Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool English Texts and Studies): 79 1789620260, 9781789620269

Citation preview

B or de r Blu r s

LI V ER POOL ENGLISH TE X TS A ND ST UDIE S 79

BORDER BLURS Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland

Border Blurs

GREG THOMAS

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2019 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2019 Liverpool University Press The right of Greg Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-026-9 epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-444-1 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents Figures



vii

Notes on Referencing

ix

Acknowledgements xi 1. Introduction

1

2. Concrete Poetry/Konkrete Poesie/Poesia Concreta: The International Scene

19

3. Order and Doubt: Ian Hamilton Finlay

65

4. Off-Concrete: Edwin Morgan

115

5. Apophasis: Dom Sylvester Houédard

159

6. Abstract Concrete: Bob Cobbing

203

7. ?Concrete Poetry and After: Conclusion

249

Works Cited

261

Index

281



v

For my family, friends, and Saskia

Figures Figures



1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Chapter Two: The International Scene Eugen Gomringer, ‘Ping Pong’ Eugen Gomringer, ‘Silencio’ Décio Pignatari, ‘LIFE’ Décio Pignatari, ‘Bebe Coca Cola’ Augusto de Campos, ‘Sem um Numero’

32 34 39 40 40

Chapter Three: Ian Hamilton Finlay 1. From Glasgow Beasts, An a Burd 74 2. Toy Cow 79 3. From Concertina 80 4. ‘An Eatable Peach’ 85 5. ‘m’ 86 6. ‘roses’ 88 7. ‘eve’ 89 8. Spread from the first ‘Changing Guard’ Times Literary Supplement 91 9. Standing Poem 2: Apple/Heart 95 10. Key and detail from Standing Poem 3 96 11. 4 Sails 99 12. Canal Stripe Series 3 ([6–13]) 100 13. Canal Stripe Series 3 ([28–29]) 101 14. Ocean Stripe 5 ([11]) 102 15. Starlit Waters 107 16. ‘The Four Seasons in Sail.’ Honey by the Water 109 17. The Four Seasons in Sail 109

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Chapter Four: Edwin Morgan 1. From Morgan’s scrapbooks 119 2. ‘Dogs Round a Tree’ and ‘Original Sin at the Water-Hole’ 131 3. ‘Instant Theatre Go Home’ 134 4. From Festive Permutational Poem 137 5. ‘Starryveldt’ 140 6. ‘Message Clear’ 142 Chapter Five: Apophasis: Dom Sylvester Houédard 1. ‘Thalamus Sol’ 2. ‘Birhopal Takistract: Eyear Poem for Takis Vassilakis’ 3. ‘Four Stages of Spiritual Typewriting’ 4. ‘4’ 5. ‘Om’ 6. ‘070267’ 7. ‘020467’ 8. ‘Visualisation of Idapingala Staircases with Mount Meru up the Middle’ 9. Cube Typestract 10. Screen Typestract Chapter Six: Abstract Concrete: Bob Cobbing 1. ‘Crabtree’ 2. ‘Typestract: Introduction/Conclusion’ 3. ‘Worm’ 4. From ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’ 5. ‘Marvo Movie Natter’ (two versions) 6. ‘Fugitive Poem’

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175 177 179 180 181 192 193 194 195 196 209 228 230 232 240 243

Notes on Referencing Notes on Referencing Given the difficulty of defining the medium of certain concrete poems, any two-dimensional work referred to by its creator as a ‘poem’ is treated as such; three-dimensional ‘poems’ are generally treated as works of art. References are not always provided for three-dimensional poems seen only in reproduction, many of which no longer exist in any other form. Untitled poems are named according to their first lines, or, in the case of ‘non-linguistic’ poems, by date of composition, an annotative phrase, or – in as few cases as possible – a simple descriptive term provided by the author. The page numbers of works and quotes from unpaginated bound volumes have been calculated by taking the cover as the first page. The following abbreviations are used throughout the text after being introduced once: ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts); POTH (Poor. Old.Tired.Horse); TLS (Times Literary Supplement); DIAS (Destruction in Art Symposium).

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Acknowledgements and sincere thanks are due to the following estates and individuals for granting various permissions: Eugen Gomringer, Augusto de Campos, and the estate of Décio Pignatari for reproductions of poems, and Augusto for quotes from unpublished letters to Ian Hamilton Finlay and from Edwin Morgan; Wild Hawthorn Press for quotes from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s unpublished letters and reproductions of his poems and artworks; the Edwin Morgan Trust (charity number SC043142) for quotes from Morgan’s letters and reproductions of his poems and scrapbooks; the Prinknash Abbey Trustees for quotes from Dom Sylvester Houédard’s letters and unpublished lecture-transcripts and reproductions of his poems; the family of Bob Cobbing for reproductions of his artworks and quotes from his unpublished notebooks and interviews; the Artistic Estate of Gustav Metzger for quotes from Metzger’s unpublished writing; the Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation for a brief quote from Eduardo Paolozzi’s Metafisikal Translations. Acknowledgements and thanks are also due to the following presses for granting various permissions: Carcanet Press for quotes from and reproductions of Edwin Morgan’s poems; Writers Forum Press for reproductions of poems by Dom Sylvester Houédard; Writers Forum, Arc, and Magenta for reproductions of poems by Bob Cobbing; Edition Hansjörg Mayer for reproduction of Edwin Morgan’s ‘Message Clear’; Jane Dalrymple-Hollo for reproduction of a poem by Anselm Hollo; Claire Sharkey and the family of John Sharkey for reproduction of a poem by John Sharkey. Acknowledgements and thanks to the following institutions for allowing various quotes from and reproductions of items stored with their collections: the Scottish Poetry Library for reproductions of poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan in the Edwin Morgan Archive; the National Library of Scotland for quotes from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s letters to Derek Stanford (1960s–1970s), J.F.

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Hendry, Gael Turnbull, and Robert Nye; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for reproduction of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Toy Cow’; Tate Galleries and Victoria Miro Gallery for reproduction of the Tate catalogue image of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Starlit Waters; the Harry Ransom Research Center for quotes from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s letters to Derek Stanford (1940s–1950s); the Special Collections Department at the University of Glasgow for quotes from unpublished letters by Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, John Sharkey, and Augusto de Campos, quotes from Edwin Morgan’s unpublished ‘Spacepoem 2’, reproductions from Morgan’s scrapbooks, and quotes from unpublished lecture transcripts by Morgan and Houédard (all stored with the Edwin Morgan Papers); the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester for quotes from unpublished letters by Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Eugen Gomringer and quotes from Houédard’s unpublished poems; the British Library for quotes from unpublished notebooks and interview transcripts stored with the Papers of Bob Cobbing; and the Themersons Archive for quotes from Dom Sylvester Houédard’s letters to Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Finally, acknowledgements and sincere thanks are due to the following families and individuals for quotes from letters, correspondences and interviews: Claire Sharkey and the family of John Sharkey for quotes from John’s letters; E.M. de Melo e Castro for quotes from his letters; Stephen Bann and Hayden Murphy for quotes from personal interviews; John Furnival, Liliane Lijn, and Thomas A. Clark for references to personal correspondences and/or interviews. Legal matters aside, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the interview panel who selected me for the studentship from which this book project grew: Laura Marcus, Julie Johnstone, and Robyn Marsack. To Julie and Robyn I owe much more besides. I also want to thank the various academic peers and mentors who helped me to bring this work to fruition, but I must single out Alex Thomson and Stephen Bann for particularly copious praise. More recently, Andrew Patrizio and Bronać Ferran have offered invaluable advice and encouragement. For help with the extensive archival work involved in this project thanks to staff at all the relevant institutions, and especially to Sarah Hepworth and her team. Sincere thanks also to Jenny Howard and Christabel Scaife at Liverpool University Press, and the team at Carnegie, for their hard work and patience. Many artists, poets, editors, curators, and collectors were extremely generous with their time and knowledge, including Bill Allen, Stephen Bann, Laurie Clark, Thomas A. Clark, Alec Finlay, Astrid xii

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Furnival, John Furnival, Liliane Lijn, Peter Manson, Jim McGonigal, Hayden Murphy, Alistair Peebles, Hamish Whyte, and the late John Sharkey. For opportunities to present and publish work related to this project thanks to all the organisers and editors involved, including Sarah Dunnigan and Carole Jones, Bronać Ferran and Lizzie Fisher, Andrew Hunt and Will Cobbing, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Terri Mullholland and Nicole Sierra, Robert Sheppard, and Nicola Simpson. Thanks to Katrina Falco for designing a fantastic cover. On a more personal note, thanks to friends old and new in Edinburgh, London, Cambridge, Nottingham, Glasgow, and elsewhere. Finally, and above all, my thanks and love to my family – Mum, Dad, Joe, Adam (who helped with the Russian), and George (who helped with the maths) – and to Saskia.

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ch a p ter one

Introduction Introduction This book is about the practice of concrete poetry in England and Scotland during the 1960s and early 1970s. Concrete poetry was an international literary and artistic style developed largely during the 1950s–1970s, defined at the most basic level by its focus on the visual, sonic, and otherwise formal or material elements of language. It shared that concern, of course, with other styles and movements that might similarly be called modernist, but is unique among those styles in various respects, not least in its practice long after the early twentieth-century heyday of the self-defining Western modernist vanguard, often in areas of the world – and areas of Britain – only tangentially or belatedly broached by earlier waves of modernist and avant-garde activity.1 In these new contexts, concrete poetry turned pre-defined impulses towards the merging of artistic media to new ends in response to a gamut of new artistic, cultural, and social contexts: from the mid-century flowering of modernist aesthetics in the worlds of architecture and design to the enveloping swath of literary and artistic activity – including conceptual, intermedia, and pop art, cut-up, Lettrist, and sound poetry, aleatoric musical scores, abstract expressionist painting, and artists’ books – refocusing attention on interactions between the linguistic, visual, and sonic planes; from a post-war emphasis on rebuilding international relations through forms of globally coherent communication to the unravelling of medium boundaries in sixties art as a revolt against socially mediated psychology; and from the emergence of computer coding and associated discourses around cybernetics and information theory – which presented both a challenge and an opportunity for poetic language – to prophecies of a dawning ‘electric’ age in which the hypnotic grammars of mass media would have to be simultaneously or ‘spatially’ processed (McLuhan 1962). The list could go on, and yet, despite these myriad points of interest, concrete poetry has, until relatively recently,

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been most conspicuously distinguished from its modernist predecessors by its long-term failure to earn serious literary-critical attention. This may partly reflect the very diversity of thematic associations and analogies – like those just listed – that concrete poetry has been able to support, which make it somewhat difficult to process conceptually in retrospect. Bearing this in mind, and focusing especially on concrete poetry’s adaptation in England and Scotland, this text distils many of the contexts just described into a slightly more specific thesis, which also offers some explanation for the divergence of opinion that has developed on the subject. The emergence and evolution of concrete poetry, I argue, indicates an ongoing exploration of the legacy and relevance of early twentieth-century literary and artistic vanguard activity during the 1950s–1970s, manifested especially in a tension and interplay between broadly constructivist and broadly neo-dada strains within international literary and artistic culture. This was not an atavistic or backwardslooking debate, but indicated how both sets of impulses continued to be developed and defined in the decades following the Second World War. In particular, the competing positions in these debates tended to reflect fundamentally different ideas of social progress, with notions of post-war reconstruction through existing social frameworks clashing and intermingling with the more anarchistic ideologies of the sixties counter-culture. On top of this, in England and Scotland, two countries where concrete poetry was taken up simultaneously, the style became inextricably bound up with questions of nationalism and national identity, for all its transnational connotations.2 In the broadest sense, then, this book emphasises the paradigmatic cultural significance of concrete poetry by showing how it adapted modernist and avant-garde techniques to new artistic, cultural, and social paradigms. In doing so, I partly hope to contribute to ongoing discussions within literary studies concerning the development of modernism beyond its early twentieth-century zenith, and outside the urban Western networks implied by older uses of the term. More specifically, I am interested in how concrete poetry developed in England and Scotland: both as an end in itself and to make a more specific contribution to the new critical picture of concrete poetry worldwide that is already emerging, thanks to recent texts such as Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for A Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement 1955–71 (2016). Finally, I am concerned with the work of four individual poets, two of them Scottish – Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan – one of them English – Bob Cobbing – and one of them a native of the 2

