In this way, discourse is put to use in concrete poetry in a manner that is distilled down to ‘the lowest common denominator of language’.85 For concrete poetry, language is not a system in which discourse or poetry happens, but is whatever language materially is – letters, sounds, spaces, words, sentences, and so on. What ideas or beliefs do get communicated in concrete poetry adhere in these small parts of language that are elsewhere used, too, to eventually construct discursive speech. But, the larger propositions discursive language might build to are hardly present. Concrete poetry is not interested in using discourse, but, rather, in revitalising the material properties of all language, discursive and otherwise. This would bring concrete poetry’s manner of meaning closer to that of other objects, which can act as symbols but don’t generally prioritise communication of discursive ideas, beliefs or propositions. Likewise, just as objects, even symbolic ones, are not reducible to their ability to mean, concrete poetry can be said to have a substantial existence outside of its referential capacity. This can be a frustrating feature of concrete poetry, especially when it is evaluated from the point of view of ‘oral communication, expository writing, or even discursive verse’,86 which Perrone notes can inspire ‘the frequently employed topical metaphor for concrete poetry as a “dead end” or “blind alley”’.87 Yet concrete poetry can also be seen as offering a new, material opportunity to the very kind of language it rejects. As Augusto writes, concrete poetry doesn’t intend to be a panacea to take the place of discursive language. Concrete poetry circumscribes its own space and autonomous functioning within the field of language. But it does try to influence discourse, in the manner in which it can revivify and dynamize its dead cells, impeding the atrophy of a common organism: language.88

In addition to its characterisation as a dead end, concrete poetry has been criticised both for proposing a vision of language that can only materialise within concrete poetry and for being no different

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from any other kind of language, which is just as material as concrete poetry. As Augusto indicates, concrete poetry agrees that all language is material, but creates, in his words, the ‘space’ for these already existent features of language to come to the fore. In this context, the verbivocovisual qualities of language can be more readily understood (and seen and heard) and, from there, animate language more generally. Concrete poetry is not opposed to the existence of discourse, but is against language’s ‘appropriation by discourse’,89 and seeks a poetry where language can resist being limited to its communicative function alone. Haroldo de Campos’s ‘nasce morre’ can further illustrate concrete poetry’s nondiscursive use of language (Figure 1.5). Here, we have the makings of entire sentences, if all that’s required is a subject and a verb. For example, the poem begins ‘se nasce’ (referring to birth). But, though that phrase expresses the idea of being born, it isn’t necessarily a proposition in Langer’s sense. Even the ambiguity of the conjugations in Portuguese stress this fact as that short phrase, lacking a supporting context other than the poem itself, could be translated into English as either ‘people are born’/‘one is born’ in the general sense, or as ‘if he/she/it is’ (or even ‘we are’, if the implied subject is the frequently used ‘a gente’ meaning ‘we’, but conjugated in the third person) ‘born’. Furthermore, as Perrone points out about that phrase and ‘se morre’ (morrer means to die), ‘if a reflexive se is understood to govern all the verb forms here, what results are strange phrases something like “one borns oneself”, or, with the articulation of an implied subject, “he/she dies him/herself”, “you re-birth yourself”,

Figure 1.5 Haroldo de Campos, ‘nasce morre’, 1957–9

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or “you dis-die yourself”’.90 What all these confusingly concurrent interpretations make evident is that meaning cannot be found here by reaching for a discursive understanding of these phrases. The concrete poets may take Langer’s depiction of discourse and its difference from poetic language as a starting point for their practices. But, they put even more distance between discourse and poetic language than might be possible in other poetries that would, to a greater degree, ‘use’ discourse in the way Langer describes. Concrete poetry’s use of discourse is not only stripped down to its most basic parts, but is also stripped of its usual dominance, such that all of language’s other material is able to come forward in importance. Gonzalo Aguilar argues that ‘the concrete poets further distance themselves from the narrative forms of discursive poetics and approach the spatial work of painting and music’91 in their use of grid-based layouts. That much is evident in ‘nasce morre’, which, like many concrete poems, is laid out in a simple, geometric formation that concords visually with the characteristic shapes of concrete painting. The materiality of this poem also includes the play of words like ‘remorre’ (re-die) which repeats its first and last syllables (both visually and sonically) just as it points to a repetition of death. This is also true for the way the poem eliminates the words ‘nasce’ and ‘morre’ so that just ‘re’ remains. It later returns these missing parts back to the page as that which ‘desmorre’ (un-dies). This material play is thus isomorphic with its subject matter, birthing and dying itself on the page. At the same time, as Perrone suggests, this poem ‘makes strange the real-life progression toward death, and will not allow such linearity to penetrate the poem’.92 As a result, the poem interrupts the possibility that its discursive units might represent, or lead to, some extra-poetic understanding of birth and death comparable with (or mimetic of) human experience. In this way, concrete poetry creates opportunities for using bits of discourse in a meaningful way without being dissolved into a broader discursive proposition. This allows other, often overlooked, aspects of language to share more prominently in the construction of the poetic object. Writing on this topic, Haroldo indicates that concrete poetry creates a nondiscursive linguistic area that shares the advantages of nonverbal communication (greater proximity to the object, preservation of the continuity of action and perception), without mutilating its instrument – the word – whose special power to express abstractions, to communicate interpolations and extrapolations, and to frame wide-ranging aspects

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America of diverse events and ideas in comprehensive terms are not rejected but rather used toward the creation of a total communication.93

Inside of this ‘area’, concrete poetry enables language to contribute to the poem as both meaning and matter. Though it may, in a subtractive way, use discourse, it equally uses the word’s ‘nonverbal’ aspects towards what Haroldo calls ‘total communication’. Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function as that which ‘projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination’,94 can thus be observed in concrete poetry as operative at all levels, verbivocovisually. Haroldo counters concrete poetry’s poetic function to the functioning of discourse, writing, whereas for the referential use of language it makes no difference whether the word astre (‘star’) can be found within the adjective désastreux (‘disastrous’) or the noun désastre (‘disaster’), or whether there are affinities between espectro (‘specter’) and espectador (‘spectator’), for the poet this kind of ‘discovery’ is of prime relevance.95

Though this happens in more poetries than the concrete, it happens differently, and to an even greater degree there. Because concrete poetry distils language down so greatly, it is able largely to construct itself as the poetic function, with nearly no discursive excess. The lines below from Haroldo’s late 1950s collection Fome de forma (Hunger of Form) can offer a further illustration: nomeio o nome nomeio o homem no meio a fome nomeio a fome96

Here, the word ‘nome’ (name) resists being dissolved into the thing it names (which, in any case, is itself). The activity of this poem takes place thanks to the words’ material likenesses which encourage relations within the poem. Here, it doesn’t matter that in a discursive situation there would be no meaningful relation between the homophones ‘nomeio’ (I name) and ‘no meio’ (in the middle) because the poem provides the space in which these words’ material similarity can matter. Harman condemns New Criticism’s ‘view of the text as a holistic machine in which all elements have mutual influence’ (in addition

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to its ‘sociopolitical blindness’).97 He argues that, though the New Critics in some ways championed a kind of relation-resistant theory of texts akin to his own object-oriented philosophy, they ultimately shifted relation from the contextual to ‘the interior of the text’.98 This claim might also be made of concrete poetry, which favours intra-poetic relations over those that would seek to bind the poem to extra-poetic discourse, representation or meaning. Yet, I would argue that concrete poetry remains open to these features of language, if not always prioritising them. And, as the group’s practice evolved, it grew to incorporate further contextual and political references, without abandoning concrete poetry’s formal programme. As Adam Shellhorse describes, ‘in 1962, the poets begin to explore explicit political “objects” in their poems. These include, but are not limited to, subaltern hunger [‘nomeio’ also facilitates such a reference], agrarian reform, capitalist propaganda, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Cuban revolution’.99 In Harman’s account of literature, such contextual references are useful not because ‘they utterly define every entity to the core, but that they open a space where certain interactions and effects can take place and not others’.100 Yet, as he goes on to say, ‘objects must be an excess or surplus outside their current range of relations, vulnerable to some of those relations but insensible to others’.101 In many ways, the concrete approach to poetry exemplifies this way of conceptualising objects and works to remind its readers that, while language is in general highly vulnerable to its relations of referentiality, it is not reducible to those relations.

The Object Speaks The poetic material that is both emphasised and exploited in concrete poetry facilitates a use of language that is more expansive than discourse and less discursive than other uses of language, poetic and not. Still, Haroldo’s ‘nomeio’ poem introduces a further complication in the middle of its homophonic play – the ‘I’. The poem reads ‘I name’. And it’s hard to ignore the presence of some kind of poetic voice here – a feature that might be more commonly associated with the ‘hedonistic poetry of expression’102 that concrete poetry rejects. Behind this, of course, is the nagging problem that poetry, even concrete poetry, must be made by someone. Objects, too, can be made by people. But not always. So while being made isn’t necessarily a criterion that would strip the concrete poem of its status as an

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object, it does call into question its autonomy outside of the relation between poet, poem and reader. The ‘I’ who names in this poem can’t help but suggest a ‘you’. And suddenly, concrete poetry finds itself reconstituted within a relational, communicative or discursive understanding of language. Still, concrete poetry does manage to find ways out of this problem. Even as the ‘I’ shows up Haroldo’s poem, it disappears into ‘nomeio’, always stuck inside the poem, never quite speaking from outside of it. The structure of the Portuguese replicates this situation – though ‘nomeio’ means ‘I name’, the subject is bound inside the verb, whose first person is a homophone for ‘in the middle’. The word is an act of naming that never needs to name its namer. In other concrete poems, the ‘I’ is likewise difficult to isolate. There are biographical traces of the ‘I’ in Augusto de Campos’s poem ‘dias dias dias’ (days days days) (Plate 1). Reading down the middle ‘minh/a/mor’ and on the left side of the tenth line down, ‘DEMIMLYGIA’, are references to the poet’s wife, Lygia Azeredo. But the poem at large scrambles the potential identification of a unified speaking subject. For one, it borrows phrases wholesale from poets Luís Vaz de Camões and Luís Caetano Guimarães Júnior. Second, its visual arrangement disrupts the flow of discourse to a great degree. Not only do the words offer no clear order of operations, but their different colours further impede a direct exchange between speaker (were there one) and reader. As Pedro Erber writes, there are ‘multiple trajectories of reading, to which a plurivocality of meanings corresponds’,103 making both the act of reading and the possibility that this poem could be read as having issued from a single speaker – a poetic ‘I’ – difficult to conceive. However, as Erber recounts, this poem was in fact recorded by musician Caetano Veloso in 1979. In the recording, Veloso attempts to mimic the words’ changing colours by changing his pitch when they do. For Erber, this points to ‘the possibility of an immediate, simultaneous perception of the poem’, where ‘Caetano’s multiple voices seem to come from different places, thus introducing a sense of space even in recitation itself’.104 Here, Erber makes the case not only for ‘an immediate form of communication’105 which, for the concrete poets, allows the poem to speak as spatial objects do, but also demonstrates the equal participation of the sonic and performative materials of language in the poem’s construction, materials often overlooked in favour of concrete poetry’s visuality. But Erber’s claim points to another outcome as well – that these multiple voices disperse the formation a singular ‘I’. Instead, the voices seem to come from the poem itself, whose particular vocovisual structure is what directs their speech.

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Elsewhere, it’s even more evident how concrete poetry defers its authorial position to other actors, human and not. In Haroldo’s ‘Alea 1 – Variações semânticas’ (Semantic Variations) written in 1962–3, part of the poem is dedicated to an anagrammatic operation, ending with two lines that read ‘MUNDO/LIVRE’ (literally WORLD/ FREE). This operation is to be carried forward by the readers, as the poem suggests. programa o leitor-operador é convidado a extrair noutras variantes combinatórias dentro do parâmetro semântico dado as possibilidades de permutação entre dez letras diferentes duas palavras de cinco letras cada ascendem a 3.628.800106 [program the reader-operator is invited to extract other combinatory variations within the given semantic parameter the possibilities of permutation between ten different letters two words of five letters each reach 3,628,800]

While this poem dates to the third phase of concrete poetry, which opened out the approach from its earlier dogmatism and invited participation, ‘Alea 1’ also concentrates some of the group’s earlier theoretical proposals. The participatory ‘programme’ at the end of the above citation suggests that this is a poem with no author other than itself. Its compositional material establishes the parameters of the poem and any reader, even a nonhuman one, can write the rest. In this way, it is the poem, and not the poet, which ‘uses the word (sound, visual form, fixed concepts) as compositional material rather than a vehicle of interpretation of the objective world’.107 This idea is key for understanding the concrete poem as an object, one which, though made of language, is not subordinate to its relation to a speaking subject. In concrete poetry, it’s not just that the word’s materials are what construct the poem, but they are also what define its form, its limits and its possibilities. The concrete poem can be, in other words, a ‘poem that generates itself’,108 as in this other example by Augusto, written in 1963:109

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The poem consists of one continuous line that ends on ‘cidade’, followed by that word’s English and French cognates on lines two and three. It is constructed of portions of words, in alphabetical order, that all carry the ending ‘cidade’ in Portuguese, ‘city’ in English and ‘cité’ in French, for example ‘atrocity’, ‘duplicity’, ‘felicity’, ‘sagacity’, and so on. Like ‘Alea 1’, this poem dates to the final phase of concrete poetry but carries forward many of the theoretical precepts of the concrete poetic object. First, it stresses its verbivocovisuality by constructing itself as a poem which can be apprehended only via the three-part process of understanding, looking and listening. Though its visuality is somewhat altered in its appearance within this chapter, it was published by the concrete poets in their journal, Invenção, on one long, narrow piece of paper that folded out from the surrounding pages. Charles Perrone describes this poem as a ‘verbal skyline’, whose ‘conglomeration of words and lexical correspondences’ are as ‘cosmopolitan’ as São Paulo.110 But, like other concrete poems, this field of meaning is generated as a result of the poem’s material construction, not by direct representation of, in this case, a city. Even the word ‘city’ though it appears in the poem (in three languages) is, like the subject in ‘nomeio’, bound to other words whose meanings gesture in other directions. Together, these words contribute to a chaos of language(s) and subject(s) and interrupt the constitution of discursive propositions. There can be no singular speaking subject, and not even a single ‘national’ language in which it could be said to speak. This poem has taken various forms over the years, including as part of a 1995 album entitled Poesia é risco (Poetry is Risk), in collaboration with the poet’s son, the musician Cid Campos. For Perrone, the many versions of this poem reached their ‘apex in the sensually enhanced grand finale of a show – a vocal-instrumental-video performance of these texts, also called Poesia é risco – which toured Brazil’ and was performed elsewhere, including in the United States and Paris in the late 1990s. In a performance available online at the time of this writing, Augusto introduces his poem as ‘maybe the shortest long poem, or who knows, the longest short poem that’s ever been written about this city’.111 The performance includes overlapping voices and corresponding flashing letters, words and images, which turn the

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already chaotic experience of reading this poem as a text into a multisensory experience of perceiving it in performance. As Perrone points out, the presentation notably includes a projected image of Brazilian poet Erthos Albino de Souza’s translation of the poem into an early computer program, stamped on an IBM punch card.112 As such, the performance of this poem facilitates the inclusion of a fourth ‘language’ into the three existing languages that already composed the poem. This not only further disperses the potential for a speaking subject, but invites a nonhuman language (and by implication, nonhuman readers) into the mix. While concrete poetry, particularly in its early years, might be accused of prioritising the visual material over other kinds of poetic materiality, this later elaboration of the form capitalised on a confluence of various sensory materials. Within the visual domain, there are alterations to the way the poem appears in its original form compared with how it is translated into the performance. The text moves horizontally across the stage on which the performers are standing. It sometimes blurs or overlaps with itself, generating the effect of quickly scanning or losing one’s visual focus during the reading act. The punchcard version of the poem also appears. Along with these visual projections of linguistic patterns, there appear images of urban and natural spaces – city buses and what looks to be a sunset. Augusto and Cid Campos’s performance of ‘cidadecitycité’ finds ways of exploiting the vocovisual potential of poetry, while exploding the meaningful possibilities of the poem across, eventually, four languages of communication. In the place of a speaking subject is, literally, ‘multiplicity’. Though we might call this Augusto’s poem, it’s the poem’s linguistic materials that, in effect, wrote it, with preselected cognates determining what the poem would or could contain. In concrete poetry, then, language comes to find its ‘autonomous life’ as an object not by divorcing its relations, but by, in Harman’s terms, showing how language can exist ‘apart’ from them as well. This includes the relation language has to the represented, along with the complicated network of relations that meaning itself spurs – between words and things, writer and reader, medium and message. Concrete poetry makes language into an object not by making language anything other than itself, but by making the object out of everything that language already is.

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Acknowledgement Images included in this chapter, aside from Figure 1.2, © Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, respectively, reprinted with permission.

Notes 1. Graham Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’, 187; Harman’s emphasis. 2. Andrew Cole, ‘The Call of Things’, 107. 3. The group took its name (also the name of their magazine) from Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. 4. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 5. Ibid. 217. 6. Augusto de Campos, ‘Poesia Concreta’, 34. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 7. Ibid. 34. While Bill Brown and others draw a distinction between things and objects (see Bill Brown, Other Things), the concrete poets often use the terms interchangeably, to refer to real material objects (linguistic though they may be). I will take their lead. 8. Augusto de Campos, ‘Poesia Concreta’, 34. 9. Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic, 168–9. 10. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 199. 11. Ibid. 12. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry, 7. 13. Marjorie Perloff, ‘Writing as Re-Writing’. 14. Ibid. 15. Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden, 32. 16. Liz Kotz, Words To Be Looked At, 138. 17. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 236. 18. Ibid. 19. Barbara Johnson, ‘The Task of the Translator’, 49. 20. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 236. 21. Ibid. 22. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 93. 23. Ibid. 94. 24. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, 20–1. 25. Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’, 199. 26. Ibid. 200. 27. Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: Part I’, 223. 28. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 217.

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29. Perrone categorises the development of concrete poetry in stages: ‘The first (1952–1956) involved the organization of the self-named Noigandres group by the São Paulo poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and Haroldo de Campos. In this “organic” or “phenomenological” phase, creative texts were still verselike but visual factors and verbal dispersion began to play leading roles. In the second stage, a spatially syntaxed poetic minimalism developed.’ The second stage is what is referred to as the ‘heroic phase’ and was eventually followed by a third stage. As Perrone writes, ‘more flexible notions of creativity and “invention” prevailed in the third stage, beginning about 1961. The last phase witnessed both definition of social concerns and extreme challenges to the conventions of poetry, as well as intense discord and the emergence of other vanguard groups.’ Charles A. Perrone, Seven Faces, 26. 30. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 31. Ibid. 32. Greg Thomas, Border Blurs, 39. 33. Concrete poetry has been criticised for this, especially in relation to politics. While this chapter prioritises a theoretical reading of concrete poetry that helps establish a baseline for later elaborations of material poetics in the Americas – including overtly political ones – other scholars have examined concrete poetry’s relationship with politics more closely, from Brazilian developmentalism to dictatorial resistance and intra-American leftist solidarity. See for example Adam Shellhorse, Anti-Literature, or Eduardo Ledesma, Radical Poetry. 34. Charles Bernstein, ‘Charles Bernstein on Haroldo de Campos’, Poetry Society of America, accessed 24 April 2012, http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/tributes/ remebering_haroldo_de_campos_cha/ 35. There was some consternation over whether ‘objectivism’ was indeed a movement, though the term was used by Zukofsky, in quotation marks, for his guest-edited edition of Poetry magazine in 1931. 36. Louis Zukofsky, ‘Sincerity and Objectification’, 274, 277–8. 37. Ibid. 274, 276. 38. Ibid. 275–6. 39. Ibid. 276. 40. Eleanor Berry, ‘Objectivism’, 963. 41. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 236. 42. Zukofsky, ‘Sincerity and Objectification’, 276. 43. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 44. Ibid. 217–18. 45. The Brazilians established the name ‘concrete poetry’, but the origins of ‘concretism’ refer to concrete music and to concrete art, whose influences include the Swiss artist Max Bill, to whom Gomringer was secretary. 46. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Brazilian and German Avant-Garde Poetry’, 252.

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60 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82.

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America Ibid. Ibid. Johanna Drucker, ‘Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry’, 44. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Brazilian and German Avant-Garde Poetry’, 252. Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry, 20. Manuel DeLanda and ‘assemblage theory’ are further discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 174. Luis Arturo Guichard, ‘Simias’ Pattern Poems’, 91. Charles Boultenhouse, ‘Poems in the Shapes of Things’. Décio Pignatari, ‘Ovo novo no velho’, 129. Ibid. 131. Claus Clüver, ‘Iconicidade e isomorfismo em poemas concretos brasileiros’, 24. Augusto de Campos, ‘Pontos-Periferia-Poesia Concreta’, 21. Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, 31. Drucker, ‘Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry’, 41. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation’, 96. Jaime Hilder, Designed Words for a Designed World, 147. Ibid. Mary Ellen Solt, ‘Flowers in Concrete’, 380. Perrone, Seven Faces, 26. Ibid. 28. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 240. Ibid. 241. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, 327–8. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 237. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. Perloff, ‘Writing as Re-Writing’. Price, The Object of the Atlantic, 5. Ibid. 172–3. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crisis in Poetry’, 157. Here, Haroldo describes Mallarmé’s use of the blank space and poetic silence, noting concrete poetry’s indebtedness to the symbolist poet’s experiments with poetic form. Haroldo de Campos, ‘The Open Work of Art’, 221. As the de Campos brothers and Pignatari write, concrete poetry is a ‘tension of word-things in space-time’; Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 118–19. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, 227. Ibid. 211.

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83. Oswald de Andrade was greatly admired by the concrete poets, who wrote frequently about him and his work, for example in Haroldo de Campos’s essay ‘Uma poética da radicalidade’ that accompanied Oswald’s Poesias reunidas in 1966, or the fourth issue of Invenção, which was dedicated to the modernist poet. 84. Oswald de Andrade, Pau Brasil, 141. 85. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 86. Perrone, Seven Faces, 39 87. Ibid. 37. 88. Augusto de Campos, ‘A moeda concreta da fala’, 113. 89. Ibid. 90. Perrone, Seven Faces, 41. 91. Gonzalo Aguilar, Poesía concreta brasileña, 218. 92. Perrone, Seven Faces, 43. 93. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 244. 94. Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, 358. 95. Haroldo de Campos and Maria Lúcia Santaella Braga, ‘Poetic Function and the Ideogram/The Sinological Argument’, 23. 96. This might be translated as: I name the name / I name the man / in the middle of hunger / I name the hunger (from Haroldo de Campos, Xadrez de estrelas, 126). 97. Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’, 191, 201. 98. Ibid. 201. 99. Shellhorse, Anti-Literature, 87. 100. Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’, 191. 101. Ibid. 102. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 219. 103. Pedro Erber, ‘The Word as Object’, 89. 104. Ibid. 105. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 243. 106. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Alea I – Variações semânticas’, 32. 107. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 237. 108. Ibid. 240. 109. Augusto de Campos, ‘cidadecitycité’, Invenção (1964): unpaginated. 110. Charles Perrone, ‘Performing São Paulo’, 64–5. 111. Augusto de Campos, ‘Cidade/City/Cité Live’, filmed November 1996 at Festival Internacional Videobrasil, São Paulo, https://www.youtube. com/watch?reload=9&v=G7AOGvHj6T4 112. Perrone, ‘Performing São Paulo’, 67.

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Chapter 2

Sensation, Relation and Neoconcrete Poetics

Neoconcretism was a multimedia artistic movement which followed just on the heels of concrete poetry in late 1950s Brazil. The group, comprised of poets and artists, joined together with the intention of rejecting earlier modes of mathematical concretism1 in favour of a participatory and what they deemed ‘intuitive’ approach to the making of art.2 This approach included a variety of media and methods that intersected with painting, sculpture, performance and, among other things, poetry. The practitioners associated with neoconcretism produced works that cannot be easily categorised and the significance of their aesthetic intervention is, in part, owed to the group’s embrace of inter- and multimedia strategies that rendered traditional categories of artmaking irrelevant. Acknowledging this, this chapter will consider neoconcretism and its legacy from the point of view of poetry, but not with the intention of claiming the group for poetry alone. Rather, I wish to provoke a reception within poetry of the unconventional objects that follow, and to consider what the consequences of that reception might be for a broader theory of material poetics and poetic objecthood in the Americas. Until recently, poetry’s contributions to neoconcretism have been somewhat overlooked. Renato Rodrigues da Silva writes that there is still ‘only an insufficient or distorted knowledge’ of neoconcrete poetry. Da Silva attributes this to the ‘academic organization of the fields of literary studies and art history’ which, as delimited, struggle with the highly interdisciplinary nature of the work made during neoconcretism.3 And, writing on Brazilian poetry after modernism, Charles Perrone remarks that, ‘from the point of view of poetry [neoconcretism] hardly existed’, though, as he goes on to say, the movement ‘was significant for the plastic arts, having involved such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica’.4 While the group also included one of Brazil’s most prominent poets, Ferreira Gullar, as

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Perrone later points out, Gullar’s engagement with the group was extremely brief. Perrone dates his involvement from 1959–61,5 but this could be even further winnowed to the late 1950s alone. Gullar’s neoconcrete poetry – in which I would include the bookpoems, spatial poems, object-poems and the ‘Buried Poem’ – was largely produced in the years immediately preceding the publication of the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ in 1959. Though proclaiming the launch of the movement, the manifesto built upon an already brewing set of shared practices and sensibilities among its signatories. In fact, the year of its publication marked the end of Gullar’s experiments with neoconcrete poetics as he began to question his approach on the basis of aesthetic and political concerns. Yet, poetic experiments contributed strongly to neoconcretism – both as a theory of aesthetics and as a practice in artmaking. Within the movement, poetry’s practitioners were not only poets but were also plastic artists interested in accessing the contributions of poetry and language via, and alongside, other material means. Diverse works by those associated with the group carried the title ‘poem’. This chapter takes that provocation as an opportunity to explore how poetry intersected with the group’s development of what I will here call a ‘relational poetics’. This poetics takes different forms in the work of the three neoconcrete participants discussed in this chapter: Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape. Yet, as I will show, in each case, poetry and language play an important role in the development of the group’s participatory works of art (‘art’ being broadly construed). These works, in turn, can inform a theory of poetic objecthood that differs from what we saw in Chapter 1. In place of the autonomous object concrete poetry aspired to be, neoconcrete poems (and other works titled ‘poems’) come about via the relational exchange of sensing subject and material object. They reintroduce a substantial (albeit reinscribed) role for poetic subjectivity and open new opportunities for understanding the role material poetry can play in the political realm.

The Neo and the Concrete Before the two groups splintered, those associated with concretism and neoconcretism had been less distinct and showed their work together. There were differences between the São Paulo- and Rio de Janeiro-based concretists from the beginning (with these groups known, mostly among the plastic artists, as grupo ruptura and grupo

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frente, respectively). But, many of the figures who went on to claim the ‘neo’ prefix began as Rio-based concretists, including Pape, Oiticica and, though not without tension, Gullar. Concrete poetry’s emphasis on the ‘verbivocovisual’ materials of language carried through into neoconcrete poetry, but the latter group also activated the tactile and three-dimensional spatial aspects of poetry. By incorporating further materials and the senses they engaged, neoconcrete poetry extended the experiential capacity of the poem. Concrete poetry’s strategies included the visual arrangement of the words on the page as well as repeating visual and sonic motifs taking shape in the language itself, encouraging readers to look at and listen to the poem, as much as understand it. A similar claim might be made about the neoconcrete poem in Plate 2 which contains just a single word – ‘noite’ (night). Thanks to its bright blue circles, the work is strikingly visual. But readers are also encouraged to move the blue circle in the top right of the image onto and off the base where ‘noite’ appears in the centre of the dot, covering or revealing it. In this way, touch is as important as sight or sound to the work’s activation and is perhaps more important than an interpretation of its meaning. This is rare for readers of more lyrically inclined, or even early concrete poetry, where tactile engagement with poems typically extends no further than the usually inconsequential act of turning a book’s pages. During neoconcretism, works such as this one began to invite this kind of haptic participation. Not all of these were considered poetry by their makers, but for Gullar, a work like this constitutes a poem. Fellow neoconcrete poet Theon Spanúdis writes in the preface to his ‘Poemas’6 that neoconcrete poetry ‘opened an entirely new method of spatial creation in the field of poetry that abandoned traditional verse and syntax, and included the graphic space of the page as a constitutive element of poetic production’.7 Eventually, though, even the space of the page would be superseded in favour of other material and spatial possibilities, as ‘noite’ demonstrates. As it developed, neoconcrete poetry broke radically from traditional verse, and further radicalised concrete poetry’s engagement with the senses, adjusting the parameters of what we can understand as the poetic object. Of the six signatories on the 1959 ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ three are poets – Reynaldo Jardim, Gullar and Spanúdis. At the same time, poems and poetry contribute to works of plastic art produced by the group. This is the case with, for example, Lygia Pape’s ‘visual poems’ or Oiticica’s ‘box-poems’, among other works. While Oiticica and Pape may not have shared Gullar or Spanúdis’s principle orientation towards poetry, their use of the term in a number of works suggests

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that ‘poetry’ offered something important to their practice, which I am interested in tracing here. In addition to this gesture, poetry was a driving force in neoconcretism’s break with concretism. When the neoconcretists came together, it was with the intent to combat what they saw as the ‘greater and greater tendency toward rationalisation’ at work in concretism.8 They located this rationalisation in both concrete poetry and concrete plastic art, but for Gullar, serving as the group’s most vocal theorist, the concrete poets were the primary target of his critique. Their approach to poetry, and Gullar’s desire to push poetry in new directions, served as a point of departure for the broader project of neoconcretism as Gullar helped articulate it. Gullar understood the concretists, and the concrete poets in particular, as conceiving of the work of art (poetic or plastic) as a ‘machine’ or ‘object’.9 As an alternative, Gullar would forward the notion of the work of art as a ‘quasi-corpus’, – ‘a being whose reality isn’t exhausted by the exterior relations of its elements’.10 This perspective demonstrates a departure from concrete theories of the object. Rather than theorising that objects (poetic or otherwise) are separate from human subjects, Gullar’s theory collapses the distinctions between these poles. The work of art, for the neoconcretists, is not an autonomous material object but, like the human participants it engages, is also corporeal – a being capable of relating to and merging with the human subject. This relational understanding of object and subject was informed by a set of theoretical interests shared among the neoconcretists. At the launch of the movement, Gullar and others were particularly influenced by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work Gullar began to read just as he was breaking from concretism.11 Among other things, Merleau-Ponty offered Gullar an alternative to the ‘scientificist vision that sought to explain everything mathematically’, a vision of art that Gullar saw as hurtful to concretism.12 In this approach, as Gullar saw it, ‘art lost its autonomy and its creative capacity, in order to become an echo of science’. As an alternative, Gullar argued that ‘phenomenology recovers intuitive thought, which is aesthetic thought’ and it was this possibility that motivated work under the neoconcrete banner.13 Though I would not say a purely ‘scientificist vision’ is as representative of concrete poetry as Gullar claims, the distinctions he draws here do point to additional differences in the way the two groups approach the object and its autonomy. The concrete poets, for their part, insist that the ‘poem is an object in an of itself, not the interpreter of more or less subjective feelings’.14 In this way of thinking,

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the autonomy of the poem is carved out from a background where language is beholden to the objects or emotions it expresses, so that the poem can become one object among others. Though neoconcrete approaches to the object would also come to complicate the direct representation of ‘exterior objects’, this is not Gullar’s understanding of autonomy. For him, the concrete poem, if liberated from the dominance of representation, remains obliged to the scientific approach that Gullar sees the concrete work as necessarily emerging from. The neoconcrete work, on the other hand, is autonomous precisely by its binding to sense experience, which, though taking place in the body of the participant, emerges not from an imposed framework but via engagement with the object and its materiality.

The Relational Object That said, the precise status of ‘the object’ is a tricky question for neoconcretism. Like the indistinction of poetry and plastic art within the movement, the blurred boundaries of subject and object are a hallmark of the group’s practice. And, conceived in Gullar’s language as a ‘being’, it’s possible the term ‘object’ is itself problematic, a remnant of a way of thinking that neoconcretism works to break with. Nevertheless, the group does use the word ‘object’, if in modified form. Appearing shortly after the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’, Gullar’s essay, ‘Theory of the Non-Object’, is one well-known instance. There, Gullar writes, The expression non-object doesn’t intend to designate a negative object or any thing that would be the opposite of material objects with properties exactly counter to these objects. The non-object isn’t an anti-object, but a special object in which a synthesis of sensorial and mental experiences is intended to be realised: a body transparent15 to phenomenological understanding, fully perceptible, that gives itself over to perception without leaving a remainder.16

It may be tempting to read a rejection of the object in the term ‘nonobject’, but as Gullar points out, this is not entirely the case. Rachel Price describes Gullar’s argument there as favouring ‘the abandonment of the obsession with objecthood per se’ and suggests a that the object and non-object are positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum.17 However, as Sérgio B. Martins has pointed out, this spectrum is not meant to separate the object from what is entirely not an object. Rather, the spectrum has to do with a difference between the neoconcrete object

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and objects ‘in the sense of an ordinary thing’ that might be put to use in everyday life. ‘The prefix’ Martins writes, ‘was meant to detach the artwork from that kind of ordinariness’.18 Not ordinary, non-objects are actual and material. In fact, the theory of the non-object was formulated on the basis of Gullar’s observation of a real object of art created by neoconcrete artist Lygia Clark. This artwork has been lost to history, but, as Martins describes, its legacy can be traced to ‘a dinner at Lygia Clark’s in 1959 when she chose a new work to present to her guests’. As Martins goes on to write, ‘Gullar’s many later descriptions of this work are far from consistent but commonly portray a diagonal construction of interlocked painted wooden plaques, connected at the edges’.19 Material but not useful or ordinary, this object helped establish the theory of the non-object. As da Silva describes, ‘what had initially begun as an interpretation of Clark’s experiment became an aesthetic requirement’.20 As opposed to conceptual art where ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’,21 in the theory of the non-object, an object led to an idea that generated other such objects. In neoconcretism, such objects have to be materially realised, and sensorially engaged, in order for the work to exist. Just as the non-object is not an ordinary object, but is still an object, the term non-object does not signify a conceptual or dematerialised other to the object. Instead, the non-object, via its very materiality, exceeds its material relations to function as a site where another kind of relation takes place – between the object and the subject’s sense experience. In this way, the external and internal are, like subject and object, bound together. The interiority that matters in the non-object is an openness that enables the subject’s internal sense experience to penetrate the object. The idea alone cannot call into being what Gullar describes as ‘a body transparent to phenomenological understanding’.22 Phenomenological understanding involves a relational exchange in which the material object engages the participating subject. While Gullar examines this exchange in the context of his theory of the non-object, neoconcrete theories of relationality can also be tied to the ‘relational objects’ that Lygia Clark produced during, and in the years following, neoconcretism. A strict definition of her relational object would limit its scope to include only those objects Clark would place on the bodies of participants during her therapeutic practice that began in the 1970s. However, in this chapter I would like to approach the relational object more broadly to include earlier works by Clark, as well as by Gullar, Oiticica and Pape.