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Channel Islands based in England, Dom Sylvester Houédard. As well as responding to the broader questions just outlined, this book therefore functions as a series of overviews of individual poetic practices. I am presenting my work in response to numerous recent studies of these poets, especially the Scots, Morgan and Finlay. Finlay’s work in particular appears to have been in critical ascendency over the last decade, with an important anthology of his work, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (2012), edited by Alec Finlay, and two illuminating collections of letters from the 1960s–1970s, Stephen Bann’s Midway (2014) and Stonypath Days (2016), appearing in the last few years. Morgan, whose erstwhile status as Scottish Makar consolidated a uniquely prominent position within his nation’s literary culture, has been the subject of James McGonigal’s excellent biography Beyond the Last Dragon (2010), a book of selected correspondence from 1950 to 2010, McGonigal and John Coyle’s The Midnight Letterbox (2015), and Alan Riach’s International Companion to Edwin Morgan (2015). Though the work of the English poets I am discussing has not attracted the same level of attention – at least within literary criticism – Houédard’s is the subject of an engaging and superbly presented collection of essays and reproductions, Nicola Simpson’s Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter ([2012]) and, more recently, Simpson and Andrew Hunt’s portfolio-size Dom Sylvester Houédard (2017). William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper’s Boooook: The Life and Work of Bob Cobbing (2015) has performed a similar task for Cobbing’s practice, which is also the subject of Lawrence Upton’s Commentaries on Bob Cobbing (2012) and a special issue of the Journal of Innovative British and Irish Poetry from 2012 (4 no. 2). As already implied, this flurry of activity partly reflects an ongoing global critical re-evaluation of concrete poetry, perhaps loosely related to the revisionist concerns of research on literary modernism over the last two decades, and certainly connected to a renewed engagement with non-linear and ‘coded’ poetries in the context of increasingly ubiquitous digital interfaces with language. Introducing Reading Visual Poetry in 2011, Willard Bohn cited a related and ‘astonishing transformation’ of criticism of visual poetry across the preceding three decades, noting that ‘[s]ince 1978, visual poetry has come into its own as a legitimate genre’, referencing ‘[a]t least a dozen books’ published over that period as well as a recent resurgence in the use of visual techniques among contemporary poets (2011, 13–14). Though any renaissance in the reception of concrete poetry – a different term – must be located in the more recent past, the republication of period anthologies such as Emmett Williams’s Anthology 3

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of Concrete Poetry ([1967] 2013) and Bob Cobbing and Peter Mayer’s Concerning Concrete Poetry ([1978] 2014), as well as the appearance of a collection of post-1960s concrete poetry, Chris McCabe and Victoria Bean’s The New Concrete (2015), are among various projects that attest to it. More recently, Jamie Hilder, in Designed Words for a Designed World (2016), has presented a ground-breaking critical reappraisal of concrete poetry worldwide, stressing its relevance to post-war developments in architecture, technology, economics, and fine art, and its status as the first truly global literary movement. To some extent then, in presenting this research I am riding the crest of a wave. But I also present it on the basis that none of the titles just mentioned offers a broad, context-specific account of the uptake and development of concrete poetry within Britain. To do so, as I am attempting – accepting my exclusive focus on England and Scotland – is not only to ride the crest of a wave but also to become mired in a longer tradition of critical indifference and hostility that is particularly evident in a British context and to contend with the partialities and blind-spots of those few engaged accounts of concrete poetry that have appeared within Britain – or which refer to British poets and artists – since the 1960s. To that end, the second part of this introduction sketches out those critical debates, showing how this text positions itself in relation to them. That account will make more sense, however, if I first present the overall narrative of this book as succinctly as possible. My first key assumption is that concrete poetry, accepting numerous historical precedents and the pressure placed on the term by decades of revisionist analysis, is a style that emerged in West Germany and Brazil in the early to mid-1950s. Most of the poetry produced in this context was rooted in constructivist aesthetics, a range of literary modernisms, and an interest in simplifying and clarifying language systems often related to semiotics, especially information theory. I indicate all of this by a term already in use among concrete poetry scholars, ‘classical concrete’. By the close of the 1960s, however, a different definition of concrete poetry, more connected to Dada, Futurism, and in many instances intermedia art, had taken hold worldwide. This other concrete poetry – accepting that such distinctions present an overly neat contrast – was more concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense, and with instating in language’s place various forms of multi-media communication and expression, sometimes implied to possess trans-rational or spiritual values. This was not simply an aesthetic shift but implicitly an ideological one, whereby a fragile ideal 4

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of post-war international cultural renewal and dialogue, staked on the possibility of globally coherent modes of communication and tangentially responsive to the emergence of a global consumer-capitalist culture, was subsumed by a set of more explicitly counter-cultural positions. These partly developed in response to the trenchant divisions that had actually manifested themselves in post-war global politics – especially in response to Western anti-communist military aggression – and were generally concerned with uprooting prevailing social structures. Against this background, from 1962 onwards, concrete poetry was being practised in England and Scotland. Roughly speaking, some of the poets exploring its techniques accepted a view of concrete poetry closer to the initial, classical ideal, while others were more aligned with the second: again, this split was not solely an aesthetic one. Specifically, and very broadly speaking, we can trace a movement from the first to the second approach by assessing the work of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard, and Cobbing in turn, at the same time noting an increasing interaction between concrete poetry and the counter-culture. In this sense, studying the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland is one way of gauging broader changes in the prevailing social and cultural mood in those nations – perhaps across the West in general – during the post-war decades. In stylistic terms, this development often entailed a shift in the means of negotiating the more inhibiting aspects of concrete poetics, especially its demand that the linguistic and visual or material elements of the poem be literally identical or coextensive: so that a poem could not simply combine language and image, for example, but had somehow to function as language and image simultaneously. That impression could rarely be sustained over an extended period, leading poets either to re-embrace more familiar forms of literary expression or to focus more exclusively on visual, sonic, and extra-linguistic effects, often bringing their work closer – by conventional definitions – to visual and/or sonic art, or even music. Again, very roughly speaking, the former manoeuvre tended to indicate more sympathy for the first understanding of concrete poetry, and the latter for the second. At the same time as these developments were being played out, concrete poetry was becoming especially significant to Scottish writers and artists: partly as a style that seemed invigoratingly different from the conceptions of Scottish literary modernism that still held sway in the early 1960s, partly as a talisman for assertions of an independent national tradition of avant-garde literature and art, an idea linked to 5

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cultural nationalisms more generally. Crudely speaking, the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan could be taken respectively to support these two positions. The significance of concrete poetry to Scotland is a topic that I attempt to hold in focus, then, either in the foreground or the background of discussion, without losing sight of the wider scenario just outlined. In short, I am attempting to introduce concrete poetry in England and Scotland in some of its practical, creative, and cultural complexities, both as a self-sufficient goal and to contribute to a newly emergent critical picture of concrete poetry worldwide, as well as ongoing debates around the spatial, temporal, and formal parameters of modernism. However, I am also assuming that the four individual practices I consider in detail are significant enough to merit discussion on their own terms. Thus, while I never stray too far from my overall narrative, chapters three to six offer contextual and biographical detail uniquely relevant to their subjects. In this sense, as I have already suggested, the book ought to function as a set of author-specific surveys. Mud Pies: The Critical Context Contrasting critical positions on concrete poetry did not manifest themselves immaculately in the work in question, but were rationalised and supported by the work of critics, many of them also poets, and most with particular affiliations and prejudices, often geographically rooted ones. The argument just outlined takes its cue from the key positions in these debates, and will be better understood if I briefly outline them. But, before doing so, let me briefly re-emphasise that critical responses to concrete poetry in a British context have, until recently, been largely apathetic. We might take this to reflect the Leavisite critical consensus against which concrete poetry first took hold, or perhaps some vague native suspicion of self-defining avant-gardes. In fact, the picture is rather more complicated than that, as hostility towards concrete poetry has tended to emanate from milieux associated with modernist literature as much as – if not more than – any other source. In any case, it would be unnecessary to reference every unflattering account of concrete poetry to have appeared in Britain or with reference to British poets since the 1960s. But it is worth touching on a few, if only to clarify the need for this study and to show that such responses do not necessarily denote a reactionary attitude to literary form or any other subject. More often, they tend towards the mistaken assumption that concrete poetry 6

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abandons language in some sense, and that the visual or sonic effects that supersede it are meaningless, beyond a rather facile emphasis of language’s status as a material object. Certainly, it is notable as regards concrete poetry’s reception in Scotland that some of the earliest and most hostile attacks on it appeared in the articles and letters of the country’s most celebrated twentiethcentury poet. Hugh MacDiarmid’s letters from the 1960s and 1970s document his attempts to prevent concrete poetry appearing in The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse in 1966, and in Edinburgh University’s annual Scottish Poetry series, which ran from 1966 to 1976: ‘[t]hese spatial arrangements of isolated letters and geometrically placed phrases, etc. has [sic] nothing whatever to do with poetry, any more than mud pies can be called a form of architecture’ ([1965] 1984, 628). Across subsequent decades, important British critics of modernist poetry, from Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1978) to Andrew Duncan (2003), have lambasted concrete poets along fairly consistent lines: not for disrupting inherited relationships between language and reality – the task of the modernist poet by some accounts – but for abandoning potential ones by discarding language altogether. This book does not respond to these arguments directly, but I do so indirectly simply by paying close attention to the work in question, which is enough to make clear that the concrete poem need not abandon language, nor are the non-linguistic effects that take language’s place in some instances necessarily glib or one-dimensional in their appeal. Against this backdrop of critical apathy, any engaged responses to concrete poetry are welcome. But responses of this kind focused on or produced within Britain, as well as being thin on the ground, have tended to be partial and selective, generally limiting their focus to particular individuals or groups. Often, as I have noted, this reflects cultural and/or geographical attachments of some kind. Indeed, for the sake of clarity, I am going to divide such responses into four categories, two of them defined by contrasting approaches to concrete poetry’s stylistic parameters and ideological connotations, two by different accounts of its importance to Scottish literature and culture. According to one school of thought, perhaps most active during the 1960s and 1970s, concrete poetry ought to be judged according to the tenets of the style as conceived in mid-century Brazil and Germany: minimalism of linguistic and visual expression, the use of visual presentation to enhance semantic meaning, and a slimmer emphasis on sound and performance than comes across in some definitions of 7

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the genre. Key reference points for this understanding of concrete poetry include constructivism and concrete art, literary modernism, and semiotics, although in a British context the latter term was more likely to indicate a broadly structuralist approach than the mathematical theories of linguistic communication, adapted from information theory and cybernetics, important to the first concrete poets. Focusing on the adaptation of these principles by British poets, critics expounding this approach tend to take Finlay’s work as exemplary and are generally sceptical of the wilder aesthetic tendencies introduced into concrete poetry by the late 1960s. The interest in Finlay’s work partly reflects the fact that this approach can be associated primarily with individuals and groups introduced to the style by Finlay himself, most notably a group of young critics based at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s, including Stephen Bann, Mike Weaver, and Philip Steadman, two of whom – Bann and Weaver – met Finlay in Edinburgh in the summer of 1964.3 This group’s approach to concrete poetry was influenced by their existing creative interests, including the objectivist and Black Mountain poetry that Weaver was then studying, constructivist art and architecture, and structuralist semiotics. Bann has connected the second influence with the University of Cambridge’s architecture faculty, where Steadman was a student, and which was populated in the 1960s by figures connected with ‘the whole Bauhaus ideology’, including Leslie Martin, co-editor of the 1937 constructivist anthology Circle (Bann, personal interview, January 10, 2011). The third was largely Bann’s area of expertise, reflected in his translation of essays such as Barthes’s ‘The Activity of Structuralism’ ([1963] 1966) for the little magazine Form, which Bann co-edited with Weaver and Steadman over an eleven-issue run between 1966 and 1969. At an earlier stage the magazine Image, edited by Steadman for three issues between Autumn 1964 and Winter 1965, had provided a similar outlet. Bann’s editorship of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967), published by London Magazine Editions – one of three major concrete poetry anthologies to appear in the late 1960s, along with Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry ([1967] 2013) and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View ([1968] 1970) – ensured the long-standing influence of this group’s approach, though all of its members shortly moved on to new critical territory.4 Bann’s short essay ‘Communication and Structure in Concrete Poetry’ ([1964]), published in Image, exemplifies that approach to some extent. Using broadly structuralist terminology also informed by E.H. Gombrich’s 8

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essay ‘Communication and Structure’, and by the psychologist C.E. Osgood’s notion of ‘semantic space’, Bann presents the visual form of the concrete poem as a manifestation of the underlying, differential frameworks of linguistic cognition, ‘a graphic way of representing the relationships of words among themselves’. The ‘readiness with which we posit relationships between words that transcends their conventional meaning’, Bann suggests, ‘depends on our fundamental ability to assess information in terms of alternative categories’ ([1964], 8). In this sense, the value of concrete poetry lay in making that interplay of pre-semantic categories lucid to the conscious mind through its visual materialisation, allowing readers to perceive ‘the mysteries of structure at a conscious level’ and priming their receptiveness to the content channelled through that structure (Bann [1964], 9). In contrast, many critics have endorsed precisely that understanding of concrete poetry more prevalent by the late 1960s and 1970s. These accounts – most of which appeared during those decades – emphasise concrete poetry’s capacity to occupy the spaces between media, often endorsing improvisation and spontaneity in composition or performance as the qualities able to unlock such spaces. This approach can often indicate counter-cultural affiliations, with analogies drawn between stress placed on the conventions of language and medium and stress on social structures of various kinds. Writing in this vein often broadens the definition of concrete poetry by tracing its origins back prior to the 1950s – to the work of the Dadaists and Futurists, for example, or further – connecting it with contemporaneous movements – such as Lettrism, sound and cut-up poetry, and Fluxus-related intermedia practices – and citing a diverse and active concrete poetry movement extending into the 1970s or beyond. For critics working from this angle, Cobbing’s work is often exemplary. Indeed, many of them, most notably Eric Mottram, were or are connected to Cobbing’s press and reading group Writers Forum. Cobbing’s own critical statements on concrete poetry, printed in various little magazines from the mid-1960s onwards, helped to establish this approach. So too, to a lesser extent, did the writing of Houédard and other poet-critics based in the south-west of England during the 1960s and 1970s. Cobbing’s article ‘From Haiku to Happening’, published in The International Times in 1968, sums up this understanding of concrete poetry and also indicates the surprising levels of hostility that debates on the subject were capable of inciting:

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bor de r blu r s CONCRETE POETRY which began as small Haiku-like constellations of words on a page has EXPLODED to become a 7 ft high maze of multiworded screens with cowbell entrance and automatic central speaking-shrine the first epic concrete poem – or complexx of sound tapes in an environment of films and slides total sound/visual experience – or improvisations human & percussive with mime & live-action to a vibrating drone on tape ‘a revolution for the body-spirit & intellect & ear’ BUT there R those who would artificially restrict this growth & confine concrete poetry once more Chieff Offender in this country is the appropriately named Stephen BANN. Have none of his London Mag edition anthology Only anthology giving a hint of the multiplicity of approaches in VISUAL concrete is EMMETT WILLIAMS anthology. (Cobbing 1968, 17)

Eric Mottram’s Towards Design in Poetry, written as an introduction for Cobbing and Peter Mayer’s 1978 anthology Concerning Concrete Poetry – though never used as such – offers a more thought-through exposition of this position. Eschewing Bann’s minimalistic, semiological approach, Mottram focuses on concrete poetry’s intermedia and extralinguistic qualities, its connection to a range of contemporary intermedia art-forms, and its performance possibilities: Concrete poetry is part of the developments in conceptual, visual and sculptural art, and in music; the essentially interfacial nature of these developments has been clear for some years now … . Within this sphere of action, the poem is more clearly than ever materials for performance. The poetic event is not the text on the page, to be subject to academic analyses as if it were complete. (Mottram [1977] 2005, 9)

The subversive political potential that Mottram claims for concrete poetry is equally distinct from the general themes of Bann’s writing: ‘[t]o be possessed by a poem or a performance, however brief the catharsis may be, strikes terror to the leisure class because, like the presence of the new, it lies outside the expenditure of energy on money, property, comfort and disciplinarian hierarchy’ ([1977] 2005, 33). Clearly, the two schools of thought just outlined are antithetical in fundamental respects. However, the approaches are bound together by their tendency to overlook concrete poetry’s significance to Scottish literature and culture, some recognition of which has nonetheless been one of the mainstays of the style’s critical reception in Britain. Writers who have recognised this have tended, very roughly speaking, to adopt one (or both) of two further positions, both of which can still be found within contemporary discussion on the topic. Some are chiefly concerned

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with internally plotted histories of Scottish literature, particularly with the concrete poets’ defiance of the principles of the so-called Scottish Renaissance. Others are more interested in concrete poetry in Scotland as evidence of an independent tradition of avant-garde literature and art, sometimes offset against alternatives defined in some way as English. The first of these positions focuses on the flytings of Finlay, Morgan, and other younger Scottish poets, with Hugh MacDiarmid and his acolytes during the 1950s and 1960s, over the latter’s perceived detachment from contemporary Scottish culture and society. In this context, concrete poetry’s potential lightness of theme and tone – what we might call its ‘pop’ credentials – are often stressed, as are its international associations, essentially those qualities most antithetical to certain aspects of ScottishRenaissance ideology, particularly its emphasis on the use of literary Scots. By 1966, this context was coherent enough for the English critic Edward Lucie-Smith to speculate that concrete poetry might have ‘implanted itself so firmly in Scotland, and, till now, so comparatively feebly in England’ because it represented ‘a way of throwing off the shackles of an oppressive Scottish Nationalism’ (1966, 44). This argument has been explored more recently in critical studies of Finlay’s work. Alec Finlay’s introduction to Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections places his father’s early 1960s poetry in the context of an ‘oddly homely’ ‘Scottish avant-garde’, completed by Morgan and the poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson, pressing ‘a fey shoulder … against the wheel of the moribund Scottish Renaissance’ (2012, 20). By another, overlapping account, concrete poetry can itself be used to support a nationalist or nationally oriented reading, exemplifying an independent tradition of avant-garde Scottish art and literature sometimes contrasted with ‘English’ alternatives. This argument can involve comparisons between concrete poetry’s unconventional grammatical structures and regional, nonstandard, even post-colonial languages and dialects, and, in some cases, the claim that concrete poetry was not composed well, or not composed at all, south of the border. This position arguably has its origins in Edwin Morgan’s writing on the subject. Certainly, in a 1965 article for Peace News, Morgan pitched the style against a complacent English poetry scene implicitly associated with Phillip Larkin et al.: The English Channel is a pretty narrow strip of water, but it’s remarkable what an effective barrier it has been to the passage of ideas. … [Q]uietness and absence of ideas and discussion may indicate lazy minds and smallness

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bor de r blu r s of spirit. Too many English poets since World War Two have been busy stacking their neat little bundles of firewood, and have stopped planting trees. (Morgan 1965a, 6)5

More recently, Michael Gardiner has argued that concrete poetry’s visual qualities encode a ‘post-colonial’ sensibility particularly apt to Scottish poetry. Because ‘power over visual space is a basis of empire’, ‘any poem in which the visual is awarded too much importance relative to mainstream narrative poetry, and in which prosodic “reading” and imageformation ironise one another, can be regarded as critically postcolonial’ (Gardiner 2006, 112). This rather ostentatious argument leads Gardiner to claim (incorrectly) that concrete poetry ‘bypassed England to arrive in Scotland’, though he acknowledges that ‘there were many underground English versions in the 1970s’ (2006, 113).6 In the context of these overlapping narratives, my aim in presenting four highly contrasting bodies of work is to show that concrete poetry in England and Scotland, taken collectively, can accommodate all of the readings just outlined (putting aside straightforward factual oversights). In the process, I hope to emphasise concrete poetry’s surprisingly wide and paradigmatic significance as a cultural phenomenon in Britain and beyond. To that end, the approach I take is based on historically contextualised close reading, which seems the best way to counter the tendency towards generalisation that has dogged previous approaches to the topic. Paying close attention in this way does mean, however, that as an overview of concrete poetry in England and Scotland my text must work by example rather than exhaustive documentation. Focusing closely on four poets’ work means overlooking or paying only scant attention to other relevant figures, including poets and artists based in Scotland – Tom Leonard, Alan Riddell – and the West Country – Kenelm Cox, John Furnival, Hansjörg Mayer, John Sharkey, Charles Verey, Thomas A. Clark – as well as individuals of a slightly older generation, notably Edward Wright and Stefan Themerson, whose work predicts concrete poetry in certain respects.7 My focus on England and Scotland also prevents engagement with the work of Peter Finch, whose press and journal Second Aeon brought concrete poetry to Wales in the mid-1960s.8 Most importantly, while my almost exclusive focus on male poets presents an undeniably accurate portrait of the gender of concrete poetry during the 1950s–1970s, we must also acknowledge the significance of women poets, musicians, and artists to the concrete scene in England 12

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and Scotland, including Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Liliane Lijn, Lily Greenham, Annea Lockwood, and Paula Claire, not to mention the under-acknowledged partners and collaborators whose creative contributions were vital to the development of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s practice during the 1960s and 1970s, most importantly Jessie McGuffie and Sue Finlay.9 Many of the individuals just named operated slightly after the period I am focusing on, or at the peripheries of the scenes and networks identified, almost certainly for gender-related reasons. Indeed, the sociological and stylistic explanations for the relative dearth of women in concrete poetry between the 1950s and early 1970s is another topic deserving closer attention than I can offer in a text preoccupied with other themes. Instead, I engage with these issues in my forthcoming article ‘Concrete Poetry and Scottish Women’s Writing’ (Thomas), which focuses especially on the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and which I see as a companion piece to this book. It is also worth responding at this point to Jamie Hilder’s criticisms of what he calls the ‘national’ approach to writing about concrete poetry, which presents a picture of the style’s development within a particular nation or geographical region ‘in spite of the fact that the movement had no geographical centre’. This approach, Hilder asserts, ‘prevents readers from discussions of how the very concept of nationhood was being challenged and transformed at mid-century, especially in relation to the re-drawing of borders after World War Two’ (2016, 20). There is much to agree with here: all of the poets I discuss recognised themselves as participants in an international or transnational movement as much as, and often more than, they placed themselves in any local, regional, or national genealogy. The internationalism of concrete poetry was often particularly appealing for English and Scottish poets, who were working in response to increasingly introspective and bigoted tendencies within their own national literary cultures. Even putting aside internationalism as a conscious element of concrete poetics, the emergence of new social, economic, and technological paradigms that made international communication and information transmission easier, faster, and feasible for a broader sweep of the global population was a vital catalyst for the concrete scene. However, my response on this issue – bearing in mind the geographical restrictions of this study – is twofold. Firstly, a commitment to international cultural identity does not rule out the simultaneous expression of national or regional character through a creative practice. In fact, the two impulses are often mutually defining. Edwin Morgan, though clearly 13

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interested in expressing various forms of international cultural allegiance and political solidarity throughout his life, was also a committed Scottish nationalist, taking the very internationalism of concrete poetry to define the version of Scottish culture he sought to project. Secondly, even where commitment to an international style or movement is not counterbalanced by any consciously national or regionally oriented aspect of creative identity, this does not mean the erasure of all geographically determined content from the work in question. Bob Cobbing’s concrete poetry often involved forms of abstract sonic and visual composition bereft of any indication of ‘context’, geographical or otherwise. Yet his work would not have developed in this way had he not been based during the mid-1960s at the counter-cultural hub of Better Books bookshop, thus engaging with the intermedia artistic practices that influenced his approach. Even putting these arguments aside, there is no reason why a geographically oriented study of a particular network of concrete poets should preclude an internationally focused engagement with the style or vice versa. Having said this, given the extensive interactions between concrete poets in England and Scotland and worldwide, it is still worth relaying my own understanding of concrete poetry as a global phenomenon before proceeding to more geographically specific analysis. My second chapter therefore focuses on the international concrete style to which developments in England and Scotland relate back, and which, as I have already suggested, developed out of a period of practice that can be characterised as ‘classical’. Classical concrete was influenced by a range of early twentieth-century literary modernisms and artistic avant-gardes, but also by a mid-century modernist aesthetic connected to architecture and design, tempered by the imperatives of post-war reconstruction. Ideas associated with semiotics, especially information theory, information aesthetics, and cybernetics, were also important. The underlying aim in many cases was the development of transnational systems of linguistic communication that might provide the basis for a new era of global social harmony. Across the 1950s–1970s, however, and especially towards the close of the 1960s, a global shift occurred that framed the terms of concrete poetry’s development in England and Scotland. The style was increasingly related to an alternative set of early twentieth-century reference points such as Dada and Futurism, and to contemporary influences and affinities such as intermedia art, as well as a counter-cultural desire to tear down social institutions. In chapters three to seven I offer roughly chronological surveys tracing the development of a particular poet’s work from that point when they 14