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As relational, these objects push into the distance between an artwork and its viewer to initiate a sensorial event in which there is ‘no separation between subject-object’.23 This lack of separation is a literal as well as a philosophical stance. Clark’s relational objects were made to function by actually diminishing the space between them and the subject who encountered them, coming to ‘have meaning and structure only in the moment of direct bodily interaction with the spectator, now more accurately called participant’.24 These objects, consisting of a range of primarily everyday materials – including plastic, rubber, sand and paper, among other things – are able, in the encounter with the participant, to act on her and her sensory apparatus. The term can be connected with Gullar’s theory of the non-object and can be applicable to number of works made by those who aligned themselves with neoconcretism. That the relational object might eliminate the separation between subject and object might sound improbable, but many of the works made by those associated with neoconcretism do manage to invite the participant into the object. One example is Clark’s well-known Caminhando (often translated as Trailing). This piece begins as a strip of paper and becomes something else as the hands of the viewer-participant literally enter the material object, following instructions Clark lays out: take one of those strips of paper that surround a book, cut it horizontally, twist it, and glue it so that you get a Moebius strip. Next, take a pair of scissors, poke a hole in the surface and cut lengthwise continuously. Pay attention so you don’t fall into the cut already made – the one that separates the band in two pieces. When you have gone all the way around the Moebius strip, choose between cutting to the right or cutting to the left of the cut already made. This notion of choice is decisive. The only sense of this experience resides in the art of doing it. The work is its act. As you cut in the band it will thin and unfold into interlacings. In the end, the path will be so narrow that you won’t be able to open it further. This is the end of the trail.25

If Clark’s hand is visible in this score, it is the participant’s hand that penetrates the object to create the work. This is one way in which the relational object emphasises its materiality, despite the potential that having a score means a work like Caminhando could be read as conceptual. The concept, though contributing to the execution of the participant’s intervention, exists outside both the object and the participant-subject, and that distance means that,

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unlike the penetrating participant and penetrated paper, the score partakes only tangentially in the phenomenological experience of the work. The meaning of the work lies not in the impetus laid out by the score, but in the experience the paper and scissors make possible – of cutting, of holding one’s wrist at an appropriate angle, of choosing along which path to continue cutting, and when to quit, and so on. These experiences of the object do not just contribute to, but comprise, the meaning of the artwork. Its sense lies not in the impetus of the concept, but in the sensorial relations that are located between the participant and the relational object. Whereas the art object was characterised by Gullar as a ‘quasicorpus’, the body of the participating subject undergoes an analogous transformation as it engages sensorially with a work like Caminhando. Cutting into the moebius strip, the participant’s body transforms into ‘one of the objects’ that constitute the work.26 In this way, Caminhando helps to materially realise an aspect of MerleauPonty’s phenomenology that was appealing to the neoconcretists. In his words, ‘[I] treat my eyes as bits of matter. They then take their place in the same objective space in which I am trying to situate the external object.’27 In Caminhando, all the senses with which the participant engages the strip of paper partake of the same ‘objective space’ that the object does. In this way, both the object and the subject are bodies, or both are objects, or both. It is in this kind of relationality that Gullar’s understanding of artistic autonomy adheres. This definition is able to emerge thanks to neoconcretism’s understanding of the object as mutually constituted with the subject in an exchange that prizes sensation over linguistic representation.28 As Gullar says about the non-object, what is created is ‘a creature of the cultural world that, in representing nothing, is its own representation and, therefore, pure meaning’.29 Though the relational object can be seen as a way of materially working out a set of phenomenological curiosities inspired by Merleau-Ponty, the object itself does not simply represent its idea. Just like a moebius strip has no inside or outside, the neoconcrete resistance to representation marks another way in which the interiority of the work is bound to its material exteriority. The meaning to be found in the relational object is precisely that meaning that accumulates from the sensorial experience of its matter. Because the experience of the work is equal to its meaning, the meaning it represents is not just the fact of the object’s materiality, but the fact of those relations made to exist between the material object and the participant’s experience of it. The relational object can come to

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stand, then, for the convergence of subject and object that the group theorised after Merleau-Ponty not because it ‘represents’ this idea, but because it opens up the space where this convergence becomes materially possible. This is as true of neoconcretism’s poetic objects as it is of the plastic. Gullar stresses this with regard to poetry, saying the work ‘is a direct phenomenological experience’ and asking, ‘What does a poem mean? What is said there . . . if I could write it in another way, I wouldn’t make a poem. That means the work moves beyond its condition as an object, creating for itself its own way of existing, and above all opening a field of meaning, in some way.’30 Though this claim may suggest that the object is a means to a meaning, it cannot be overlooked that that meaning is only possible by way of the particular material construction of the poem which is not, and cannot be, substituted for. The kinds of materials which make a neoconcrete poem may differ slightly from those which make a neoconcrete work of plastic art, but, regardless of the kind of material, what matters, and what means, for the neoconcrete work is the intersection of the object and the sensing subject. To pause for a moment, it may be helpful to summarise the characteristics of the neoconcrete object – poetic or plastic – before considering how these adhere in the poetic context and what their adherence there might have to contribute to a broader understanding of a relational poetics. First, neoconcretism rejects an understanding of the object-as-machine in favour of one where the object is considered, with the subject, to be a ‘quasi-corpus’. Second, the object and its materiality matter to neoconcretism. Third, in neoconcretism the object is relational and characterised not just by the relations of exteriority between its parts, but by its openness towards the traversal of a participating subject’s sense apparatus. Fourth, the neoconcrete object, despite – or because of – its relationality upholds the autonomy of art in that the meaning of the work is the work itself. It is not beholden to either the method by which the work was produced or to another object or idea it might be said to represent. Furthermore, the work includes both the object and its relations, but nothing more. Finally, as this work stresses, neoconcretism’s object belongs both to the history of art and the history of poetics.

Ferreira Gullar’s Relational Poetics Carving out a more focused discussion of the poetic relational object is admittedly complicated by the fact that the indistinction of poetic

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and plastic categories is itself is a defining feature of neoconcretism. Still, from the perspective of poetry, the poems and ‘poems’ made by members of the group can offer new theoretical dimensions towards our understanding of poetic objecthood and its capacities. The neoconcrete intervention significantly rewrites how poetry is made and what it is made from. Not just language, neoconcrete poetry can include such materials as plastic, dirt, smells and human bodies themselves. Interacting with these materials, and the material object that is the poem, also comes to constitute a reinscribed poetic subjectivity, one that is embodied, sensorial and relationally entwined with the poem-object. Bill Brown writes in Other Things about the ‘perennially demonized subject-object distinction [that] was a defining feature of modern thought (the thought of Descartes, say)’.31 New thinking on objects has sought to undo or flatten this distinction. Levi Bryant writes that, following Harman, flat ontology refuses to privilege the subject-object, human-world relation as either a) a form of metaphysical relation different in kind from other relations between objects, and that b) refuses to treat the subject-object relation as implicitly included in every form of object-object relation. To be sure, flat ontology readily recognizes that humans have unique powers and capacities and that how humans relate to the world is a topic more than worthy of investigation, yet nothing about this establishes that humans must be included in every inter-object relation or that how humans relate to objects differs in kind from how other entities relate to objects.32

It’s fair to say that neoconcretism will continue, in Bryant’s words, to ‘treat the subject-object relation as implicitly included’ in its participatory works, in part because of the emphasis these works place on human sensation. Yet, in its own way, neoconcretism also seeks to overcome the distinction between subject and object. As we will see, the group will find ways of imparting characteristics more often associated with subjectivity onto objects and will also treat human participants as themselves objects and matter that share in the construction of a poem. The neoconcrete poetic object contributes new dimensions not just to our understanding of poetic objecthood, but also towards an understanding of subject-object relations as they adhered in neoconcretism broadly speaking. At its origins, poetry gave rise to the neoconcrete exploration of relationality. Gullar’s book-poems and spatial poems, according to him, were ‘the stimulus that led Lygia

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[Clark] and Hélio [Oiticica] to future experiences with the “objetos relacionais” [relational objects]’.33 Poetically engaged experiments of this sort would be undertaken not just by Gullar, but by other neoconcretists as well, notably Oiticica and Lygia Pape. Each of these artists would extend and complicate the practice of relational poetics within the movement. For Oiticica, poetry would join with the art object to sustain the relational experience of the senses. For Pape, poetics would not just become a relational object, but objects themselves would become a relational poetics. I’ll return to Oiticica and Pape, but I’d like to begin by discussing Gullar’s poetry and the ways in which it comes to embody relational practices via a material poetry. I would like to take a closer look at Gullar’s career leading up to, and including, his neoconcrete works, and consider how, with each new material experiment, his relational poetics developed. As already mentioned, in the years preceding the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ Gullar was associated with concrete poetry and exhibited his work alongside concrete poets and artists (including some later neoconcrete colleagues) at the National Exposition of Concrete Art. This exhibit brought together works of concrete art and poetry from both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1956 and 1957 and Gullar contributed some seven pages from his 1955 poem, O Formigueiro (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). The fifty-page poem, according to Gullar’s introduction to its first published edition in 1991, is ‘born from one word – a formiga’ (ant) that, over the course of its reading, ‘disintegrates itself into its elements [letters] and reintegrates itself in a new form’.34 The titular punning on ‘formiga’ and ‘forma’ (form) in this statement represents one such dis- and re-integration of the work’s basic elements and speaks to a broader concern of Gullar’s early production – that of poetry’s form. Among the poet’s earliest visually experimental works, O Formigueiro (The Anthill) functions via the visual (and, were one to try and read the poem aloud, vocal) dis- and re-integration of the poem as the letters of ‘a formiga’ disperse and recombine, like ants, before the reader in the space of the page. Gullar claims that O Formigueiro ‘sought, as well, to valorise [the] interior silence of the word, its semantic material, that which seemed to materialise in the blank space of the page’.35 At 1.5 m tall × 50 cm across, the original pages of the poem which were displayed at the Exposition would have exaggerated this effect, calling additional attention to the space of the page. At such a scale, space is able to shed its status as mere support and enter fully into the poem’s perceptible materiality. The published version of the

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Figure 2.1 Ferreira Gullar, O Formigueiro, 1955

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Figure 2.2 Ferreira Gullar, O Formigueiro, 1955

O Formigueiro accomplishes this differently by being, in Gullar’s words, ‘the promise of the book-poem that [he] would realize in 1959’ in which the book and the poem would become ‘an indissoluble unity’,36 and could no longer be apprehended separately. Many of these characteristics are true not just of Gullar’s work, but of all the concrete poetry displayed at the Exposition. Still, O Formigueiro can be seen as a site of rupture, because, as Gullar tells it, ‘in the opinion of the paulista group, O Formigueiro wasn’t a concrete poem’.37 And though he credits the break-up to the São Paulobased poets, who apparently rejected his contribution, in the same breath Gullar offers a critique of theirs, writing that O Formigueiro ‘neither reduced words to a mere element of phonetic-visual mechanics, nor intended the type of immediate, instantaneous communication, characteristic of advertising, that the paulista’s theory then prescribed’.38 This critique is one version of Gullar’s fairly consistent characterisation of the concrete poets after the rupture. That their method was problematically mathematical or scientific is, as we have

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seen, another. It’s hard to be sure exactly how this falling-out took place, and if the concrete poets did, indeed, rebuff Gullar’s contribution for not partaking of the kinds of ‘sectarianism’ that he sees in their approach to poetry, but it’s clear that, whatever the precise historical circumstances, after the Exposition, Gullar’s work and thinking would move in new directions. The first of these directions, and the most important for the purpose of this chapter, is the neoconcretist. During this period, Gullar began to produce relational works in which the poem’s materiality more self-consciously engaged its participant – what he called ‘book-poems’, ‘object-poems’ and ‘spatial poems’. Though only one explicitly says so, in each case, the poem becomes an object whose construction and consumption invite the reader-participant in as they create an experience that takes place in the relations between object and subject. For example, in the book-poems, to which O Formigueiro was a precursor, ‘the poem and the book are constructed at the same time’39 via the reader’s participation, which renders the poem indivisible from its status as a material object just as it allows the participant to traverse it sensorially. In addition to emphasising the material elements of its construction, the book-poems also ‘materialize [a] sensation’.40 They are, in this way, Gullar’s first trial of a more realised relational poetics. Gullar describes ‘Book-Poem Number 3’ (Figure 2.3) as follows: This livro-poema begins with blank space, and the first page, which is half the book diagonally, opens to uncover the word flauta [flute]. The next page, also on the diagonal, uncovered an entirely blank page and covers the earlier word flauta. Another diagonal page opens and the word prata [silver] can be seen. Everything else continues entirely blank. Next the reader must open a diagonal page toward the left, and then another along a diagonal to the right, to reveal the word fruta [fruit]. That is, this book opens as if it were being peeled. I had wanted to materialize that sensation of opening fruit, through the use of an object.41

Though Gullar recognises that he ‘wasn’t the first person to make a spatial work’, acknowledging that ‘the book is and was always that way’,42 his book-poems and poem-objects assure that the process of reading is no longer an activity so second-nature as to be practically immaterial, but rather is a deliberately relational, materially-experienced process. In this example, some remains of representation can be seen, in that the work’s unfolding is, if not

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Figure 2.3 Ferreira Gullar, diagram of ‘Livro-poema no 3’, 1957

necessarily representative of, at least analogous to, a fruit’s peeling. But what distinguishes this potential link to an external object from other ways in which traditional verse might approach such a thing is that, in the book-poem, it’s not just that language represents by way of sensual description. The object also materially reminds of a similar sense experience. By the time Gullar makes 1959’s ‘Poema enterrado’ (Buried Poem) this remnant of representation would be diminished and sense experience further forefronted. This work would invite the reader ‘to participate with the entire body, entering the poem itself’.43 This poem was a collaboration with Hélio Oiticica and was constructed in the garden of Oiticica’s family home. It was: a poem that could be a 3m × 3m room . . . buried under the earth. Readers would access this room via a set of stairs, would open the door of the poem, and would enter into it. In the anteroom preceding the poem itself, the reader-visitor would find the instructions of what to do in order to

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America activate the poem. Once inside the poem, reader-visitors would find a 50cm × 50cm red cube; once lifted, it would reveal a 30cm × 30cm green cube. Once the green cube was lifted, they would find a smaller, white cube that was 10cm × 10cm, and on the face of the cube that was touching the floor, the word Rejuvenesça [Rejuvenate].44

Here, as opposed to the book-poems, Gullar’s poetry would not just make material the process of reading, but would create an entirely new ‘reading’ experience, made possible by the spatial and material construction of this room/poem and existing in the relational space inside of it. To a greater degree, even, than a work like Caminhando, this work is ‘a body transparent to phenomenological understanding’.45 It is fully penetrable, scented with jasmine and creates a relation of total immersion in which the participating subject, literally inside the poem, is both a sensing body and one poetic object among others that, together, make the work. Though this work shares many characteristics with neoconcrete works of plastic art, and though it was a collaboration with Oiticica, the ‘Buried Poem’ is a poem in which the most traditional of poetic materials – language – contributes to the kind of relationality produced. In the ‘Buried Poem’, language is present in the work’s most internal space, buried not only in the ground but under a series of nested boxes, themselves contained by the room. As Mariola V. Alvarez argues, Gullar’s choice of the imperative ‘rejuvenesça’ (rejuvenate) also asks ‘the spectator to do something – to perform the word. The word “rejuvenesça” functions as a sign, and yet exactly how the reader experienced rejuvenation was left undetermined.’46 In this way, even language forms part of the material impetus towards sensory experience helping to incite the action of the participating subject. In turn, the participant contributes to the material construction of the object that is the poem. In Caminhando language existed outside the relational object as a score which prompted the participant to cut the paper. But in the ‘Buried Poem’ the word is an intimate constitutive material of the work. It is not representational in any clearly defined way, but it calls for a rejuvenation of our understanding of how poetic language matters. By emerging from the participant’s sensorial engagement with the nested boxes contained in the poem, it suggests that language does not just function as a way of approaching objects. Rather, only by engaging bodily with objects, in their materiality, can language be uncoverable. While language might be, phenomenologically speaking, left over in a work like Caminhando, in the ‘Buried

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Poem’ language too ‘gives itself over to perception without leaving a remainder’. While this lack of a remainder means the poem is effectively relational – exchanging and melding subject and object – it can also represent a closed system in which relations beyond this exchange are ignored in favour of the relational exchange itself. This notion would come to be problematic for Gullar in the years following his neoconcrete period when, as Irene Small notes, ‘Gullar himself felt that neoconcretism had reached a theoretical impasse’,47 which was both poetic and political. Following the start of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1964, Gullar would make a number of personal moves and become, by the end of the decade and as the military regime grew more repressive, director of the Communist Party in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In these years and the years that followed, his writing would also shift away from the relational poetics that characterised his neoconcrete period towards more overtly politically engaged poetry. I have argued elsewhere that it is possible to read a micropolitics in Gullar’s relational poetics which, in collapsing the subject and object, horizontalises the usual hierarchies between the poet, the poem and the reader.48 Likewise, the emphasis in the ‘Buried Poem’ on an extremely local sensory experience prevents the work’s easy rearticulation by the falsely universalising gesture of international (Western) art. In this way, Gullar’s poetic engagement with the relational object does suggest a burgeoning potential for an overlap between poetic materiality and political materialism, even at its most avant-garde. Still, Gullar’s relational poetics, as represented by his neoconcrete poetry, is limited in its potential to be political speech. Its resistance to representation, few words, and lack of a speaker foreclose a number of opportunities that might be available in other poetic contexts, even those, like the lyric, that have also been accused of being a- or anti-political. In fact, in addition to his roles in state politics, Gullar did return to more a more lyrical committed poetry after neoconcretism. Though his later work would still make use of the space of the page and play with language’s materiality (especially its sound), he understood his transition out of neoconcretism as abrupt. In the end, he sought dramatic ways of ending this period, even proposing ‘an exhibition that would open at 5 p.m. and close at 6 p.m. Each object would have a bomb underneath it and at 6 p.m. we would tell the audience that they should leave the room, and at that moment the bombs would explode, thus ending the show’. While this event never came to pass, Gullar reflects that ‘the very fact that I had imagined

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the possibility demonstrated my state of mind and the vision I had of those avant-garde experiments’.49

Hélio Oiticica’s Lyrical Sensibility As Gullar recounts, Hélio Oiticica, who also collaborated with Gullar on the ‘Buried Poem’ was entirely opposed to this plan, objecting ‘I don’t want to destroy my works.’50 And this is indicative of a feature of Oiticica’s practice in and out of neoconcretism, which tended towards evolution rather than rupture, and in which each of his major series built on and incorporated interests explored in the prior. Like Gullar, Oiticica was associated with concretism before later participating in the neoconcrete movement. But, unlike Gullar, who hovered at the margins of concretism prior to his establishment of neoconcretism, Oiticica remains one of Brazil’s best-known concrete painters. Small notes that ‘following Oiticica’s premature death in 1980, his reputation as an uncompromising, even unclassifiable, artist grew’, but his early work was especially characteristic of concrete painting’s dedication to geometric shapes and colour.51 But whereas Gullar would seek entirely new forms for neoconcretism, Oiticica’s early interests evolved during and after neoconcretism as he pulled shape and colour off the canvas and into more participatory and experiential works. Oiticica was known for working in series, and, as Pedro Erber writes, ‘with the Núcleos (Nuclei) and Penetráveis (Penetrables), Oiticica aims at transposing color from the object into environmental space. Intuitively experienced by the subject, metaphysical color can no longer be objectified as something merely exterior, something “out there.”’52 The Nuclei series consisted of hanging, geometrically-shaped panels of similar hues, arranged in a maze-like formation that the participant could walk through. The Penetrables varied, but likewise consisted of maze-style structures which, like the ‘Buried Poem’, invited participants into the works and encouraged their sensory engagement. This series included the well-known Tropicália installation which helped launch the musical movement of the same name and which incorporated a number of materials, including plants and sand, as well as wood-framed, fabric-panelled penetrable structures within it. Viewer-participants were meant to walk into these, barefoot. Notably, Tropicália’s materials also included language, from the inscription ‘Pureza é um Mito’ (Purity is a Myth) on one of the penetrable structures within the work to a series of small poems by

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Roberta Camila Salgado, handwritten on placards, sheets of metal, pottery and other materials. These rest throughout the installation, for example, against potted plants. One such poem reads: sozinho na mata ele vive sozinho na mata ele ama da mata ele come da mata ele vive sozinho na mata da mata ele morre sozinho é mato é mata ELE VIVE [alone in the forest he lives alone in the forest he loves the forest feeds him he feeds on the forest alone in the forest he dies of the forest alone it is the brush it is the forest HE LIVES]53

With its references to indigenous life (and death) in the tropical forest, the poem contributes to the larger work’s critical take on Brazil’s national mythology. Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto argues that Tropicália reflects ‘the craving of a generation who experienced the decline of a modernisation project and that wanted to go beyond that project, critically questioning the reality of the country’.54 Poetcollaborator Salgado describes the poems scattered throughout as ‘written in 1964–65, a time of political repression and censorship’ and dedicates them to ‘the people of the Amazon forest’ and ‘the great “architects” of the favelas and other peripheries of [Brazil]’.55 Like Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’, these words are embedded within the work and can be found only by walking into it.

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Poetry and language appeared elsewhere in Oiticica’s series, too, as with the Parangolés, that consisted of wearable, multi-layered, cape-like structures. One such Parangolé reads ‘eu incorporo a revolta’ (I embody the revolt). As the ‘I’ in ‘I embody the revolt’ suggests, Oiticica’s use of language differed from Gullar’s, even as they were both invested in making participatory, relational works. Gullar’s relational poetics involved a turn away from the lyrical ‘I’ in favour of increasing the sensory and participatory potential of poetic subjectivity. But, Oiticica’s poetics welcomed lyrical tactics, even as the lyric was moved into other material and relational forms. In breaking with these strategies, Gullar’s neoconcrete poetry can be seen as a radical poetics, one that, within the history of poetry, would position itself against more aesthetically conservative and familiar types such as the lyric. But for Oiticica, who neither left behind his vanguard practices nor went into party politics, a borrowing from poetry that recovered lyrical forms of subjectivity, representation and discourse, would be incorporated into his works of plastic art. This incorporation would enable these works to uphold the values of neoconcretism with regard to participation and relational engagement with objects while simultaneously enabling poetry to speak on (and via) all kinds of matters. Although Oiticica is known primarily as an artist, and he himself has said that he was ‘not a poet’,56 from 1964–6, in the years just following the strictly neoconcrete period, he wrote a collection of poems in the traditional sense, that is: on pages, in verse lines, unattached to three-dimensional objects (beside the page anyway). This collection, called Poética secreta (Secret Poetics) consisted of ten handwritten lyrical poems. About these, Oiticica wrote that ‘the lyrical truth is an immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression’. And he claimed that his practice with the lyric was the ‘polar opposite’ of his work in the plastic arts.57 Oiticica’s plastic works, many of which were made of everyday materials in this period, came to shed their everyday functions upon their transformation into works of art. The poem, for Oiticica, worked in the opposite direction, to capture and still everyday subjective experience as art. Subjective experience always played a key role in works by the neoconcretists, both in and outside of the period, where the body of the participant would be invited to engage in the construction and materialisation of the work. But, this kind of embodied, relational subjectivity is not identical to lyric subjectivity. In neoconcrete works, the body of the participant and the external engagement of his or her sense apparatus with the work is emphasised over the internal,

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psychological or mental experience of the creator as registered in the work created. Relational subjectivity was materialised in Gullar’s neoconcrete poetry and it was evident in much of Oiticica’s work, even after neoconcretism. For example, the olfactic sack (Figure 2.4), part of Oiticica’s ‘bólides’ series, is a rubber sack filled with coffee out of which extends a plastic tube that the participant can place around their nose and smell. In works such as this one, the participating subject’s experience of smelling the coffee makes the work come into being. There are potential social commentaries to be made about the economic, political and historical roles of coffee in Brazil, but there are few traces of the creator-subject here, either conceptually (as a speaker of these potential commentaries) or formally. There are no marks of his creation – no brushstrokes or impressions of his body on this work that, like Lygia Clark’s relational objects, is made of readily available, pre-existing, mass-produced (or harvested) materials. The sensing body of the participant – his hands on the bag and hose, his nose inside the tube – is what registers here. If there are traces of

Figure 2.4 Hélio Oiticica, B50 Bólide Saco 2 ‘Olfático', 1967. Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

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internal, psychological or mental experience, these come about via the memories, associations or feelings that take shape in that participating subject, via his embodied interaction with the work. Lyrical subjectivity, on the other hand, typically has less to do with the reader of the lyric than with its writer or presumed speaker. This is a model that Jonathan Culler describes as one in which ‘the lyric poet absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness’. As he goes on to say, ‘the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity’.58 Though Culler elaborates other, and more complicated, models for what the lyric might be, parts of this understanding of subjectivity’s lyrical function can be found in Oiticica’s description of poetry. He writes that ‘what’s day-to-day becomes experience and eternalises itself in the poem’.59 That this can happen relies on the division Culler describes between the poet’s experience of the world and his ‘stamping’ of it in the form of a poem. This act requires a subject which has those experiences (whether imagined or real) and does that stamping. But in Oiticica’s case, this stamping is also a way of capturing, materialising and making last the subject’s otherwise fleeting sensorial experience of the world. The materiality of the poem itself, then, still matters. And this is registered, in the Secret Poetics in the mark of the (hand-)writer as creative subject (Figure 2.5).60 But this differs from the subjective experience made possible in a work like the olfactic sack, where material form and contents act as a catalyst for an actual sensory experience that takes place in the body of its participant. The poem, on the other hand, acts as a material archive for a broader set of subjective experiences that took place before and outside of the poem itself. The first poem from the Secret Poetics (Figure 2.5) begins with ‘o cheiro’ (the smell) – but not in the way the sack of coffee does. The poem opens with a written record of a smell, whereas the olfactic sack opens to emit an actual smell. Although the poem does not, itself, smell of the smell it refers to, this is how the poem is able to be, in Oiticica’s words, ‘an immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression’.61 The fleeting sense experience of smelling gets recorded as poetry and is thus prolonged, though again the cost is rematerialisation. In exchange for its endurance, the smell is no longer a smell, but the word for it. Maurice Blanchot describes the ways that language is ‘not only representative but also destructive’. He writes ‘“I say: a flower!” and I have in front of my eyes neither a flower, nor an image of a flower, nor a memory of a flower, but an absence of a flower.’62 The poetic smell, unlike the real smell of coffee the sack makes possible, does not actually

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Figure 2.5 Hélio Oiticica, from Poética secreta. Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

smell. And the poetics of this fact point to the ways in which Oiticica’s work, though interdisciplinary in the sense that it draws from and combines practices like the poetic and the plastic, is sometimes built on an assumption of difference that divides the two regimes and their functions even within works that incorporate them both. Though I might argue, then, that Oiticica’s conception of poetry is, in fact, a more conservative one than the conception Gullar had during his neoconcrete phase, a welcoming of this more conservative poetics – one that is open to the representative, subjective (and destructive) possibilities of language – also creates opportunities for Oiticica’s work to continue to engage poetically and materially amid

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a changing political landscape in 1960s Brazil. This, as we’ve seen, is less the case for Gullar, who abandoned his relational practices with material poetry in favour of more direct forms of political and poetic engagement. Oiticica, on the other hand, continued to uphold many of the tenets of neoconcretism, even as the movement itself had largely ended. He continued to make work that emphasised embodied and sensory participation, through series like the bólides (of which the olfactic sack was a part) and others. Poetry and language also continue to occupy an important role in these series. The bólides notably included several so-called ‘caixapoemas’ (box-poems). Box-Poem 1 (Figure 2.6) is a small box that the viewer-participant can open to remove and handle a plastic sack filled with raw, powdered pigment. Written on the plastic which contains the pigment and attaches it to the box are the words ‘Do meu sangue, do meu suor, este amor viverá’ (from my blood, from my sweat, this love will live on). As Guy Brett writes about this work, ‘it is not possible to assign this object to the language of painting, sculpture or poetry separately’.63 All are present and the object is made of, and is, all of these things at once. But the work does not

Figure 2.6 Hélio Oiticica, B30 Bólide-caixa 17 variação do B1, caixa-poema 1: do meu sangue/do meu suor/este amor viverá, 1965–6. Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

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necessarily represent the collapse of what is poetry into what is not poetry. Rather, it is possible to see, within a single object, the divergent functions of the olfactic sack and the first poem from the ‘Poética secreta’. Instead of two objects, one poetic and one plastic, the box-poem is a single object that acts in two directions. On the one hand, the participant-subject’s body is able to engage with the object itself, opening the door to the box, handling, through the plastic sheeting, the raw materials that would, in other contexts, go on to become paint. In the other direction, the words can be read during the time of this experience, but they are neither that experience nor the experience they describe, refer to or stand in for. Rather than being embodied experience, the poetry references the body and also, via the love that will ‘viverá’ (live on), insists on what Oiticica describes as the eternalising function of the lyric. It is possible to see a split subjectivity here – the mind and body are engaged by the different regimes, and these map onto the lyric subject and the participating, relational subject. The ‘my’ of ‘my blood’ and ‘my sweat’ belong to the lyrical ‘I’ though it’s the viewer-participant whose blood and sweat are present in the moment of engagement with this work. The poetry incorporates experience exterior to the object itself and allows the subject and object to speak outside of the immediacy of sensory engagement with the material work. Though this example is not overtly political, it’s possible to see here how poetry opens a door that would invite other kinds of subjectivity into a hybrid work of art and poetry like this one. This happens in other box-poems from the bólides series, as for example, Box-Poem 2 ‘Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo’ (Homage to Cara de Cavalo) (Plate 3). Cara de Cavalo, pseudonym of Manoel Moreira, was a friend of Oiticica’s who had been accused of shooting a police officer. A month later, he was killed by the police in a much publicised and brutal spectacle. This box is also open-able by the viewer-participant. The door, in this case, pulls down to reveal a red-painted strip of gauze and a pouch of red pigment. The walls are lined with a photograph of Cara de Cavalo’s body lying in the street after he had been shot sixtyone times. The box contains the inscription, ‘Aqui está e aqui ficará. Contemplai seu silêncio heróico.’ This can be translated as ‘Here he is and here he will stay. Contemplate his heroic silence’, but because the grammatical subject is unclear in the Portuguese, it could also be ‘here it is and here it will stay. Contemplate its heroic silence’, referring to the body of Oiticica’s slain friend.

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This box-poem functions differently from Box-Poem 1. First, its material elements are not just themselves, or there to be perceived with only the viewer’s physical senses. The bright red pigment, as Small points out is ‘acutely metaphoric, evoking both the blood and ashes of the victim in palpable, visceral form’.64 In this box-poem, the representative function of the pigment is perhaps its most prominent function, and representation does not here belong only to language that, to follow Blanchot’s logic, in representing would therefore destroy the represented. Here, the photographic images of Cara de Cavalo’s body doubly perform that function: destroying the body by standing in its place as well as depicting the body as destroyed by state violence. This box-poem builds on the prior in that, as an object, it relationally engages both embodied and lyrical subjectivity. But, in this box-poem the poetic and plastic are not just woven together as distinct but collaborative forms. Here, they do function together. Though representation and metaphor cannot be said to belong only to language or poetry, it’s possible to see here that what were poetic functions in Box-Poem 1 and the Secret Poetics are shared with the material components of this work. The pigment is to be touched and felt, but it is also affective, touching. Small argues that ‘spectacular and distancing violence is counteracted with the haptic quality of touch’, as the only way to arrive at the photograph is to touch and unfold the box.65 The work speaks of an experience outside the object, but, in the immediate, it also makes the viewer-participant feel – with heart and hands. What was a divided subject, with the lyrical ‘I’ on the one hand and the sensing body on the other, is here complex but whole. The poetic inscription, which again points to the eternalising possibilities of poetry (‘here it will stay’), is embodied not just by the ‘I’ – the lyrical subject from which these words proceeded – but by the body that is also photographically represented in the box, and triangulated with the sensing subject who physically engages with the work. In this way, the poetic, while perhaps still a distinct regime from the plastic, is not an isolated, immaterial domain. Rather, it is able to share its possibilities with the material components of the work, which, in turn, share back. In this example, then, we can see a reinstantiation of the kind of material poetics Gullar abandoned in favour of politics precisely in one of Oiticica’s highly political works. As such, Oiticica’s hybrid poetic-plastic objects demonstrate that what might seem to be a less radical poetic path – one that relies on more traditional forms of lyrical subjectivity and representation – also holds

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the potential for a poetics of radicality, and without the loss of the subject/object relationality key to neoconcretism. One solution to Gullar’s apparent dead end, then, is to recover the lyric tradition without abandoning the relational methodologies developed during neoconcretism. But though exchanges between subject and object and poetry and plastic art maintain their importance in Oiticica’s box-poems, these works do seem to suggest that the only way out of relational poetry’s bind is to re-welcome linguistic representation. This has consequences for the materiality of language, which, in representing something external to itself, resumes the kind of transparency neoconcrete poetry broke with. In the box-poems, readers go back to looking through language, feeling the affective message imparted by the lyrical ‘I’, rather than perceiving language itself, in its materiality.

Lygia Pape’s ‘Plastic Language’ Lygia Pape offers an alternative to this outcome. Though better known as a plastic artist, Pape has also, both in and outside of her strictly neoconcrete period, demonstrated a consistent interest in language and poetry. And in her work the seam between language and object is eventually sealed, suggesting the possibility for a fully materialised poetics in which language is made from apparently nonlinguistic objects and yet still has something to ‘say’. This happens, on the one hand, as an outcome of Pape’s wide-ranging artistic output. Neither a poet, as Gullar always was, nor ‘not a poet’ as Oiticica insisted he wasn’t, Pape’s loyalties were to a broad set of practices, which included language-based works as well as works rooted in what was traditionally the domain of the plastic arts such as printmaking and painting. Like Oiticica, Pape would not abandon the tenets of neoconcretism amid the social and political upheaval that came about as a result of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Beyond the micropolitical propositions which might be attributed to Gullar’s neoconcrete practices, they did not explicitly engage with politics. Oiticica’s did, but to some cost for the materiality of language. Pape, however, engages politics directly, and does so via an extension of the material and linguistic practices she began working with during neoconcretism. For her, relational poetics became a method capable of engaging directly with the political sphere. Contrary to both Gullar and Oiticica, she found ways of making poetic political speech without giving up on material language.

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Like Oiticica, Pape began as a concretist and used both plastic and poetic methods. She also called a number of her works ‘poems’ and it’s in some of these, and in works that use language and the book form, where many of her experiments with relationality take shape. As Pape herself says, she ‘experimented with all kinds of language’.66 For her, these ‘languages’ were not limited to those composed of words, but rather, included ‘poems, sculptures, paintings, graphic designs’,67 woodcut prints, and more. As such, much of Lygia Pape’s output can be read as an investigation of the ways in which language and poetry find their place in the material objects of her creation. Though Pape does, at times, construct language from words, elsewhere they are absent and in their place is a wholly materialised language, one that shares the relational potential of Gullar and Oicitica’s material poetics but fully fuses poetic language and object, creating what Pape calls a ‘plastic language’.68 In the early years of Pape’s career, her work demonstrated the same interest in the line, the plane, geometric shapes and limited set of colours that characterised the work of other concrete plastic artists like Oiticica. With Oiticica, Pape showed her work as part of grupo frente’s first exhibit in 1954. Later, having joined with the neoconcretists, her work engaged a number of that group’s shared problematics including what Luis Camillo Osorio calls ‘the displacement of the creative gesture, which ceases to be preoccupied by the “I” and seeks its realisation in collective communion with the other’.69 But even though Pape’s work took on common concerns, it also stands out in a number of ways. Osorio argues that, ‘the dissemination of the act of expression was to become one of the poetic and political hallmarks of neoconcrete art’.70 But, as we’ve seen, Gullar’s ‘dissemination’ of creation comes at the cost of his poems’ ability to engage (and not just perform micro-) politics. While Oiticica does directly engage politics in his poetic works, this happens thanks to a relative loss of the hallmark Osorio describes – via the lyric’s reconstitution of the ‘I’. Pape manages to avoid both of these losses through her sustained engagement with materiality and relational poetics in the years following neoconcretism. This is one way in which Pape’s practices generally, and poetics specifically, can be distinguished from her colleagues’. Likewise, scholars have commented on the breadth of Pape’s work as another factor that differentiates it from others associated with neoconcretistm. In addition to underscoring ‘printmaking, and the woodcut in particular’,71 as unique to Pape, Adele Nelson, for example, points to Pape’s use of many so-called ‘languages’, writing that ‘over the

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course of [Pape’s] fifty-plus year career, she explored multifarious mediums and fields, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture, as well as filmmaking, graphic design, installation, jewellery, and performance’.72 What’s missing from this list, notably for this chapter’s concerns, is poetry, which has at least as long-standing a place in Pape’s career as any of the other ‘multifarious mediums’ that Nelson names. As Lisbeth Rebollo Gonçalves points out, the notion of ‘poetic space’ was also an important structuring idea for Pape throughout her career and linguistic and poetic questions are often the tie that binds the artist’s varied and multiple practices together.73 Though Pape’s poetry would eventually move in other directions, in the years just prior to their signing of the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ Pape produced book-poems, akin to those by Gullar. These, like the one in Figure 2.7, shared features with the book-poems by Gullar, including cut pages that, as the reader-participant turns them, reveal a limited set of words, one at a time. In Brazil, the term ‘book-poem’ preceded that of the ‘artist’s book’ and, as Márcia Regina Pereira de Sousa writes, ‘the experiments of the concrete poets [including some later identifying as neoconcretists] can be taken as a point of origin for the artist’s book’ in the country.74 This is another way in which we might understand neoconcrete objects such as the books made by Gullar and Pape as rooted in a poetically emphatic tradition. This is not to rule out the interdisciplinary nature of neoconcrete production, but it is a way of recognising the influence of poetry on Pape’s work in the movement’s early years. In the example in Figure 2.7, the reader

Figure 2.7 Lygia Pape, Livro-poema, 1959. Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

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opens onto a series of concentric circles that grow larger with each turn. Turning the pages, a spiral of words is revealed that begins with a rupture (‘rompe’ [break]) and ends with an embodied battle metaphor on ‘fronte’, meaning both front, as in wartime, and forehead. The other words here – roar, alarm, expand and resound – amount to a poetic version of the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’, published the same year, and this statement is no less strong. Pape’s, in fact, is fortified by its materialisation as a book that can be read both as a poetic call to arms and as a relational poetic object. Her book-poem marks its departure from concretism not just by announcing it, but by framing and inviting the readers’ sense participation into the very disclosing of this announcement. As with ‘Buried Poem’, these words emerge via the reader’s entry into the materialised poem. This is another version of the phenomenological openness that’s characteristic of the relational object, one that, as poetry, places language in its innermost space. Pape and Gullar both partake of this strategy, but Pape’s bookpoem also makes use of a number of features that are emblematic of her practice, notably concentric circles. This shape reappears in her Livro da criação (Book of Creation) and the circular form, in general, materialises again and again throughout Pape’s career. In this book-poem, it both encloses the space where readers’ senses are meant to focus, and suggests the rippling, resonant potential of the neoconcrete project. Elsewhere, its meaning varies. As a result, the circle becomes a kind of floating signifier in Pape’s career, a piece of material language that suggests the potential not just that words might come to occupy a position parallel to objects – as earlier, concrete poetry also suggested – but that objects can function as words do. In the Book of Creation, objects are meant to, for Pape, ‘“narrate” the creation of the world’.75 This work is comprised of free-standing pages that each represent one piece of a creation story that the readerparticipant can assemble as s/he wishes. The pages include perforations and cut-outs, pop-up features and bright, solid colours. They make imprecise reference to water, vegetation, light and the cosmos, among other possibilities. The Book of Creation, though not explicitly poetic, maintains an interest in ‘ethical questions’ that, as Nelson points out, are tied to poetic language for Pape during and after neoconcretism.76 Here, Pape manages to increase the relational potential of her earlier book-poem while also insisting on a fully materialised language in which material objects become language, not the other way around. Though the language Pape creates pre-exists its reading, the reader doesn’t follow a pre-set path through the book.

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This is the first of a series of major differences that Pape’s relational poetics have from Oiticica’s and Gullar’s. In comparison with Oiticica, it’s clear that Pape does not emphasise a division between the material/plastic and linguistic/poetic regimes. The two are fundamentally, and relationally, exchangeable with one another. In contrast to Gullar, Pape leaves the arranging of her book up to the reader, whereas Gullar’s neoconcrete poetry often set a predetermined order by which individual words would be apprehended. His book-poems, specifically, responded to the poet’s wish to ‘oblige a word-by-word reading’.77 In the Book of Creation, on the other hand, the reader’s participation in the story’s ordering is key. For Pape, then, to a greater degree than for Gullar (or Oiticica who maintains the lyrical ‘I’), the relational space is one in which the reader and writer don’t simply come together but share in the unfolding of creation. This is similar to the way that Lygia Clark’s relational objects, such as Caminhando, also rely on the viewer-participant’s manipulation for their realisation. In Pape’s example, though, this happens not as an outcome of the participant’s following of the artist’s score; rather than following external instructions laid out in language by the artist, for Pape the participant is able to deploy the very (plastic) language that comprises the work, undirected. This takes place in both the act of arranging the story and in the act of instilling it with meaning. Though the work, for Pape, is a creation story, she notes that ‘for another person, according to their particular sensibility and experience, those forms can have another meaning’.78 It’s thus both a creation story as in ‘origin story’ and a creation story as in a story that tells of its own creation. Looking again at the concentric circle (Figure 2.8), it’s evident that its meaningful possibilities multiply by way of the relational encounter. This particular page of the Book of Creation carries the subtitle of ‘Man Discovered that the Sun was the Centre of the Universe’, but this wouldn’t necessarily be apparent to readers-creators of the book. Instead, the circles can again suggest the movement of a pond’s surface, or of a planet and its rings, or, as Figure 2.8 suggests, any number of ‘naturally’ occurring concentric circles drawn from experience of the sensible world. Pape’s poetics thus diverges from Gullar’s in another important way. Gullar’s work with the non-object insists on a complete resistance to representation and seeks a material language that comes, via its being experienced sensorially, to stand only for itself. Though Pape also emphasises that the reader’s experience is what makes matter mean, her Book of Creation does not foreclose the

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Figure 2.8 Lygia Pape, from Livro da criação. 1959–60. Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

object’s representative potential. Instead, it complicates it, offering a more open and less directed reinstantiation of representation than, on the other hand, Oiticica. Book of Creation makes use of forms that are especially, but not particularly, suggestive. Unlike the non-object, these objects aren’t tautological in their representative capacity. They can and do point outward to other objects and ideas. But, this field of possible representations, unlike Oiticica’s, is not strictly determined by authorial intent, except in the sense that Pape’s intent is towards openness. Ultimately, though, exactly what Book of Creation represents is determined by the reader’s experience of both the work and the world in which they experience it. This is not a new function of objects. They have, at least as long as language, held both symbolic value and the instability of representation that comes along with it. And this wouldn’t be news to the concrete poets either, whose interest in semiotics included a special interest in Charles S. Peirce, into whose definition of the ‘icon’ Pape’s concentric circles could fit. The icon, as Peirce notes, ‘has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness’.79 It’s the likeness of Pape’s cardboard concentric circles to those created by a ripple on a pond’s surface that allows them to participate in what, in the pond’s case, is already an object-based metaphor for the way a disruptive idea travels. But though Pape may not be the first to use objects in the

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creation of meaning, her use of them is unique among her concrete and neoconcrete colleagues. Pape’s objects come to function as language in the same poetic lineage where language was previously made to function as objects. This demonstrates another way in which neoconcretism diverges from the concrete poetics that preceded it and, though Pape wasn’t as outspoken a theorist of the group’s practices as Gullar was, her work contributes to a broader vision of what relational poetics can be. If, in neoconcretism generally, there is slippage between subject and object, in Pape’s work this slippage extends to language and object. In her plastic language, what’s plastic is language and language is plastic. The result of this slippage is that Pape’s work from neoconcretism on cannot be read cleanly as either plastic or linguistic art. It is often both. While we can’t say Pape’s work is strictly poetic, receiving it from the point of view of poetics has the potential to radically alter the most basic of poetry’s assumptions: that as a linguistic art, poetry must be made of words. Even in Gullar’s poems, this remains assumed. Words become few, words become material components of the relational object, but they are never entirely abandoned. In Pape’s so-called ‘poems’, words are not crucial to expression. Pape’s work proposes a poetry whose language doesn’t just call attention to its own materiality, but takes shape in, and as, nonlinguistic material objects. And it is language’s ability to join with the subject and object in Pape’s works that enables her to grow the neoconcrete project from a philosophical one to political one. Unlike a number of her contemporaries, Pape remained in Brazil during the military dictatorship. Gullar went into exile in Chile, Argentina and Peru, and Oiticica spent eight years in New York, initially thanks to a Guggenheim grant. Pape not only remained in Brazil, but, in her work, openly (if allegorically) opposed the regime. In her words, she was ‘one of few plastic artists who participated in that period, in the physical sense of the thing’, and, as a result ‘really suffered’.80 This suffering is reflected in her work from the period, like Língua apunhalada (Stabbed Tongue) (Figure 2.9). This photograph is part of a series of works under the banner of ‘visual poems’. As Isadora Mattiolli describes, ‘the series in general is not united by formal or thematic cohesion, but by various experiments with words and objects’.81 The word ‘língua’ means both tongue and language. Here, this linguistic bond takes on new importance. This work from 1968 coincides with the tightening of the military regime that, though not without violence, was less strict during its initial four years. The bleeding tongue enacts the literal, violent silencing of artists and dissidents that

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Figure 2.9 Lygia Pape, Poemas visuais: Língua apunhalada, 1968, Photo: tongue and blood, Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

was happening concurrently in the political sphere. As a poem, its message is both absent in words and present in tongue. This is made possible by Pape’s dedication to a plastic language that permits language to be at once missing and material. This exact combination allows the Stabbed Tongue to speak, binding the tongue-object with the speaking subject inside a language that matters. As this example shows, Pape made use of a fully materialised language that, despite its lack of words, was able to reintroduce the possibility for poetry to speak in the political sphere. In this way, Pape’s poetics counter Gullar’s assertion that neoconcretism led ‘to the progressive grindingdown of the language of art until all that was left was its primary elements: sensations’82 by insisting that the sensible is already language. That said, this might also come at a loss. Stabbed Tongue, despite incorporating the participation of one, can be read as a work in which the viewer (or reader) resumes the role of passive contemplator, in place of the role of active participant. But while there is nothing for the viewer to touch here, this work, like Oiticica’s box-poem in homage to Cara de Cavalo, is affective and makes the viewer feel.

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While this is a long-standing function of art and certainly not introduced for the first time by Pape, when taken in context with neoconcretism, it adds, like Oiticica’s Box-Poem 2, another dimension to these artists’ engagement with the perceiving subject. Whereas earlier neoconcrete works emphasised the potential for sensory participation, Pape’s Stabbed Tongue emphasises the potential that its viewers might feel something as they engage the work, a kind of engagement that, she makes clear, is not at all passive. Likewise, this work complicates the reinstantiation of the authorial or artistic ‘I’ that might be assumed to accompany a less overtly participatory work such as the self-portrait Stabbed Tongue. Whereas Oiticica’s poetic works tended to maintain individual subjectivities like the lyrical ‘I’ or the embodied Cara de Cavalo, Pape’s Stabbed Tongue, made as it was in 1968, was likely to have been received as more than representative of the artist’s subjectivity alone. This stabbed tongue belongs, it suggests, to all Brazilians – artist and viewer(s), as well as all the invisible others not present in the encounter with the work. This happens by way of a reintroduction of the representative function of art in that the violence depicted in the work can’t but stand for something other than itself in such a highly charged political context. In calling this work a poem, though, it also makes a statement about the ways materiality still matters to Pape’s understanding of poetic language, which, despite being representational, does not disappear beneath the weight of the represented. The material features of this bleeding tongue remain among its most striking aspects. This differs from Oiticica, who capitalises on language’s noncoincidence with matter as a way of relating otherwise temporary experiences with the material world. And it differs from Gullar, who sought, with his proposed ‘terrorist act’,83 to violently break out of an increasingly restrictive poetic practice. With Stabbed Tongue, Pape would actually commit violence against the art object (and subject) it/herself. But in her case, this would not spell the end of her neoconcrete-adjacent practices. Rather, it would show that it was possible to use the violent act to merge the living object (the tongue) with the speaking subject inside of a plastic language that, despite being stabbed, has no trouble mouthing its message. Though Stabbed Tongue involves a return to more realist approach to artmaking, its insistence on itself as a poem via the title – the only, strictly speaking, language to appear ‘in’ the work – is a reminder of its relationship to the broader poetic concerns of the artists and poets associated with neoconcretism. Though each of the three (not-)poets considered in this chapter take different approaches to the expression

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of these concerns, they all share an interest in the ways poetic language can materially and sensorially engage with its participants. The consequences of their exploration of these possibilities are numerous for how material poetic practices might be understood in the Americas, where such practices are often thought of as proposing a kind of vanguard purity that eliminates poetry’s potential to engage beyond itself. As Oiticica reminds us in Tropicália, though, ‘purity is a myth’ and he, along with Gullar and Pape, to some degree, demonstrate a resistance to the notion that deep engagement with poetic materiality must come at the expense of political commitment. Though Gullar may have been least sympathetic to this suggestion, having left his neoconcrete engagement with materiality to dedicate himself to practising real politics, hints of his later commitments can be seen even in his most experimental works. And Oiticica and Pape suggest other possibilities for materialising poetic engagement in the hyper-local sphere of subject-object relations as well as in the national and international political spheres. Far from constituting a dead-end aesthetic alienation, relational poetics demonstrate the potential for radical rejuvenation in and outside of poetry.

Acknowledgement Images included in this chapter © Ferreira Gullar, © Projeto Lygia Pape and © Projeto Hélio Oiticica, respectively.

Notes 1. This refers to both concrete poetry and concrete art, movements that preceded and contributed to the launch of neoconcretism in Brazil. Concrete art prioritised simple geometric shapes in painting and sculpture (among other media) and concrete poetry sought, at times, an algorithmic or mathematical mode of generating poems. 2. Amílcar de Castro et al., ‘Manifesto neoconcreto’, 4. 3. Renato Rodrigues da Silva, ‘Ferreira Gullar’s Non-Object’, 257. 4. Charles Perrone, Seven Faces, 62. 5. Ibid. 6. This preface was reprinted in the 23 March 1959 Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil alongside the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’. 7. Theon Spanúdis, ‘Poesia neoconcreta’, 1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 8. Castro et al., ‘Manifesto neoconcreto’, 4.

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9. Ibid. 10. Castro et al., ‘Manifesto neoconcreto’. This language demonstrates the difference between the neoconcrete understanding of the object and what Manuel DeLanda (after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) calls assemblages, where it’s precisely the ‘exteriority of their relations’ that define the object as such, something I will take up in the following chapter on Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela. 11. Gullar notes that Phenomenology of Perception, The Structure of Behavior and Eye and Mind were among his most influential texts. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 43. 12. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 69. 13. Ibid. 43. 14. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 15. In this language, it’s possible to see Gullar working closely with MerleauPonty’s assertion that ‘the completed object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 79. 16. Ferreira Gullar, ‘Teoria do não-objeto’. Here, in addition to the influence of Merleau-Ponty, it’s possible to identify the influence of critic Mário Pedrosa. As Mónica Amor describes, Pedrosa wrote in a 1957 article for the Jornal do Brasil’s Sunday Supplement of ‘a mere phenomenological object given to direct experience’. Mónica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 87. 17. Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic, 169. 18. Sérgio B. Martins, ‘Phenomenological Openness Historicist’, 79. 19. Ibid. 20. Rodrigues da Silva, ‘Ferreira Gullar’s Non-Object’, 259. 21. LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 12. 22. Gullar, ‘Teoria do não-objeto’, 1. 23. Lygia Clark, ‘Caminhando’, accessed 20 September 2013, http://www. lygiaclark.org.br/ 24. Guy Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body’, 61. 25. Lygia Clark et al., Lygia Clark, 25–6. 26. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 81. 27. Ibid. 28. In spite of its anti-representation rhetoric, neoconcrete poetry, like concrete poetry, does not abandon meaning-generation altogether, but, as Pape’s work in particular shows, it extends this function across all of the poetic materials in use, which can include words, as well as nonlinguistic materials and sensation itself. And as with concrete poetry the field of meaning produced by the neoconcrete poem tends to be less proscribed than in other instances of linguistic communication. 29. Ferreira Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta, 128. 30. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 42.

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98 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America Bill Brown, Other Things, 21. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, 246. Ferreira Gullar, Arte concreta e neoconcreta. Ferreira Gullar, O Formigueiro. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 35. Gullar, O Formigueiro, unpaginated preface. Ibid. Ibid. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 71. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 72. Ibid. 71–2. Ibid. 76. Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta, 129. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 83–4. Gullar, ‘Teoria do não-objeto’. Mariola Alvarez, ‘The Anti-Dictionary’, http://nonsite.org/feature/theanti-dictionary-ferreira-gullars-non-object-poems Irene Small, ‘Exit and Impasse’, 96. Rebecca Kosick, ‘Decolonial Developments’. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 85–6. Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta, 130. Irene Small, Hélio Oiticica, 3. Pedro Erber, Breaching the Frame, 106. Poems by Roberta Camila Salgado in Tropicália, 1967. Translations by Steve Berg, Wall Text, Hélio Oiticica 2019, Tate Modern, London. Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto, ‘Political Crisis and Artistic Renewal in 1960s and 1970s Brazil, 7. Poems by Roberta Camila Salgado in Tropicália, 1967. Translations by Steve Berg, Wall Text, Hélio Oiticica 2019, Tate Modern, London. Hélio Oiticica, Poética secreta, accompanying notes, quoted in Frederico Oliveira Coelho, Livro ou livro-me, 108. Ibid. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 2. Oiticica, Poética secreta, accompanying notes. This poem might be translated as: The smell new touch, restarting of the senses absorption memory, oh! , come what may, shall be, will become, will be handful of future, apprehension.

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Sensation, Relation and Neoconcrete Poetics 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Oiticica, Poética secreta, accompanying notes. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 30. Guy Brett, Kinetic Art, 69. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 179. Ibid. Lygia Pape et al. (1983), Lygia Pape, 46. Ibid. Lygia Pape et al., Lygia Pape: Palavra do artista, 39. Luis Camillo Osorio, ‘Lygia Pape’, 572. Ibid. Adele Nelson, ‘Sensitive and Nondiscursive Things’, 30. Ibid. 27. Lisbeth Rebollo Gonçalves, ‘The Poetic Space by Lygia Pape’. Márcia Regina Pereira de Sousa, ‘Poesia concreta’, 2242. Pape et al., Lygia Pape: Palavra do artista, 31. Nelson, ‘Sensitive and Nondiscursive Things’, 39. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 70. Pape et al., Lygia Pape: Palavra do artista, 31. Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 114. Pape et al., Lygia Pape: Palavra Do Artista, 77. Isadora Buzo Mattiolli, ‘Estancar a ferida’, 770. Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta, 131. Gullar, Ferreira Gullar in Conversation, 85.

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Chapter 3

Assembling La nueva novela: Juan Luis Martínez and a Material Poetics of Relation

Despite its title, La nueva novela (The new novel) is unlikely to be considered a novel. The book was first assembled in 1971 by Chilean poet Juan Luis Martínez. It might be received as an artist’s book or work of collage, given its highly diverse visual, material and textual contents, many of which are appropriated from other sources. But Martínez understood the book as poetry. Like the neonconcrete works of the prior chapter which took the name ‘poem’, this chapter takes Martínez’s provocation as an opportunity to reframe poetry on the basis of a highly unconventional book-object that makes a claim on the genre. Martínez grew up in Valparaíso and moved later to Viña del Mar, occupying a somewhat marginal place in the geography of twentieth-century Chilean poetry. And in its early years La nueva novela struggled to reach an audience. Martínez sought its publication with the University of Valparaíso Press, but, having been rejected, it was not until 1977’s self-publication of 500 copies and, later, 1985’s 1,000-copy facsimile edition, that the book began to generate more widespread attention. During these years, as Scott Weintraub notes, La nueva novela ‘would circulate in a clandestine manner in literary circles and cafés in Santiago, Valparaíso, and Viña del Mar’.1 Although less well-known now than his former brother-in-law Raúl Zurita, for example, Martínez has been considered an important figure for Chile’s ‘neovanguardia’,2 and his influence at home and among successive generations of poets and artists is indisputable. But the book and the poet have occupied a relatively marginal position in the rest of the world until very recently. This is in part a deliberate strategy and in part due to the nature of Martínez’s work. He published only two collections of poetry during his lifetime, both of which radically upend expectations of what poetry – even

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experimental poetry – is, does and is made of. Of these two collections, La nueva novela is better known but is also a deliberately confusing, often nonsensical material object that, even for its most intimate readers, is very hard to know at all.3 Martínez the poet is equally unconventional. An autodidact, like Ferreira Gullar, who left formal schooling behind as a ‘rebellious, car-stealing, motorcycle racing’ (and crashing) adolescent,4 Martínez’s rigorous engagement with philosophy, mathematics, poetry and art took shape outside of institutional settings and at the margins of more cohesive artistic movements taking place in Chile at the time. Martínez also employed a number of strategies to secure his marginal – even anonymous – status, cultivating ways of diminishing his role as ‘author’. In the case of La nueva novela, in place of any kind of authorial ‘I’ is a series of material components including drawings, cartoons, mathematical problems, paradoxes, photographs, other people’s poems, homework assignments and, in one case, actual fishhooks taped to the page, among many other things. Each of these components ‘constitutes a poem; but at the same time they are all fragments of the whole which is the book itself’.5 There is no generic differeniation between these fragments, and the more readily recognisable poetry within the book is as much poetry as any of the book’s other parts, as Figure 3.1 suggests. Here, the equation of apparently unequal parts is staged literally and visually. This is just one of several appearances of Étienne Carjat’s famous 1871 photograph of Arthur Rimbaud, which circulates with and alongside a well-known 1875 photograph of Karl Marx by John Jabez Mayall throughout La nueva novela. For Michael Leong, this equation ‘seems to obliquely reference Rimbaud’s disheveled dandyism’6 and there is other evidence in the book that supports such a portrayal of Rimbaud, as well as a valorisation of radical politics. But the form in which such references manifest is nevertheless confounding, indirect and open to nonsense. That said, however antagonistic of sense-making, the equations that make up section 3 of the book ‘Tareas de aritmética’ (Arithmetic homework),7 like much of the book, prominently display themselves as sensible material. Together, La nueva novela’s components constitute what I will call a material poetics of relation, and this requires first of all accepting that the apparently non- and extra-poetic elements of La nueva novela are poetry. In part, my acceptance follows from Martínez’s suggestion that they are poetry, but it also grows from well-established multimedia poetic practices in Chile that include such examples as Vicente Huidobro’s visual poems, at the beginning of the

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Figure 3.1 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 48

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twentieth century8 and the work of Cecilia Vicuña today.9 In Chile, poets have long incorporated material practices into their poetry; understanding these material practices is important for understanding poetics within that context, and, for the purposes of this book, a broader theory of material poetics in the American hemisphere. Though emerging from another context, La nueva novela partakes of the same history of material poetics to which the Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete poetries also belong. As in the concrete poetries of Brazil, the poem’s ability to be sensed contributes to what makes it poetry. For the São Paulo-based poets of the 1950s, the poem is sensed as a visual, vocal and verbal object, one that must be seen, heard and understood in order to be apprehended. For the neoconcrete poets, based in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1960s, the poem’s material presence grows to include the haptic, inviting the reader to touch or physically co-create the poem. At times, this extends even to a fully immersive poetic experience, in which readers find themselves to be not only co-creators of the poem, but constitutive parts of it. I have called these kinds of practices a relational poetics – one which closely resembles strategies employed by neoconcrete artists of the same period, including Lygia Clark, whose relational objects emphasised embodied participation over distant contemplation. La nueva novela embodies, alternately, a material poetics of relation. This concept intersects with relation as it has already been theorised by Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Glissant. In his book Poetics of Relation, Glissant makes use of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of the rhizome to rethink, among other hierarchies, the problem of centre and periphery. As an alternative, Glissant’s poetics of relation ‘make every periphery into a center’, prizing errantry over rootedness, and proposing ‘unities whose interdependent variances jointly piece together the interactive totality’.10 As a political poetics, this would level what Pascale Casanova calls ‘the opposition between the great national literary spaces, which are also the oldest – and, accordingly, the best endowed – and those literary spaces that have more recently appeared and that are poor by comparison’.11 In a world poetics of relation, the artistic output of former colonies and other socalled peripheries would instead come to hold a position equal in value to that of the ‘centres’ because, in the rhizome, there is no centre. This idea is important to this chapter in that its centre is a book constructed in the margins of what might usually count as poetry, outside of what Casanova deems ‘the great national literary spaces’. However, this study will largely engage with Glissant’s poetics of relation from a literal and material perspective, asking what a

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decentring poetics of relation looks like inside a single, if ambitious, book of poetry. As with elsewhere in this study of material poetics, materialism is primarily literal in this chapter. Here, ‘material’ refers to La nueva novela and the parts it is made from – its language, its ink, its images, its paper, and so forth. Further, this chapter will bring together Glissant’s theorisation of relation with Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of assemblage theory, both of which extend from Deleuze and Guattari’s work with the rhizome, in order to consider how La nueva novela materially constructs relation as a poetics. In this, it will show how a book-object can create a staging ground for the ways its parts make and are made as sense, and the ways they do or do not belong to, or in, the book at all. La nueva novela was initially assembled just before the golpe de estado that established Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1973. It later appeared in its published forms during the dictatorship. As Michael Leong has suggested, Martínez’s long-standing ‘insistence on anonymity, on disappearing as an author, puts him in radical solidarity with the detained-disappeared’ of the period.12 And among La nueva novela’s many components are politically suggestive and referential words, images and things. The final section of the book, ‘Epígrafe para un libro condenado: La política’ (Epigraph for a condemned book: Politics), is partially obscured by a fragile paper Chilean flag and makes a clear political intervention, overtly referencing state violence in a quote attributed to Francis Picabia. The first part of this section’s title is also the title of the Spanish translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Épigraphe pour un livre condamné’, which was planned for the second edition of Les fleurs du mal after portions of the first were condemned for obscenity. Likewise, just prior to this epigraph appears a copy of Ezra Pound’s letter to the censors during his internment in Pisa. Also, Marx’s and Rimbaud’s portraits appear there pasted into a wanted poster. All these factors suggest a relation between radical politics and poetics and point to the difficulty artists (and, as the flag suggests, all Chileans) faced during the repressive regime. The many non-Chilean political actors who appear in the book can be read as ways of avoiding directly antagonising this regime, as scholars have pointed out. Jesús Sepúlveda writes that ‘Martínez finds his way to euphemistically address political issues censored at the time in Chile through an image of Hitler as representation of Pinochet and the notion of nonexistence as a reference to the detained-disappeared’.13 Weintraub describes how Chilean presses at the time showed a ‘stifling reticence’ to publish the work, which was apt to be negatively received

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by censors and critics alike.14 The likelihood of a negative reception can be pinned as much to politics as to the book’s absolute oddness and suggestive volatility, which together ensure that the book would have been sufficiently suspicious, even though, while certainly open to political interpretation, the book often frustrates efforts to read it in terms of a direct stance-taking – political or otherwise. Marx’s portrait, for example, appears five times but always in different contexts and outside of a context that might be called ‘his’, always positioned in relation to other visual or textual materials that don’t apparently belong together. The book is politically meaningful, but the kind of meaning to be found, like much of the meaning in La nueva novela, is suggestive rather than directive, often paradoxical, and extremely open to interpretation. Glissant writes that a poetics of relation ‘remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability’,15 and this is true of La nueva novela in that its political and ideological engagements, while frequent, can be hard to pin down. Within the book, images and references to politics constantly move, reappear and recontextualise themselves, and these references are generally open to not making sense. There is also so much more that cannot be subsumed under political relation alone. With this in mind, my aim is to attempt to account for how all the book’s distinct, unstable components constitute and set in motion a material poetics of relation. Among these relations are political ones but also many other kinds, and this chapter is reluctant to subject La nueva novela to a purely allegorical reading in which these other confusing and apparently illogical parts come to be chaotically representative of the ‘context of social and political instability in Chile’.16 As Gwen Kirkpatrick points out, this book is not that simple, and, among other things, it ‘covers themes that are philosophical as well as literary and political’.17 What’s more, the book resists any absolute rootedness and proposes in its place a rhizomatic horizontality where there is no hierarchy between its various ‘themes’. Thus, this study intends to let the book be what it seems to be: a strange assemblage of mismatched materials that do not communicate a unified message and often do not appear to belong together, or in a book of poetry. That question of belonging extends to what might usually be called the author or the poet – the subject from which the poetic utterance could be said to have sprung. La nueva novela doesn’t have an author of this sort, but ‘is made of variously formed matters’.18 As such, this chapter takes pains to avoid saying ‘Juan Luis Martínez’s

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La nueva novela’ as a way of resisting, with the book, its belonging to a single author, which the book calls into question before it is even opened. On its cover, the title appears along with the author’s name twice repeated, crossed out, and set inside parentheses as (Juan Luis Martínez) and (Juan de Dios Martínez).19 Already doubled, the ‘de Dios’ (of God) in the second name hints at a God who, in the Catholic tradition, is a thrice-split subject. And the book is full of other authors and their work, along with authors who appear not in the subject position as unified authorial ‘I’s, but as the subjects of other texts. For example, preceding the table of contents are two dedications ‘encontradas por (el autor) en un ejemplar del libro de Miguel Serrano: “Antología del verdadero cuento en Chile”’ (that were found by [the author] in an edition of the book by Miguel Serrano: ‘Antología del verdadero cuento en Chile’).20 Then, there appear what are made to look like two order forms inviting the reader to request by mail Rimbaud Cyclists and Was Marx a Satanist? by Rev. Richard Wurmbrand (Figure 3.2).21 Though the latter sounds the more improbable (or maybe it doesn’t), Was Marx a Satanist? is available today in English, German or Russian. Each sales slip contains a portrait of the book’s subject beneath the Nietzschereferencing heading, ‘El eterno retorno’ (The eternal return). This heading previews the at least occasional return of these two images throughout the rest of the book. They appear, for example, as the heads on the bodies of Superman (Marx) and a naked, Lois Lanestyle damsel (Rimbaud). Or in a wanted poster advertising a $2,000 reward. Or as components of mathematics exercises. In their first appearance, before the book even claims to officially begin, they are the subjects of other books. Before arriving at the table of contents, this book works to establish itself not as a singular creation which belongs to a single authorial subject, but as ‘a system of references that operate permanently in every direction’.22 To ‘read’ La nueva novela is to engage with a labyrinthine library of other books, ideas, objects, images, and so forth that aren’t necessarily La nueva novela’s alone. Though bound together as this book, its parts work equally to unbind it, to point out towards other things, people and places. The same might be said for any book which, made of language, is only ever a holding place for a series of word-parts it has gathered into a whole, but La nueva novela makes this fact manifest, and in more than just language. It may be a system of references, but these references are not just alluded to; they are made by and with materials borrowed from all kinds of things. The famous portraits

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Figure 3.2 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, unpaginated preface

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Figure 3.3 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 75 (detail)

of Rimbaud and Marx, for example, are images which have circulated through lots of other compositions. Also included in the book are constructions of clippings from newspapers and other preprinted materials. And the fishhooks that are taped to page 75 (Figure 3.3) are really there and may have been tied to the end of a line and stuck through a fish’s lip before composing part of what is titled ‘Ichthys’. That these things are all copies, including the fishhooks, is only an extension of La nueva novela’s already confused boundaries. As Zenaida Suárez writes about La nueva novela and another Martínez-assembled book, La poesía chilena, ‘all of the objects [inside the books] possess a specific function outside of the system that we call “the poetic works of Juan Luis Martínez.”’23 But by comparison with La nueva novela, La poesía chilena is less heterogeneous in its contents and less heterogenous still in the ways those contents are (re-) arranged and (re-) contextualised. As Gonzalo Montero writes, La poesía chilena was ‘composed in the middle of the military dictatorship, in a context of political repression and vigilance’.24 And, although, as Montero goes on to say, there are few ‘explicit references to the immediate political context’,25 this book contains a more cohesive set of contents that, together, lend themselves more easily to political interpretation. La poesía chilena includes death certificates of the famous Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda and Pablo de Rokha (and Martínez’s father) alongside bibliographic cards referencing the poets’ poems about death.