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began exploring concrete forms until they stopped using the term for their work; or until its essential aspects had been established. Chapter 3 considers the relatively brief period during the 1960s when Ian Hamilton Finlay referred to himself as a concrete poet. Finlay, I argue, utilised concrete poetry’s capacity for formal duality – that is, to combine linguistic and non-linguistic modes of composition – to generate or enhance ‘thematic duality’, establishing precise and surprising links between disparate objects, phenomena, and cultural contexts. This poetic style, indebted to classical concrete poetry, partly expressed Finlay’s opposition to the more stifling aspects of Scottish literary culture during the early 1960s. Yet his interaction with the concrete poetry movement itself quickly became similarly fraught. Through his production of visual poems on the page, card and booklet-poems, poems set in glass, wood and stone, and, finally, poems cast as three-dimensional installations in the landscape, Finlay both extended and overran the formal parameters of concrete poetry from a historically minded, ideologically loaded sense of the proper boundaries between media. At the same time, he reacted with increasing dismay to what he saw as the co-option of concrete poetry by the counter-culture, and by a series of associated neo-dada principles. These combined factors led to a pointed break from the concrete poetry movement during the late 1960s. Turning to Edwin Morgan’s concrete poetry in Chapter 4, we find a far more mercurial and irreverent version of concrete style. Morgan responded enthusiastically to the early examples of concrete poetry that he had encountered in 1962 and, like Finlay, adopted similar techniques partly to challenge anachronistic elements within contemporary Scottish literary culture. But Morgan’s work expresses a more self-conscious desire than Finlay’s to subvert the grammars of concrete poetry itself, turning it to a new range of expressive, descriptive, and polemical ends and to fantastical scenarios of communication ranging from outer space to the animal kingdom. In this respect, Morgan’s concrete poetry not only reflects the nationalist agendas outlined above but also tests the limits of what could be achieved, formally and thematically, within the constraints of early concrete style. In its attention to topical context and evident refusal to endorse notions of universal linguistic value, Morgan’s ‘off-concrete’ poetry not only predicts a post-structuralist intellectual consensus but also grants concrete poetry an activist tone exemplary of the decade. One way in which Morgan and Finlay both remained committed to the ideas initially associated with concrete poetry was by using the 15

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visual and phonetic arrangement of words to enhance or complement semantic sense. For the Gloucestershire-based poet and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, concrete poetry instead came to entail a grammar of abstract visual motifs in which semantic meaning was largely eradicated, a quality particularly evident in his ‘typestracts’, meticulous visual–linguistic compositions created on the typewriter. Houédard’s poetics partly exemplified the reconceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada art-form connected to the ideologies of the Western counter-culture, especially the idea that modes of creative expression that defied the conventions of medium could manifest ideal states of non-authoritarian social interaction. At the same time, the unique distinction of Houédard’s work was its intimation of the divine, casting off language and symbol to express a negative awareness of God. For Bob Cobbing, too, concrete poetry became a means of transcending semantic language. In his case, this reflected a suspicion of certain modes of public linguistic discourse – or perhaps of semantic language in general – that was directly related to counter-cultural ideologies. But, whereas Houédard’s withdrawal from language comprised an ascetic renunciation, Cobbing’s granted access to a realm of intermedia poesis, integrally related to live performance, whereby an absolute objectivity of communication was implied to have been achieved. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and pre-twentieth-century literary and artistic genres, with classical concrete poetry effectively serving as a stylistic counterpoint. In this sense, Cobbing’s work represents the end-point of the stylistic and ideological shift with which my text is concerned. Having considered concrete poetry in England and Scotland partly as the index of a global development, in my final chapter I consider those characteristics that set it apart from the international picture. Concrete poetry in England and Scotland, I suggest, tended to lack the grounding in design theory and semiotics that defined the style’s development in Northern Europe and South America. To a larger extent, it stood for a broader literary–cultural paradigm of the 1950s–1970s whereby British poets re-engaged with early twentieth-century literary modernisms, often via the example of mid-century North American modernist poetries. It can therefore be seen as one aspect of what Eric Mottram called ‘The British Poetry Revival’ (1993). At the same time, focusing on the example of concrete poetry in England and Scotland can help to nuance existing understandings of the Revival by casting new light on its geographical locations and cultural affinities. 16

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Notes 1 As I refer to concrete poetry as both ‘modernist’ and ‘avant-garde’, it is worth offering a working definition of these two terms. My definition of ‘modernism’, a term I apply mainly to literature, is essentially reactive, allowing the term’s currently wide range of applications to determine my use of it to a large extent, though I do take it that modernism must be characterised by a self-conscious emphasis on formal innovation. I use the term ‘mid-century modernism’ more specifically, to describe a paradigm within architecture and design outlined in the following chapter. I effectively use ‘avant-garde’ in two contexts: on the one hand, to refer to visual or multi-media art to which the application of the term ‘modernist’, with its strong literary-critical associations, seems like a category error – and thus to concrete poetry when I am stressing its non-literary aspects or affinities – and, on the other, as a substitute for the term ‘modernism’ when I am emphasising modernism’s combative qualities: when it seems that the innovation is seized on as a conscious affront to inherited techniques. 2 The title of my book, ‘Border Blurs’, is intended to reflect not only the interplay of literature and other media in concrete poetry but also this interaction of two distinct national literary cultures during the 1960s–1970s. Though the precise meaning I bring to the term is my own, the phrase itself is one I associate with the aesthetics and literary-critical terminology of Dom Sylvester Houédard, who referred in several articles during the early to mid 1960s to the blurring of borders or boundaries – of various kinds – through concrete poetics. In ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’ he described the ‘rejection of divides & borders, delight in accepting ambiguity/ ambivalence: alive blurring of frontiers between art & art, mind & mind, world & world, mind art & world’ that animated the style (1963c, 48). Introducing the first of a series of exhibitions held at Arlington Mill in Gloucestershire three years later, he commented: ‘arlington-une begins w/ the idea that poetry frontiers have been shifting & in fact are being shifted … by crossing and demolishing boundaries [poets] have made it clear that only an aesthetics of nationalism & apartheid could ever continue to defend them’, making the implied connection between border blurring in art and geopolitics more explicit (1966b, [5]). But it was perhaps in 1969, when Bob Cobbing staged a concrete poetry exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Poetry Society’s 60-year anniversary celebrations, that the term ‘Border Blur’ was first used with explicit reference to concrete poetry and Houédard’s work in particular, though it is not clear if the choice of phrase was Houédard’s or Cobbing’s. In any case, it adorned a poster introducing a collection of Houédard’s typestracts included in the show, as Cobbing commented in his write-up of the exhibition: ‘near the entrance was a photograph of Dom Sylvester Houédard over the repeated legend Borderblur Borderblur’ (1969a, 302). 3 On the details of this meeting see Bann (2015). Bann (2017), the writer and artist Reg Gadney (2017), and the architect Dean Hawkes (2017) have recently written of the interdisciplinary atmosphere that supported this group’s activities in 1960s Cambridge. 4 Solt’s anthology was initially published as a special issue of the magazine Artes Hispanicas/Hispanic Arts in Winter/Spring 1968 but was republished by Indiana University Press in 1970 (Solt 1996, 350–51).

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bor de r blu r s 5 Morgan is writing for an English magazine here, and it is possible that he is identifying himself, hugely uncharacteristically, as an English poet. However, Morgan later described concrete poetry more forthrightly as ‘an international movement that turned out to be strong in Scotland but not in England’ (2002, 18). 6 For an example of a more successful attempt to present concrete poetry through a Scottish lens – one that lets the poems do the work – see Cockburn and Finlay (2001). 7 For my discussion of Furnival’s work see Thomas (2015). The Polish emigre Stefan Themerson established Gaberbocchus Press with Franciszka Themerson in London in 1948, publishing a range of avant-garde and modernist poetry and art over the next thirty years, including works by Apollinaire, Schwitters, Hausmann, and Queneau (Reichardt 2017, 30). The ‘semantic poems’ embedded in Themerson’s novels, such as Bayamus ([1949] 1965), were taken as precursors for concrete poetry by Houédard and Cobbing. Edward Wright’s work across a range media during the 1950s–1960s, including typography, painting, poetry, and architectural lettering, presages concrete poetry in various respects. During the 1950s Wright ran experimental typography workshops with his students at the LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts, which, according to Theo Crosby, ‘produced what is now called concrete poetry’ ([1977] 2007, 31). Some of the results were printed in the anonymous Typographica article ‘Pattern, Sound, and Motion’ (1954), and were reprinted by Cobbing and Mayer as evidence that Wright was ‘making what are obviously concrete poems well before 1955’ ([1978] 2014, 54). Wright designed the lettering for concrete poems including Finlay’s 4 Sails ([1966a]) and briefly served as typographical editor for Houédard and Furnival’s press Openings after meeting Furnival at Between Poetry and Painting in Autumn 1965 (Furnival, letter to the author, May 18, 2012). 8 Second Aeon operated from 1966 until the mid-1970s, as Finch has recently discussed (2012). In an earlier essay, Finch suggested that official Welsh literary culture was cautious about concrete poetry because it could not necessarily be written in Welsh, suggesting parallels with the hostility of Scots-language poets to concrete poetry in Scotland (1978, 88–90). 9 Paula Claire has recently written about her involvement with concrete poetry during the 1970s in relation to her collaborations with Bob Cobbing (2016) and Bill Griffiths (2007). Liliane Lijn’s revolving Poem Machines of the early 1960s were created partly in response to the cut-up techniques of beat poets such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whom she had befriended in Paris around the close of the 1950s. John Furnival and Kenelm Cox later told Lijn that her Poem Machines – first displayed in Britain at Signals Gallery in 1964 – influenced their own experiments in this area (Lijn, personal interview, January 16, 2018). The Danish sound poet Lily Greenham was connected during the 1950s to the Vienna Group of sound and concrete poets. After moving to London in 1972, she became associated with the group around Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum.