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These contents represent a more apparently purposeful set of relations than the ones present in La nueva novela. The collection also presents a metaphorical but evident meditation on death, dying and, by extension, being killed/disappeared. And, as Leong argues, La poesía chilena makes more extensive ‘use of elegy’ and more overtly critiques ‘the state’s impingement on its country’s literary traditions’ than La nueva novela would appear to.26 La nueva novela can be distinguished from La poesía chilena by its inclusion of a much more complicated set of components whose relations with one another, with extra-poetic contexts, and to the book as a whole are much less transparent. For Suárez, the objects that appear in La nueva novela are ‘the Chinese calligram, the blank page, the parchment paper, the transparency, and the fishhooks’ and can be separated into ‘invulnerable’ and ‘vulnerable’ categories.27 Objects belonging to these categories either do or do not, according to Suárez, ‘maintain, even after being introduced into [the book’s] system, the mark of their primary objectual domain’.28 She would categorise the fishhooks, for example, as invulnerable, and the transparency (a clear piece of plastic that acts like a window through pages 41 and 42) as vulnerable. For me, these five objects do not exhaust the potential ‘vulnerabilities’ of La nueva novela’s parts. Like the found dedications which open the book, or Marx and Rimbaud’s portraits, or the references that appear on almost every page to other authors, other books, theorists, artists, and so on, essentially all of La nueva novela is assembled from parts that, as Manuel DeLanda writes about the assemblage, ‘may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which [their] interactions are different’.29 These are what DeLanda, after Deleuze and Guattari, refers to as ‘relations of exteriority’ and what characterise an assemblage. Though, for DeLanda, assemblage theory is much bigger than the book, for Deleuze and Guattari the book grounds the theory. As they write: In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity.30

To be a multiplicity, the book can’t belong to a single author. This is an important goal of Martínez’s poetics broadly speaking, and

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of La nueva novela in particular, and is something the poet and Guattari discussed when they met at Martínez’s house in 1991. During this conversation, included in the posthumously published Poemas del otro, Guattari tells Martínez, ‘I don’t speak of “I” but rather of existential territories that integrate the I’.31 This position stakes out a theory that would disperse authorship, in general, but for Martínez, dissolving the ‘I’ is a poetic project. As he tells Guattari in their conversation, ‘my primary interest is the absolute dissolution of authorship, anonymity, and the ideal, if that word can be used, is to make a work in which almost no line belongs to me, a long work articulated by many fragments’.32 As a value shared by the poetics of relation, this notion also recalls Glissant’s claim that the author ‘is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation’.33 But though the stakes of this process are at play in La nueva novela, the crossing out and doubling of the author’s name on the book’s title is not merely a game, and the apparent absurdities that abound within the book’s binding are not just paradoxical jokes but ways of achieving the ‘deterritorialisation’ that Deleuze and Guattari describe. For Martínez, as Figure 3.4 shows, this is the task of poetry.34 La nueva novela is an assemblage, one which puts into practice a material poetics of relation, undermines single-authorship, and reveals in its stead the book’s construction in, and as, parts that bind and unbind it. These parts extend, in DeLanda’s terms, from ‘a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other extreme’.35 I will call these poles the sensible and the sensical. And though an emphasis on a human’s ability to ‘sense’ this book leads towards a reconstitution of the subject, I wish to distinguish between the authorial subject and reading subjects. Though La nueva novela works to dissolve the authorial subject, its reading subjects are already dispersed, as the numerous dedications – to Roger Caillois, Pablo Neruda, Yoko Ono, Maurice Blanchot, and many more – that appear throughout the book demonstrate. The human does not vanish because the book is, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, ‘unattributable’, but it is, rather, also multiple.36 La nueva novela doesn’t have a reader. It has readers. Describing these poles as sensible and sensical does not mean that the two have no overlap. As DeLanda indicates, these are not distinct categories but ends of a spectrum on which ‘a given component may play a mixture of material and expressive roles’.37 This is, in fact, almost always the case with the components composing La nueva novela,

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Figure 3.4 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 26

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which is not only full of expressive (and material) language but, as Suárez writes, ‘promotes a kind of extremely complex coding where objects that already have a meaning and function outside of [the work] come to have their meaningful and functional possibilities multiplied, and operate within the work like interpretable texts in the literary context to which they are attached’.38 But, though I agree with Suárez that the more material objects (like the fishhook and transparency) can be read for meaning within the text, the material cannot simply be subsumed under the meaningful in La nueva novela. And it should be reiterated that the sensible and sensical are poles between which the book constructs itself. Because just as the objects that might be more readily identified as sensible can be interpreted meaningfully, the more apparently meaningful portion of the book – the text – is constantly calling into question its ability, in any straightforward manner, to make sense.

The Sensible The question of sense-making will return, but first I would like to attempt to describe the book as a sensible object and temporarily resist, as much as possible, reading it. This is a challenging proposition. On the one hand, there is the problem, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus point out in their introduction to ‘Surface Reading’, of ‘whether we can ever set aside our responses in order to produce undistorted accounts of things’.39 We cannot. But, it is worthwhile to attempt anyway, and especially so in the case of La nueva novela. The reasoning for this claim is bound up in another of the book’s particular challenges to its being described as a sensible object: it is incredibly complex. Weintraub criticises the ‘overwhelming tendency in Martínez studies towards the proliferation of the kind of summative laundry lists – and extensive, unanalyzed citations (often of unattributed citations!) – that tend to dominate critical work on Juan Luis Martínez’s poetry’.40 While this chapter will contribute another of these lists, I would claim that this tendency is not critical laziness in the face of a hermetic and challenging text, but a particular kind of reading that is demanded by La nueva novela itself – one that doesn’t disregard a hermeneutic approach but also requires a mode of surface reading, akin to the kinds Best and Marcus discuss. Besides, to read the book for meaning, which will follow in the next section, readers are first owed the chance to familiarise themselves with the book as a whole. More than for other books, this is needed

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in La nueva novela’s case. Its extreme complexity makes description urgent. (It also makes exhaustive description impossible.) Because its complex contents do not really belong together in any way other than the fact of their belonging together in the book, it is not easy to summarise them. The only account of the book which might be considered ‘undistorted’ would end up looking like the unwieldy map in Borges’s ‘On Exactitude in Science’ in which ‘the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’.41 With this in mind, it would be productive, for example, to offer an account of some of the images in the book. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many are readers willing to read? And if, as a short cut, some of these images are reproduced here, has this chapter left the domain of description and begun to create a partial ‘Map of the Empire’? Also, if the book is a sensible object, which of its sensible aspects should be mentioned? A map-maker can indicate a forest without drawing every tree, but, in the case of La nueva novela, the forest is not trees. It is hundreds of dissimilar pieces without a taxonomic relation. I will leave all those hesitations on the table but will work to offer an account of the book-object anyway. To begin simply, La nueva novela is approximately 27 × 19 × 1.5 cm. It is printed in black ink and has 147 pages, not counting the colophon or the final blank page before the back binding. As the colophon notes, it was initially a single original, and transformed later into a ‘very limited edition’, which, for Oscar Sarmiento, ‘suggests that it effectively insists on its presence as a dissonant object’.42 It should be added that this dissonance is not just against a background of other objects and books but is also a good way of describing the clash of La nueva novela’s contents. This begins on the book’s cover, where, in addition to the two crossed-out, parenthetical names there is a black and white, overexposed photographic image of houses that appear to be tumbling into one another (Figure 3.5). The back cover is a graph-paper-like grid with instructions that read: ‘Dibuje el contorno de cada cuarto incluyendo puertas y ventanas. Marque dos rutas de escape para cada miembro de su familia. Cada cuadradito equivale 2 cm2.’ (Draw the contour of every square, including doors and windows. Mark two escape routes for every member of your family. Each little square equals 2 cm2.)43 The table of contents separates the book into seven sections plus two extra: ‘I: Respuestas a problemas de Jean Tardieu’, ‘II: Cinco problemas para Jean Tardieu’, ‘III: Tareas de aritmética’, ‘IV: El espacio y el tiempo’,

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Figure 3.5 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, cover

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‘V: La zoología’, VI: La literatura’, ‘VII: El desorden de los sentidos’, plus ‘Notas y referencias’ and ‘Epígrafe para un libro condenado: (La política)’. Each section begins with the section’s title set alone on the page and contains additional pages that are usually, but not always, broken out with their own titles or headings. So far, this is a description of the La nueva novela’s skeleton, those things that bind it together as a book – its covers and the sections its contents are divided into. But there is lots more to it. The first section, ‘Respuestas a problemas de Jean Tardieu’ (Answers to the problems of Jean Tardieu),44 doesn’t so much contain ‘answers’ as more problems; for example, on a page titled ‘El tiempo’ (Time), there is the instruction, ‘Medir en décimos de segundo el tiempo que se necesita para pronunciar la palabra “eternidad”’ (Measure in tenths of a second the time required to pronounce the word ‘eternity’).45 Elsewhere, there are images, or calls for images, such as, following a page titled ‘La psicología’ (Psychology), the question: ‘¿Cómo se representa usted la falta de pescado?’ (How do you represent the lack of fish?).46 On the following page, there are three examples that show how this might be done. The second section, ‘Cinco problemas para Jean Tardieu’ (Five problems for Jean Tardieu), has more than five problems, which include, for example, a page titled ‘El lenguaje’ (Language) on which appears images of a five-fingered hand spelling out the Spanish alphabet in sign language, below which is the caption ‘Tardieu, a partir de la afirmación de que generalmente no se usa el sexto dedo porque su existencia no es físicamente perceptible, modifique el alfabeto que aparece en la lámina superior’ (Tardieu, beginning with the affirmation that the sixth finger is not generally used because its existence is not physically perceptible, modify the alphabet that appears in the illustration above).47 This section also marks the appearance of the transparency, which works as a window through a page titled ‘Un problema transparente’ (A transparent problem) and reveals, depending on which way the page is turned, one of the following: either ‘Si La Transparencia se observara a sí misma, ¿Qué observaría?’ (If Transparency observed itself, What would it observe?) or ‘La Transparencia no podrá nunca observarse a sí misma’ (Transparency will never be able to observe itself).48 Section 3, ‘Tareas de aritmética’ (Arithmetic homework), contains arithmetic problems like the one featuring Rimbaud shown at the opening of this chapter and others, such as ‘Una máquina de coser x Una lámpara de lágrimas = Una viuda con 12 hijos’ (A sewing machine x A torch of tears = A widow with 12 children),

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which carries the footnote ‘En el estricto plano del lenguaje nada más triste que una lámpara de lágrimas’ (Strictly on the level of language, nothing sadder than a torch of tears).49 ‘El espacio y el tiempo’ (Space and time) is the title of section 4, and is also the title of individual subsections in sections 1 and 2. Section 4 has an image on every page except 62, which is blank other than its heading – ‘La proximidad’ (Proximity) – and a footnote to that heading – ‘Si La Proximidad se acercara un poquito más a las cosas, se convertiría en las cosas’ (If Proximity approximated things a little more, it would become things).50 Most of the other images in this section are reproductions of photographs, including three images of the Parthenon that are overexposed similarly to the image of the three crumbling houses on the book’s cover. These appear under the title ‘La curvatura del tiempo’ (The curvature of time), dedicated to Deleuze, followed by the caption below: Existe un lugar (Ej. La Ruinas del Partenón) cuyo interés no reside ya en la importancia arqueológica que alguna vez haya tenido, sino en la creciente inquietud que provoca vislumbrar fugazmente en los alrededores del Templo, la coincidencia de un momento y un lugar privilegiados y desde cuyo ángulo es posible verificar que el espacio transparente y azul que rodea a las columnas, exhibe ya también, visibles señales de deterioro.51 [There is a place (e.g., The Ruins of the Parthenon) whose interest no longer lies in the archeological importance that it may have once had, but in the growing uneasiness provoked by a fleeting glimpse of the Temple’s surroundings, the coincidence of a privileged moment and place from whose vantage point it is possibly to verify that the transparent blue space surrounding the columns also now shows visible signs of deterioration.]

Section 5, ‘La zoología’ (Zoology), features the fishhooks page, along with other references to animals (imaginary and not), including a ‘Bibliografía general sobre los gatos’ (General bibliography on cats) that lists T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats among other titles.52 There are also two images – negative and positive – of a fox terrier that appears elsewhere in the book, including on the title page, and following the colophon on the last page, where he is there labelled ‘El Guardián del Libro’ (The Guardian of the Book). In ‘La zoología’, the terrier is split in four by two intersecting avenues, each named after mathematicians (Figures 3.6 and 3.7).

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Figure 3.6 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 80

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Figure 3.7 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 82

The opposing pages are titled ‘Fox terrier desaparece en la intersección de las avenidas Gauss y Lobatchewsky’ (Fox terrier disappears in the intersection of Gauss and Lobatchewsky avenues) and ‘Fox terrier no desaparecido no reaparece en la no-intersección de las no-avenidas (Gauss y Lobatchewsky)’ (Non-disappeared fox terrier doesn’t reappear in the non-intersection of the non-avenues (Gauss and Lobatchewsky)).53 As note 4 in the notes and references section points out, the terrier’s name, ‘Sogol’, is ‘Logos’ in reverse. ‘La literatura’ (Literature), the sixth section, is home to ‘La página en blanco’ (The blank page), a semi-transparent piece of vellum with that title on it, along with a footnote that reads ‘El Cisne de Ana Pavlova sigue siendo la major página en blanco’ (Ana Pavlova’s Swan continues to be the best blank page).54 The page that follows is actually a blank page. This section is also home to what Suárez calls the ‘Chinese calligram’, a thin piece of paper, smaller than the rest of the book, which is folded in half and tucked between pages 96 and 97 on which Chinese characters appear. There is also a repeating photograph by Lewis Carroll of a young Alice Liddell,55 an image of musical notations that look to be spilling from the mouths of birds,56 and a page titled ‘Meditaciones sobre René Magritte’ (Mediations on René Magritte).57 In the final numbered section, ‘El desorden de los sentidos’ (Disorder of the senses), the first page is titled ‘El oído’ (The inner ear),58 but none of the remaining pages is titled after sense organs. Instead,

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they reference and picture Napoleon,59 Hitler60 and Tania Savich.61 Hitler’s and Savich’s photos appear inside a line drawing of a square and circle, respectively, under the titles ‘Adolf Hitler y la metáfora del cuadrado’ (Adolf Hitler and the metaphor of the square) and ‘Tania Savich y la fenomenología de lo redondo’ (Tania Savich and the phenomenology of roundness).62 The last two pages of this section reproduce, in positive and negative, a photograph of Dennis Oppenheim’s Rocked Circle in which the artist can be seen standing inside a rectangular patio stone, inside a circle.63 This description of each of the book’s main sections has been, I expect, both dull and interesting. Dull because this has mostly been a list of the materials that compose the book, and interesting for the same reason. These materials are themselves interesting and, because they refer to or are borrowed from so many other things and people, they invite curiosity. Readers want to know what they mean and why they are there, not just that they are there. And that makes an account like this frustrating. As a methodological approach, it provides the opportunity to ‘show’ much more of the book than a more purely interpretational account would have the time to do. But it also means an exhaustive interpretation of these materials does not arrive. This is in line with the book’s playful provocations, and so in some ways this description replicates the effect La nueva novela has on its readers – it opens a series of questions but it does not answer them all. La nueva novela does offer a section of ‘Notas y referencias’ (Notes and references), though, where there are notes and references to prior sections. As might be expected by now, these are not in the usual style of other books’ notes and references. For example, note 4, which refers to the negative image of the fox terrier from section 5, contains images of a dog’s potential belongings – leash, collar, whistle, and so on – but no image of a dog. It also includes a quote from Stéphane Mallarmé: ‘mi obra es un callejón sin salida’ (my work is a dead end).64 At the bottom is a bibliography that lists only one text: ‘La Transversalité; Félix Guattari., Rev., Psychothérapie institutionnelle, núm. 1.’65 The cover of Hobbes’s 1669 Quadratura circuli, cubatio sphaerae, duplicatio cubi, breviter demonstrata appears as note 12, referring back to the images of Hitler and Tania Savich.66 The book’s final section, ‘Epígrafe para un libro condenado: La política’ (Epigraph for a condemned book: Politics), opens as noted earlier with a tissue paper version of the Chilean flag, tucked just before the section’s title page. Immediately preceding these pages is one with a stack of rats under the heading ‘La estructura del pensamiento político’ (The structure of political thought) (Figure 3.8).

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Figure 3.8 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 139

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There is also a pink page, the thickness of cardstock, on one side of which appears the text from its facing page printed in mirror image, and the other side of which is titled, in English, ‘Throught [sic] the Looking Glass, and What the Poet Found There’.67 A reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s rabbit also appears there, as well as on the section’s second page.68 Near the end of the section are two more appearances of Marx and Rimbaud, in the wanted poster69 and as heads pasted onto a drawing of the bodies of Superman (Marx) and a naked woman (Rimbaud).70 Between these two pages is the reproduction of Ezra Pound’s letter about The Cantos to his censors in Pisa. Coming to the end of this description, it is clear that though I have tried to avoid interpreting what is described above, inevitably my intervention deeply marks the material, and implicit value judegments about what ought to be included in the description, when to include images from the book and even what ‘counts’ as material for it have affected what appears in the preceding pages. There is no discussion of the smell of the pages, though the smell of books likely holds a special nostalgic importance for many of their readers. Though its dimensions are listed, its weight or how heavy it feels when carried do not appear. As expected, La nueva novela cannot be described simply. It is not, for example, a story about two lovers torn apart by circumstance, or a series of poems about the forest. It is not obviously a book about anything, except in the sense that ‘there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made’.71 Instead, La nueva novela is a collection of parts both sensible and sensical that, as DeLanda describes following Deleuze and Guattari, also vacillate along a second axis between ‘territorialisation’ and ‘deterritorialisation’. In DeLanda’s words, these terms refer to the process whereby an assemblage’s components ‘either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it’.72 Because the assemblage under consideration is a book, I have been calling these processes binding and unbinding. Though, as DeLanda notes, ‘one and the same component may participate in both processes’,73 there are parts of the book which act more deeply in one or the other direction. The front and back covers, for example, literally help to bind the book. And the table of contents and section headings, not surprising things to find in books, generically speaking, help to bring this book’s diverse contents together into a whole, even though the contents themselves perform the unbinding work of constantly reminding the reader that La nueva novela exists in, and as, relations of exteriority. The rabbit, for example, is part of the

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book but is also Dürer’s rabbit. Rimbaud’s and Marx’s images are part of this book, but they are also someone else’s portraits, not to mention someone else’s faces. To try, as a scholarly exercise, to give readers a sense of this book demands some kind of thorough description, precisely because its contents are so diverse and so overtly operate along the spectrums DeLanda describes, as materials that are, at once, binding and unbinding, sensible and sensical.

The Sensical To move towards the sensical, then, is not as simple as turning to consider, now, what this book means. Neither is it as simple as treating what were its material facts as, now, material symbols, though many of the book’s materials can and do function symbolically. In ‘Meditaciones sobre René Magritte’ (Meditations on René Magritte), both visual and the verbal materials work, and in an almost identical manner, to convey meaning (Figure 3.9). Or it might be said that a visual functioning is part of the verbal functioning of this poem, as the words pipa (pipe), taza (cup) and kilo are split with a slash that works to visually break the words in the same way that the drawings are broken. In a twist on the idea that, in the words of Foucault (to whom this page is dedicated), ‘things and language happen to be separate’,74 in this poem things and language happen to be separated. That this separation happens on a page meditating on Magritte makes sense. The page’s title is a reference to the artist’s famous commentary on the very separation to which Foucault refers, 1929’s The Treason of Images, a painting which depicts a pipe above the caption ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (This is not a pipe). The Treason of Images points to the fact that neither the word pipe nor the painting of the pipe are, in fact, a pipe. And the image and text on La nueva novela’s page all work together to make, and remake, this point. Two years after La nueva novela was first put together, Foucault published an essay entitled Ceci ne’est pas une pipe, addressing Magritte’s painting. It’s unclear if the essay was available to Martínez prior to La nueva novela’s later publication in 1977. But, as English translator of Foucault’s essay James Harkness recounts, we do know that Magritte read Foucault’s now famous Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) and, as Harkness later indicates, both Magritte and Foucault explored ‘the essentially circumstantial, conventional, [and] historical nature of the bond between the

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Figure 3.9 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 93

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signifier (e. g., a word) and the signified (the object or concept represented)’.75 This exploration continues on this page of La nueva novela. Foucault describes The Treason of Images as ‘a calligram that Magritte has secretly constructed, then carefully unraveled’.76 He writes that ‘the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read’.77 Because ‘Magritte redistributed the text and the image in space’, Foucault writes, ‘each regains its place, but not without keeping some of the evasiveness proper to the calligram’.78 Although the calligram aspires to bring together textual and visual means of expression, for Foucault the act of reading or looking at one imposes its own divide: For the text to shape itself, for all its juxtaposed signs to form a dove, a flower, or a rainstorm, the gaze must refrain from any possible reading. Letters must remain points, sentences lines, paragraphs surfaces or masses-wings, stalks, or petals. The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates.79

To look at a calligram, then, is not to read (and vice versa). La nueva novela’s Magritte-meditating poem is not a calligram, in that it too maintains a separation of words and images. But it finds new ways of bringing their functions together, by way of their visual separation. As a result, both the words and the drawings of the poem resist being pulled entirely to the expressive end of DeLanda’s spectrum, and reading involves not just an understanding of the signifiers present on the page but also an apprehension of the material signs, split as they are. Though these things mean, they also matter. And yet, the meaning of the words and images pictured in the centre of the page – pipe, cup and kilo – largely does not matter. The pipe does make it easier to connect, along with the page’s title, to Magritte’s painting. But it could easily be anything else, as the cup and kilo show. These words and drawings are not there because they mean pipe, cup or kilo. Instead, they function as words uttered for their own sake, as when someone says, for example, ‘take the word pipe’. On this page, that ‘ta/za’ can refer to a real cup has little importance. Instead, what matters, and what means, is that the word and the image of the cup are split. This is another way of thinking about the territorialisationdeterritorialisation axis of the assemblage. It is possible to see this

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page working to bind materials that are also at work unbinding it – ‘cups’ that want to be cups, so to speak. And though cups do go on being cups, that ‘ta/za’ isn’t really about a cup for this page means that it, in addition to resisting the separation of words and images, also succeeds in resisting the separation between words and things. The word ‘ta/za’ really is about ‘ta/za’. This is underscored by the parenthetical ‘mis propiedades’ (my belongings) which introduces the three image/word pairs on the page. Whether the image or word belongs to the thing it represents is mostly irrelevant here. The images and words, themselves, are belongings – components that bind this page as it constructs itself as part of an even larger assemblage, the book. Word and image function together in ‘Meditaciones sobre René Magritte’ to convey meaning, but it’s not always the case that the book’s materials function expressively. For one thing, there are lots of parts of this book that would find themselves performing ‘a purely material role’80 like the glue of the binding. But it’s also the case that much of La nueva novela actively resists making sense. One way in which this works is through the book’s use of what Weintraub refers to as ‘a series of illogical investigations, constructed in a general sense as paradoxes or aporias, but that only serve to interrupt and confound [the book’s] reading’.81 These paradoxes do interrupt, and, by interrupting, they prevent readers from moving smoothly through language to the things it means to mean. Consider, for example, ‘Un problema transparente’ (A transparent problem), which asks, ‘Si La Transparencia se observara a sí misma, ¿Qué observaría?’ (If Transparency observed itself, What would it observe?).82 This is just one of the many paradoxes that appear throughout the book. It’s unsolvable, and in this way, it can’t be read ‘transparently’ and instead claims, as Glissant has phrased it, ‘the right to opacity’.83 In this case, readers aren’t able to move from the words on this page to the meaning outside of it. There is no seeing out of this ‘transparent problem’. And so, a resistance to meaning also performs the role of binding this book. It’s not just the glue and thread that keeps it together. La nueva novela’s paradoxes do, too. Imagining an extraliterary transparency which might be capable of observing itself will not be of much help. So, there is nowhere to turn outside the book, and, instead, readers are forced back inside the question, and to the real transparency that appears on the following page – a piece of plastic fixed inside the paper. Bill Brown describes a novel in which the protagonist ‘looks up at a filthy window and epiphanically thinks, “I must have things”’,

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arguing that ‘the interruption of the habit of looking through windows as transparencies enables the protagonist to look at a window itself in its opacity’.84 Though Brown goes on to use this as a way of distinguishing objects from things, this observation could be applied to La nueva novela’s ‘A transparent problem’. There, both the language-based paradox and the actual transparency serve to force attention onto the ‘opacity’ of this book-object instead of allowing readers to look cleanly through the window that language often functions as. In this book, the words themselves resist making sense and function like the object on the following page to disrupt the transparency of both language and, literally, transparencies. As a result, this object demands that readers look at it, and consider the alignment and size of the words on the page, which match the size and position of the transparency, so that when the page is turned the nontransparent question remains visible, even when readers do look through the window. This paradox turns a resistance to expressivity into a performance of territorialisation, but it also provokes questions about how the object is capable of acting and what the object is. If taken seriously, the question of what the transparency would observe if it could observe itself reveals one way that this book constructs itself as relations of exteriority. The transparency is transparent, meaning that, if it could observe itself, it wouldn’t be limited to observing its surface. It could observe right on through. This fact may provoke readers to wonder whether, if it is possible to get past the object’s surface, it might be possible to get down to the heart of things. On a page titled ‘La metafísica’ (Metaphysics) a similar question is posed: ‘¿La Esencia está mezclada con los objetos en forma de polvo? ¿O como un líquido? ¿O bien como raíces muy sutiles inmersas en el centro de las cosas?’ (Is Essence blended with objects in the form of dust? Or as a liquid? Or like extremely delicate roots immersed in the center of things?).85 This question, like other of the book’s paradoxes, asserts a similar resistance to transparently making sense. But the notion that ‘essence’ could be a dust, liquid or root is not nonsense. Instead it is an insistence that the interiority of material objects is other material objects. DeLanda makes this claim when discussing genes, arguing that ‘the interactions of genes with the rest of a body’s machinery should not be viewed as if they constituted the defining essence of that machinery’. Instead, genes ‘are simply one more component entering into relations of exteriority’.86 The transparency suggests the same thing in a slightly different way – that what is observable on the outside is also what is inside. The surface is also ‘the center of

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things’, and the ‘delicate roots’ that the question about essence references, then, do not grow down, but out. This is one way in which the book demonstrates its partaking of the notion that ‘all multiplicities are flat’.87 The flatness of the multiplicity that is La nueva novela may, ironically, best be seen on a page whose component parts actually stick out, the page titled ‘Ichthys’, onto which two metal fishhooks are fixed with plastic tape (Figure 3.10). For Suárez, the fishhook is invulnerable, meaning ‘upon introducing it to La nueva novela, it doesn’t lose any of the principal axioms it participates in outside of the book’.88 If we think about this as contributing to deterritorialisation, it is possible to see how the fishhooks work to unbind La nueva novela. In a very material sense, because they stick out they put pressure on the book’s binding. But metaphorically speaking, perhaps more clearly than other of the book’s component parts, they point away from the book. It is possible they were actually used to perform the job with which we associate them. And even if not, they were likely bought from a seller who had this in mind, as the catalogue-style text in the ‘Quorum’ section at the bottom of the page suggests. But, their deterritorialising function also doesn’t hurt the book as a whole. Rather, it is exactly in the outward pull of unbinding, and inward push of binding, that the book happens. The title ‘Icthys’ points to this again and again. ‘Icthys’, from the Greek for ‘fish’, is also the word for the symbol of the fish that stands for Christ. There are, in this, at least seven movements of deterritorialisation, likely more: (1) the word ‘icthys’, meaning ‘fish’; (2) fish; (3) Jesus, the once-living man; (4) Jesus, the religious symbol; (5) ‘Jesus’ as a name for both the man and the symbol; (6) ‘ ’ as a symbol for fish; and (7) ‘ ’ as a symbol for Jesus. It is in these moving parts that La nueva novela constructs itself, and how the book becomes ‘all the more total for being fragmented’.89 The book insists on itself as a fragmented whole repeatedly and via its very repetitions. The unbinding pull of deterritorialisation doesn’t just lead to some other exterior thing but back to the book itself. If the fishhooks point out that they, and all the other circulating ‘fishes’ that Icthys sets in motion, are not bound only to this book, that does not threaten the book as a whole. It can let them swim away. Even the hole they leave behind can work to bind this book whole, a point the La nueva novela makes when it includes a space to ‘represent the lack of fish’ (Figure 3.11). A lack of fish, then, is not an emptiness that threatens the wholeness of La nueva novela. For one, their lack contributes materially

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Figure 3.10 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 75

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Figure 3.11 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 18

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to the book. But also, their movement in and out of the book is precisely what makes La nueva novela. This is how the book shows its parts to be in a rhizomatic, if not taxonomic, relation with one another. It is not just a collage of dissonant materials. In collage, juxtaposition is a dominant factor, and the proximity of unlike things enables these things to be seen in a new comparative light. In La nueva novela, materials are not just juxtaposed but are always in relation with everything else, however dissonant. The book makes this manifest by keeping its parts moving and by having them constantly show up in new places, where they can then expose new relations that the book consists of, and exists as. ‘La página sesenta y uno’ (Page sixty-one) and ‘La página noventa y nueve’ (Page ninety-nine), for example, emphasise the movement of the book’s parts, inside, out of, and around, itself (Figures 3.12 and 3.13). Here, the book’s ‘lines of flight’ (in Deleuze and Guattari’s words) aren’t just between the images of legs and other objects exterior to the book, such as the legs that posed for these photographs. Their movements are also within the book itself, as notes ‘E’ on both of the pages (among others) show. In English, these notes read ‘The person seen in the foreground of this frame is (the author) of this book who, desiring not to delay his reader, is rushing off to wait for her/him on page 99’ and ‘It was the (author’s) intention to wait for the reader in this frame but, as the reader lagged behind in his/her reading, (the author) is already back on page 61, waiting for a subsequent reader who, faster in his/her reading, may manage to find him on this page’. Here, the ‘(author)’ is proposed to be inside the book, and is shown to be literally inside the text in the form of a pair of parentheses. So, even though the word ‘author’ could suggest a separate subject which might pull away from this book, the book binds the word to it, without limiting its freedom to move about. The same is true of its readers, who, though moving at different speeds, are also pulled into the frame by the book. In this way, the book shows itself capable not only of having parts that can detach from it and attach to a different assemblage, but of having parts that can detach and attach in different places within this same assemblage. Though its sections and pages are numbered, they are not ordered, and the book ‘has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle’.90 In this way, it is not just that every periphery becomes a centre but that an assemblage like La nueva novela, in Glissant’s words, ‘abolishes the very notion of the center and periphery’,91 and brings everything into its edgeless middle. It turns surfaces into essences, outsides into insides.

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Figure 3.12 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 61

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Figure 3.13 Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 99

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As a poetic project, La nueva novela is more than just a catalogue of references its readers can trace; it is a sensible and sensical assembling of them – a material poetics of relation. To read La nueva novela as a sensical object, then, is not just to turn from description to interpretation. It also requires that interpretation and description both attend to the material aspects of the book – the parts it is made from and how they are bound together. Though this chapter tried to separate the two approaches to ‘reading’ that this book’s material-expressive axis demands, they are inevitably inextricable. Part of what allows sense to be made from, for instance, the question of authorship for this book, is also the fact that the author or (author) or (authors) appear in different places, looking different ways, within the text. Those are material facts of the book as well as meaningful opportunities that the text offers to its readers. It is a book-object where the dash that separates those categories doesn’t represent a gap between them but their coincidence. This is one of many ways in which La nueva novela insists on relation. And the outcome of this insistence on, and material practice of, a poetics of relation is broad. It binds together what might appear on many fronts to be a marginal object – an experimental work of poetry put together by a relatively little-known Chilean poet – and positions it as a centre in which relations of all kinds are staged. In doing this, it demonstrates that poetry can provide the space for this staging, expanding the genre out into what might previously have been assumed to be unrelated territories. Along the way, it works to achieve what Glissant ambitiously describes as ‘a poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible’.92 The ambition of La nueva novela is no less than this, and its material realisation comes rather close to achieving it.

Acknowledgement All images included in this chapter © Fundación Juan Luis Martínez, reprinted with permission.

Notes 1. Scott Weintraub, Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics, 1. 2. This group, largely based in Valparaíso, would include, according to Iván Carrasco Muñoz, ‘Juan Luis Martínez, Raúl Zurita, and Juan

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Cameron, along with the indirect participation of Adolfo Nordenflycht and others’. In Santiago, this would also include those associated with the interdisciplinary group CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte). As Carrasco describes, the Chilean neovanguardia bears a resemblance to the historical avant-gardes but also radicalises some of their methods, including ‘the use of irony, parody, experimentation with the signifier, the metalinguistic dimension, and the depersonalisation of the subject’. Iván Carrasco Muñoz, ‘Antipoesía y neovanguardia’, 37, 38. This and future critical citations originally in Spanish are my translations unless otherwise noted. The other collection published during Martínez’s lifetime, which I will briefly touch on, is called La poesía chilena. Andrés Morales describes the collection in detail as follows: ‘a small box in black (predominantly) and white that contains an envelope with “earth from the valle central de Chile”, a set of bibliographic cards (authenticated with a stamp from the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile and which outline four important poems about the theme of death, by the poets Gabriela Mistral, “Los sonetos de la muerte”, from Desolación from 1922; Pablo Neruda, “Solo la muerte”, from Residencia en la Tierra, Volume II, 1935; Pablo De Rokha, “Poesía funeraria” from Gran Temperatura, 1937, and Vicente Huidobro, “Coronación de la muerte”, from Ultimos Poemas, 1948, posthumous), together with Chilean flags and photocopies of the death certificates (of these four “founding fathers” of Chilean poetry: Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, and Pablo de Rokha, plus the biological father of Martínez, Luis Guillermo Martínez Villablanca) and a short but emotive poetic text in Latin that opens the set: “Ab imo pectore”’. Andrés Morales, ‘Para una lectura interpretativa de La poesía chilena de Juan Luis Martínez’, 108. Weintraub, Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics, 2. ‘The New Novel, Juanluismartinez.cl, accessed 11 October 2017, http:// juanluismartinez.cl/jlm_english/obra/obra-literaria/la-nueva-novela/ Michael Leong, ‘Poetry Homework’, 166. English translations from La nueva novela, unless otherwise noted, are by Jack Schmitt and were previously published on the website maintained by the Martínez foundation, Juanluismartinez.cl See, for example, Vicente Huidobro and Orlando Jimeno-Grendi’s Horizon Carré or Huidobro’s 1922 exhibition of painted poems, Salle XIV. See, for example, Instan or any number of Vicuña’s works that combine text, image and matter. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 29, 93. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 83. Leong, ‘Poetry Homework’, 178. Jesús Sepúlveda, Poets on the Edge, 121. Weintraub, Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics, 1. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 32.