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Concrete Poetry/Konkrete Poesie/ Poesia Concreta The International Scene The International Scene

On May 25, 1962 a letter from the Portuguese poet E.M. de Melo e Castro appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in response to an article by deputy editor John Willett entitled ‘Poetry, Prose and the Machine’ (May 4, 1962): Sir,—I have read with great interest the article ‘Poetry, Prose and the Machine’ by a Special Correspondent in your issue of May 4, but I cannot help feeling surprised at his not mentioning the increasingly important movement of poesia concreta, which originated in Brazil and is now reaching Portugal. In fact poesia concreta is a successful experiment in ideogrammatic or diagrammatic writing and poetic creation precisely on the lines to which your Correspondent refers. This kind of experiment is slowly replacing the traditional descriptive method of communication by a visual, compact, ideogrammatic way of bringing about and conveying complex and subtle relations among ideas, images, words, things, &c. Poesia concreta is arousing a wave of interest both in Brazil and in Portugal, especially among young people and the most advanced poets. (Melo e Castro 1962b)

In his 1964 article ‘Paradada’, published in the first of two subsequent editions of the TLS dedicated to the ‘Changing Guard’ in contemporary poetry, the concrete poet and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard emphasised the importance of this seemingly incidental little note: ‘edwin morgan / ian h finlay / anselm hollo / myself all came to concrete directions out of different places thru TLS letter 250562’ (Houédard 19

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1964d). As Houédard suggests in his distinctively clipped, beat-style prose, the practice of concrete poetry in England and Scotland stems largely from several independent encounters with Melo e Castro’s letter. The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, upon reading it, wrote directly to Melo e Castro, who promptly sent him an anthology of Brazilian concrete poetry published by the Brazilian Embassy in Lisbon, along with the address, in São Paulo, of the concrete poet and founding member of the Noigandres group Augusto de Campos. Morgan also reported his findings to his friend the Edinburgh-based poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who printed concrete poetry for the first time in the British Isles early in 1963, in the sixth issue of his literary journal Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Houédard, like Morgan, seemingly came across the letter directly, and spent the next few years galvanising a group of writers and artists based near his home at Prinknash Abbey in rural Gloucestershire – including John Furnival, John Sharkey, Kenelm Cox, Charles Verey, Thomas A. Clark, and Hansjörg Mayer – into a period of loosely collective activity orientated around concrete poetics. Many subsequent introductions to the style, including that of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, came from writers or artists alerted by Melo e Castro’s letter. This apparently singular point of origin might suggest some degree of group-mindedness among English and Scottish concrete poets. If any such mindset can be inferred, the sixth issue of the little (and littleknown) magazine Link (June–July 1964), edited from Gloucestershire College of Art’s Cheltenham Campus by David Holmes, serves as well as anything as an indicator. This issue featured poems and critical statements by Finlay, Houédard, Sharkey, Furnival, and Anselm Hollo alongside Houédard’s translation of the French poet Pierre Garnier’s ‘Position 1 of International for Spatialist Poetries’, written in October 1963. Garnier’s manifesto had collated recent developments in concreterelated poetries worldwide, and had been signed by Houédard, Finlay, Furnival, Morgan, Hollo, and even Herbert Read (Garnier 1964).1 This collective endorsement itself gives some impression of common ground, as did the many group exhibitions of concrete poetry organised in England from the early 1960s onwards. These include the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Phonetic, and Kinetic Poetry, held at the University of Cambridge in November 1964, organised by Mike Weaver, Reg Gadney, Stephen Bann, and others, and Jasia Reichardt’s breakthrough show Between Poetry and Painting, held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in October–November 1965. In stylistic terms, meanwhile, the turn to concrete poetry among English 20

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and Scottish writers and artists can be broadly defined by the unique extent of their engagement with Anglo-American literary modernism as an analogue and precedent, an idea returned to in my final chapter. However, concrete poetry in England and Scotland is perhaps best characterised by the striking lack of binding principles – stylistic or ideological – evidenced by the enormous distinctions between the four practices explored in detail in this text. To offer some context for that disunity, already alluded to in my introduction, this chapter turns to concrete poetry’s development worldwide during the 1950s–1970s. That global process became defined by a comparable divergence of approaches, which reflected and fed into that evident in England and Scotland due to networks of mutual influence and common sets of precedents and pressures. While there are many viable ways of narrating concrete poetry’s development worldwide, that is, one feasible approach is to trace its evolution from a minimalistic literary style that sought to clarify linguistic meaning through the visual and formal arrangement of words – what I call ‘classical’ concrete poetry – to a more spontaneous, expressionistic style concerned with undermining or complicating semantic sense, the use of sound and performance, and ideas of intermedia form. Before embarking on this narrative, it is worth offering a working definition of concrete poetry. In fact, such was the breadth of definitions unearthed during my research for this book that the only features I find to be universally applicable to concrete poetry are some unusual degree of attention to language’s formal or material properties2 – that is, to its visual, sonic, physical, and/or tactile properties – and its description by its creator as ‘concrete poetry’. Importantly, however, I am taking the use of the term ‘concrete’ to reflect an adherence, or some other kind of response – potentially tenuous or subversive – to the tenets of the style as conceived in 1950s Brazil and Germany rather than an unrelated or only indirectly associated coinage, as in the term ‘musique concrète’, for example. Connecting concrete poetry, even this loosely, with that point of origin has tended to prove contentious. Many critics have pointed out the vast range of early twentieth-century and historical precedents for the style, or have opened out the term to incorporate contemporaneous literary and artistic genres such as cut-up and sound poetry, pop art, conceptual art, book art, Fluxus-related intermedia activities, graphic musical scores, and Lettrism. I should perhaps distinguish, then, between defining such work as concrete poetry and acknowledging its analogousness and relevance to concrete poetry; even its influence upon it. While my reductive terminology is partly pragmatic, it does reflect 21

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my general sense that the only universal connotation of concrete poets’ description of their work as such – besides its emphasis of the material aspects of language – was some kind of response to the classical style. However, concrete poetry was also clearly borne on broader waves of multi-media linguistic experiment, traceable either across the middle decades of the twentieth century or across a longer period originating around the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the work covered by these expanded chronologies is touched on at some point in this book, as a frequent rather than universal influence on concrete poetry. Pre-twentieth-century work is excluded from similar consideration, though it is mentioned briefly in my chapters on Houédard and Cobbing, for whom concrete poetry’s historical precursors were especially important. This decision is again partly pragmatic, reflecting the unfathomable vastness of the field in question, which incorporates everything from medieval carmina figurata to Victorian nonsense verse. It also seems clear, both from concrete poems themselves and from the context of their composition, that fundamentally they represent a response to developments in art and literature roughly following the publication of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés in 1897. The aims and contexts of concrete poetry are largely unrelated to the history of religious and ceremonial visual poetry surveyed in Dick Higgins’s Pattern Poetry, for example. I also agree with Higgins – and with the comparable argument offered by Hilder (2016, 22–27) – that after ‘pattern poetry and knowledge of its traditions gradually disappeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth century’, twentieth-century poets generally explored similar techniques ‘without any deep knowledge of the earlier works’, ‘starting, as it were, from a blank page’ (Higgins 1987, 17). Concrete Foundations: Classical Style and the Concrete Movement The term ‘classical’ is generally used by critics such as Charles Perrone to refer to the concrete poetry produced by the Noigandres group between 1956 and 1960, following an initial period of experiment and preceding the introduction of ‘more flexible’ compositional models (Perrone 1996, 26). But the word also usefully suggests the qualities of expressive clarity and restraint applicable to the slightly broader range of work with which I associate it. That said, by the 1960s the poets whom I take to be the main architects of classical style were indeed moving on to new stylistic territory. Perhaps most significantly, by 1963 Haroldo de Campos had begun his huge prose sequence Galaxias, in which, as Antonio Sergio 22

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Bessa and Odile Cisneros put it, ‘the excesses of the baroque reappear with unexpected vigour’ (Haroldo de Campos 2007, xxi). For this and other reasons, ‘classical concrete poetry’ should be understood as a phrase that sums up some of the key aspects of a related group of poetic practices during a particular period and is pragmatically seized upon to provide a point of discursive contrast with other types of work, rather than a description that can contain all the complexities of the oeuvres in question. Bearing this in mind, I am going to repeat a perhaps over-stressed but still historically valid narrative about the origins of concrete poetry. In 1955 the Brazilian poet Décio Pignatari, co-founder of the São-Paulo-based poetry collective Noigandres, travelled to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, where he met Eugen Gomringer, a Swiss poet of Bolivian ancestry who, since 1954, had worked there as secretary to the concrete artist Max Bill, the school’s rector. This encounter, according to Stephen Bann, generated both ‘a channel of communication’ and an agreement to identify their work by a ‘common title’ (1967, 7). Gomringer’s first concerted use of the term ‘concrete poetry’ was in the preface for an unpublished 1956 anthology later published under the title ‘Concrete Poetry’. The Noigandres’s work became widely known as ‘concrete poetry’ after its inclusion in an exhibition of concrete art at São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art later that year (Bann 1967, 7).3 Eugen Gomringer was a student of concrete art whose literary interests ranged from Mallarmé to Shakespeare’s sonnets (Gomringer 1967). His workplace, the Hochschule für Gestaltung, was a design school co-founded by Bill, an ex-Bauhaus student, in 1953. Under Bill’s rectorship (1953–56) the school promoted ideas rooted in the northern European variant of constructivism associated with the Bauhaus, stressing the capacity of man-made objects to solicit common cognitive and emotional responses and thus to have an indirectly socially cohesive value.4 Ulm’s compulsory ‘Basic Course’ taught its students to ‘overcome the opposition between pure knowledge and habitual action’ by using ‘practical exercises and allied systematic investigations’ (Tomás Maldonado, qtd. in Lindinger 1990, 41). This post-Marxian notion of praxis was tempered by a desire to reformulate national culture and international relations after the Second World War. Indeed, the Hochschule was initially an outgrowth of the Ulm School of Adult Education, co-founded in 1946 by Inge Scholl, sister of White Rose Movement leaders Hans and Sophie Scholl, to explore ‘questions of a new beginning [and] societal change’ in the wake of Nazism (Inge Scholl, qtd. in Krampen and Hörmann 2003, 33). 23

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The Hochschule’s student base spanned 49 countries (Lindinger 1990, 9), indicating an internationalist outlook that the concrete poetry movement would match. Perhaps equally significantly, the school was established with the aid of a DM 1,000,000 donation from John J. McCloy, the US representative on the Allied High Commission during 1949–52. It has been argued that the vested interests behind this donation hampered the Hochschule’s ability to forward models of social interaction whose associated theories of economic recovery would be incompatible with the expansion of the free market.5 Germany was, after all, a nation recently split in two, and global communism even in its cultural manifestations was presumably seen as a locally massed threat by the Commission, which had been established by France, the United Kingdom, and the USA in 1949 to oversee the foundation of the Federal Republic in the West. The academic atmosphere at Ulm thus fused constructivist pedagogy with a post-war spirit of reconstructive empathy perhaps inflected by a kind of liberal humanism. In this context, ideas of objective artistic form were more likely to involve appealing to innate cognitive aptitudes than attempting to reconstruct the compositional or interpretive ego along new lines, as per the logic of Soviet constructivism. These influences underpin Gomringer’s attempts to construct universally coherent linguistic messages through spatial arrangements of tiny groups of words. He had been making similar attempts prior to his meeting with Pignatari: his first concrete poems, named ‘constellations’ after a term of Mallarmé’s, were published in 1953, but he had been experimenting with the form since 1951. In his 1954 statement ‘From Line to Constellation’ Gomringer had already outlined ‘the new poem’, which was to be ‘simple’, visually perceptible ‘as a whole as well as in its parts’, ‘an object to be both seen and used’, ‘containing thought but made concrete through play-activity’ ([1954, 1968] 1970). Décio Pignatari had formed the Noigandres poetry group with the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in São Paulo in 1952. All three were in their early to mid-twenties – Gomringer, born in 1925, was only slightly older – and their early critical writing displays a precocious knowledge of early twentieth-century Western and South American avant-garde and modernist movements, as well as recent developments in concrete art, serialist music, information theory, and world literature. Like Gomringer, they were working in a cultural context where pre-war constructivist aesthetics were being redefined in geographically specific post-war circumstances. In particular, their poetics arose from, and 24

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helped to shape, the Latin American concrete art scene that emerged around the close of the Second World War, partly through interaction with constructivist-influenced artists and intellectuals fleeing the war in Europe (Tomás Maldonado, qtd. in Krampen and Hörmann 2003, 41).6 In 1950s Brazil the notions of objective aesthetic form that defined concrete art symbolised a newly purposive national culture, its economy strengthened by the provision of raw materials to the Allied Forces, undergoing a period of rapid industrial, technological, and social development, and attempting to forge a new place for itself in global trade networks (Mesquita 1996, 211–12). Arguably, the most iconic symbols of this ‘brief utopian moment in Brazil’s political history’, as Antonio Sergio Bessa describes it (2008, 5), were not artistic but architectural, typifying an international, mid-century flowering of architectural and designbased modernism that was also rooted in constructivism: The radical views on urban planning that swept Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century encountered a blank slate in a country striving to overcome its colonial past. One needs only to be reminded of two landmark projects to understand the visionary, if not messianic, role ascribed to architecture at the time: Le Corbusier’s ‘corniche extensions’ proposal for Rio de Janeiro in 1930 and the construction of Brasilia in the 1950s … , by two of Le Corbusier’s disciples and former collaborators, Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa … . [T]he scope was monumental and geared toward altering history’s path. In this context, modernist architecture was identified with social and political progress, and ‘concrete,’ both as building material and concept, became the embodiment of a utopian program that aimed to replace the ‘empty words’ of old political rhetoric with the tangential materiality of the ‘here and now’. (Bessa 2008, 8)7

This turn to constructivist architectural principles reflected a global renaissance of architectural modernism that, as Tyrus Miller notes, occurred several decades after the perceived demise of literary modernism: ‘[a]rchitectural modernism had its first heave with the socialist urbanism of the late 1920s and early 1930s and its second wind with the urban development after World War II, whereas literary modernism peaked much earlier and, free of any strong ties to economic and political institutions, much more feebly’ (1999, 10). The Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’, first published in 1958, alludes to Costa’s ‘Pilot Plan’ for the country’s new capital, constructed during 1956–60, indicating the formative effect of architectural tropes on their work (Noigandres [1958, 1968] 1970). Like Gomringer, the group were exploring a near-concrete style prior to 1955. Augusto, for example, had published his Poetamenos 25

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(‘Poetminus’) poems in 1953, using colours to direct reading order and identify word theme, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions (Augusto de Campos [1953] 1973). The encounter at Ulm, then, constituted a meeting of minds shaped to some extent by a range of early twentieth-century literary modernisms, but more primarily by a mid-century modernist paradigm associated with constructivist architecture and design. Charles Jencks notes an ‘anomaly’ in the latter modernism vis-à-vis its ‘optimistic and progressivist’ tendencies, its commitment to an ‘ideology of industrialization and progress’ that ‘modernism in most other fields has either fought … or lamented’ (1991, 12–13). In accordance with this optimism, the Ulm meeting also represented a convergence of national cultural discourses espousing social progress through existing social frameworks, broadly interpretable in an international context of post-war renewal and implicitly configured, as Hilder has suggested, by the new global dominance of capitalist economics. This range of influences manifested itself in a poetics of rational formal innovation wherein the individual visual forms of, and visual interaction between, words would programmatically enhance or alter their semantic value. As compared with some of the work later presented as ‘concrete poetry’, classical concrete poetry can be distinguished partly by this emphasis on the visual qualities of language – though it also relied on phonetic and grammatical patterning – as opposed to language’s sonic aspects. As a result, early concrete poems were generally objects for silent contemplation, whereas other work was intended for vocal enunciation or performance. But the most significant characteristic of this early concrete poetry as compared with much that followed it was that the visual or formal arrangement of language was rarely intended to undermine semantic sense. Instead, words were presented in a state of metaphorically enhanced clarity which seemed somehow dependent upon that arrangement. This necessitated a certain linguistic minimalism, and a neatness or iconicity of visual appearance – showing language in an apparent state of streamlined semantic functionality, but also generating an impression of sheer, object-like presence – which was equally anathema to many subsequent exponents of concrete style. In their emphasis on semantic communication, the first concrete poets were also anxious that their work, for all its medium-defying influences, be recognised as a legitimate literary genre rather than as a mixed-media or an intermedia art practice: again, that conceptualisation came later. The stress they placed on maintaining and renewing inherited language 26

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systems also distinguished them from their iconoclastic Dada and Futurist forebears. The idea of concrete poetry as ‘arrière-garde’, first proposed by Marjorie Perloff (2007), seems particularly effective in evoking the character of classical concrete poetry. The term ‘arrière-garde’, borrowed in Perloff’s case from William Marx’s Les Arrière-Gardes au XXe Siècle, can in one context refer to ‘a group which moves in the same direction as a preceding avant-garde, defending and even institutionalising its ideas and forming some kind of delayed avant-garde’ (Verstraeten 2018, 25). As Perloff notes, such an idea serves as a useful corrective [T]o the usual conceptions of the avant-garde, either as a one-time rupture with the bourgeois art market … – the Peter Bürger thesis – or as a series of ruptures, each one breaking decisively with the one before, as in textbook accounts of avant-gardes from Futurism to Dada to Surrealism to Fluxus, to Minimalism, Conceptualism and so on. (2007, n.pag.)

As Perloff suggests, the poetics of concrete, with its rational quantification and re-application of early twentieth-century avant-garde techniques – not to mention the concrete poets’ exhaustive acknowledgement of influences and precursors and, we might add, their frequent connection to institutions of higher education and arguable tendency towards less politicised applications of inherited approaches – might seem to make it the literary arrière-garde par excellence. It is worth noting, however, that the irreverence and radical political connotations of avant-garde aesthetics took hold again in later variants of the style. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, international cells of activity sprang up in response to the early model of concrete poetry defined by Gomringer and the Noigandres poets, generating a loosely interconnected worldwide movement whose overarching social contexts have been extensively explored by Jamie Hilder (2016). The factors Hilder discusses include: the emergence of international travel and communication networks, a new and related freedom of international cultural exchange, and the underlying emergence of global trade networks through the mass infrastructure generated by war production and later through the Marshall Plan. The threat of nuclear war and the advent of space travel, as Hilder also notes, engendered a new, sometimes disconcerting sense of global community, further facilitating the growth of transnational artistic and literary movements. So too did the emergence of computer coding and related discourses around information theory and cybernetics that implied the possibility of transnational, universally 27

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coherent modes of communication. In many cases, however, the geographical spread of concrete poetics involved reorientating existing practices around the new terminology and concepts, complicating the stylistic principles associated with the movement in the very process of expanding it. This, along with the sheer range of cultural scenarios in which concrete poetry took hold – not so levelled out by the new global imaginary as Hilder implies – makes it hard to define concrete poetry in homogenous transnational terms, either as style or movement.8 Stephen Bann’s Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967) represents the most concerted attempt at the time to relate the mushrooming concrete movement back to a common style – one rooted in the formal principles outlined above – and to place clear geographical boundaries around it, with Latin American, Germanic, and Anglo-American subgroups. The first mainly includes Brazilian poets associated with the post-Noigandres Invenção group: Ronaldo Azeredo, Edgard Braga, José Lino Grünewald, Pedro Xisto, and the three Noigandres poets. The Germanic group can be seen to comprise several further subgroups, not all of whom Bann represents: the Darmstadt circle of Claus Bremer, the North American Emmett Williams, and Swiss Daniel Spoerri; the Stuttgart Group, including Max Bense, Hansjörg Mayer – based in south-west England from 1966 – Helmut Heißenbüttel, and Reinhard Döhl; and the Vienna Group, including Gerhard Rühm, Ernst Jandl, Friedrich Achleitner, and others. The stylistic incoherence – which Bann acknowledges – of his Anglo-American section, including Robert Lax, Jonathan Williams, Bann himself, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Edwin Morgan, and Emmett Williams, not to mention the inclusion of the French Pierre Garnier and German-born Mexican Mathias Goeritz in the Latin section and the oversight of other centres of activity, such as Japan and Czechoslovakia, reflects the difficulty of defining concrete poetry either stylistically or with reference to distinct networks of practitioners by the late 1960s. As the Universe Constructs: Eugen Gomringer and Constructivism Expanding on the definition of classical concrete poetry just outlined means engaging more closely with some of its key influences. The following sections therefore assess Gomringer’s poetry in relation to constructivism and concrete art and the Noigandres’s work in relation to modernist literature—though, in reality, all such influences were shared. The aim is not just to provide a more in-depth overview of the precursors 28

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for their work, but in both cases to alight at a point of conceptual tension within the early concrete programme that can be quantified by recourse to those influences – the requirement, that is, that concrete poems function as both image and language simultaneously by squaring two subtly distinct notions of ‘objectivity’. I am taking the term ‘constructivism’ to indicate an ethos evident across visual, sculptural, and architectural media from around the 1910s onwards in Russia, and from around the 1920s in Europe, where it became especially associated with the Bauhaus. However, I am also assuming that the term was theorised to some extent retrospectively, often during the 1950s–1970s, and often by the same critics who were defining concrete poetry. Stephen Bann’s anthology The Tradition of Constructivism (1974) was one of the first texts to present a coherent genealogy of international constructivism, extending into the present through the work of artists such as Charles Biederman and Joost Baljeu. Notably, Bann presents the constructivist ethos as emerging in the wake of, and in response to, the ‘Dadaist critique’ of previous Western assumptions of aesthetic value (1974, 51), suggesting that in this new, retrospective context constructivism was placed in a stylistic dichotomy with Dada; and thus, effectively, with the Russian and Italian Futurism that had prefigured the first Dadaists’ activities. Central among the assumptions toppled by the ‘Dadaist critique’, Bann asserts, was the idea that representative art could solicit accurate, shared sentiments regarding its objects. In the place of such outmoded concepts, constructivist artists and craftsmen sought ‘laws of art reformulated from firm and objective bases’ (1974, 51). Formulating these ‘objective laws’ – laws that would generate artistic forms coherent in the same way to any given interpreter – meant relaying the imperceptible scientific processes responsible for generating the universe’s perceptible sensory forms. This resulted in a preference for non-figurative over figurative effects, and for artworks that expressed mathematical or scientific theorems in some way.9 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner’s ‘Realistic Manifesto’ of 1920, an important early tract of Soviet constructivism, called for artworks constructed ‘as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits’ ([1920, 1957] 1974, 9). Implicit in this fascination with mechanical and scientific process – as well as majestic cosmic forces – was the idea that works of art should not represent reality at all but assume the same self-sufficient, efficacious presence within it as the machine or the architectural construction.10 In a Soviet context, the idea of artistic insight penetrating beyond the 29

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visible and tangible world was also conducive to notions of revolution in human society and psychology. Moreover, in the case of architecture, constructivism could literally induce or compel similar processes of societal reconstruction, facilitating new, collectivist patterns of behaviour and routine through its arrangements of space. From constructivism Gomringer took not only the idea of a lexicon of compositional forms that would bear objective aesthetic values but also an underlying interest in artworks that would move beyond symbolic reference or signification altogether, becoming what he called ‘functional objects’ ([1960, 1968] 1970). This partly explains the tension within the early concrete programme between the ideas of objectivity as referential accuracy and as autonomous, non-referential presence. However, Gomringer inherited constructivist ideas in altered form through the intermediary influence of concrete art. Theo Van Doesburg’s ‘Basis of Concrete Painting’ ([1930] 1974) had been taken as a point of inspiration for the development of this genre by a younger generation of artists, including Gomringer’s employer, Max Bill, who was largely responsible for moulding it into a coherent style across the 1930s and 1940s. Bill was also influenced by the methodical rearrangement of colour and shape in the serial work of his former Bauhaus tutor Josef Albers.11 Concrete art can be understood both as a rationalisation of constructivist principles and as a programme for reintegrating them with more recognisable models of artistic value. This involved attempting to endow basic elements of artistic composition with objective interpretive values – sometimes related to mathematical theorems – that were divorced from any external referent. In practical terms this sometimes meant rearranging a small, pre-defined set of compositional elements – shapes, lines, colours – according to a permutational or algebraic formula whose possibilities would be methodically and exhaustively expressed by the resultant composition: the artwork thus seemed to refer to nothing beyond itself, assuming a kind of self-evident value. Such creative formulas, epitomised by works such as Richard Paul Lohse’s Colour Groups Arranged in Squares (1944), predict the methodical permutation of a small pre-defined group of words in some early concrete poetry. But the underlying and most significant lesson of concrete art for Gomringer and others was simply that composed objects might display self-sufficient formal characteristics, and could therefore solicit the same response from any given viewer, bridging the chasms of thought and perception responsible at some deep level for inter-societal misunderstanding and conflict. It was this notion of functionality as self-evident meaning 30

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rather than the more literal one associated with constructivism in some instances that Gomringer appropriated for the concrete poem. But this hardly obviated the tension already noted between ideas of objectivity as referential accuracy and objectivity as non-referential presence, which was just as palpable in concrete art as in its ancestral style. That said, one way in which the impact of constructivism on Gomringer’s work was substantially altered by the influence of Bill or Albers was in terms of its ideological content. Intended to bring observers to points of mutual understanding by tapping into common and innate interpretive faculties, the connotations of the concrete artwork were more humanist than communist, predicting the ethos of Gomringer’s work and of much early concrete poetry, particularly in Northern Europe.12 There are numerous precedents for Gomringer’s attempts to transpose constructivist principles onto literature, partly because the constructivist programme was always intended to implement aesthetic principles so elementary that they transcended medium boundaries.13 But Gomringer’s sense of a constructivist literature was uniquely coloured by mid-century influences: from the distinct aesthetic and ideological connotations of concrete art – and a newly pronounced sense of constructivism as the other or opposite of Dada – to the reconstructive uses made of constructivist design in post-war Germany, as well as the intellectual influences of information theory, information aesthetics, and cybernetics. The convergence of all these themes can be sensed in Gomringer’s early statements of intent for the concrete poem: Concrete poem structures can … unite various kinds of language, … unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality. Concrete poetry is founded upon the contemporary scientific-technical view of the world and will come into its own in the synthetic-rationalistic world of tomorrow. ([1956, 1968] 1970)

Stirring beneath the influences of Ulm morality, information theory, and concrete art we can still sense in Gomringer’s 1956 statement ‘Concrete Poetry’ the residual technocratic fervour of the constructivist vanguard. Gomringer’s first sentence also lays bare that basic incoherence within the notion of objective expression attached to the concrete poem, which became especially clear when constructivist ideals were transferred onto the medium of language. It is not clear, that is, whether the objective language that Gomringer prophesies is meant to entail a universally coherent sign system of some kind – one that ‘unites languages’ and is intelligible to any given interpreter – or a literal melding of sign with 31

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object, whereby language literally becomes what it describes, obviating the difficulty of mediating the world through signs per se. The distinction is elided, as it is in much writing on concrete poetry, in Gomringer’s statement, wherein the ‘view of the world expressed in the mother tongue’ does not simply relay ‘physical reality’ with new accuracy but is ‘united’ or merges with it. Suffice to say, a language that literally became what it signified would cease to be a language in any real sense, becoming instead a collection of referentially inert objects. A similar statement in fact applies to visual and sculptural art, but it was undoubtedly easier for such work to avoid explicit referential gesture, and thus to metaphorically unite with the reality it evoked, without thereby seeming to abandon the medium in question. The difficulty of achieving a similar effect in language is evident from Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems, which tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem ‘Ping Pong’ (Bann 1967, 32; Figure 1). Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.