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16. Gwen Kirkpatrick, ‘Desapariciones y ausencias en “La nueva novela” de Juan Luis Martínez’, 227. 17. Ibid. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3. 19. Delightfully, the two author names are even extended to the ways in which the book is catalogued in library metadata, where it is listed under both. 20. Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, unpaginated preface. 21. Both mail-order slips appear originally in English. 22. Juanluismartinez.cl 23. Zenaida Suárez, ‘Objetualismo en Juan Luis Martínez’, 88. 24. Gonzalo Montero, ‘Entierros y desentierros’, 194. 25. Ibid. 195. 26. Leong, ‘Poetry Homework’, 170. As addressed by both Leong and Montero, the posthumously published El poeta anónimo is, in Montero’s words, the ‘work that makes Martínez’s political preoccupations most evident’; Montero, ‘Entierros y desentierros’, 198. 27. Suárez, ‘Objetualismo en Juan Luis Martínez’, 88. 28. Ibid. 29. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 10. 30. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3–4. 31. Juan Luis Martínez, Poemas del otro, 84. 32. Ibid. 82. 33. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 25. 34. The title translates as ‘Poetry homework’ or ‘Tasks of poetry’. 35. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 12; original emphasis. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3–4. 37. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 12. 38. Suárez, ‘Objetualismo en Juan Luis Martínez’, 88. 39. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, 18. 40. Weintraub, Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics, 35. 41. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, 325. 42. Oscar Sarmiento, ‘Intersecting Reflections’, 158. 43. My translation. 44. As Leong has pointed out, Martínez ‘appropriated many of [La nueva novela’s] exercises, which are grouped under such labels as “Archaeology”, “Geography”, and “Metaphysics”, from the 1978 Le Professeur Frœppel by Jean Tardieu’; Leong, ‘Poetry Homework’, 165. 45. Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 13. 46. Ibid. 17. 47. Ibid. 39. 48. Ibid. 40–1. 49. Ibid. 51. 50. Ibid. 62. 51. Ibid. 63.

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Assembling La nueva novela 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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Ibid. 77. Ibid. 81, 83. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 86, 105. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109–11. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. ‘The Phenomenology of Roundness’ is also the title of chapter 10 in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 116–17. Ibid. 125; my translation. It was left in the Spanish in the Schmitt translation. Ibid. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 141–2. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 147. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 12. Ibid. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 132. James Harkness, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Michel Foucault This is Not a Pipe, 2, 5. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 24. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 12. Scott Weintraub, ‘Juan Luis Martínez y las otredades de la metafísica’, 150. Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 40. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 194. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 1, 4; all emphasis original. Juan Luis Martínez and Juan de Dios Martínez, La nueva novela, 31. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 16. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. Suárez, ‘Objetualismo en Juan Luis Martínez’, 92. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6. Ibid. 25. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 29. Ibid. 32.

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Chapter 4

Concrete USA: Building Ronald Johnson’s ARK

In a 1996 interview with Peter O’Leary, Ronald Johnson claims that his book ARK is both an epic without history1 and a concrete poem that ‘took it way beyond’2 concrete poetry. The book was written over a period of more than twenty years from 1970 through to its initial publication-in-parts in the 1980s and 1990s. As a concrete poem beyond concrete poetry, the book’s 2013 full release from Flood Editions is a literal monument to behold, taking up the kind of threedimensional space that usually eludes the strictly practised concrete poetry of the mid-century. For the Brazilian concrete poets discussed in Chapter 1, for example, poetry’s spatiality was usually made visible through the unconventional arrangement of words on a single page or plane of text. This is true of ARK, too, but ARK is also 307 pages long. Within these pages, what look to be small, discrete concrete poems are embedded inside centre-justified verse and prose poetry. The book as a whole is split into three sections: ‘The Foundations’, ‘The Spires’, and ‘The Ramparts’. Each of these is divided into a further thirty-three parts, called ‘Beams’, ‘Spires’ and ‘Arches’ (and occasionally other things as well). In addition to concrete poetry, the book draws on twentieth-century experiments with the epic form by poets like William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky. As such, ARK is a big book which takes a great deal of time to read. This differs from the early practice of concrete poetry in Brazil in that ARK does not manage, nor set out to, put ‘into effect an immediate form of communication’3 whereby the reader can look at and apprehend the whole of the work in an apparent instant, as might seem to be the case when looking at, for example, a concrete poem made from a single word. As Chapter 1 recalls, the Brazilian group of concrete poets, known collectively as the Noigandres group argued that ‘the concrete poem

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communicates its own structure: structure-content’.4 ARK also communicates its structure, but it doesn’t do this in the way that early, and more orthodox, practices of concrete poetry did, where the poem’s entire structure is almost immediately visible. This is just the first of the ways ARK diverges from many of the givens of concrete poetics. In early Brazilian concrete poetry, for example, the ‘poem [wa]s an object in and of itself, not the interpreter of more or less subjective feelings’.5 ARK, on the other hand, is full of subjective feelings, and the language describing them. As an example, these lines ask: What will I tell in it? but jolt amazements of being wholly imagination6

The book does not resist subjectivity, as the presence of the ‘I’ here indicates. It also does not resist naming or describing subjective feelings. And as these lines suggest, ARK works with, and via, imagination. This is another major departure from strictly practised concrete poetry, not only because imagination is another indicator of subjectivity, but also because imagination is what sets the great metaphors of ARK in motion. Earlier concrete poetry did not rely on metaphor in its aim to become an ‘object in and of itself’. In that version of concrete poetry, the poem is itself an object, not a poetic record that helps readers imagine extra-poetic objects, feelings or events. ARK, though, is a poem that asks readers to imagine objects, and one kind in particular: architecture. Earlier concrete poetry, as an object, is sensible by human readers/viewers. ARK is too, but ARK is also a poem about sensation, and about its potential to synesthetically combine and confuse the senses. As an architecture, ARK is an epic concrete poem that is able to build from the principles of concrete poetry without having to excise concrete poetry’s excisions – ARK is a spatial poem which is also temporal. ARK is a literal object which is also metaphorical. ARK is an object with a subject. And ARK is a sensible object which is also about how sensation works. With these features in mind, this chapter argues that ARK builds a hybrid future for concrete poetry, one that can continue to work with the axioms of the original movement and incorporate more local experiments with epic poetry. Such an approach, I claim, proposes a model of poetic objecthood that posits the object as processual, under construction and on the move.

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The Epic Space of History This is a literal assertion, as I will go on to describe the ways in which ARK constructs itself inside space and time. But, ARK also demonstrates the ongoing vitality of a twentieth-century vanguard that, to many, never made much of an impact on US soil, and was most certainly considered out of fashion by the 1990s when ARK appeared in full. A queer poet from Kansas, Johnson is somewhat of an outlying, if beloved, figure in North American poetry, with no fixed belonging to a school or movement, despite traversing the ley lines of the Anglo-American poetic canon. While at Columbia University, he got to know Louis Zukofsky. He was connected to the Black Mountain school through his long-time partner Jonathan Williams and the Jargon Society, and he maintained a lengthy correspondence with Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. He later lived for twenty-five years in San Francisco, where he was founder of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club and made a living mostly by writing cookbooks. Eventually returning to Topeka, he died in 1998. Johnson drew on myriad influences and his long, ARK-itechtural poem reflects this.7 But though Johnson’s work may not be fully yoked to a single school or regional group within the United States,8 it is possible to understand his work in context with other practices of US poetry that, while not always claiming the label of ‘concrete’, share strategies with the poet from Kansas. The Introduction to this volume recounts some of the concrete-style poetries circulating through anglophone poetry in North America during the latter half of the twentieth century. In line with Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete poetry, many of these take a minimal form. This is evident, for example, in Saroyan’s one-word poem, ‘lighght’. But during that same time frame, a trend towards what might be understood as a maximalist approach to material poetry can also be identified. This registers in ARK’s 300 pages, as well as in the work of US poets like Charles Olson and Norman (N. H.) Pritchard. In the Canadian context, we might also include Steve McCaffery, whose Carnival is another more maximal take on material poetry with words and bits of words swirling across pages that are meant to be torn from the book by its readers and reassembled into large-scale panels. As I will discuss further in the following chapter, Anne Carson’s Nox can also take part in the ‘spreading’ of material poetry, though it does so with more materials than type. The relationship between Johnson and earlier modern and postmodern US writers of long poems has been well established in the

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critical literature. Nathan Brown writes that ‘most readers of Johnson track the procedural elements of his work to the influence of Zukofsky’, and argues that there is a ‘pervasive influence of [Olson’s] open field poetics’ legible in Johnson’s early work.9 Ross Hair describes what he calls ARK’s ‘bricolage poetics’ which, for example, ‘draw on Book X of the Odyssey’, also referenced by Pound in Canto XXXIX.10 Pritchard is less often cited in these discussions, because, as Aldon Lynn Nielsen writes, ‘critics of white poetry simply seldom look at black writers while compiling their genealogies of aesthetic evolution’.11 But Pritchard’s work, as Nielsen writes ‘clearly foregrounds the materiality of the means of signification’ and shows an ‘interest in concrete poetry’.12 I would add that, like Johnson, Pritchard’s take on concrete poetry can be understood as rearticulating the form on less minimal terms than those put forward in the 1950s and 1960s. In his 1971 book EECCHHOOEESS, for example, there is a two-page spread that is literally ‘crowded’ – forty-five lines of the repeating word ‘crowds’ completely fills the pages. There are no spaces between the various ‘crowds’ and the lines run entirely to the edges of the pages (as well as into the binding) with no margin.13 In this case, Pritchard’s poem contains only one word – not unlike Saroyan’s – but the word’s extreme repetition sets it apart from more minimal takes on the form. Other poems in EECCHHOOEESS incorporate unconventional spacing inside of longer lines of verse. For example, the final line of the poem ‘The Shroud’ reads ‘m ayb ebutpe bb lesbet weensa nda adse a’. When spaced conventionally, this translates to ‘maybe but pebbles between sand and sea’.14 Here then, the reading process is significantly slowed and stymied. While it is possible to read the ‘crowds’ poem in the almost instantaneous manner demanded by some of the ‘heroic’ phase-concrete poems, when taken as a whole Pritchard’s sets up a different kind of concrete endurance, echoes of which are identifiable in Johnson’s poetry. In terms of Charles Olson, we might point to a shared preoccupation with space, which, the opening lines of his Call Me Ishmael15 pronounce as ‘the central fact to man born in America’ (we can only speculate about women).16 The same could be said for Brazil, a country nearly the size of the United States. But, mid-century Brazilian concrete poets spatialised poetry by limiting its word count in order to transfer emphasis onto the matter of the words and letters themselves. Poets like Olson writing in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand, could be said to have spatialised poetry by writing enormous books of it (among other strategies). This has the added effect of

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elongating the time of poetry, something that can be said of Johnson’s ARK as well. As O’Leary points out, ‘ARK seems comparable to epic Modernist poems like The Cantos, Paterson, Maximus’,17 and Johnson admits that these works, and others in that tradition, were models for how he understood his own epic concrete poem. But, ARK departs from these in its construction of time. In reply to O’Leary, Johnson notes that ‘Olson said that an epic is a poem with history. Zukofsky put a lot of contemporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. William Carlos Williams had a topography, a history of all of the people around him.’ ARK, on the other hand, was to be ‘without history’.18 As this chapter will show, what takes history’s place in ARK is not not-time, but rather a construction of time that is also tied to space and to a continuous circling-back that propels the poem in a non-linear manner, and as non-linear matter, through concrete poetry. Nathan Brown suggests that one way of understanding ARK is ‘as a literary historical bridge between the mid-twentieth-century context from which it stems (Concretism, Olson, Zukofsky) to the visual/sound poetry’ that would come later.19 But, we can also look at ARK as a bridge between the various American modernisms to which Brown refers, in that it draws from both epic and concrete strategies. In her anthology of concrete poetry, Mary Ellen Solt makes a comparison between Olson’s notions of ‘projective verse’ and some aspects of concrete poetry, writing that ‘Olson’s insistence that “form is never more than an extension of content” is but a hair’s breadth away from the concept: form = content / content = form’.20 It’s fair to say, though, that there are very large differences between Olson’s poetics and that of concrete poetry, starting with the scale of a work like The Maximus Poems, which is completely at odds with the pared down approach of the Brazilian concrete poets working concurrently. Yet, within that long text, there are deviations from verse line that edge Olson’s poetry closer to the unconventional layouts associated with a broadly construed concrete or visual poetry. One example would be ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’. This poem starts by charting a paced path: 125 paces Grove Street from East end of Oak Grove cemetery to major turn NorthWest of road

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this line goes finally straight from Wallis property direct to White (as of 1707/8)21

If readers are able to follow this path through lines of verse, this becomes a challenge when the poem arrives at ‘Kent’s property/ Pearce’ and comes, quite literally, to a fork in the road (Figure 4.1). As Christian Moraru writes, the poem begins to arrange ‘letters, words, phrases and numbers in a pattern suggesting, if not utterly copying, the lines and shapes of a map’,22 and readers are no longer able to move along a straight path through lines of verse. This poem emblematises many of the ways that space is represented in The Maximus Poems, which refers constantly to Olson’s home in Gloucester, MA. Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes that the ‘Polis’ which comprises the book’s local and extra-local setting in Gloucester and elsewhere ‘begins as a vanguard formation of people who have a kind of collective will to know, to synthesize, to act. It is also, ideally, a site where the individual body, the geography of the place, the world, and both US and world history are continuous and inter-involved.’23 All of that gets staked out here, in this poem that is also, in part, a map. The paces that indicate distance in the opening lines are ways of registering the geography of this space against the

Figure 4.1 Charles Olson, from ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, The Maximus Poems, 150

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amount of space an individual body can take up mid-stride. And the poem ‘evokes’, as Moraru writes, the ‘process through which natural space becomes significant, culturally articulated and politically controlled space, that is, history’.24 Robert von Hallberg points out that the paced map of Gloucester ‘draws Maximus into its history, because he wants its meaning’.25 Here, space thus functions as an access point to the history not only of a given site, but also of History broadly rendered. That said, the poem doesn’t just draw Maximus, and readers, into space as a way of relaying history. Space is also an important material fact of the poem’s form and the way it attempts to map the geographical space of Gloucester onto the arrangement of the words on the page. Like in ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, The Maximus Poems elsewhere depart from the conventions of typesetting. This occurs, among other places, in part three, where a pair of pages open to one of several references to British coloniser Obadiah Bruen’s path through the northeast of the United States (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, 498–9

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Elsewhere in The Maximus Poems, Bruen’s references are less critical, but here the poem acknowledges the ‘hell and death and dirt and shit’ ‘in this filthy land / in this foul country where / human lives are so much trash’.26 These lives are not just human lives in the abstract sense, but specific people that have populated the spaces of Olson’s personal history – Bruen, but also Leroy (a likely reference to Olson’s friend, the poet Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones). Finally, the poem turns, literally, towards Olson’s father. The words there require the reader to actually turn the pages, a movement that mimics the movement of the poet ‘turning this page to Right / to write’.27 Moraru argues that ‘the astounding materiality of writing and the visual resources of the page not only contribute or “add” to’ the poem’s message, but ‘forcefully create it’.28 And in other parts of the text, language’s materiality can be seen as prominently contributing to its message-making capacity, in a mode akin to concrete poetry’s isomorphic understanding of the relationship of form and content. ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, ends with another map, but this time one that reduces a portion of the map of Gloucester from the title page to its linguistic and numeric elements alone (Figure 4.3). This, and the page-turning movement shown in Figure 4.2 is noteworthy in light of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’. There he writes that ‘ verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath’29 which will determine ‘the line its metric and its ending’.30 This is what he calls: ‘COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective’.31 Many critics have pointed out that Olson’s poetry often does not match what is here outlined as his poetics. If line breaks are a pause for breath, the long prose sections of ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’ and other poems, for example, are hard

Figure 4.3 Charles Olson, from ‘Letter 3, May 2, 1959’, The Maximus Poems, 156

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to square. Do the periods there between sentences mark the breath? Or is none taken until the paragraphs end? Nathan Brown also questions whether, in light of Olson’s (underappreciated) use of the term ‘objectism’, we ought to reconsider the common emphasis on Olson’s poetics ‘as constitutively bound to a theory of the organism, the biological body’.32 Instead, Brown suggests that Olson’s objectism ‘is at odds with any ideology or theory for which organic structure or biological functions essentially distinguish living bodies from objects’.33 There is further evidence for de-emphasising the priority given to the living body in Olson’s poetics in the more visually experimental portions of the Maximus Poems as well. To return to the verbal and typographic maps that bookend ‘Letter, May 2, 1959’, it’s possible to see how space and nonhuman influences – not the poet, not his breath – are what determine the form of the poem. Even before its lines diverge, the poem emphasises the ways that space imprints on the body, as opposed to the ways the body imprints on the space of the page. The poem’s first line reads ‘125 paces Grove Street’.34 The pace, as a measure, is a way of counting the human stride against the established space of the land, and paces continue here as the measure of this poetic map. Like the reader who must turn the page to read what the poet turned the page to write in Figure 4.2, this poetic map is both a record of how space – Gloucester, in this case – determines the movement of the body and a poetic spatialisation itself. Here, then, space is both content and form. It is a central fact of the poem – what the poem describes and recounts, what it is about – and is also a material fact of the poem – how it is laid out. This differs from the kind of influence that is usually traced from Olson to Johnson, but, it makes clear, as Solt claims, that ‘impulses toward concrete poetry have’, as she says, ‘been strong in American poetry’ in spite of its reputation. However, the poets Solt cites, including Robert Creeley, Williams and Olson, would not, she acknowledges, ‘wish to be or could [not] be labeled “concrete”.’35

Poetic Spacetime That said, these big books show that the long duration and the spatial expanse of poetry are entangled. Like The Maximus Poems, ARK is interested in how poetry might take up space as well as in what bodies (living and not) might contribute to a poetic foundation. But, uniting influences from North American modern and postmodern epic poems with the practice of concrete poetry, ARK also pushes

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these questions in new directions. This is particularly true of concrete poetry’s relationship to time. As Johnson tells it, the book ‘begins with sunrise and ends at the end of the night’,36 but its components aren’t moments. Rather, they’re material. The book’s three parts are ‘The Foundations’, ‘The Spires’ and ‘The Ramparts’, and its three sub-parts are ‘Beams’, ‘Spires’ and ‘Arches’. ARK’s overall structure demonstrates an isomorphic, circular understanding of space and time that is replicated as well in the book’s very first and very last lines. These lines narrate the launching of a spaceship: Over the rim body of earth

rays exit sun37

ad astra per aspera countdown for Lift Off38

ARK may be without history, but that does not mean the book is without time. Rather, its time is one that is always circling towards a new now, a present-ness that stays present. And ARK finds ways of writing this experience of time into itself. The spaceship described in the opening lines doesn’t come to land at the end of the book, or at what Johnson describes as the end of the night. Instead, as the final line’s ‘countdown for Lift Off’ suggests, ARK is always taking off. That the book begins with daybreak and ends with the night’s end is another way of saying this, because the end of the night is daybreak and this morning was yesterday’s future. Hair notes that ARK’s resistance to history has to do with ‘history’ as ‘a shorthand term for the methods and values implicated by Pound’s quoting strategies in The Cantos’.39 He also points out that ‘Johnson does not adopt an epic persona in the manner that Pound adopts Odysseus or Olson adopts Maximus, to articulate an overarching mythic structure’.40 But the model of time that shows up in ARK also contrasts with a linear understanding of history in that ARK’s time is one of a circling, but enduring present. It constructs itself, as the poet recounts, out ‘of things in my time’.41 Johnson tells O’Leary: in all art, you are building. I think at the heart of ARK is my father’s lumber yard. He and his father before him managed this lumber yard and I helped there and did all kinds of things. It was a huge building with these slots for different kinds and lengths of wood. And it was kind of a maze of wood. There were secret rooms and belfries – there was one

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with bats. And you could get up on the roof and there were black walnut trees and you could drop black walnuts before people and not exactly hit them. We weren’t allowed to go there.42

To build a structure from childhood memories and imagination is to bring them into the present and give them a material endurance they otherwise lack, something captured by the architecture metaphor that circulates throughout ARK. If not quite ‘history’, it is a re-cognition and re-visiting of the past. ARK builds from other materials as well. For example, Johnson writes that ‘ARK is fitted together with shards of language, in a kind of cement of music. Based on trinities, its cornerstones [are] the eye, the ear, the mind.’43 Here, sense perception is materialised doubly. It is not the experience of sight, but the embodied eye itself, and that eye, in turn, forms a cornerstone of the book’s architecture. The trinity he refers to likewise contributes to ARK’s structure of 3s and 33s. Of course, the trinity also refers to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, themselves made material in flesh, and in this reference the book’s title is shown not just to suggest architecture but Noah’s Ark or the Ark of the Covenant – other built objects that carry the material remnants of God’s destructive and creative acts. As Johnson tells it, the title means all those things, and others: I didn’t think about Noah – well, Noah gets in there. He’s got to get his lick in. I don’t know. I just thought ARK because it also included the rainbow44 – the rainbow goes all the way through the poem, that kind of arch, ‘arc’. It has all kinds of meaning, like ‘A’ has meaning for Zukofsky. You have to look at that several different ways to translate that title. I thought ARK had as many, and it was a structure, which I wanted; it was to save mankind, and the animal and vegetable and mineral world; and so I set off on a kind of science fiction, like building a time-capsule of everything I’ve heard and seen, to go out to the dark, to the stars.45

The time capsule, like the biblical Arks, is an apt metaphor for the work ARK keeps on doing. It gathers the materials of its moment, uses them as constructive materials for the poem, and keeps them moving in time and space. Together, these features suggest that the architecture of ARK is not that of a still-standing structure, but of a ship forever taking off, never coming back to land. ARK 81, Arches XV begins:

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Noah on board (Dialogue between Eddy & Flo) agenda: eternal purr46

Here, we have Noah getting his lick in. This stanza repeats the version of time suggested by the first and last lines of the book. This ship’s journey doesn’t come to a close but ‘dialogues’ between the continuous movement of ‘flow’ and the continuous return of the ‘eddy’, a whirlpool whose circular current runs counter to the stream it interrupts, but runs nonetheless. The circle and the stream are familiar metaphors for how time works – the calendar comes back around, the day begins again every morning, and time continues flowing forward. ARK constructs itself from these kinds of metaphors in which space and spatial structures can stand for time. For example, in the prose Beam 12 of the book’s first section, Johnson writes: If we represent the three-dimensional world we live in as a line, ray, or passage, between the fourth dimension as a globe, then as the universe expands this line describes involutions within that globe.47

This passage is hard to follow, in part because of its many ‘involutions’ which invite the collusion of the apparently opposing poles that are space and time. The ‘three-dimensional world’ here is proposed to be represented by the line, an image more commonly used to represent time, as in timeline. The fourth dimension – time – becomes a globe. In addition to the ways in which ARK stages the metaphorical collapse of space and time, the book itself is a structure that replicates this collapse on a broader scale. It is a concrete poem which takes up space and a long, epic poem which has an obvious physical thickness and, unlike orthodox concrete poetry, takes a long time to read. ARK is not the only literary work which might be said to mix space and time. Any (printed) book which takes a long time to read is likely to also be thick, and this feature is evident in the twentieth-century epics ARK builds from. But where this fact might otherwise be treated as incidental, for ARK it is monumental – a way of building concrete poetry out from flat space. The concrete poem of the 1950s also made use of space, but this was originally limited

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to the two-dimensional space of the page. On the other hand, ARK is a three-dimensional object. This is true of books generally speaking, but because it is not true of orthodox concrete poetry, ARK’s thickness matters in a way books’ thickness usually doesn’t, and it helps ARK construct a challenge to long-held assumptions about the domains of space and time as they belong to the arts. In a famous series of essays called ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ Joseph Frank engages with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, noting that the visual arts are often presumed to be ‘spatial, because the visible aspect of objects can best be presented juxtaposed in an instant of time’.48 ‘Literature, on the other hand, makes use of language, composed of a succession of words proceeding through time’.49 As a narrative poetic form, the epic would appear to represent this distinction. Not apprehensible in an instant like a work of visual art would seem to be, the epic has to be read through (or recited and listened to) over the course of time. ARK also unfolds over the course of time, but it simultaneously presents challenges to linear succession by insisting on itself as an object that is always in progress or only just beginning. This feature, in turn, begins to muddle the apparent distinction between space as the domain of the visual arts and time as the domain of the literary. That said, their distinction was already muddled. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out in his engagement with Frank’s essays, time and space are scrambled by all kinds of everyday experience, knowledge and modes of understanding: a more sensible solution is to note that we experience time in a wide variety of ways and that we consistently use spatial imagery to describe these experiences. In literature, our sense of continuity, sequence and linear progression is not nonspatial because it is temporal. Continuity and sequentiality are spatial images based in the schema of the unbroken line or surface; the experience of simultaneity or discontinuity is simply based in different kinds of spatial images from those involved in continuous, sequential experiences of time.50

Spatial form is not simply the opposite of continuity through time, and the two are hardly separable anyway. As Mitchell argues, space absolutely pervades our experience and accounting of literature, from discussions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels within a literary work, to structure and form, to what we ‘see in our mind’s eye’ as we read.51 Still, the notion that time and space each pertain to a single generic domain has had staying power. Ezra Pound, for his part, offered the definition of the image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and

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emotional complex in an instant of time’, going on to claim that ‘it is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’.52 For Pound, the image is a way of compressing time down to the instantaneous and of spreading out – all the way out – into space. Such an image can be made possible by literature, which might suggest an erosion of the supposed distinction between the domains of the visual and literary arts. But, Pound’s definition does still rely on the notion that where an image belongs is in big space and tiny time. And space’s growth, here, comes at the expense of time’s shrinking. Ekphrasis might be said to represent the opposite understanding of time. Rather than tiny time, ekphrasis can be thought of as a situation in which ‘a poem aspires to the atemporal “eternity” of the stoppedaction painting, or laments its inability to achieve it’.53 Though here time becomes eternal, ekphrasis, like Pound’s definition of the image, reifies the assumed split between the literary and the visual. Mitchell describes how ekphrasis can be characterised by ‘ekphrastic hope’ and ‘ekphrastic fear’. In ekphrastic hope, literature, or text’s, aspiration isn’t just to get outside of time but to get outside of itself entirely, to overcome its own otherness with regard to the object it works to bring into language.54 Ekphrastic fear, on the other hand, sees the possibility for exchange between the plastic and textual arts as ‘a dangerous promiscuity and tries to regulate the borders with firm distinctions between the senses, modes of representation, and the objects proper to each’.55 Part of what has composed these borders, historically, is the apparent non-coincidence of time and space, and ekphrasis’s own promise and impasse has, despite the work it does at these very borders, helped to maintain them. As Mitchell notes, ‘the image, the space of reference, projection, or formal patterning, cannot literally come into view’, something that is true of the mind’s-eye images generated by literature as well. ‘If it did’, Mitchell writes, ‘we would have left the genre of ekphrasis for concrete or shaped poetry, and the written signifiers would themselves take on iconic characteristics’.56 Concrete poetry, then, doesn’t just work at the borders between the imagistic and the verbal; it leaves Mitchell’s hopeful and fearful tensions entirely, and gives way to the realised promise of hybridity inside these otherwise distinct domains. Still, though in more strictly practised concrete poetry, text may overcome the divide between itself and other objects, this often comes with a cost to the longer temporality usually associated with literature. It prioritises space by diminishing

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the time it takes to read. It’s not necessary, or even productive, to read many concrete poems word by word. This isn’t the case with every concrete poem, and in the years following its stricter roll-out in the 1950s, its practitioners experimented with other like-minded, but distinct, approaches that did not always aim for instantaneity. But an early hallmark of concrete poetry was its ability to be perceived all at once, and it was this ability that enabled the concrete poem to be a spatial object. Early concrete poems by Ronald Johnson appeared in the Anthology of Concrete Poetry put out by Something Else Press in 1967, the first major collection of its kind in the United States. Though many of the poems gathered in that collection upheld concrete poetry’s early mode of becoming spatial, Johnson’s poems already showed an interest in time and space and the potential for non-instantaneity in concrete poetry. A portion of Johnson’s poem ‘Io and the Ox-Eye-Daisy’ (Figure 4.4) can serve as one such example. This poem cannot be read in an instant. It’s no epic either, but it does take time to read, and indeed constructs itself in time and space, as the ‘e’ in the palindromic ‘eye’ takes time to move from top to bottom. That it’s a palindrome also reiterates the kind of temporal circularity indentifiable in ARK. This poem invites a reading that has the potential to go on forever, and the reader is encouraged to not only read from top to bottom, but from bottom to top, back down again, and so on. A version of this poem makes it into ARK as well, in Beam 5 of ‘The Foundations’: eyeyeye57

This version turns the operation on its side but doesn’t give up any of the palindromic cycling the word sets in motion in the previous version. If anything, its presence in ARK some thirty years later is proof of the earlier version’s suggestion that it can keep on going forever, even inside a new construction that spreads out in time and space. Beam 5 underscores this in its opening line, where the double ‘o’ in ‘loom’ is replaced by the infinity symbol, a figure 8 turned on its side. As Hair writes, ‘this mathematical term introduced the idea of limitless, unbounded time’,58 something reiterated by the multiple appearances of ‘eyeyeye’ in Johnson’s oeuvre. Where this word was previously part of a small concrete poem, in ARK it is a component of a much larger construction. And in ARK this and other more concretely concrete sections like it act like interruptions in the flow of the long text whose own temporality is likewise ‘infinite or uroboric’ as Hair also points out.59

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Figure 4.4 Ronald Johnson, from ‘‘Io and the Ox-Eye-Daisy” in Emmett Williams, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Primary Information, 2013), unpaginated

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In many ways, these concrete interruptions could be said to represent a similar impulse to ekphrasis, which also interrupts the narrative flow. But, besides being themselves textual objects, Johnson’s concrete interjections don’t propose the same stillness that ekphrasis does. Instead, they act like eddies in the flow of time, interrupting time’s linearity but not the movement of time itself. In Johnson’s ARK, text doesn’t just take on the characteristics of visual art by foregoing its time for something else’s space, but it confuses and then constructs itself out of both time and space at once.

Objects Out of Time This book looks at different ways concrete and material poetries work to become object-like. In the case of ARK, architecture isn’t just a convenient metaphor the title begins to sound out for us, nor an overt deference to other ‘real’ architectural analogues. For ARK, architecture is a specific type of type – an object that reveals certain aspects of what it means to be an object that often get hidden in the ways we think about them. Importantly for the purposes of this chapter, architecture is a good way of exposing objects as processual, open to material transformation in time. If literary invocations or descriptions of the object often shrink or stop their time in order to grow in space, accounts of objects often treat objects as solely spatial material, not belonging to time, or simply: done. Addressing Heidegger, Graham Harman writes: All that emerges from his ‘temporal’ analysis of a hammer is that the hammer must be regarded both as the execution of a real effect (a.k.a. ‘past’) and as a discrete reality determined by its significance for a human involved in a specific projection of the world (a.k.a. ‘future’). The ambiguous co-existence of these two moments gives us Heidegger’s ‘present’. Voilà! There you have it: the supposed Heideggerian theory of time, which would hold good even if a sorcerer were able to freeze time forever in its tracks.60

Part of what bothers Harman here is that, for him, Heidegger’s readyto-hand and present-at-hand hammers are subordinated to their ‘significance for a human involved’. As Harman describes it (this time with billiard balls as the exemplar object), ‘the problem lies in assuming that two balls in collision do not also objectify each other, as if humans faced a world of still unperceived depths but inanimate objects exhausted one another’s reality upon the slightest contact’.61 If the human is the

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problem here, and time is wrapped up with him, then, for Harman, that notion of time is also a problem. That’s another version of the split assumed between literature and visual regimes. Text is temporal because a human has to read or write it. Alternately, the world of objects is spatial whether a human is around to notice it or not. Harman’s figurative sorcerer points to this too, as he doesn’t ‘stop’ time, but ‘freezes’ it ‘in its tracks’, in other words, turns time into a spatial, material object. That kind of spatiality isn’t usually thought of as ‘time’. Sure, the hammer-object used to be wood and steel, but those are just woodobject and steel-object, stable in their objectness regardless of what they could or did go on to become. Like the impression of ekphrasis’s pausing effect on the unfolding of narrative time, ‘in the world of solid objects envisaged by material-culture theorists’, Tim Ingold writes, ‘the flux of materials is stifled and stilled’.62 As Ingold points out, We see the building and not the plaster of its walls, the words and not the ink with which they were written. In reality, of course, the materials are still there and continue to mingle and react as they have always done, forever threatening the things they comprise with dissolution or even ‘dematerialization’. Plaster can crumble and ink can fade.63

Rather than dematerialisation, I would rather deem this process ‘rematerialisation’ as a way of highlighting Ingold’s point that ‘despite the best efforts of curators and conservationists, no object lasts forever. Materials always and inevitably win out over materiality in the long term.’64 The building, in other words, doesn’t dematerialise; it just turns into other materials with the passage of time. That movement, then, uncovers the materials the building already was – plaster, brick, wood, and so on. This is one way in which time registers on objects. Via the object’s deterioration over time, it is revealed that the object used to be other materials, or objects. Timothy Morton argues that, ‘we never find some material substrate that is not already some object’.65 This is another way in which the broken hammer can matter – not just because it can’t be used by a human anymore, or because it makes the human stop and notice it, but because the broken hammer contributes to next stage of the rematerialisation of those objects that were a hammer, and before that, wood and steel. Objects, though, are good at hiding the work time does to them, and good at purporting to be something much simpler, or more stable, than everything it took to make them. Marx knew this of course, and Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner describe how ekphrasis is complicit in the commodity’s occlusion: ‘the ekphrasis of almost any cultural object’, they write, ‘elides the cost of its production

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in human labour’.66 These alone are reasons to be suspicious of the idea that objects are without time or humans. But, even without a human around to take note, objects are beholden to time. This is true of the hammer, the wood, and the tree they used to be. The tree, though, may make it clearer to the people around to notice that something’s changing, as its materials differ visibly from season to season. If the presence of those people is a problem for Harman, it’s not a problem for ARK, and, in addition to built objects, ARK often invokes living ones – both people and not. Even beyond ARK, Johnson has had an interest in the living world and its intersection with poetry – seen for example in his The Book of the Green Man and The Shrubberies.67 These interests play out in ARK, too, and are entangled with ARK’s usual tangles of time and space, humans and objects. Beam 30, The Garden, adds the divine to this mix, telling readers, for example, that ‘The Lord is a delicate hammerer’68 (does that count as a hammer without a human?). And divine causality is at the heart of the story of Noah’s Ark. In Johnson’s ARK, though, objects, living and otherwise, also ‘objectify each other’, as Harman would say: Literally, a flowing: form-take-hand -with-form (That Which Fasteneth Us) pillar to pillar the great dance arch itself through all that is or was or will be, ¾ time. This will be a glade at the head of one stream69

Humanity registers in these lines but is not a markedly distinct category from that of objects. Here, forms go hand in hand. That they have hands is personifying, but a hand without a human might better be characterised as an object than a person. In the third line here, though, pillar takes to pillar without human intervention. And what fastens everything together is a ‘that’, not a ‘he’, nor a ‘He’, for that matter. For ARK, objects can exist outside the human, but, as these lines suggest, they are always still in time. This shows that ARK’s narration of time might not rely solely on the presence of a differentiated human subject and their ability to notice its passing. The kind of time that ARK’s objects endure takes a circular shape again. In the fourth line above, ARK’s arch makes an appearance.