Figure 1: Eugen Gomringer, ‘Ping Pong’ 32

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But the most obvious and resonant metaphor for objectivity in Gomringer’s work is its visual appearance, which involves a lexicon of non-figurative or subtly figurative visual effects sometimes borrowed directly from concrete artworks. As Gomringer puts it, ‘the distribution of signs follows an inherent law, and certain systems evolve therefrom. This is a matter of bare linguistic structure, and the visible form of concrete poetry is identical to its structure’ ([1956, 1968] 1970, 67). ‘Visible form’ is ‘identical’ to ‘bare linguistic structure’: a poetry of objective linguistic value was to be staked on visual form rather than semantic minimalism, and in their reliance on visual appearance Gomringer’s poems imply the second type of objectivity more clearly than the first. Certainly, the visual arrangement of the concrete poem – as in ‘Ping Pong’ – partly emphasises syntactical and logical relationships in the way he suggests, as if to fix the interrelated meanings of words with maximum concision. But, more than this, it suggests a kind of self-evident presence or, in combination with the semantic element, the curious impression that the poem has turned into the thing it describes. Many critics understandably choose to downplay this element of concrete poetics, which has perhaps been over-emphasised in the past, and which has led to much knee-jerk denunciation of the style as a kitsch revival of literary-modernist compulsions towards immaculate manifestation of the poetic object.14 But, for better or worse, the early statements of concrete poetics seem deeply concerned with how such a union with the object might be implied at a visual level. Generally, this seems to involve borrowing notions of self-referential compositional form from concrete art. The Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’, for example, asserts that the visual form of the concrete poem in its ‘advanced’ state should be non-figurative, largely to distinguish it from the too obviously pictorial quality of, say, Apollinaire’s calligrammes: In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearances (motion). … In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail. (Noigandres [1958, 1968] 1970, 72)

The references to movement and motion suggest a preference for capturing the structural dynamics of movement over its appearance to the naked eye, as per constructivist aesthetics. But the general rule implied is simpler: the less the concrete poem looked like anything in 33

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particular – and the less it therefore appeared to be a sign or symbol for an object outwith the poem – the more it would appear to have captured the qualitative essence of its referent. At the same time, Gomringer’s concrete poetry depends on semantic communication. More specifically, it depends upon both impressions of objectivity just outlined operating in a mutually supportive balance, preventing the machinations of either appearing too obviously to the reader–viewer. While non-figurative visual form could generate the impression of intimately relaying or capturing the poem’s subject matter – as well as establishing concise grammatical relationships – that impression also depended on some indication of what that subject matter was, and thus upon language in the everyday sense. Ultimately, language and visual form are interdependent in the classical concrete poem, visual form assuming an auxiliary, elucidatory role in relation to semantic expression. A reading of Gomringer’s famous 1953 poem ‘Silencio’ (‘Silence’) (Bann 1967, 31; Figure 2) might indicate how this meticulous compositional tension was rendered in practice. In its use of a single, repeated word, the poem partly presents the kind of reduced lexical range implying concentrated referential function. Indeed, the fact that the word ‘silencio’ is printed fourteen times, emulating the fourteen lines of a sonnet, places the poem conspicuously in a literary context. At the same time, the repetitions of ‘silencio’ form a black frame around an enclosed white space, as if offsetting the partiality of the linguistic sign – a window before the world – against the wordless elucidation of sight. The poem cannot describe silence, it seems, but can somehow visually enact or become it. Crucially, however, as well as seeming to undermine or obviate linguistic expression, the visual form of ‘Silencio’ subtly enhances

Figure 2: Eugen Gomringer, ‘Silencio’

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linguistic meaning with visual effect. The visual arrangement, that is, is unobtrusive (non-figurative) enough in the way it engages the reader’s visual attention to be imagined as somehow inflecting or augmenting the meaning of the words gathered around the central space, and thus as an aspect or quality of the semantic register. Importantly, to present a formalist reading of a poem such as ‘Silencio’ is not to sacrifice any possible acknowledgement of the social context of its composition. Indeed, as Hilder suggests (2016), many early concrete poems, including Gomringer’s, ought to be interpreted in more sociologically and politically alert ways. The linguistic asceticism of ‘Silencio’ can be read not only in the context of Cage’s exploration of (non)silence within the musical composition – 4’33’’ premiered the year before the poem was written – but also in relation to that tranche of post-Second World War poetry and theory, from Celan to Adorno, that explicitly or implicitly queried the capacity of rational language to express the horrors of ethnic genocide and global warfare: silence or non-expression become the only viable forms of response. In a related vein, Steve McCaffery (2013) offers a brilliant analysis of this poem’s connotations of political silence given its publication shortly after the discovery of Nazi extermination camps. The difference between Gomringer’s silence and Celan’s allusive obscurity – if we accept that comparison – is Gomringer’s quiet positivity, his apparent faith in a language renewed or revivified by its interaction with the visual plane, which, in this case, might provide a minimal vocabulary of mourning or remembrance. But to successfully convey that impression early concrete poetry depended upon a balance of linguistic and visual effect – each appearing to operate within the other – that would prove increasingly hard to recreate without falling back on repetitive compositional gesture. Constellations and Ideograms: The Noigandres and Modernist Literature The difficulty of maintaining the impression of visual–linguistic symbiosis conveyed by poems such as ‘Silencio’ was one reason for the subversion and adaptation of concrete poetry to come. Before turning to that subject, it is worth considering the different literary and artistic heritage of the Noigandres poets, whose critical writing references concrete poetry’s literary prehistory far more extensively than Gomringer’s. Their description of their poems as ‘ideograms’, for example, was a nod 35

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to Ernest Fenollosa’s studies of Chinese writing systems, the term ‘Noigandres’ itself a reference to Pound’s Cantos.15 Their ‘Pilot Plan’, whilst referencing modernist architecture, concrete art, cybernetics, and serialist music, devotes far more energy than Gomringer’s early manifestos to placing concrete poetry in a literary genealogy: one incorporating symbolism, Imagism, and Fenollosa’s ideogram studies, among many other things. However, these influences are channelled into a theory of visually rendered semantic objectivity that is fundamentally similar to Gomringer’s, though the poetic results are often put to more explicitly didactic and polemical ends. The opening statement of the ‘Pilot Plan’ indicates both the Noigandres poets’ clear awareness of their literary precursors and their underlying sense of common purpose with Gomringer: ‘Concrete poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmic unity) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent’ (Noigandres [1958, 1968] 1970, 71). Invoking a grand literary prehistory – the ‘historical cycle of verse’ – the statement nonetheless declares this history ‘closed’ and calls for a poetic style rooted in a self-sufficient logic of visual composition – ‘graphic space as structural agent’ – that will ‘structure’ semantic meaning. It is perhaps peculiar that the Noigandres poets cite Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés as their first ‘forerunner’. Notwithstanding its significance to modern visual poetries in general, this poem’s use of spatial arrangement tends to re-emphasise the mutable, contingent quality of linguistic sense implied by its semantic imagery (Mallarmé [1897] 1914). Indeed, the symbolist emphasis on visual space as a substantive element of written poetry is generally accepted to stand not for some ideal of visually rendered semantic clarity but for the inability of language to express the object represented by that space, enacting the linguistic ‘suicide’ that Barthes attributes to Mallarmé’s writing ([1953] 1970, 75).16 The ‘Pilot Plan’s’ reference to Mallarmé captures something of this impulse, but, more primarily, it seems to write Un Coup de Dés into a timeline of quasi-scientific investigations into graphic-linguistic sign-making: ‘[f]orerunners: Mallarmé (Un coup de dés, 1897): the first qualitative jump: “subdivisions prismatiques de l’idée”; space (“blancs”) and typographical devices as substantive elements of composition’ (Noigandres [1958, 1968] 1970, 71). For the Noigandres, the visual forms of, and spatial relationships between, Mallarmé’s letter-things seem to secure the poem’s value to a greater extent than the blank spaces encompassing them. 36

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The qualities the ‘Pilot Plan’ ascribes to Un Coup de Dés are more easily attributed to the Imagists, who sought a ‘poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite’, adhering to the contours of its objects via a ‘concentration’ of their physical characteristics, which would be at least metaphorically visual (Lowell [1915] 1972, 134–36). Pound is cited in the ‘Pilot Plan’, as is e.e. cummings; so too is Joyce, whose agglutinative lexicon might seem anathema to concrete poetry’s semantic minimalism, but whose influence can be sensed in the use of paragram, pun, and portmanteau even in the Noigandres’s earliest work.17 T.E. Hulme’s proto-imagist pronouncements in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (ca. 1911–12) on a ‘dry, hard, classical verse’, a ‘visual concrete’ poetry which ‘make[s] you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’, seem a more obvious precursor for concrete poetics, but the Plan does not mention him (Hulme 2003, 79). Suffice to say, concrete poetry’s extensive literary-modernist prehistory is laid bare in the Noigandres’s early critical prose. As already implied, references to this prehistory have tended to be central to literary-critical dismissals of concrete poetry as kitsch or anachronistic. One way of responding to this critique would be to emphasise the act of ‘writing back to the centre’ that the Noigandres’s Eurocentric literary genealogies represented in post-imperial Brazil, and thus the idea of modernism evolving along multiple spatial and temporal axes, as forwarded in much recent work on ‘global modernisms’.18 We must also note the self-conscious and therefore fundamentally new uses made of modernist poetics in concrete poetry’s ‘arrière-garde’ moment, and the significance of contemporary semiotic theory, especially information theory, to its compositional schemas. Nonetheless, as already noted, it is impossible not to interpret concrete poetry at least partly as reviving that compulsion towards union or convergence with the linguistic object that defines the literary-modernist tradition just sketched out. The tension in early concrete poetics between the ideas of objectivity as referential clarity and objectivity as non-referential presence can thus be traced back to its literary as well as its artistic and architectural influences. Any of the literary genres just mentioned might be usefully outlined in more detail. But Fenollosa’s writing on Chinese ideograms can effectively be taken to stand for several others, given its configuration of what Hugh Kenner (1972) called ‘Pound Era’ poetics. According to Fenollosa – who overlooked the ideogram’s phonetic function – each Chinese written symbol comprises a ‘vivid shorthand picture’ of its referent (1936, 12). It thus captures or crystallises the essence 37