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Though only half of a rainbow is usually visible, rainbows, too, are circles. So, the ‘arch’ ‘through all that is was or will be’ is on a course to come back around again. Further, the stanza begins and ends with the stream, whose familiar flow travels all around ARK. And, in a rewrite of the idiom ‘from pillar to post’, meaning from one place to another, Johnson substitutes ‘pillar to pillar’ – from one place back to that same place. All of this is set to a ¾ time dance. The most famous of these is the waltz, which consists of moving in a ‘box step’ around in the room in a counter-clockwise loop. Even the square, it seems, comes back around. And, that’s not the first time ARK says as much: c i r c l e c i r c l e70

This circular time, as its shapely metaphor suggests, is not apart from space. All of the spatial objects dance in ¾ time and that dance moves them in place and around through space. The human wouldn’t be out of place in this scene, but at the same time, none of its objects seems to have particular need for a human’s actions (past or potential) to make their moves through time happen. The concrete poem from Beam 5, in which the circle is squared, suggests something similar. A visual pun for the ‘circle2’, that poem is equal to ‘circle x circle’. In this way, it is an example that shows ARK does not, as Harman warns, ‘assum[e] that two balls in collision do not also objectify each other’.71 The circle is a spatial metaphor which represents the way time works in ARK. But it is also a place where ARK shows itself to be an object made of other objects objectifying each other, even if it was put together by a person.

Inside the Archi-type When Ingold writes that ‘we see the building and not the plaster of its walls, the words and not the ink with which they were written’,72 he points to the ways objects often not only hide the past of their production, but their pasts as other objects, or what Ingold calls ‘materials’. This might be true of objects in general, but the examples he gives of buildings and words are notable in the context of this chapter. Buildings and words are guilty of elision, he suggests, but I might argue that they are worse at it than other things. Buildings, once they’ve been built, can and do hide the labour that built them.

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But buildings, as opposed to many kinds of contemporary cultural objects, whose production happens somewhere behind the closed doors of the production space, aren’t just encountered when they’re already done. The pre-fab home is a rare exception, but even it passes by on the highway in two or more parts, exposing itself as an objectin-progress. In most other cases, the building is built exactly where it will stand, and humans are witness to its becoming-building in the way Johnson was witness, in his father’s lumber yard, to the ‘raw’ materials that inspired the building of ARK. Ingold writes that ‘we commonly describe materials as “raw” but never “cooked” – for by the time they have congealed into objects they have already disappeared’.73 Johnson, perhaps more than most, would be inclined to see the raw in the cooked. In addition to being a material and otherwise experimental poet, he was a cookbook author. His oeuvre includes a surprising blend of titles like To Do as Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson and Simple Fare: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Real Food. Cookbooks, and cooks, are first-hand witnesses to the becoming-object of raw materials. Unlike a cake on a shelf, which is already a cake, a recipe for a cake always represents the future of the ingredients it lists as well as a record of the cake’s past in parts. Buildings, too, register their pasts in this way. If Heidegger’s hammer bothers Harman for being too entirely inside the grasp or awareness of the human, that same hammer’s past as other materials has the opposite problem. It’s largely invisible to the hammering human. Buildings, on the other hand, show themselves under construction, and humans do take note. They wander through the open ‘rooms’ of unfinished buildings and imagine what they’ll look like once the drywall goes up. And because, even once completed, humans rely on buildings as a shield from the weather, they have a way of frustratingly revealing themselves to be made of what Ingold calls materials again. That’s one way the building registers time – by showing itself to be not just a building-object, but a building made of other material objects. Yet, perhaps more than other objects, they are constantly demonstrating the ways they are caught up in the progress of time. In English, even the word itself tells us this. A ‘building’ is a noun, but it’s also a present participle, a continuous tense that grammatically traps its action into acting forever. ARK is (a) building, but it is not attached to the earth, which means its materials are even more subject to the flux of time and space. As Morton points out, space is also a useful indicator of the way ‘things time other things’ in that ‘time is an aesthetic appearance that flows out of a thing, as Einstein argued, depending on its material properties,

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so that clocks run faster in a place at high altitude than they do on the Earth’s surface’.74 ARK operates as spaceship metaphor, underscoring this point. Literally, though, ARK is a ‘literal’ object – a book made of words and images, made of letters and marks on pages of paper. After buildings, words were the other example Ingold gave for objects that hide the materials they are made of. But like buildings, which show themselves in the making, words are a type of object which, despite what Ingold says, does show what it is made of, and not just when its ink begins to break down. This, as a matter of fact, is the very stuff concrete poetry is made of. Concrete poetry works by reminding readers that words are made of letters and ink, that they are objects that can be broken down, and out, and looked at, or listened to, in parts. And, as Nathan Brown argues, ARK is an architecture not only ‘because it is conceived as such or because its books and its subsections are named after parts of buildings, but because the graphemes of which it is composed are microstructures out of which macrostructures are built’.75 The repeating letter ‘O’, which appears throughout ARK, both in and outside of words is, in addition to being another circle, one example of this type of concrete architecture in the book. In Ark 55, The ABC Spire, words’ materials are building materials for the spire, for example: n

n

n

n

n

O D E

n

n

O D E

n

n

n

n

n

76

or t e l l

t i m e

t o m b

t u r n

t i d e

t u n e

t a l e

t r e e

77

These concrete building blocks based around the letters ‘n’ and ‘t’ show how ARK can reveal the materials words were before they were (and while they are) words. They also, again, work to lengthen the time of concrete poetry. A single one of these blocks may be possible to apprehend in what feels like an instant. The ‘node’ example, in particular, works like this. But, stacked together, one after the other

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in alphabetical order, they invite a kind of reading that combines the momentary with the monumental. Like the building under construction, readers can see as this poem comes together in time and in space.

Synesthetic Foundations The steady presence of those readers points to another characteristic of buildings and words: they are the kind of objects that humans fill in. ARK’s desire to ‘make it an architecture’78 is not a desire to build a building without a builder or inhabitants. Humans are all over ARK, and this is another way Johnson’s concrete poetics differ from more strictly practised versions. ARK’s concrete epic poem is full of people, bodies and even a subjective voice more proper to the lyric. The first line of Beam 3 is, for example, ‘I KNEW THEN THAT I HAD COME TO A PLACE.’79 And so, here ‘I’ is! It is both prominent in the book, and caught inside its tangle of spacetime, emerging inside the ‘then’ of time and the ‘place’ of space. The ‘I’ is important for ARK, but not just as an abstract placeholder for the ‘voice’ from which this poem is, in part anyway, constructed. This ‘I’ is also always an embodied subject which contributes its sense organs to the material construction and function of the poem. ARK’s building, per the poet, is a ship cornerstoned by ‘the eye, the ear, the mind’.80 So ‘I’ is also the ‘eye’ (and the ear and mind). The word ‘eye’, in fact, appears in the book before the word ‘I’, alone as the fourth line of ARK’s first Beam, just after the blast-off scene of the book’s opening. The first time ‘I’ appears, in Beam 2, it’s in this phrase: ‘in what I see’.81 ‘I’ is always a seeing ‘eye’, a sensing subject inside the sensible object that is ARK. ARK is founded on the ‘eye’, and on the other sensory organs too, but the ‘eye’ comes first. As a practice in material poetics, ARK is an architecture that is built out of and perceivable by the human’s senses. This, too, involves an exchange of time and space as ARK takes shape in the time of perception – the time it takes to listen and look. Of the book’s three sections, ‘The Foundations’ is the most variously sensible. In Beam 5, for example, there are lots of little concrete poems, like the squared circle examined earlier, and, on the same page, these three lines: i n m i n d i n a e a e a e a e a e w v w v w v w v w v eyeyeye

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The waves are an example of a concrete poem which ‘communicates its own structure’83 in that, in this poem that recalls Finlay’s ‘Wave Rock’, what the poem spells out is also how the poem is spelled out. Waves also represent sound, meaning that in this little triad the eye, ear and mind cornerstones of ARK come literally into view. Along with them comes their confusion, because, like time and space, ARK’s senses are not distinct aesthetic categories. Instead, they build into a kind of poetic synaesthesia in which sound emerges from sight, and vice versa, and the mind is caught up in it all. In addition to its palindromic back and forth, ‘eyeyeye’ is a synesthetic concrete poem that produces a sensible chain reaction as it is read. Seeing ‘eyeyeye’ is one thing. Hearing it is another. It could be ‘eye ye ye’ but it probably sounds more like the Spanish, ‘ay ay ay’ – an interjection that doesn’t grammatically mean anything but sounds out a feeling. This sound, and that feeling, come out of the poem’s ‘eyes’. Later in the poem, five lines of text are introduced by what looks like the beginnings of a musical score but turns out to be a key made of a series of flats with no notes to flatten (Figure 4.5).

‘bear’ (Polar) among the asphodel, singing Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello. Ear (solar) in Bosch metanoias—nose to nose Is, Is, Is (noise) Polyphony of epiphanies

Figure 4.5 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 17–18

Musical scores are visual symbols capable of being heard. But in this one, language, not music, is sounded out. These lines play with the musicality of language itself, but they also work to turn sound into other senses. For instance, a coupling is suggested between ‘‘bear’’

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and ‘Ear’ but, unlike ‘Polar’ and ‘solar’, the rhyme never emerges in sound. Instead, their relationship is mostly visual as is the one between ‘nose to nose Is, Is, Is’ and ‘(noise)’. The letters (as visual symbols) are what echoes, not overall the sounds. Along the same lines, ‘Is’ can be heard two ways: as ‘is’ or as a plural ‘I’. And, so ‘noise’ itself is shown to be made of nose and, if you listen without looking, ‘eyes’. Finally, though there is singing, Bach, and a cello, the ear itself is in line with Bosch, the painter. The symbol at end of the stanza tells us to go back to the beginning and do it all over again, another of ARK’s circular eddies, but this time in a musical score. Music shares with literature the distinction of long having been considered a temporal art, something that ‘differentiates it from the visual arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and sets it in a certain relationship to drama, poetry, and the dance’.84 As might be expected by now, ARK isn’t convinced of these distinctions. Instead, it works to show itself as being constructed precisely out of the aesthetic confusions among the senses and between time and space. Beam 25, A Bicentennial Hymn (Figure 4.6), is another example of this indistinction. It depicts a series of stages of cellular mitosis. The title refers to music, and though the poem goes on to invoke, among other things, A FIREWORKS MUSIC:85

the cell divisions don’t sound the same song. Theirs is the sound of science. Because each stage of the mitosis is mapped onto a letter from the alphabet, these scientific diagrams are a kind of image-text code that might be used in lieu of the letters that form the basis of alphabetic language, and ultimately, the sounds of speech. For example, the three images that comprise the upper left corner spell ‘BAD’. By adding the image second from the left in the second from the top row, ‘BEAD’, among other possibilities, can be spelled. If not obviously a music, the mitosis is a language that works like a visual word search, in which readers are encouraged to make their own words out of the partial alphabet these splitting cells act as. Importantly, the word search only comes to be words found if someone is willing to take the time to look around, and the imagistic display of mitosis itself works like the building-in-progress to reveal the two cells’ pasts as a single cell. This in turn refers back to the ‘Unaccompanied Cello’ of Beam 5, whose second word can be read as ‘cell-o’, a reference to the lone cell and its shape. ‘Cell-o’, written

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Figure 4.6 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 68

this way, is the opposite arrangement of the opening lines of Beam 25 (in which the mitosis appears): prosper O cell86

Like ‘eyeyeye’, readers can watch as this ‘O’ moves through the cell. If these cells have music in them, then, it registers visually, through a play of language that takes shape on the page. In addition to being cell-o’s, the splitting cells are also image-based explosions that evoke the ‘FIREWORKS MUSIC’ mentioned on the following

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page – something that, as a spectacle, is sensed through sound and sight, in time and space. The word search-like form of the mitosis also belongs to an ancient tradition of material poetry. As an example, Michael Squire describes a poem by fourth-century poet Optatian, also laid out like a word search, in which the ‘letters are shown to depict not only visual patterns, but also Greek texts concealed within and behind the Latin’ which produce, among other results, ‘a field of epic sounding poetry simultaneously shrunk into epigrammatic “play”’.87 Johnson’s concrete epic, ARK, is at home in this tradition, though, if we read the stages of cell mitosis in alphabetical order, its outcome is not a shrinking but a doubling of its original single cell. Still, as the mitosis suggests, ARK shares with these Greek texts an interest in the ways two apparently distinct forms – epic and concrete – can coincide in the same space. Their coincidence in space is also an insistence on the synesthetic lack of disparity between the senses. Readers can see the sound of fireworks and watch the cells divide in time. The mind, ARK’s other cornerstone, gets in on this confusion too, when, later in the poem, :the mind become its own subject matter:88

So subjectivity is undivided from the mind’s matter. And matter and mind, for that matter, are also not divided hierarchically, as Beam 3 suggests: mind over (under, behind, ahead) matter89

For ARK, mind is one matter in relation with others. Like points on a circle these relations can look to be under, over, behind or ahead, depending on who’s looking, and from what vantage point. The question of who’s looking and with what frame of reference, for Merleau-Ponty, has contributed to a lack of understanding of synaesthesia. As he writes, Synesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speak, feel, in order to deduce, from our own bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel.90

But if believing the physicist and not the evidence of the senses is, for Merleau-Ponty, what has prevented synaesthesia from being recognised as the rule, that’s not the case for ARK. There, science is evidence of

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synaesthesia. We saw this in the scientific ‘language’ of cellular mitosis that visually expressed the sound of fireworks. And it is visible-audible in Beam 14 (below) when a scientific aside is followed immediately by the crash of a false palindrome (‘underneathunder’) which straddles the boundary between sight and sound: (As Bohm posited: at zeropoint of energy a cubic centimeter of space = 10,000,000,000 tons uranium) underneathunder91

Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s physicist, the presence of physicist David Bohm in this poem does not stand in the way of synesthetic experience. Instead, he’s beside it. The words ‘underneath’ and ‘under’, which follow his appearance in the poem, visually crash into one another, literally making ‘thunder’, which is both evocative of the noisy weather event and a newly pronounceable word that emerges from the visual combination of two others. It is the passage these words make from the eyes to the mind, out of the mouth, and back into the ear which makes all this possible. The Brazilian concrete poets might call this ‘verbivocovisual’ – a poem that constructs itself out of materials that can be understood, heard and seen. ARK’s cornerstones of the eye, the ear and the mind clearly share a relationship with the three pegs of the verbivocovisual stool. But, unlike the concrete poets, who less often ventured towards the tactile,92 ARK reaches out. Jena Osman connects the hand in Figure 4.7 to the Orpheus myth that runs throughout ARK, especially through Beams 21, 22 and 23, which, together, form the section ‘The Song of Orpheus’. Part of this song, in turn, is composed via erasure from the Psalms. Johnson erases words from the Psalms to compose a portion of the poem called ‘Palms’, whose title, itself, is composed by erasing the first ‘s’ in Psalms.93 The palm comes through the Orpheus myth via Jean Cocteau’s film, Orphée, which Johnson refers to in his interview with O’Leary. In their conversation, Johnson says, Orpheus went into the underworld, which I take to be the unconscious, and there he finds Eurydice and tries to lead her out. Cocteau did this as a mirror, which was a bath of mercury. Which is one of the reasons the palm is there [‘Beam 18’], is that palm going into the mercury to get to the underworld.94

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Figure 4.7 Ronald Johnson, ARK, 49

With all this in mind, Osman claims that ‘the palm is reaching down for us, the readers. We are the ones who are in fact beneath the surface – the reader is the “eye” beneath the water’.95 But, if the underworld is the unconscious, it is the material hand that drags us out from ‘beneath the surface’. The hand is the part of the body we use for touching, and Beam 18’s hand is an insistence on the presence of touch within what might be assumed to be the non-tactile space of the English language. Seeing this palm print makes the generally hidden role of touch within the reading process explicit. And, as the reader imagines placing his palm against Johnson’s, he also becomes (self-) aware of what he is touching, which is not just the page but ‘a veritable touching of the touch’.96 This is one of several places in ARK where an unconscious activity – in this case, the usually unnoticed action of touching the

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page – is made to matter. This happens with Beam 18’s palm print as readers ‘see’ touch, another synesthetic undoing of the divisions between the human body’s sense perceptions. Later, in Beam 26, Johnson cites Carl Jung. Jung: ‘There are unconscious aspects of our perception of reality. The first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the real of reality into that of the mind. Within the mind they become psychic events whose ultimate nature is97

The remainder of the page is left blank, suggesting a nearly endless field of possibilities for what might follow. Among them, readers are invited to become writers and, literally, fill in the blank. There’s also an additional confusion of authorship. These are Jung’s words, but, like the erasures that allows the Psalms to rematerialise as ARK’s ‘Palms’, the spacing that places ‘nature is’ apart from the rest of the quote makes Jung’s words into something new. The quotation opens in Beam 26 but doesn’t close there. The title, ‘BEAM 27’, on the next page, is the next text to appear after the ‘is’ in ‘nature is’. A third effect of the blank page is to suggest nothing. Nature is . . . empty. Alternately, nature is space. But space, for ARK, is never just empty. The quotation does eventually close. After the title of Beam 27, there are several more blank lines and then: unknowable’.98

The mind is not the site of knowing in the citation, but ARK’s spatial intervention before ‘unknowable’ provokes the reader to try and know anyhow, or at least wonder about it. In this, the poem enacts the process described in Jung’s quote. Readers see the blank space of the page, their senses ‘react to’ it as a ‘real phenomen[on]’, but they can’t really know what the blank, ultimately, is. It is an opportunity, it is an open question, it is nothing. It is all these things and also, materially, space. In addition, for ARK, space is not just the space of the page, but the outer space the ship is destined for. In this Beam, like others, space is also time. When readers arrive at the blank space that follows ‘is’, they pause before they get to ‘unknowable’. As a result, amid the senses and their mixing, space and time are mixed again too.

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Before ARK was called ARK, ARK was called WOR(L)DS. According to Johnson, ‘the book was a concrete poem with the word “worlds” with an el in parentheses so it would make “words” or “worlds” depending on your focus’.99 As a note of explanation, Johnson goes on to say, ‘that was its original title. I think it’s still a good title. But Guy Davenport said never title a book something you can’t pronounce. And I believed him.’100 ‘WOR(L)DS’, though, is pronounceable, doubly so as Johnson points out. The pronunciation problem lies only in the fact that the two words can’t be pronounced at once. The same cannot be said for their perception. The word play in the discarded title can be perceived almost immediately and the two words read together. In other words, the title can be heard with the eyes, where it is perceived as a textual object made of others. Its original title then is also a preview of the ways in which ARK will construct itself inside the gaps between genres, time and space, the senses, mind and matter, and so on. But, instead of acting like scaffolding which unites two distinct poles, ARK proves that the concrete can be the epic, that space can equate to time, that the eyes can do the work of the ears, and that all these things can happen both in the poem and as the poem. ARK is an object that makes these mixed perceptions possible at every turn. It builds itself in time and space and reveals itself to be a spatial object that is also, always, in time. In turn, space and time reveal themselves to be two more perceivable aspects of the poem’s ark-itechtural object. Readers can see, hear and feel ARK. They can read ARK for meaning. And they can perceive it as spatial-temporal. The synesthetic mixing of sight and sound and touch in ‘The Foundations’ extends to a time-space synaesthesia in which the experience of one always requires the experience of the other. In this, ARK shows itself to be an object-in-the-making and also a metaphor for that same object. If the concrete poem is an object, and this is a concrete poem in progress, then ARK also represents one version of how concrete poetry can progress. Concrete poetry has sometimes been perceived as a dead end, a twentieth-century vanguardism which led poetry to a place with nowhere left to go. In other words, concrete poetry has been thought of as a stasis inside of poetry, an object that put a stop to the wider genre’s forward momentum. ARK underscores the fallacy of this perception by showing itself to be not just a concrete poem in progress, but concrete poetry in progress. Its particular progression involves the many circular eddies that in the book interrupt, but don’t stop, the movement of time. This is the way ARK progresses as concrete poetry. It doesn’t leave the practice behind in order to get back on track. Instead, it circles in and out

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of concrete poetry, showing itself to be architecture built from prior poetic objects that are always heading towards the future. All aboard the ARK.

Acknowledgements Quotations from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson © University of California Press 1984, reprinted with permission. Quotations from ARK by Ronald Johnson © 2013 published by Flood Editions, reprinted by permission of the publisher and the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Quotations from ‘Io and the Ox-Eyed Daisy’ (Figure 4.4) by Ronald Johnson © 1965, reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

Notes 1. Peter O’Leary and Ronald Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 33. Peter O’Leary is now Ronald Johnson’s literary executor and editor of the book’s most recent release from Flood Editions. 2. Ibid. 47. 3. Haroldo de de Campos, ‘Concrete Poetry-Language-Communication’, 243. 4. Augusto de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. 5. Ibid. 6. Ronald Johnson, ARK, 291. 7. Nathan Brown has tracked ARK’s relationship with real-world architectural experiments, including those of Buckminster Fuller, to whom Johnson dedicates ‘ARK 53, Starspire’. Brown makes a compelling case for a correspondence of poetic and architectural form shared by the two ‘architects’. As Brown acknowledges, Johnson also cites the Watts Towers by Simon Rodia (sometimes considered outsider art) as inspiration for ARK. Here I am less interested in how ARK replicates existing built environments than in what ARK’s particular model of architecture – which is at times analogous to actual architecture, but is also, according to the poet and poem, a strange medley of religious references, human sense organs, popular and poetic ‘stuff’ – can reveal towards further theorisations of poetic objecthood. Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication, 127. 8. When I say Johnson cannot be linked definitely to a single poetic school or regional group in the United States, this is not to suggest he was unknown. In fact, his ubiquitous presence throughout US and UK poetry of the era is partially responsible for his un-schooling. Working

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America against the regional model often dominant in canonical accounts of US literary history, Ross Hair suggests Johnson may belong to a transnational ‘extended family’ of vanguard poets who share a pastoral orientation as well as ‘similar sources, references, and allusions’. Ross Hair, Avant-Folk, 179. Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication, 133, 135. Ross Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, 158. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant, 13. Ibid. 13, 15. Norman H. Pritchard, EECCHHOOEESS, 56–7. Ibid. 27. Call me Ishmael was a short and idiosyncratic critical account of Melville’s Moby Dick that grew out of Olson’s graduate work on the subject. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, 17. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 33. Ibid.; Johnson’s emphasis. Brown, The Limits of Fabrication. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry, 48. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, 150. Christian Moraru, ‘“Topos/typos/tropos”’, 260. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘Olson and His Maximus Poems’, 138. Moraru, ‘“Topos/typos/tropos”’, 260–1. Here, von Hallberg refers to Maximus, in that word’s denotation of a kind of figure or character in the poem. Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson, 108. Olson, The Maximus Poems, 498. Ibid. 499. Moraru, ‘“Topos/typos/tropos”’, 266. Olson, Collected Prose, 239. Ibid. 242. Ibid. 239. Brown, The Limits of Fabrication, 59. Ibid. 60. Olson, The Maximus Poems, 150. Solt, Concrete Poetry, 49. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 48. Johnson, ARK, 5. Ibid. 307. Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, 177. Ibid. 166. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 33. Ibid. 40. Johnson, ARK, 312. The rainbow is also a reference to Johnson’s Rainbow Motorcycle Club.

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Ronald Johnson’s ARK 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

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O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 34. Johnson, ARK, 251. Ibid. 34. Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: Part I’, 223. Ibid. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Spatial Form in Literature’, 542. Ibid. 550–3. Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, 200. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 13–14. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 156. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 158. Johnson, ARK, 16. Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, 159. Ibid. 161. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 99. Ibid. 100. Tim Ingold, ‘Materials Against Materiality’, 11. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Timothy Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry’, 218. Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner, ‘Eight Ways of Looking at at Ekphrasis’, iii. Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies and The Book of the Green Man. Johnson, ARK, 84. Ibid. Ibid. 16. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 100. Ingold, ‘Materials Against Materiality’, 10. Ibid. 9. Timothy Morton, ‘The Liminal Space between Things’, 272. Brown, The Limits of Fabrication, 140. Johnson, ARK, 170. Ibid. 172. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 35. Johnson, ARK, 9. Ibid. 312. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 16. Hair notes that the ‘vowels in the miniconcrete “w a v e” poem also spell the name of Circe’s island abode, Aeaea’ in one of several references to the Odyssey (and also Pound). Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, 161. de Campos et al., ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, 218. Joan Stambaugh, ‘Music as a Temporal Form’, 265. Johnson, ARK, 69. Ibid. 68.

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170 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

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Material Poetics in Hemispheric America Michael Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell, 220–1. Johnson, ARK, 70. Ibid. 9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 266. Johnson, ARK, 38. Tactile engagement with poetry would become a major aim of neoconcrete poetry, which followed on the heels of concrete poetry in Brazil. See Chapter 2 for more on neoconcretism. Johnson was interested in erasure poetry and used the method throughout his career. See, for example, his RADI OS, an erasure poem composed from Milton’s Paradise Lost. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 50. Jena Osman, ‘Paranomastic Migrations’, in Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger (eds), Ronald Johnson, 236. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133. Johnson, ARK, 72. Ibid. 73. O’Leary and Johnson, ‘An Interview with Ronald Johnson’, 34. Ibid.

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Chapter 5

Lyrical Matters and Posthuman Poetics in Anne Carson’s Nox

As we saw in the previous chapter, Ronald Johnson’s ARK represents one of the ways in which concrete poetry moved through North America and into the late twentieth century. While Johnson was among few in the United States to call themselves concrete poets, as I discuss in Chapter 4, practices allied with that movement’s emphasis on the visual and material aspects of poetry are prevalent throughout North America. This is true despite the fact that, the lyric, though having what Jonathan Culler describes as an ‘uncertain generic status’ itself, has become nearly synonymous with ‘poetry’, especially in the United States.1 Elsewhere, this book has looked to Latin America as a way of establishing that, when American poetry is viewed through a hemispheric lens, material poetries such as concrete poetry can be seen as occupying a much stronger tradition than they have been given credit for. But, while material poetics played a prominent role in Latin American vanguards, this feature of the history of American poetics is not only legible there, or in the few but dedicated concrete poets of the North American tradition such as Ronald Johnson. Likewise, material poetic practices were not left behind in the twentieth century, even amid the much heralded arrival of the digital age. Nox, published in 2010 by Canadian-born poet Anne Carson, represents one such example of contemporary practices in material poetics. The book comes in a grey box that holds a long, accordionfold facsimile of a collage the poet made following her estranged brother Michael’s death. Just before he died, Carson received the first call from her brother since 1978 and made plans to go to Copenhagen to see him. A week before she was to leave, Michael died. Carson describes how Michael’s wife, whom she hadn’t known of, called but didn’t identify herself, she just said, ‘You don’t know me’. So I went to Copenhagen and met her and the dog and found out some things about

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his life but the more I found out the more I didn’t understand about who he had been those twenty-two years he was gone. So I started the book as an effort of understanding, just trying to put strands of things I could say about him into one place and see what it added up to. As it went on, it became what I called an epitaph, a way of praising him.

This ‘epitaph’ is thus a deeply biographical work. Among its scrapbooked ‘pages’ (‘pages’ because the book has no actual pages, only folds) are photographs from Carson’s childhood and remnants of Michael’s scant correspondence over the years. There are postcard stamps and torn bits of a single letter he wrote after fleeing to Europe and India to avoid arrest at home. This letter, which Carson notes in section 2.2 and elsewhere, was written ‘the winter the girl died’.2 In section 4.1 Carson writes about the girl: ‘My brother did not marry Anna. He married two (that I know of) other women during those years, one of whom divorced him, the other is now his widow.’ In section 3.2, ‘the widow says calmly’ that Anna ‘was the love of his life’. Thematically and visually, the letter Michael wrote following her death occupies a large portion of the book. It echoes Michael’s own death and materialisation in text, and it is pasted in parts throughout Nox. The information it imparts, like all of the siblings’ infrequent correspondence, looms large. ‘Because our conversations were few’, Carson writes in section 8.1, ‘I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I’d been asked to translate them’. Faced with such a biographical work, it is hard to avoid, as a reader, getting sucked into the unsolvable mystery of Michael’s life and death. But the work is also deeply – or broadly – material. Its subject matters are not just made present in theme, but are brought materially into the work. These include biographical remnants from the poet’s own life, but other things too – bits of text, poem 101 by Roman poet Catullus in both ‘original’ and translations, LatinEnglish dictionary entries for each word of Catullus’s poem, pieces of tape, staples, drawings, paintings and paint, among other things. Critics have commented on the book’s materiality in the years since its publishing. Similar to Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela,3 Nox’s incorporation of photographs, fragments of a letter and other things immediately suggest that the book’s matter matters. Its departure from the codex offers further proof of this assertion. But, as Kiene Brillenburg Wurth has incisively pointed out, many of these features are a ‘“show” of materiality’ that ultimately reveal ‘a material presence that is staged, screened, derived or second-hand’.4 Unlike Martínez’s facsimile,5 Nox’s inviting tactility is rarely actual.

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The bits of paper which appear pasted onto the ‘page’ only appear that way and their wrinkles and folds are, in fact, untouchable. Still, the ways a reader does touch this book are significantly influenced by its accordion structure, and the box it comes in. Like many of the material poetries discussed here, this fact makes Nox’s ‘pages’ into noticeable material components of its poetic project, rather than its unnoticed supports. Whether the book’s seemingly touchable components are all actually touchable in the way they suggest does not, for me, disqualify the book from being read as material, or through that lens. As Wurth writes, Nox is ‘at once text and texture, verbal and visual, memoir and artists’ book, an object to be read and an object to behold’.6 In this way, it also takes up a central proposal of new materialist thought, namely a rejection of binaries generally, and a specific rejection of what Rosi Braidotti refers to as ‘the binary opposition between the given and the constructed’.7 While Braidotti is primarily concerned with overturning this binary in the arena of ‘nature-culture interaction’,8 here the coincidence of the given and the constructed takes shape in (at least) two surprising ways that this chapter will go on to discuss. The first of these has to do with the way the book incorporates the lyric into its prominently material poetics. We began to see a similar incorporation of contrasting poetic types in Johnson’s ARK, something that points to the ways in which material poetics, when moving out of the twentieth century, began to soften some of the antagonisms that were upheld by earlier practices of the form. In spite of what I have identified as a robust tradition of material poetics throughout the Americas, the lyric’s near equation with poetry is still often taken as a given in twenty-first-century North America. Nox, though, uses the lyric as constructive material for its poetics. It builds poetic matter out of the lyric rather than presenting itself as the lyric’s alternative. Second, Nox works to propose a monism of person and poem, reconstructing, but also constructing for the first time, Michael through the poetic assembling of life’s material remnants. Michael’s death precipitated Nox, but he was already, in many ways, unknown to the poet. In its attempts to (re)construct Michael (and others, including Catullus, and his brother), Nox not only makes use of material poetic practices but works along that boundary described by Braidotti, revealing the given in and as the constructed. Among these monist gestures – of uniting lyric and material poetry, language and matter, poem and person – are others. For example,

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absence and presence are paired throughout the book. And notably, Nox blurs the boundary between original and translation through its continual reworkings of Catullus 101. Written after the death of each poet’s brother, Catullus 101 and Nox both slip between source and target text, which can be said of Michael’s letters too. Such gestures are a hallmark of Carson’s oeuvre generally, which is traceable to her first book of poems entitled (in a gesture reminiscent of Martínez’s titular genre-bending) Short Talks. As Joshua Marie Wilkinson points out, the poems were anthologised in collections of both short stories and essays. He writes, ‘it’s hard to imagine another first book of poems doing so much cross-genre pollinating’.9 This trend continues into her later works such as Decreation, which Cole Swenson notes ‘crosses from the genre of the essay to the genre of the opera, smudging the boundaries of each and interlacing them’.10 Nox takes Carson’s tendency to smudge literally in some cases – faded, waterlogged and smudged ink appears throughout the book’s pasted text fragments – and proposes a productive intersection between poetic and posthuman matters.

The Digital and the Material The fact of Nox’s materiality within the context of its publishing in the early twenty-first century has provoked a great deal of discussion. Wurth points out that Nox does not lend itself easily to digital forms of reproduction, arguing that the book ‘can ostensibly not exist on screen without losing something significant in the experience of reading it’.11 Along these lines, Liedeke Plate describes a commonly held view that Nox is one among ‘such works [that] present a reflection on the book and on the act of reading in the digital age’.12 Though both Wurth and Plate are, like me, invested in materialist readings of Nox, they point to a way of thinking in which works like Nox may be imagined as anachronistic acts of nostalgia for a more analogue age, deliberately resistant to the dominance of the digital. I will concede that it is possible, likely even, that the digital age is at least partly responsible for the rise in scholarly attention to the material aspects of literature and poetry that has taken hold in recent decades. But, what I have aimed to show throughout this book is that poetry has already been material. Many of the works discussed in these pages – from the pattern poems of Ancient Greece13 that would certainly be familiar to Carson, a classicist, to works of twentieth-century poetry whose materiality is not just resistant to digital iterability, but actually singular14 – share with

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Nox an investment in finding alternatives to the codex, in emphasising the sensory aspects of reading, and in centring extra- or nonlinguistic poetic materials. Thus, to Nox’s various monisms, I assert a resistance to the divide between the analogue and the digital in our understanding of the history (and future) of material poetics. While in this chapter, and elsewhere throughout this book, I borrow from posthumanism an interest in nonbinary thinking, my reading of material poetics departs from a binary that scholarship in posthumanist and other newly materialist areas nevertheless tends to uphold, between our current technologically entangled era and whatever came before. Braidotti writes that ‘there is a posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’.15 I do not dispute that this degree of technological change does, and ought to, bring about new ways of thinking our conditions of being. In this book, I have been eager to adopt a number of the tools that have come out of these discussions, but I have done so without adopting the premise that, at least within the domain of material poetics, the technological advances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are alone responsible for what has been described as a ‘new “current” of material reinvention in literary writing’.16 This current has been strong for some time in the context of hemispheric America. In addition to the examples I have discussed from Latin America and the United States, Canada boasts a strong tradition in concrete, visual and otherwise material poetics that includes poets such as Steve McCaffery and bpNichol. Anne Carson is not always connected to the international movement that built up around concrete poetry, but her work should be incorporated into a broader snapshot of material poetics in the American hemisphere. Nox, in particular, shares much in common with the artist’s book-style poem that is La nueva novela, as well as concrete poetry’s investment in the objecthood of poetry. As Karl Young points out, the entry for Canada in Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View is only two sentences long.17 Canada’s entry is even shorter than the entry for the United States, which admits ‘it would be an exaggeration to speak of a concrete poetry movement’ in the country and yet extends across thirteen pages.18 The Canadian entry reads: ‘Canada’s leading concrete poet is B. P. Nichol, one of the editors of Gronk. From his text we learn that “love” is also a beautiful word to look at’.19 Nichol died in

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1988 but remains one of Canada’s more prominent practitioners of visual and material poetry. In 2015, Canadian publisher Brick Books hosted ‘A Celebration of Canadian Visual/Concrete Poetry’, and in her introduction to the celebration, Amanda Earl notes that ‘when you read through the contributors’ lists of influences, you’ll notice that the name bpNichol comes up a lot’.20 His work included more orthodox concrete poetry – such as the love poem Solt includes in her anthology – and other forms of visually and materially experimental poetry – such as ‘Cold Mountain’, which Young describes as a ‘booklet [that] contained instructions for folding the book and burning it’ such that ‘the real visual poem was something you could only see for a few minutes: the book burning in front of you’.21 Among the contributions Brick Books gathers for its celebration of concrete and other materially invested poetries are an enormous variety of practices. As Earl describes, ‘whether they are reacting against the tyranny of convention in the form of the left-hand side of the page, Canada’s atrocious treatment of its indigenous peoples, consumerism as foisted on us by large corporations, or are engaging with age-old rituals, the visual poets presented [in the feature] offer a variety of methods, styles and aesthetics’.22 This diversity is not just a feature of the Canadian concrete, visual or material poetry community. What Earl notes about those poets aligns broadly with the impression given by the editors of The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008, which was published in 2012.23 Responding to the question of ‘Why “last”?’ Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis write ‘we tend to think that Vispo, as a category, now includes so many thriving sub genres that it cannot contain them all. Text art and visual language are so fecund, and the inclusion of digital potential so vast, that the scene has changed abruptly in the past few years’.24 Much of the uptake of these forms of poetry over the last years has, as the Vispo anthology editors also have, emphasised the influence of digital technologies. That is not to say that the digital is not also material. I agree that it is, and many scholars acknowledge this fact. N. Katherine Hayles writes that ‘the materiality of digital text increases the writer’s sense that writing is not merely the fashioning of a verbal abstraction but a concrete act of making, a production that involves manual manipulation, proprioceptive projection, kinaesthetic involvement, and other physical senses’.25 Here, much of what Hayles highlights – especially an investment in ‘concrete act[s] of making’ and the ‘physical senses’ – overlaps with the concerns of the material poetries investigated in this book. But, I am also keen to address examples of material poetry which demonstrate that there

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can be overlaps with recent theoretical interests in objects, matter, sensation, the posthuman, and so on that don’t have to rely on a concurrent investment in the digital on the part of poetry. In the same vein, material poetic practices which demonstrate resistance to the digital – which might be said of Nox, although it is itself a digital copy of a single original – don’t have to be defined entirely by their relationship to technological advances taking place at the moment of their publication.

The Lyrical and the Material I read Carson’s book not as contributing to a reactionary trend in contemporary poetics that seeks to recover earlier material forms, but as one recent manifestation of poetry’s long-standing ability to make itself matter. What Nox contributes, from its position in twenty-first-century North American material poetics, is further proof of a tendency I’ve identified – towards a reconciliation of the antagonisms by which the prior century’s practices in material poetics defined themselves. Notable among these is the tension between lyrical and material poetic types. The concrete poetry of the mid-twentieth century can be in part defined by its rejection of lyrical modes of poetic expression. It resisted everything from the lyric’s tendency to capture or express subjective feelings to the very possibility that language would prioritise the expression of any kind meaning at all. In place of, or at the expense of, these possibilities for poetry, mid-twentieth-century material poetics emphasised the ways poetry looked, sounded, felt to the touch, and so on. This began to change as material poetics moved away from early orthodoxies.26 In the last chapter, we saw how Ronald Johnson’s ARK, in the 1990s, reincorporated subjective modes of communication including use of the lyrical ‘I’ and expressive language, all the while circling back to, and through, concrete poetry. Johnson achieved this by embedding concrete and material modes of communication into his long, ‘epic’ poem. Nox goes further. It doesn’t just incorporate familiar forms of lyrical subjectivity within material poetic practice, but actually materialises, and rematerialises, the lyric itself. This feature of the book is what I see as among Nox’s notable contributions to the future of material poetics. For the most part, earlier practices in material poetics positioned themselves in opposition to the lyric.27 Nox’s incorporation of it, then, suggests a less antagonistic future

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for the practice and, perhaps, the possibility that material and lyrical poetry can share a common claim to our understanding of what poetry is now. That said, the opposition to lyrical subjectivity voiced by, for example, the Brazilian concrete poets was in part a necessary response to its sheer dominance – a dominance still perceived today. The lyric entry in the 2012 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics begins by noting that ‘in Western poetics, almost all poetry is now characterized as lyric’ (emphasis in the original),28 and so to stake a nonlyrical claim on ‘poetry’ required the kind of fortitude that antagonism enabled. Further, what Culler describes as lyric’s ‘promotion to the norm for poetry’,29 especially in twentieth-century anglophone America, gave the impression that material poetic practices were just occasional divergences from that norm – experiments that popped up once in a while – but nothing that could be said to constitute a major poetic type. What I’ve hoped to show throughout this book is that, taken together, these material ‘experiments’ in poetry are, in fact, a major portion of what poetry has come to be over the last century. But, it’s also the case that, in order to make space for themselves, material poetries often self-defined in resistance to the lyric. Nox, though, remains firm against such resistance and goes further to actually use the lyric as constructive material. Just after what might commonly be called the title ‘page’ of Nox, an image of Catullus 101 appears pasted into the book (Figure 5.1). In one of the book’s many gestures towards death, its ink bleeds. The paper on which the poem was typed is yellowed and the words take shape in an italicised, antique-suggesting serif font. This is generally not the case for other bits of paper which appear pasted into the book. These portions more often retain a grey-white colouring and modern, sometimes sans serif, fonts, despite sharing with this piece wrinkles and torn edges. Those items which do share degrees of 101’s yellowing include portions of Michael’s letter and old family photographs (actually old things) and translations of 101 that follow this Latin version later in the book. Together, these portions of the object that is Nox act as a meaningful and material foundation for the book, which goes about building connections between the lyric, the brother(s) and the material book as it comes into being. This is what Liedeke Plate refers to as Nox’s ‘bookishness’ – one whose materiality is ‘understood to encompass interpersonal relations, the relations among things, and those between people and things’.30 These relations are present in Nox. But they are also already present in Catullus 101. Nox’s

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Figure 5.1 Gaius Valerius Catullus, ‘CI’ in Anne Carson, Nox, unpaginated

distinction has less to do with the presence of such relations than in how they materially manifest (Figure 5.2). Examining Catullus 101, Juan Luis Arcaz Pozo describes how the poem can be broken into three parts, with lines 1–4 establishing the ‘situation and motive for [Catullus’s] trip’, lines 5 and 6, offering a ‘lament for the brother’s death’ and lines 7–10 encompassing the ‘offering of gifts and final goodbye’.31 With Plate’s framework in mind (‘interpersonal relations, the relations among things, and those between people and things’), it is possible to see that the poem’s lament is itself a relation among people. Both brothers are related here, too, by way of the burial gifts that Catullus offers (a peoplething relation). While the brothers could be said to occupy the status of person, these gifts, and the poem’s mention of ‘mute ash’, point to the double status of Catullus’s brother, who here is both person and, now dead, thing. Culler describes Catullus as ‘a poet who appears by his practice to conceive of the poem as a discourse addressed to another individual’, noting that ‘most of his poems [are] addressed to people presumed to be friends or acquaintances, or at least living people (very few

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Figure 5.2 Anne Carson, translation of Catullus 101, Nox, unpaginated

are addressed to no one or inanimate objects)’.32 Catullus 101, then, represents a certain middle zone for Catullus’s purported addressee, who is known to the poet, but is not living, and who has come to be, by way of death, an inanimate object. But, as the poem suggests, death here is not, as Braidotti reminds us, ‘the ultimate subtraction’, but rather ‘another phase in a generative process’33 that enables the figure of the brother to occupy the role of, and relate to, both people and things. The poem offers further proof of this porous border between person and thing, living and dead, in the example of Catullus himself, whose tears, in addition to evoking the seas he has crossed, act as both cognate and contrast to his brother’s ash. Catullus’s tears proceed from his living body to soak the burial gifts, literally constituting a fluid boundary between the poet and the objects described in the poem. Linked to the feminine,34 the fluid for Luce Irigaray ‘mixes with bodies of a like state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in an

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almost homogenous manner, which makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical’.35 As she goes on to write, the fluid ‘is already diffuse “in itself”, which disconcerts any attempt at static identification’.36 Catullus’s tears disconcert in this way, problematising the distinction between person and thing, brother and gift. And so, 101 shows itself to be, even prior to its incorporation into Nox, a staging ground for the kinds of questions Nox, too, attempts to answer – how can a poem materialise a person? And, what of the boundary between the person and the poem? As opposed to the kinds of poetic relations identified elsewhere in this book, those described in Catullus 101 are not actual to the reader. Where, in Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’,37 the reader really enters the underground chamber that is the poem, no such encounter takes place upon reading about Catullus’s journey to his brother’s burial site. This has constituted one major difference between lyrical and material modes of staging relation as explored in this book. While the lyric can be said to initiate ‘an event in the lyric present, the moment of address’,38 whatever relations described in the poem generally do not much overlap with the relations made possible by the event of its reading. An exception may be the case of direct address to the reader (a technique Carson says ‘Catullus invented’39), but in Catullus 101 the very differentiation between the posited and actual addressee serves to underscore a greater division between relations the poem recounts and relations it materialises. Catullus’s tears are not really there in the poem. Nox works to undermine this divide. By way of its incorporation of Catullus 101, the book serves as a means to materialise the ancient lyric – its relations, its themes, its components. The lyric, in turn, becomes working material for the version of material poetics that Carson develops in Nox. In this exchange, Nox insists on the object-nature of poetry differently than other examples addressed in this book that sought to make poetry into an object by way of its opposition with lyrical modes of representation.40 Nox, instead, makes lyrical modes of representation into objects. This process of transforming the lyric into Nox’s working material takes shape in big and small ways throughout the book. For example, the text of Catullus 101 appears a number of times in Nox: in its ‘original’ form, in (sometimes unreadable) translations, and as the source text for Carson’s dictionary entries that fill the lefthand side of each of the book’s ‘pages’. These entries provide English definitions for each word of Catullus 101, following the order of the words in the poem.

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Catullus 101 orders Nox and provides a literal – as in wordby-word – structure to the book’s unfolding. Because the dictionary-style entries follow the order of words laid down by Catullus, his words, as linguistic matter, give shape to Carson’s own elegiac material poem. Carson breaks apart Catullus 101, and puts it back together in such a way that the Roman poet’s words occupy a different kind, and a greater amount, of space. These entries constitute a ‘thick translation’41 that in turn constitutes the thickness of Nox. As Carson has pointed out, the structure of her ‘pages’ imitates the structure of bilingual translations of poetry that generally place the original work on the left and the translation on the right.42 But it’s not just Carson’s work on the right-hand ‘pages’. Sometimes portions of others’ – Michael’s, their mother’s – writing appears there too, and Carson also intervenes on the left-hand ‘pages’. Her definitions are not simply that, but are further poetic opportunities. As Megan O’Rourke writes in her New Yorker review of Nox, ‘when you look closely you see that Carson has messed with the Latin examples, introducing the word “night”, creating atmospheric little prose poems of the translated phrases’.43 The definition in Figure 5.3, for example, includes the phrases patiens noctis and in nocte. This has the effect of confusing source and target text(s), a confusion made possible by the mutual exchange of the lyrical and material in her work. Carson has intervened in all the entries except the one for frater (brother). Though absorbing the lyric into her brand of material poetics, this gesture also makes good on a proposal once made by the Brazilian concrete poets: that meaning, rather than the immaterial result of poetry’s provocations, can be, itself, poetic material. This is not necessarily a new proposal (and wasn’t even when the concrete poets made it), but it takes on a new ‘meaning’ in Nox. Here, meaning – in the form of dictionary entries – takes up space, structures and helps construct Carson’s book, and not just in the metaphorical sense. The definitions also point to what Carson describes as ‘a mantle, the confidence that you can ever really know what words mean because really we don’t’. She goes on to say that ‘they’re just these signs that we pretend to nail down in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they’re all wild integers. Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.’44 Nox’s incorporation of Catullus’s words, and the deconstructed manner in which it incorporates them, is then already a way of making meaning material by revealing that words are, as Carson says, ‘wild integers’. This gesture has the effect of slowing a reader’s route ‘through’ language. Though Nox is distinct from other material poetries discussed in this

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Figure 5.3 Anne Carson, definition for ‘mortis’, Nox, unpaginated

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book in that it is replete with representational content, prioritising the sign over the signified is also deeply kindred to the aims of concrete and neoconcrete poetry, as well as to Martínez’s approach in La nueva novela. Affording this priority to the sign-side of Catullus’s lyrical language is one way in which Nox makes meaning material. The inclusion of each word’s definition as actual constructive material is another. Each entry pasted into Nox is also an image of the paper it was printed on, one that displays the wrinkles of the glue that adhered it. Here, this glue is facsimile, but I am less concerned with the artifice of that fact than I am with the fact that it can still be seen. Glue is common to books’ bindings, and so its rearranged presence here is all the more striking for appearing in a book without one. Instead of binding a book to itself, the glue binds the lyric (both whole and in parts) to this long, material poem. The facsimile, ultimately, realises the promise of glue’s fluid properties. These properties allow the fluid to confuse, as Irigaray writes, ‘the distinction between the one and the other’.45 In the facsimile, the one finally becomes the other. The glue that binds also returns readers to Catullus 101 and to the other fluid (tears) that erode the distinction between the poet and the gifts he offers at his brother’s grave. Nox reiterates this erosion in additional ways, too, finding opportunities to materialise what 101 refers to. The pasted images of the poem (as ‘original’ and translations), for example, appear both wet and burned. The Catullan ashes, tears and seas, then, become material remnants in Nox. The final, nearly illegible translation which appears on the last ‘page’ of Nox is rimmed with fire-stained edges and is stained, throughout, with some kind of fluid (Figure 5.4). Carson stained the paper with tea, so we know that accounts for part of the fluid, the bleeding ink another, and the glue still another. But, reminders of tears, or of a message in a bottle style sea-soak, are also prominent. As a whole, Nox draws the reader into the relations Catullus 101 sets up between the poet, his journey and his brother’s burial site. Nearly all of Nox’s reviewers are quick to point out the similarities between the object that is Nox and various other death-adjacent objects. O’Rourke writes that the book ‘has the squat gray aspect of a stone tablet’, and that it is ‘about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible’.46 Joan Fleming describes ‘its hard box casing as closed as a coffin’.47 Its non-digitisable form also contributes to materialising the scene described in 101 – readers must physically journey to this book (or the book to them).

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Figure 5.4 Anne Carson, illegible translation of Catullus 101, Nox, unpaginated

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This journey, in turn, recalls Carson’s own journey to Copenhagen after learning of her brother’s death there, and the journey the original notebook of Nox made before becoming the facsimile it now, also, is. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Carson describes how losing Nox precipitated Nox: For a number of years, seven or eight years, I used to show the book to people one by one and then I met by chance a German publisher who does art books and fashion books who said, ‘I think I can do that in a respectful way, why don’t we try?’ So I said okay and he took it to Germany then lost it for three years. He didn’t answer emails and he had no phone so there was a certain interval of anguish about this object I thought I’d never see again. Then one day it showed up in a FedEx package. So I thought, Time to make this permanent. Then Currie figured out how to make it work as a replicated book.48

Carson’s recollection points to the ways in which loss, or absence, is materialised in the final form of Nox. This comes up elsewhere in the book too. As Wachtel remarks, ‘some of the photos that [Carson] use[s] are fragments, and many don’t have people in them. One features a shadow of a person more than the humans in the distance. A chair, a shed, an empty swing, some stairs, a wall. There is a sense of absence.’49 Absence is more than a sense in Nox, and more than a metaphor for the poets’ lost brothers – it is a material fact, something present, something to be sensed. Absence is, in this way, present everywhere in the book, though it stands out for some at certain points more than others. Françoise Palleau-Papin, for example, writes that ‘absence is best captured in the image of the stairwell represented in several photographs, drawings or passages of prose (see sections 5.3, and 10.1, text and image alike)’. ‘The stairway/stairwell pairing’, she goes on to say, ‘comes to exemplify the nexus of Nox, its gathering of apparent opposites, its moot point, and its method’.50 This pairing of absence and presence constitutes another of Nox’s monisms – where there is a well there is a way. In Nox, absence is always bound to its material other. Each of the poets discussed in prior chapters sought to draw the blank space of the page (or poetic support) into the matter of the poem.51 That gesture is prominent in Nox, too, in un-peopled photographs, in the stairway/stairwell pair Palleau-Papin highlights and, ultimately, in Nox’s very particular construction. Without a back binding, the reverse of each ‘page’ in the accordion-fold book constitutes

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another (blank) face. But even the filled fronts show their effort in revealing their own blankness. Carson describes how her partner, Robert Currie (who Nox’s box notes ‘assisted in the design and realisation of the book’), fiddled with the Xeroxing of Carson’s notebook in order to ensure the facsimile version would retain the original’s handmade quality (at least visually). ‘If you Xerox or scan something perfectly’, Carson says, ‘it looks glossy like a cookbook but if you let a little light into the Xerox machine and make it a bad Xerox, you get all those edges and life, you get what Currie calls the “decay” put back in. So it was really important to me to have that in the experience of the reader’.52 Thus, Nox’s reproduction carries with it a kind of visual staining that ensures the blank ‘page’ remains visible to its readers. Carson’s use of the Xerox machine calls to mind Steve McCaffery and bpNichol’s instructions for Xerox poems: you take a text and duplicate it, then duplicate the duplication, then duplicate the duplication systematically with exact ‘duplication’ never occurring. There’s always visual change, textual shift – an insistence on the piece’s emergent self and through the agency of the mechanical means of composition an insistence on the piece’s uniqueness at every stage.53

As McCaffery and Nichol describe, the particular technology of the Xerox machine allows for a duplication that is also distinct from its source text. This process of transformation features in the final edition of Nox and highlights one of the ways in which this material poetics is attributable to (an already old) technology. But the Xeroxenabled staining in Nox is not just a reference to a technical mode of translation. It is also a kindred gesture to the tea-stained paper Carson used to carry Catullus 101 into the work – a carrying akin, in turn, to the tear-stained gifts the Roman poet carried to his brother’s grave. The further technological process of Nox’s becoming-facsimile made it possible for a stain to materialise in the final version. The published Nox’s work of materialising the lyric’s people and things is not stopped when the book transforms from notebook to its final published state. Though the final version contains many gestures to the original notebook’s materiality which turn out to be untouchable, it remains a work of material poetry. Some features are transformed from tactile to visual material, but I do not take that to be a loss of materiality broadly speaking. Rather, it is what McCaffery and Nichol describe as a ‘textual shift – an insistence on the piece’s emergent self’. In Nox, anyway, loss is always material.

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The materiality of loss is further stressed in Carson’s statement on the back of Nox’s box. ‘When my brother died’, she writes, ‘I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.’ Jill Marsden writes that ‘with the funeral already past and the ashes scattered in the sea, the loss of Michael seemed itself to have gone astray. There was no headstone, no epitaph, nothing to see or to feel.’54 Here, she implies that the book might come to occupy the space left by the lack of such objects. But, ‘the form of a book’ is also a strange form for an epitaph, which usually exists, rather, as an inscription on another, solider mass. In this case, the epitaph is that solid mass, and it reveals the ways in which inscription, like loss, is material for Nox. Language matters in Nox, and this proposal has the effect of materialising the lyric in yet another sense – by reminding us that the language of lyrics is already material. Lyric poetry often relies on the visual (line length, stanza breaks, and so on) and sonic (alliteration, assonance, and so on) matter of language. But taken to the extreme, these features have also marked the boundaries of the lyric and have given ammunition to the antagonism with which materially invested poetries clashed with their lyric others. In Theory of the Lyric, Culler discusses Northrop Frye’s lyric poles of melos and opsis. The ‘melic limit of lyric would’, Culler writes, ‘be pure babble: meaningless magic spells or tongue-twisters such as “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” – not lyric but deploying techniques fundamental to lyric’.55 On the other hand, the opsic ‘limit would be visual pattern, as in concrete poetry’.56 Nox is less concerned with the question of melos, but it is filled with things that would be characterised as occupying the purely opsic space left of lyric, even left of concrete poetry – photographs, blotches of paint, drawings. At the same time, it places at its centre one of Western poetry’s most widely known lyrics. For this reason, it is my impression that the incorporation of Catullus 101 into Nox is also an incorporation of Nox into Catullus 101. This happens whenever the poet inserts references to nox/night into the dictionary entries that track each of Catullus’s words. And it happens in subtler ways too. In the first sentence of section 1.3, Carson writes ‘Herodotos is an historian who trains you as you read’. Herodotos appears throughout Nox, along with the question of history. Carson describes how ‘They call Herodotus the first historian when what he invented was a picture of history as all these chips of data that don’t make sense. He collects them and hands them over.’57 This process is analogous

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to Carson’s gathering and handing over of materials in the form of Nox. But Carson also shares with Herodotos an ability to ‘train you as you read’ such that the process of wading through all of Nox’s matter builds in the reader a willingness to see and constitute matter in new (lyrical) places. With readers now trained, Nox has the effect of newly materialising Catullus 101, not by adding purely visual elements to the poem (though the burned edges, bleeding ink and stained paper do do this in Nox) but by treating the words as matter. Culler describes the ways in which the lyric as ‘a display of vivid images – striking ways of depicting the world – differs substantially from the poem which is itself a visual image’.58 As we have seen, Nox works to visualise and materialise those images and relations depicted in Catullus 101. It also achieves a kind of intermedia/intertextuality in which references to other Catullan poems turn up as purely visual elements in Nox. Carson, for example, comments that the splotches of red paint are references to the suggestion of blushing before death that she had read in another (unnamed) Catullus poem.59 This reference appears other places too. For example, just before section 7.2 she asks, ‘Why do we blush before death?’ and, again, just before her Catullus 101 translation materialises in the book she writes, ‘If you are writing an elegy, begin with the blush.’ This same ‘page’ is also marked with red paint, reinforcing the suggestion that references among texts can take the form, too, of extra-textual materials (Plate 4). But, just as Carson turns inscription into a material object when she refers to the book form as an epitaph (a sub-genre of the lyric, as Culler points out),60 Nox has the effect of turning language into matter. The intermedia/intertextual references in Nox do not just move from Catullus to Carson, but in fact build on existing intertextual references already present in the Catullan poems. As Aaron M. Seider points out, ‘given its focus on his brother, poem 101 is linked to poems 65, 68a, and 68b, the only other poems in Catullus’ corpus that mention his sibling’. Furthermore, Seider writes, ‘the phrase frater adempte mihi appears at the end of 68a.20, 68b.92, and 101.6,56’.61 With matter on the minds of readers, this repetition can be seen as constituting not just a thematic bind among various of Catullus’s poems, but a material connection too. In fact, the very matter of language (these specific words) is what’s repeated. What they represent, on the other hand, changes given their context. In Carson’s translation, this repeated phrase corresponds with her line ‘brother (wrongly) taken from me’. So it is clear that Carson

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is not opposed to the introduction of contextual changes, which of course abound in Nox’s doubling of poets and brothers. But Nox’s attempt to materialise her brother through all the means and matter that comprise the book allow for a very productive confluence of lyrical and material poetics that joins these poles in both directions. The lyric becomes material in Nox, but Nox also helps reveal the essential materiality of the lyric itself.

The Person and the Poem Nox’s work to materialise Catullus 101 is always triangulated with a potentially more ambitious, fraught and impossible attempt – at materialising the person in poetic form. The person primarily in question here is Michael. But, there are others too, including Carson’s mother, Catullus and his brother, as well as others whose voices, imprints and texts circulate throughout the book. Death winds through each of these attempts, and taken together they propose a kind of poetic subjectivity that is material and un-individuated. Despite those remnants left behind in death, Nox finds there is no, as the entry for ipsum says, ‘himself (herself, itself, oneself, etc.) as opposed to others’. Michael, for example, is shown to be unknowable, but Nox goes about constructing him, first, by way of the materials he left behind – recounted speech, letters, photographs, and so on – and, second, through the links the book establishes between him, Catullus’s brother, Lazarus, and others. Nox’s version of material poetics, then, is one which works to make the person matter as poetry, in addition to one which, within poetry, works to materialise the lyric. As we have seen, the latter process helps to undo the purported split between lyrical and material categories and suggests that, going forward, they might coincide in ways they largely didn’t in the twentieth-century Americas. This is not just a surprising turn within the domain of poetics but is all the more surprising for being a poetics. As this book has addressed elsewhere,62 despite new materialism’s claims of monism, it does see itself as distinct from theories and philosophies that centre language. Braidotti writes, for example, ‘I have great respect for deconstruction, but also some impatience with the limitations of its linguistic frame of reference. I prefer to take a more materialist route to deal with the complexities of the posthuman as a key feature of our historicity.’63 What many of the poetic examples and theories examined in this book have shown is that

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this distinction is at least less pressing, and at most non-existent, for material approaches to poetry. In some ways, this has to be the case. Even works which depart from alphabetic language entirely, such as Lygia Pape’s,64 are concerned with the relationship language has to matter, or insist that language is matter. Despite their evident materialism, they also do, and can’t but, have a ‘linguistic frame of reference’, though what is meant by that differs from the deconstructive approaches Braidotti refers to here. While new materialists by and large are unlikely to disagree with my basic claim that language is matter, material poetries raise a number of questions about the degree and kinds of entanglement that exist between these two purported poles. Nox – for being material, for being about death, and for working to construct the human from the material remnants of life, lyric and, importantly, language – offers these questions in relation to the posthuman. Its brand of posthumanism, then, is one which not only doesn’t bracket language, but prioritises it as it works to materialise Michael and the book’s lost others. In section 7.1, facing one of the frater (brother) entries on Nox’s left-hand ‘pages’, Carson equates ‘prowling the meanings of a word’ with ‘prowling the history of a person’ (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5 Anne Carson, ‘prowling the meanings . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

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The parallelism of these two phrases suggests a further equation between meaning and history, word and person. We know that, for Carson, what words mean is both material and unknowable. The dictionary entries continue to unpack this idea for readers, word by word, ‘page’ by ‘page’. And this reinforces the fact that language not only must operate as a frame of reference for Nox’s version of posthumanism, but that language is the matter that will construct the human in death. The word is the person. The history of a person is just as unknowable and material, she tells us – ‘no use expecting a flood of light’. Instead, there are ‘kidnaps in the dark’, which, together, form a ‘luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web’ – a metaphor that, like the stairway/well suggests absence is presence, dark is light, and lack is matter, whether we know what to make of it or not. History is also a common way in which Carson characterises her brother and her attempt to materialise him poetically in Nox. In section 1.0, for example, she writes ‘No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history’ (Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6 Anne Carson, ‘if I wanted to fill . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

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Along with history, stars appear here again. But perhaps most interestingly, the construction of her sentence is such that ‘it’ represents an unmet expectation. Readers expect ‘him’ in that place, referring back to ‘the starry lad’ of the prior clause. Instead, there’s ‘it’, which in the context of the section as a whole can refer to the elegy that is Nox or the fact of Michael’s life and death. As a result, ‘it’ opens up a space where Michael, his death and the book can coincide. ‘It’ is history as well and, as such, Nox’s vision of death is not one in which death is a future-other of life. Rather, death is what brings Nox (and all its concomitant material) into being in the first place. This echoes Braidotti’s assertion that ‘being mortal, we all are “have beens”: the spectacle of our death is written obliquely into the script of our temporality, not as a barrier, but as a condition of possibility’.65 Braidotti’s textual metaphors are apt in the case of Nox, where this possibility is afforded to Michael, whose life becomes more (if still not entirely) knowable to Carson and her readers only after his death. His death is also, literally, what enables Nox’s becoming. Nox is a history and Nox is material. It follows, too, that history is material in Nox. But Nox is sure to remind us that the material does not equate to the knowable. Carson writes in section 1.3 that history ‘produces no clear or helpful account’ and that it ‘can be at once concrete and indecipherable’. This mirrors Nox’s understanding of language, which is just as unknowable as history or the material remnants that constitute history (or a person) in the present. As a material poetics and an object of poetry, Nox thus sets up a chain of signifiers in which a person is history, history is matter and matter is language. Ultimately, though, language is, as Carson says, a holding place for ‘the myth that you can know it ever definitively. Use it, yes. Make sense, yes. But know it, I’m not sure.’66 To return to Braidotti’s terms of the given and the constructed, this is another way in which Nox blurs the boundaries between these categories. The given – as history, as a person, as language – if it is knowable at all, is only knowable as the constructed. Nox is that construction. Nox constructs itself from, among other sources, Carson’s life and work and the two are connected by the many overlaps evident in Nox’s subject matters. While in the prior section we saw how the lyrical became material in Nox, 101 matters in other ways too. For example, there exists, prominently, an extra-poetic overlap between the recounted death of Catullus’s brother, and the recent death of Carson’s. Differently from how Nox turned portions of Catullus 101 into its working material, the relationship between

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these two lost brothers is not a direct one from lyrical to material poem. Rather, this relationship constitutes an overlap between the lyric and Carson’s life that is eventually reiterated as a matter of posthumanism in Nox. Discussing Catullus 101, Carson writes in section 7.1, ‘I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class’, where she also notes that ‘Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death.’ This might be said of hers as well. Michael’s death, then, is not an immaterial end, but an enduring presence that constructs the path leading Carson and her readers back to Catullus 101. For Carson, this happens thanks to her familiarity with the poem, which goes on to contribute matter to Nox. For her readers, it happens when Nox familiarises them, simultaneously, with 101 and the material remains of Michael’s life. As readers come to know both, further relations connecting the poem(s) and Michael’s life and death become apparent. Also in section 7.1, Carson describes how Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.

In terms of connections with extra-poetic matter, this section’s mention of Catullus’s ‘festivity’ will, in section 7.2, be echoed in a recounting of Michael’s burial at sea (Figure 5.7). This passage has a number of features in common with Catullus 101, and Carson’s reading of it. Both involve travels by sea and the brother’s ashes. In addition, Carson’s analogy of leaves turning over in the wind parallels Michael’s widow’s description of sunflowers turning around on the water – both ‘Festive in their way’. Here then, the avenues by which 101 becomes material in Nox do not just take shape between lyric and material poetries. They are also entangled with the lived events of Michael’s death and with Carson’s interpretation of Catullus’s poetry, both of which offer extra-poetic opportunities for what ultimately becomes Nox’s version of material poetics. Returning to section 7.1, within Nox, ‘I prowl him’ previews the following ‘page’’s ‘Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the

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Figure 5.7 Anne Carson, ‘my brother’s widow says . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

history of a person.’ In this section, the book equates not just word and person (and meaning and history), but also translation, a dark room and a brother. Brother, in Nox, is always at least double and, like Carson’s struggle to translate 101, ‘He does not end.’ With translation in the mix, this claim inevitably recalls an association with the notion of ‘afterlife’, a metaphor for the practice that has been unavoidable in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’. There, he famously wrote that in translation, ‘the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding’.67 There are certainly echoes of this idea in ‘A brother never ends’ and in the ways in which Nox revitalises Catullus 101 through translation and otherwise. But I do not read Nox as a book about the idea of an afterlife so much as a book that is the matter of death. Neil Corcoran writes that ‘there is in Nox the play of language, form, and material structure which themselves, and of themselves, make it clear that something, at least, may be carried over, carried forward, translated, something that may supply “a lock against oblivion”’.68 I agree with this suggestion, but Carson’s text provides a productive counter to the metaphor of the afterlife and its metaphysical implications. This is so precisely because of the play among those features that Corcoran emphasises. ‘Language, form, and material structure’ are each matter in and for Nox. As such, the way in which Nox

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carries over is also expressly material. For Braidotti, ‘the specific temporality of the posthuman subject needs to be re-thought beyond the metaphysics of mortality’.69 As I read it, Nox is one such re-thinking that prioritises posthuman matter. This happens as a matter of poetics broadly speaking, and as a matter of translation, specifically, of Catullus 101. In this, it displaces the model of translation as transcendence in favour of one in which translation is immanence. Here, then, translation’s endurance has precisely to do with a transformation of, and as, matter. The materialising of the lyric in Nox is one such transformation. The passage from person to poem is another. The person who has died in Nox is always Michael, but never only Michael. For this reason, the poem’s efforts to materialise the person in death are also a rejection of an individuated subject. This is evident in the way Nox acknowledges not only the impossibility of knowing Michael (or the meaning of words, and more) but also the impossibility of there being a whole someone there to know. In section 3.3, Carson writes ‘We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense.’ The implication of this passage is, of course: they don’t. There is no such centre to be found, and neither history nor accounts (made of words that are themselves unknowable) can make it so. The subject as coherent individual is not there in Nox, but, what’s more, the subject in Nox is never individual in the first place. In addition to the many parallels between Catullus’s brother and Carson’s, in section 8.3 Carson writes that ‘More than one person has pointed out to me a likeness between my brother and Lazarus’, someone who, as section 8.4 says, can be thought of ‘as an example of resurrection or as a person who had to die twice’. In this way, whatever outlines might be drawn of Michael are also, always, those of other brothers,70 and generally, other others. And it is not just in life that these overlaps are present. As the comparison with Lazarus shows, even death itself is multiple. The first dictionary-style entry in Nox is for multas which Carson begins by defining ‘numerous, many, many of, many a; many people, many’. Later in this entry, it reads ‘(of persons) too much in evidence’. Though Nox is, in some ways, about the lack of Michael who has been missing from Carson in both life and death, Nox itself does not lack for evidence. Just as absence is material substance for Nox, the lack of an individuated subject does not translate to nothing. Instead, Nox materialises a multitude of evidence, in the form of definitions, photographs, paint, paintings, letters, texts, and more.

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These materials are, on the one hand, Nox’s way of trying to materialise its subject matter – Carson’s unknown brother (and others). At the same time, they are also the material imprints of a number of subjective voices that, collectively, author Nox. The book is constructed from a great number of texts, in which we can include: the dictionary entries; Michael’s letter; Catullus 101; the family photographs; citations from Bashō and Herodotus; and transcriptions of conversations with Carson’s mother, Michael, and Michael’s widow (among other things). The multitude of evidence, then, includes a multitude of authorial voices. When Carson asks, in section 5.2, ‘What is a voice?’, that question raises the double dispersions of subjectivity that take shape as both subject matters and authorial subjects in Nox. In their indistinction, these multiple subjects contribute to the book’s material understanding of life and death and to Nox’s very material construction and existence. As Braidotti understands it, ‘the generative capacity of [the] life–death continuum cannot be bound or confined to the single, human individual. It rather transversally trespasses all boundaries in the pursuit of its aim, which is self-perpetuation as the expression of its potency.’71 For Nox, this trespassing ‘connects’, as Braidotti writes, ‘trans-individually, trans-generationally’ binding brothers and others as subject (and) matter. As with Nox’s incorporation of the lyric, Nox’s engagement with death differs from prior practices in material poetics discussed in this book. Of these, Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’72 is one example that is suggestive of death. There, when ‘readers’ descend into the underground room that is the poem, they, as living bodies, occupy a space typical of dead bodies. Like Nox, this poem would also have the effect of disindividuating the subject, life and death, as any and every participant can substitute for any other in the ‘reading’ of this poem. Likewise, in the ‘Buried Poem’ the person is materialised in and as the poem, by virtue of actually constituting it upon entering. But Nox differs from this example of neoconcrete poetry not just in its welcoming of the lyric, but also in its inclusion of so much language. Where other approaches to material poetics enabled language to be understood as material by paring it down to such a degree that its look and sound, for example, took on a greater proportion of importance, Nox makes language matter as a multitude. This enables it not only to constitute the subject as matter (which, for example, the ‘Buried Poem’ also does) but to have a subject matter – death. This is more difficult to do in approaches to material poetics which seek to excise poetry’s ability to represent something external to itself.

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Nox relies on the representational capacities of language, even as it acknowledges that both person and word are unknowable. A possible future of material poetics, as Nox represents it, then, is one that pushes back against the assumption that practices akin to concrete poetry died after their initial proliferation in the midtwentieth century. As the examples in this book have shown, they in fact continued steadily through the decades and went on to demonstrate elasticity and endurance. Nox, in particular, exhibits an ability to materially incorporate apparently antagonistic poetic types as the very matter of its poetics. To quote the final line of Carson’s Catullus 101 translation, in Nox, material poetries still ‘farewell and farewell’.

Acknowledgements All images included in this chapter © Anne Carson, reprinted with permission.

Notes 1. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 51. 2. Nox has no page numbers. In their place, I have used section numbers or other descriptors as appropriate. Anne Carson, Nox. 3. See Chapter 3. 4. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, ‘Re-Vision as Remediation’, 26. 5. Though La nueva novela is also a facsimile, it does include tactile components including a plastic-filled window between two pages and a fishhook taped to another. 6. Brillenburg Wurth, ‘Re-Vision as Remediation’, 21. 7. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 3. 8. Ibid. 9. Joshua Marie Wilkinson, ‘Introduction’, in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, 1–2. 10. Cole Swenson, ‘Opera Povera’, 128. 11. Brillenburg Wurth, ‘Re-Vision as Remediation’, 27. 12. Liedeke Plate, ‘How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age’, 95. 13. See Chapter 1. 14. Examples include works by Ferreira Gullar discussed in Chapter 2. 15. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 40. 16. Brillenburg Wurth, ‘Re-Vision as Remediation’, 27.

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17. A friend of bpNichol’s, Young maintains an unofficial archive of some of Nichol’s work, among other things, at Karl Young, ‘bpNichol Home Page Away from Home’, accessed 19 September 2017, www.thing. net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bp.htm 18. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry, 47. 19. Solt, Concrete Poetry. In this citation, I have omitted a reference original to the Solt text that indicates a figure number for Nichol’s ‘love’. 20. Amanda Earl, ‘Week 51 – A Celebration of Canadian Visual/Concrete Poetry: Part 1’, accessed 19 September 2017, https://www.brickbooks. ca/a-celebration-of-canadian-visual-concrete-poetry-part-1/ 21. Karl Young, ‘The Visual Poetry of bpNichol’, accessed 19 September 2017, http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/ky-e-bp.htm 22. Earl, ‘Week 51 – A Celebration of Canadian Visual/Concrete Poetry’. 23. Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis, The Last Vispo Anthology. 24. Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis, ‘The Last Vispo: Why Last?’, accessed 19 September 2017, http://www.thelastvispo.com/about/. This is also partly responsible for why I prefer to use the umbrella term ‘material poetry’, another reason being that many of the poetries examined here emphasise more than poetry’s visual materials. 25. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘The Time of Digital Poetry’, 184. 26. This is true even for the Brazilian concrete poets whose work became more politically engaged in the 1960s. 27. There are exceptions to this, including Hélio Oiticica who also incorporated lyrical modes into his material and object-based ‘box-poems’, as discussed in Chapter 2. 28. Virginia Jackson, ‘Lyric’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 826. 29. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 77. 30. Plate, ‘How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age’, 97. 31. Juan Luis Arcaz Pozo, ‘Estructura y estilo del poema 101 de Catulo’, 11; my translation. 32. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 203. 33. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 121. 34. For further work on gender in Catullus 101, see Aaron M. Seider, ‘Catullan Myths’. 35. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 111. 36. Ibid. 37. See Chapter 2. 38. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 207. 39. In an interview, Carson refers to ‘the generalized You of lyric poetry’. She says ‘Catullus invented this, I think, for the Romans, and the You is sometimes unnamed, a persona who forms as the poem forms, a sort of ideal listener’. Eleanor Wachtel and Anne Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’.

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40. For example, concrete and neoconcrete poetry which generally opposed lyric subjectivity and sought ways out of poetry’s responsibility to discursively represent anything external to itself. 41. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader. 42. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 43. Megan O’Rourke, ‘The Unfolding’. 44. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 45. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 111. 46. O’Rourke, ‘The Unfolding’. 47. Joan Fleming, ‘“Talk (Why?) With Mute Ash”’, 69. 48. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 49. Ibid. 50. Françoise Palleau-Papin, ‘Nox: Anne Carson’s Scrapbook Elegy’. 51. See Chapters 1 and 2. 52. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 53. Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Rational Geomancy, 143. This process was influenced by similar experiments of British concrete poet Bob Cobbing. As Greg Thomas describes, at a performance of Cobbing’s in 1966, ‘a stencilled announcement of the symposium programme was fed through a duplicator multiple times and gradually destroyed, producing hundreds of different prints showing it in varying states of disintegration’. As Thomas later writes, the duplicator was replaced in Cobbing’s career ‘by the photocopier as a compositional tool in 1984 arguably generating his most striking visual work, first documented in the Processual series of 1982–86’. Greg Thomas, Border Blurs, 236, 250. 54. Jill Marsden, ‘In Search of Lost Sense’, 190. 55. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 252–3. 56. Ibid. 253. 57. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 58. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 256. 59. It’s possible she is referring to Catullus 65. 60. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 244. 61. Seider, ‘Catullan Myths’, 288. 62. See Chapter 1. 63. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 30. 64. See Chapter 2. 65. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 132. 66. Wachtel and Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. 67. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, 255. 68. Neil Corcoran, ‘A Brother Never Ends’, 378. 69. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 140. 70. Lazarus is brother to Mary and Martha in the Gospel of John. 71. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 135. 72. See Chapter 2.

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Coda

The Subject of the Material Poem

Like many of the object-oriented theories circulating today, material poetry seeks to undermine the primacy of the subject. As I have shown, the poems examined here do find ways of rising to this challenge. For the most part, this book has tried to take a generous approach with this possibility, and I have worked to read these material poetries in light of the theories they claim to materialise. For example in Chapter 3, I have tried to make La nueva novela, and not just Juan Luis Martínez, the actor of my sentences. I say things like ‘La nueva novela does’ rather than ‘Juan Luis Martínez writes’. I do this in solidarity with the book’s poetics, but also with the author’s proclaimed intention. And in that move, I not only try to take at face value the stated attempt to undermine a differentiated, authorial, subject position, but I also inevitably reify that very position. Taking the poets’ own practices and self-theorisations as a foundation for my theoretical claims, as I have, is a further reification of the subject. It’s also a return to the notion of author intentionality. This is a welcome paradox for this project, which works in part to show how poetry can rid itself of subjectivity and authorship because the author said so. I know this is a paradox but I have not tried to write it out of this book. Its presence does several things for me. For one, it hints from the background at the importance of subjectivity even, or especially, for those poetic approaches that would seek to diminish it. And, second, it marks the specific sort of critical formalism I am interested in pursuing. A formalist turn away from authorship has the potential downside of proffering a universalism that risks leaving out (or does leave out) the specific context in which literature is made. This is a criticism Gullar makes of concrete poetry when moving away from his own vanguard practices and towards radical politics. The avantgarde formalism of concrete poetry, he claimed in the period following neoconcretism, was an artistic dead end and ‘the real artistic

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vanguard, in an underdeveloped country, is that which, in seeking the new, seeks human liberation, from its concrete, international and national, situation’.1 These critiques of formalism are both longstanding and valid, and not just historically. I take my poets’ words for it, and give them a say over how I read their work because I believe the outcome of this approach – one that also takes into account the author’s intention or poetics, when available – can help to prevent form from always turning towards an abstract universal that isn’t universal so much as first-world, Global North whiteness by another name. As Ken Chen writes about US formalist poetry known as conceptual, ‘the decentered self imagined by these [conceptual] poets is the elite white self’.2 Along these lines, Rosi Braidotti notes that many theorists ‘are suspicious of deconstructing a subject-position, which historically they never gained the right to’3 but I am sympathetic to her suggestion that we ought to seek alternatives to the subject-driven discourses that are by their very nature falsely universal and exclusive. The poetries I have examined here are attempts to seek such alternatives. The notion of a decentred or object-oriented subject circulated all throughout Latin American vanguard practices in the twentieth century, and it can be seen (in different ways) in the work of Ronald Johnson and Anne Carson as that century was turning. By attending to the anti-subjective proposals of these works of poetry, this book hopes to have spoken to important possibilities for what we can understand as a poetic determination to, in Carson’s words, ‘get every Me out of the way’.4 In the context of Brazil, Haroldo de Campos appeals to the liberating potential of decentring the self, what he calls the ‘ex-centric’ viewpoint, ‘that is, out of centre, de-centred’.5 This viewpoint had to do with a Latin American rejection of the continent’s perceived status as imitative of, or uncritical heir to, the arts of Europe and, later, the United States. What the ex-centric viewpoint insists is that the self that matters doesn’t just come from one of the so-called ‘centres’ of culture. I have tried in this project to let these decentred selves guide my thinking about how poetry works and what it is, ought to, or can be. Though Latin America is the context in which I began, Ronald Johnson and Anne Carson also represent a kind of decentring. Johnson was a concrete poet who found himself both outside the centres of any major US poetic movements and outside the geographical centres of the poetry he practised. While Carson is well known in contemporary poetry circles, her work consistently challenges the borders between and among genres, centring its own practice in what might be perceived as the liminal spaces between

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lyric and material poetry, poetry and prose, performance and verse (among other categories). This book proceeds with its examples towards the possibility for a poetic excision, absorption or undoing of the subject. Yet, the findings of this book also show that this might not be so simple, or that poetry, as an exemplar object, might call for a different approach to theorising objects than a hammer might. This is true despite my choice of poetries. This book considers examples of material poetry – poetry at its most object-like, poetry that stresses its materiality, and self-theorises as an object. And still, it poses challenges to our imaginings of objects, even when it tries to uphold some of these very same imaginings. To varying degrees, all of the examples I consider here work, in one way or another, to undermine the subject. This is a tricky proposal for poetry for a number of reasons. First of all, poetry – even, for the most part, the poetry examined here – must be made by someone. And, second, however much they might depart from the conventions of reading, poems – even these poems – are meant to be, and are, read. Largely, the examples I look at here are less concerned with eliminating the reader-subject than they are with eliminating the author-as-subject and the notion that what poetry is, is the subjective outpouring from a unified authorial voice. But, despite these difficulties, I have tried throughout this book to take that possibility seriously, and to explore the ways in which material poetries manage to find ways out of subjectivity. In concrete poetry, this ultimately manifests in poems capable of writing themselves. In Chapter 1, I looked at an anagrammatic poem in which readers are explicitly invited to create their own letter combinations and continue writing the poem. As I argue there, these readers don’t even need to be human. A computer program could do this sort of reading/writing as easily as, and perhaps more easily than, a human reader could. So, that’s one approach. That poem is a more overt example, but it uses a similar strategy to the one made use of throughout Brazilian concrete poetry in which the materials of language, more than a human author, are what ‘write’ the concrete poem. The poet may select the words of the poem, but it’s language’s materiality that, in the end, delimits what the poem will be made of. In an anagram, for example, the poet selects the words the poem will grow from. But, after that, it’s the letters of those words that determine the poem’s possibilities, not the subjective intervention of the author. In Ferreira Gullar’s neoconcretism, subjectivity is undermined not by trying to work around it, but by merging the subject with the

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object. In this way, neither position is pure. Objects become subjectlike. For example, objects act. They invite certain interactions. They foreclose and determine others. Subjects, on the other hand, come to be objects by entering and helping to compose (as in constitute, as opposed to write) the poem. In La nueva novela, subjectivity’s challenge is a matter of textual strategy. The author’s name, where it appears, appears crossed out and/or (inside of parentheses) such that (Juan Luis Martínez), or pseudonym (Juan de Dios Martínez), is never outside of the book-object, never a separate subject. Rather, (he) is always embedded and bound inside a text that is itself made from materials drawn from other assemblages. ARK, by Ronald Johnson, is less concerned with the textual deletion or absorption of the subject, and markers of subjectivity appear all over the text. This includes a return to lyrical forms of subjectivity discarded by many of the examples investigated in the three prior chapters. Most notably, ARK upholds the lyrical ‘I’ that was written out of earlier poetry. As I show, however, ARK’s ‘I’ is not just as an abstract placeholder for the ‘voice’ from which this poem, in part anyway, is constructed. This ‘I’ is also always an embodied subject which contributes its sense organs to the material construction and function of the poem. ‘I’, in ARK, is always coupled with an insistence that the book is an architecture whose cornerstones are human sense organs – lyrical ‘eyes’. In this way, ARK shows that subjectivity continues to contribute materially to poetry. This remains true in Anne Carson’s Nox, a book that is so deeply biographical it seems impossible to try to uphold the commonly assumed differentiation of author and lyrical ‘I’. Yet trying to locate the ‘I’ of author is made difficult by the fact of the book’s construction. It includes writing by Carson, but also includes texts or recounted speech from a number of other authors, proposing a version of poetic subjectivity that resists individuation and presents itself only as the many bits of text that, together, materialise the poem. Yet I will say here that even when language is thought of as an object, I ultimately cannot completely agree that, as Graham Harman might propose, such an object could have an entirely ‘unified and autonomous life apart from its relations’ to some kind of differentiated subject.6 Though some of the poems investigated here do attempt to severely curtail language’s communicative function, they never turn their backs entirely on poetry’s ability to mean. This inevitably interpellates at least a writer and, at most, a reader too, though we can remain open to the possibility that nonhumans might take up these roles. At the end of this project, I am looking forward to more work

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on the question of what poetic subjectivity looks like when matter matters so much to poetry.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Ferreira Gullar, Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento, 24. Ken Chen, ‘Authenticity Obsession’. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 47. Eleanor Wachtel and Anne Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Tradition, Translation, Transculturation’, 13. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 199.

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Index

afterlife, 16, 195 agent, 29, 33; see also human; subjectivity Albino de Souza, Erthos, 57 Andrade, Oswald de, 48, 61n Apollinaire, Guillaume, 22, 31, 38 calligrammes, 22, 40–2 architecture, 8, 19, 21, 137, 146, 152, 157–8, 160, 167, 167n, 204 artist’s books, 23, 89, 100, 173, 175 assemblage, 8, 15, 19–21, 23, 60n, 97n, 104–5, 109–10, 120, 123–4, 129, 204 authorial voice, 8, 22, 31, 34, 53–7, 80, 85–8, 91, 94–5, 101, 106, 110, 137, 158, 177, 197, 201, 203–4 autonomy, 8–9, 18, 20–2, 28–9, 33–6, 39, 42, 49, 54, 57, 63, 65–6, 69–70, 204 avant-gardism, 3, 5, 23, 30–1, 59n, 77–8, 80, 96, 133n, 138, 166, 168n, 171, 201–2; see also neovanguardia Baudelaire, Charles, 15, 104 belonging, 19, 23, 30, 70, 104, 105–6, 109–10, 113, 118, 124, 138, 149, 152, 168n Benjamin, Walter, 195 Bible, 146–7, 154, 184, 190, 196, 200n Black Mountain, 138 Blanchot, Maurice, 44, 82, 86, 110 blank space see space

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blood, 84–6, 93–5, 178, 184, 189 Borges, Jorge Luis, 113 boundaries, 66, 108, 120, 163, 173–4, 180–1, 188, 193, 197 bpNichol see Nichol, bp Braidotti, Rosi, 19, 173, 175, 180, 190–1, 193, 196–7, 202 Brazilian concrete poetry see Noigandres group brothers, 13, 16, 24, 29, 100, 171–4, 178–82, 184, 186–97 Bruscky, Paulo, 7 Bryant, Levi, 71 CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte) 133n calligram, 22, 40–2, 109, 117, 123; see also Apollinaire, Guillaume Campos, Cid, 10, 56–7 de Campos, Augusto, 10, 13, 21, 29, 38, 40, 49–50, 54–7, 59n, 233 ‘cidadecitycité’, 56–7 ‘cidadecitycité’ (performance), 56–7 ‘dias dias dias’, 233 de Campos, Haroldo, 17, 21, 29, 38–9, 44–5, 50–5, 59n, 60n, 61n, 202 ‘Alea 1 – Variações semânticas’, 55 ‘o âmago do ômega’, 45 Fome de forma, 52–4 ‘nasce morre’, 50–1 Carson, Anne, 4, 10–11, 13, 16, 18–19, 24, 138, 171–5, 177–98, 199n, 202, 204 works other than Nox, 174

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Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 19, 24, 172–4, 178–82, 184–5, 187–90, 193–8, 199–200n Cavalo, Cara de (Manoel Moreira), 85–6, 94–5, 235 censorship, 15, 79, 104–5, 120 centre and periphery, 79, 103, 129, 132, 202 circles, 19, 23–4, 64, 90–2, 118, 140, 145, 147, 150, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 162, 166; see also time Clark, Lygia, 22, 62, 67–8, 72, 81, 91, 103 Caminhando, 68–9, 76, 91 objetos relacionais (relational objects), 22, 67–9, 72, 76–7, 81, 90–1, 93, 103 Cobbing, Bob, 200n codex, 11, 172, 175 collage, 100, 129, 171 Communist Party, 77 conceptual art, 10–11, 41, 67–8 conceptual writing/poetry, 5, 11, 26n, 202 conceptualism, 10 concrete art, 42, 51, 59n, 62–5, 72, 78, 88, 90, 96n concrete music see music constellations see Gomringer, Eugen cooking, 19, 138, 156, 187 Creeley, Robert, 3, 144 Culler, Jonathan, 82, 171, 178–9, 188–9 cummings, e. e., 31, 38 Currie, Robert, 186–7 dead end, 5, 49, 87, 96, 118, 166, 201 death, 13–16, 19–20, 25, 49, 50–1, 78–9, 85–6, 108–9, 133n, 143, 171–4, 178–80, 184, 186, 189–97, 235; see also life/living DeLanda, Manuel, 19, 23, 39, 60n, 97n, 104, 109–10, 120–1, 123, 125; see also assemblage Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 23, 97n, 103–4, 109–10, 116, 120, 129

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Derrida, Jacques, 5 Dias-Pino, Wlademir, 7 Dickinson, Emily, 14 dictatorship, 4–5, 15, 36, 59n, 77, 87, 93, 104, 108 dictionary, 24, 172, 181–2, 188, 192, 196–7 digital, 4–5, 24, 171, 174–7 digital poetry, 5, 57, 176, 203 disappearance, 11, 19, 104, 109, 117, 156 discourse, 13, 29, 35–7, 42–3, 48–54, 56, 80, 200n, 202 Dürer, Albrecht, 120–1 ekphrasis, 19, 31, 149, 152–3 endurance, 4, 8, 82, 139, 145, 194, 196, 198 epic poetry, 10, 23, 136–7, 139–40, 144–5, 147–8, 150, 158, 162, 166, 169n, 177 epitaph, 172, 188–9 ethics, 13, 90 external see internal and external feeling (affect), 22, 65, 82, 86–7, 94–5, 137, 159, 177; see also sensation Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 9, 18, 138, 159 fish, 23, 25, 101, 108–9, 112, 115–16, 126–7, 198n form, 2, 15, 33–4, 40, 48, 52, 55, 60n, 71, 72, 82, 88, 123, 136, 140, 142–4, 148, 154, 162, 167n, 184, 188–90, 195, 202 formalism, 1–2, 12, 33, 201–2 Foucault, Michel, 23, 121–3 fox terrier, 14, 116–18 fragment, 3, 14, 44, 101, 110, 126, 172, 174, 186 Frank, Joseph, 148 Frye, Northrop, 188 geography, 5, 17, 134n, 141–2, 202 given and constructed, 19, 173, 193

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Index Glissant, Édouard, 23, 103–5, 110, 124, 129, 132 God, 106, 126, 146, 154 Gomringer, Eugen, 9, 16, 38–9, 59n grupo frenta, 63–4, 88 grupo ruptura, 63 Guattari, Félix, 19, 97n, 109–10, 118, 120 Gullar, Ferreira, 13–14, 16, 22, 62–81, 83–4, 86–91, 93–6, 97n, 101, 181, 197, 198n, 201–3, 234 book-poems, 73–6, 89, 91 ‘noite’ (night), 64, 234 O Formigueiro, 72–4 ‘Poema enterrado’ (Buried Poem), 14, 16, 22, 63, 75–9, 90, 181, 197 ‘Theory of the Non-Object’, 66–9, 91–2 haptics, 11, 25, 64, 86, 94, 103, 164–6, 173, 177, 187 Harman, Graham, 18, 22, 28–9, 32–4, 36, 39, 42, 52–3, 57, 71, 152–6, 204 Hayles, N. Katherine, 176 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 152, 156 Herbert, George, 41 Herodotus, 13, 188–9, 197 Higgins, Dick, 2, 39 Hill, Craig, 176 history, 2, 13, 23, 136, 140–3, 145–6, 188, 191–3, 195–6 Huidobro, Vicente, 7, 16, 101, 108, 133n human, 14, 19, 21, 28, 32–4, 37, 39–40, 55, 65, 71, 110, 137, 143–4, 152–6, 158, 165, 167n, 175, 191–2, 197, 204; see also posthumanism; subjectivity image, 7, 14–15, 31, 47, 56, 57, 82, 86, 104–8, 113, 115–18, 120–4, 129, 133n, 147–9, 157, 160–1, 178, 186, 189

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imagination, 40, 82, 124, 137, 146, 156, 164, 203 immanence, 19, 196 Ingold, Tim, 19, 153, 155–7 intentionality, 33, 129, 132, 201–2 internal and external, 2, 22, 33, 36, 38–44, 48, 67, 69, 75, 80–2, 87, 91, 120, 197, 200n; see also relations of exteriority interpretation, 12, 29, 35–6, 51, 55, 64–5, 105, 108, 112, 118, 120, 132, 137 intuition, 62, 65, 78 Invenção (journal), 56, 83n Irigaray, Luce, 180–1, 184 isomorphism, 39, 47, 51, 143, 145 Jakobson, Roman, 46, 52; see also poetic function Jardim, Reynaldo, 64 Jargon Society, 138 Jesus see God Johnson, Ronald, 2, 9–10, 12, 18–19, 23, 136–40, 144–67, 167n, 168n, 169n, 170n, 171, 173, 177, 202, 204 works other than ARK, 150–1, 154, 156, 170n Joyce, James, 21, 31 Jung, Carl, 165 Lane, Lois, 106 Langer, Susanne K., 48–51 Language poetry, 3 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 148 liberation, 5, 149, 202 life/living, 8, 13–16, 18, 20, 24–5, 30, 34–5, 42, 51, 57, 79, 84–5, 143–4, 154, 172–3, 175, 179–80, 187, 191, 193–7, 204; see also death lines of flight, 109, 129 listening see sound literary studies, 5, 18, 21–2, 28, 30, 34, 62 looking see visuality

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lyric, 2, 4, 6–8, 14, 17, 19, 22, 24–5, 28, 64, 77–80, 82, 85–88, 91, 95, 158, 171, 173, 177–85, 187–91, 193–4, 196–7, 199n, 200n, 203–4 lyrical ‘I’ see authorial voice McCaffery, Steve, 138, 175, 187, 200n McLuhan, Marshall, 4 Magritte, René, 23, 117, 121–4 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3, 31, 38, 40, 46, 60n, 118 Martínez, Juan Luis (Martínez, Juan de Dios), 10–11, 14–16, 18–19, 23, 97n, 100–32, 133n, 134n, 172, 174, 184, 201, 204 works other than La nueva novela, 16, 108–10, 133n Marx, Karl, 15, 101, 104–9, 120–1, 140, 153 mathematics, 29, 35, 48, 51, 62, 65, 73, 78, 88, 96n, 101, 106, 115–17, 150 meaning, 8, 11–14, 20–3, 29, 33–4, 36, 39, 42–54, 56–7, 64, 68–70, 90–1, 93, 97n, 105, 110–12, 118, 121–5, 132, 146, 166, 177–8, 182–4, 188, 191–2, 194–6, 204 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 19, 22, 65, 69–70, 97n, 162–3; see also phenomenology metaphor, 12, 16, 25, 34, 86, 90, 92, 109, 126, 137, 146–7, 152, 155, 157, 166, 182, 186, 192–3, 195 metaphysics, 48, 71, 78, 125, 134n, 195–6 mimesis/imitation, 41–2, 44, 48, 51, 123, 182, 202 Mistral, Gabriela, 16, 108, 133n Mitchell, W. J. T., 41, 148–9 mitosis, 160–3; see also science Moebius strip, 68–9 multiplicity, 4, 23, 29, 54, 57, 109–10, 126, 196–7

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music, 3, 10, 23, 51, 54, 56–7, 78, 117, 146, 159–61 concrete music, 42, 59n National Endowment for the Arts, 1 National Exposition of Concrete Art, 72 neovanguardia (Chile), 100, 133n Neruda, Pablo, 16, 108, 110, 133n New Criticism, 52–3 Nichol, bp, 11, 175–6, 187, 199n, 200n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106 night, 64, 145, 182, 188, 234 Noigandres group, 2, 4–5, 7–10, 12–13, 16–18, 20–2, 24–5, 26n, 28–58, 59n, 62–6, 72–4, 89–90, 92–3, 96n, 97n, 103, 136–9, 163, 178, 182, 199n, 202–3 nonbinarism/monism, 19, 25, 31, 173–5, 186, 190; see also subjectivity nonrelation, 8, 18, 22, 28–9, 33–7, 39, 42, 50, 52–3 nonsense, 14, 44, 101, 112, 125; see also sense (making) nothingness, 17, 46, 165, 188, 194 object-oriented ontology see Harman, Graham objectivism see Zukofsky, Louis Oiticica, Hélio, 14, 22, 62–4, 67, 72, 75–6, 78–88, 91–6, 98n, 199n, 235 B50 Bólide Saco 2 ‘Olfático’, 81–5 ‘caixa-poemas’ (box-poems), 64, 84–7, 94–5, 199n, 235: B30 Bólide-caixa 17 variação do B1, caixa-poema 1, 84–6; B33 Bólide-caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo, caixa-poema 2, 85–7, 94–5, 235 Parangolés, 80 Poética secreta (Secret Poetics), 22, 80, 82, 83, 85–6 Tropicália, 78–9, 96

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Index O’Leary, Peter, 136, 140, 145, 163, 167n Olson, Charles, 3, 10, 23, 136, 138–45, 168n paint/painting, 7, 11, 23, 25, 51, 62, 67, 78, 84–5, 87–9, 96n, 121–3, 133n, 149, 160, 172, 188–9, 196 Pape, Lygia, 14, 22, 63–4, 67, 72, 87–96, 97n, 191 Livro da criação (Book of Creation), 22, 90–2 Livro-poema (Book-poem), 89–90 ‘poemas visuais’ (visual poems), 64, 93–5: Língua apunhalada (Stabbed Tongue), 93–5 paradox, 101, 105, 110, 124–5, 201 participation, 10–11, 20, 22–3, 36, 55, 62–71, 74–6, 78, 80–6, 88–96, 103, 197 pattern poetry, 2, 22, 39–40, 174 Peirce, Charles S., 92 perception see sensation performance, 10, 56–7, 62, 89, 200n, 203 phenomenology, 19, 22, 32, 59n, 65–70, 76, 90, 97n, 118, 135n; see also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice photocopier, 133n, 187, 200n Pignatari, Décio, 8–9, 21, 29, 34–6, 38–40, 42–3, 59n, 60n ‘LIFE’, 8–9, 34–6 ‘terra’, 42–3 plastic language, 87–96; see also Pape, Lygia Plimpton, George, 1 poetic function, 46, 52 poetics of relation see Glissant, Édouard Poetry (magazine), 37, 59n politics, 1–2, 4–5, 15, 20, 23, 36, 53, 59n, 63, 77, 79–81, 84–8, 93–6, 101, 103–8, 115, 118–19, 134, 140, 142, 199n, 201–2 posthumanism, 8, 16, 19, 21, 24, 28, 174–5, 177, 190–8; see also human

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Pound, Ezra, 10, 15, 31, 38, 104, 120, 139, 145, 148–9, 169n Pritchard, Norman (N.H.), 2, 138–9 Reagan, Ronald, 1 relational object see Clark, Lygia relational poetics, 20, 22–3, 63, 70–8, 80, 87–8, 90–3, 96, 103; see also Gullar, Ferreira relations of exteriority, 19, 23, 70, 109, 120, 125 representation, 9, 11, 14, 22, 29, 38, 40–3, 48, 50, 53, 56, 66, 69, 74–7, 80, 86–7, 91–2, 95, 97n, 149, 181, 184, 198 rhizome, 20, 23, 103–4, 129 Rimbaud, Arthur, 15, 23, 101–2, 104, 106–9, 115, 120–1 Rokha, Pablo de, 16, 108, 133n Salgado, Roberta Camila, 79 Saroyan, Aram, 1–2, 4–5, 138–9 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 47 Scherle, William, 1 science, 29, 65–6, 73, 113, 146, 160–3, 175 seeing see visuality semiotics, 11, 92 sensation, 8, 10, 19–20, 22–3, 29, 44, 47, 57, 62–96, 97n, 98n, 101, 103, 110, 112–23, 126, 132, 137, 146, 149, 158–66, 167n, 175–7, 186, 204 sense (making), 13–14, 44, 101, 104–5, 110, 112, 120–32, 188, 193, 196 signification see meaning Simias of Rhodes, 38–40 smell, 71, 76, 81–3, 98n, 120 Solt, Mary Ellen, 2–4, 16, 25n, 30, 42, 140, 144, 175–6, 199n Something Else Press, 17, 150 sound, 3, 8, 10–11, 21, 25, 29, 33, 36, 42, 44, 46–7, 49–51, 54–5, 64, 67, 103, 117, 140, 146, 152, 158–63, 165–6, 177, 188, 197

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space, 19, 24, 29, 34, 43, 46–7, 49–51, 51, 54, 57, 59n, 60n, 63–4, 68–9, 71–8, 89–90, 113, 116, 136–66, 182, 186, 202 Spanúdis, Theon, 64 speculative realism see Harman, Graham Stein, Gertrude, 3 structure, 4, 8, 11, 34–5, 37, 39, 43, 54, 68, 78, 80, 137, 145–8, 157, 159, 173, 175, 182, 195 subjectivity, 10, 15, 16, 19–22, 28–31, 34, 50, 54–7, 63, 65–71, 74, 76–7, 80–7, 93–6, 105–6, 110, 123, 129, 133n, 137, 154, 156, 158, 162, 177–8, 190, 196–7, 200n, 201–5 subject-object relation, 10, 15, 16, 19–20, 22, 29–31, 63, 65–71, 74, 76–7, 80, 82, 85, 87, 93, 95–6, 158, 162 see also human substance, 8, 15, 28, 34, 38, 47, 49, 196 Superman, 106, 120 symbol, 8, 31, 48–9, 92, 121, 126, 159–60 synaesthesia, 10, 137, 158–66 technopaegnia see pattern poetry territorialisation and deterritorialisation, 109–10, 120, 123–6 time, 4, 8, 19, 23–5, 34, 73, 82, 85, 115–16, 136–40, 143–62, 165–6, 193, 196 touch see haptics translation, 11, 19, 21, 24, 31, 36, 57, 146, 165, 172, 174, 178–85, 187, 189, 194–6, 198

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transparency, 22, 26n, 29, 46, 66–7, 76, 87, 109, 112, 115–17, 124–5 underdevelopment, 202 universalism, 5, 77, 201–2 vanguardism see avant-gardism Vassilakis, Nico, 176 Veloso, Caetano, 10, 54 verbivocovisuality, 10, 21, 29, 33, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54, 56–7, 64, 163 Vicuña, Cecilia, 7, 103, 133n violence, 77, 85–6, 93–5, 104, 109 virtuality, 22, 43, 47; see also digital visual poetry (Vispo), 10–11, 16–17, 48, 140, 176; see also calligram visuality, 1, 3, 7, 8–12, 14, 16–18, 21–3, 29–31, 33, 35–6, 39–48, 50–2, 54–7, 59n, 64, 87, 72–4, 93, 100–3, 105, 121–5, 136, 140–4, 146, 148–51, 153, 155, 157–66, 171–3, 175–7, 187–9, 197, 199n, 200n Wachtel, Eleanor, 186, 199n Whitman, Walt, 3, 25n Williams, Emmett, 2, 17, 151 Williams, Jonathan, 138 Williams, William Carlos, 3, 10, 136, 140, 144 Xerox see photocopier Young, Karl, 175–6, 199n Zukofsky, Louis, 3, 10, 22, 37–8, 59n, 136, 138–40, 146 Zurita, Raúl, 100, 132n

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Plate 1 Augusto de Campos, ‘dias dias dias’, 1955

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Plate 2 Ferreira Gullar, reconstruction of ‘Noite’, 1959

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Plate 3 Hélio Oiticica, B33 Bólide-caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo, caixa-poema 2: aqui está/e aqui ficará./Contemplai/seu silêncio heróico, 1965–6. Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

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Plate 4 Anne Carson, ‘if you are writing an elegy . . .’, Nox, unpaginated

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