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of that referent where a phonetic language, using combinations of visually arbitrary signs from a predetermined list, would alienate us from it. Moreover, whereas Western sentence structures rigidify words into nouns, adjectives, verbs, or predicates, Chinese contains no such binding functional distinctions. Thus, while the former generates the illusion of discrete, self-sufficient agents and objects with auxiliary functions and qualities, ideograms acknowledge that natural objects and phenomena only ever exist in, and through, their transitive relationships with all others, in ever-changing spatiotemporal forms. Every ideogram combines the qualities of noun and verb to some extent, for example, as something is only ever something doing something (Fenollosa 1936). The ideogram thus possesses an expressive power elusive to semantic language, both in its capacity to relay natural processes with a unique fidelity to the dynamics of those processes and in its capacity to capture the essence of what it describes through a form of visual transcription. In other words, we can attribute to the ideogram as conceptualised by Fenollosa both of the implied qualities of objectivity – referential clarity and non-referential presence – that characterise early concrete poetry. The Noigandres’s arrière-garde articulation of their literary-modernist influences, and the particular significance of the ideogram, is superbly and succinctly expressed in Décio Pignatari’s 1958 poem ‘LIFE’ (Bann 1967, 85–95; Figure 3). Pignatari presents the letters of the title-word as consecutive visual frames, arranging them according to the increasing number of horizontal bars in each: I L F E. Subverting the expected order of letters, this incremental, graphically oriented construction process metaphorically reverses the dominance of semantic meaning over visual appearance as a determinant of linguistic value. That process seems to be completed in the fifth frame by the appearance of a second, right-hand vertical line on the right-hand side of the E, which creates an apparently non-linguistic, figure-of-eight symbol. However, as well as mimicking an emblem for infinity, this symbol is a minimal rendering of the Chinese ideogram for ‘sun’. Given that the sun is the source of organic life on earth, it serves as a pictographic substitute for the title-word: semantic language evolves into graphic language. Moreover, if we accept Fenollosa’s description of the ideogram in question, this symbol is richer in expressive power than the word it replaces: ‘[t]he Chinese have one word, ming or mei. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective’ (1936, 22). In Western languages, by contrast, to ‘get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots and light upon a thing 38

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arbitrarily cut off from its power of action, say “the sun” or “the moon”’ (Fenollosa 1936, 22): or the word ‘Life’, which reappears on the sixth and final frame, unseated by the graphic symbol preceding it yet oddly charged with its resonance. Indeed, through this closing flourish, and through the semantic connotations of the ideogram itself, an impression of visually rendered objective expression feeds back into an impression of enhanced semantic clarity. Again, visual form and linguistic content are subtly entwined in the classical concrete poem.

Figure 3: Décio Pignatari, ‘LIFE’ As with Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’, a formalist reading of ‘LIFE’ does not debar a contextually attentive one, and Pignatari’s piece is also more politically animated than it might seem, largely because, as Mary Ellen Solt noted in her anthology introduction ([1968] 1970), the typeface for the word ‘Life’ is lifted from the eponymous North American lifestyle magazine. A phonetic language of alienated signifiers, co-opted by a consumer–capitalist culture that was exporting itself worldwide with increasing vigour after the Second World War, is subsumed by an ideogrammatic language able to capture the essence of its referent with an unmatched clarity. The oblique cultural critique – the kind of reaction against US cultural imperialism more obvious in poems such as Pignatari’s ‘Bebe Coca Cola’ (1957; Figure 4), in which the word ‘cola’ mutates into ‘cloaca’ – is matched by the clipped polemical vigour of much 39

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Figure 4: Décio Pignatari, ‘Bebe Coca Cola’

Figure 5: Augusto de Campos, ‘Sem um Numero’

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of the Noigandres’s early work. Augusto de Campos’s 1957 poem ‘Sem um Numero’ (‘Without a Number’) (Bann 1967, 103; Figure 5) has been interpreted by Willard Bohn as a comment on the exclusion of Brazil’s rural interior population from government census and welfare programmes (2001, 251–52). In this and many other cases, the idea of ‘graphic space as structural agent’ – the impression that semantic meaning is somehow determined by visual arrangement – is really a means of disguising authorial polemic by granting the concrete poem an implied quality of impersonal neutrality. This is a significant point of divergence from Gomringer’s early poetry and a good reason for qualifying generalising statements on classical concrete poetry as blandly acquiescent in post-war global market cultures, whatever instinctive connections can be drawn between poems like these and the graphic languages of advertising. But what binds the Noigandres’s classical work together with Gomringer’s is an underlying concern with stabilising or programmatically altering the value of linguistic signs through visual treatment and semantic reduction, for progressive social ends. In their work, just as in his, this ultimately relied on carefully enfolded impressions of visual and linguistic objectivity that would prove increasingly hard to generate. The Science of the Concrete: Critical Contexts for Early Concrete Poetry In any case, it is worth acknowledging that the presentation of concrete poetry as a socially progressive force was largely a theoretical exercise: not so much because of any conceptual fallacy at the heart of its poetics as simply because of the gulf between the intellectual world it inhabited and those of mass cultural consciousness. Nonetheless, during the era of the defining manifestos, various schools of interpretation did emerge concerned with proving concrete poetry’s potential social efficacy by showing how it could express itself with an objectivity or efficiency exceeding that of other forms of linguistic communication. Perhaps most significantly, theories of meaning-making were appropriated from a set of interconnected discourses reaching their peak of critical currency in the 1950s, which also underpinned the initial conception of concrete poetry to some extent, and which were associated with the more general 1950s–1960s heyday of semiotics and semiology: those of information theory, cybernetics, and information aesthetics. In the first case I am referring specifically to what N. Katherine Hayles (1999) calls the ‘first wave’ of information theory, associated with the 41

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interdisciplinary Macy Cybernetics Conferences of the 1940s–1950s, and with figures such as Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. Information theory in this early guise involved defining ‘information’ according to the mathematical probability of a particular message being sent from a particular source rather than the content of that message, and the seductive idea that information could therefore be transferred without any loss or alteration of content between one machine or organism (potentially one person) and another. Shannon’s 1949 text The Mathematical Theory of Communication, co-authored with Warren Weaver, is considered the definitive statement of these ideas, which, importantly, were not initially assumed to apply outside Shannon’s field of electrical engineering (Hayles 1999).19 It is easy to see how the idea of information passing in uncorrupted form between communicant and receiver might have appealed in the concrete era, when communication across national and social boundaries was an ethical as well as a practical imperative. But to reach a fuller understanding of this point it is necessary to unpick some of the mathematical specifics of information theory. At the root of the Shannon– Weaver model is an algebraic formula for defining the value of a given unit of information – in this context we can say ‘sign’ – in numerical terms, according to the likelihood of its being transmitted from a particular source: in other words, how likely the sign sent was to be chosen from among all the various signs – collectively referred to as a ‘repertoire’ – that the sending organism or mechanism might have sent in a given context. This likelihood determines the information content of the sign, which is calculated by finding the logarithm to base 2 of the number of signs in the repertoire: how many times 2 needs to be multiplied by itself to equal the number of signs from which the sign was chosen. Qualifications were introduced to account for more- and less-likely-to-be-selected signs, and the information content of strings of signs – we can say ‘messages’ – could be calculated by stacking up sets of these equations; so too was the approximate information content of particular sources or repertoires.20 There are two salient points to bear in mind here. Firstly, on Shannon’s terms, the less likely a sign is to be selected from its repertoire, the higher its information content. A sign that confirms something already known, for example, is effectively being chosen from a repertoire of one, and would therefore have an information content of zero. By contrast, a sign or message chosen from a repertoire in which a large number of sign-selections were possible will have high information content. Secondly, repertoires from which no signs are especially likely to be 42

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chosen also produce signs and messages with higher average information content.21 These two basic postulations mean that information content – perhaps intuitively, perhaps counter-intuitively – can be defined as something like the opposite of predictability. However, a message with very high unpredictability, though possessing very high information content in numerical terms, runs the risk of being merely unintelligible, bearing no perceptible pattern to the recipient. Maintaining optimal information content within a given scenario of communication would thus appear to involve maintaining tension between predictable and unpredictable elements: between pattern and the randomness against which it must be defined. Working in a historical moment when coherent communication seemed a moral as well as a practical necessity, many of the first concrete poets were profoundly influenced by the idea that the value of linguistic communication could be pre-emptively, numerically fixed. In 1955 Gomringer was teaching on the Hochschule für Gestaltung’s ‘Information Course’, whose syllabus outline from that year refers to ‘[a] newly developed discipline of information and communication theory’ allowing ‘the development of unambiguous and comprehensible linguistic techniques for use in press statements, advertising copy, scientific texts, art criticism, and elsewhere’ (qtd. in Lindinger 1990, 71). It easy to see how this pedagogical model, underpinned by the idea that ‘[t]he social order is decisively influenced by the quality of information purveyed by press, radio, motion pictures’ (qtd. in Lindinger 1990, 71), might have influenced Gomringer’s sense of the concrete poem as a form of objectively accurate expression, and his sense of poetry in general as a mode of public linguistic communication. Contrary to what we might assume based on the evidence of early concrete poetry itself, information theory would not necessarily have compelled a drive towards linguistic simplification. Pattern, after all, relied on randomness to be perceived as such, and in strict terms information was something akin to disorder or entropy. What the theory rather provided was, on the one hand, a sense that the semantic content of language could be precisely fixed, and, on the other, a sense that this might involve the methodical combination of predictable and unpredictable elements. In this sense – putting aside poems and artworks that served as direct expressions of theory22 – its influence may come across tangentially in the use of anaphora: the repetition of certain grammatical features and the alteration of others, at the level of either the sentence or the word. In the first case, Gomringer’s ‘snow’ poem, 43

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for example, combines the repeated title-word with various intuitive and counterintuitive descriptors (Bann 1967, 43): snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow ….

is is is is is is is is

elemental phantastic curved inauthorized disgusting ignorant irresistible rare

In the latter case, a poem might comprise a set of near-identical terms with one or two letters changing between each, as in Gomringer’s ‘O’ poem, from 1960 (Bann 1967, 36), with its four constituent words ‘flow’, ‘grow’, ‘blow’, and ‘show’ arranged in a twisting, planar shape. In this case and others, however, classical concrete poetry did seem to consist in presenting the smallest number of words or linguistic units capable of conveying information. In this sense, the role of information theory was perhaps to play into the kind of exaggerated minimalism that characterised the classical style. Acknowledging this compositional trait in his 1960 essay ‘The Informational Temperature of the Text’, Haroldo de Campos defended concrete poetry against the charge of ‘impoverishing language’ ([1960, 1982] 2007, 223) partly by turning to information theory. He cites concrete poetry’s intended audience size – concrete, after all, was to serve as a bridge between national languages – as a motivating factor, citing the psychologist G.A. Miller’s assertion that expansions in literary vocabulary equated with decreases in readership ([1960, 1982] 2007, 225). The essay also offers a quintessentially mid-century-modernist definition of literature, ‘not as craftsmanship but … as an industrial process’, requiring simplicity and mass-reproducibility of components ([1960, 1982] 2007, 226). For these reasons, concrete poets ‘fix … the informational temperature at the minimum necessary to obtain the aesthetic achievement of each poem undertaken’ ([1960, 1982] 2007, 227). As Haroldo’s article perhaps betrays, the sociological connotations of concrete poetry’s influence from information theory are arguably more interesting than its creative outcomes. Some of those connotations come across in his description of poetry as an industrial process, but the more significant proposition was that concrete poems could relay objective linguistic content from one person to another, optimal information 44

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content translating into universally inferable semantic value. In other words, information theory promised a means of updating constructivist and literary-modernist conceptions of objective referential value, and its application bore all the post-war connotations of international communication and cultural reconstruction attendant to that project. An equally significant subtext of Shannon’s theory was the potential it allowed for human–machine comparisons, particularly when its conclusions were extrapolated through the related field of cybernetics. First outlined in Norbert Wiener’s 1948 text Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetic theory held that the intelligence of any living organism, including the human being, consisted in its capacity to recognise information patterns – defined on the above terms – in its external environment and adapt its behaviour accordingly. In its outward characteristics this process, known as homeostasis, was indistinguishable from that by which self-regulating machines adapted to pre-programmed tasks based on similar external variables. The conclusion was drawn, therefore, that there was no qualitative distinction to be made between animal (including human) and mechanical intelligence. This idea was both empowering and disturbing for the liberal-humanist conceptions of the subject that held sway during the Macy Conferences, and which underpinned much early concrete poetics. On the one hand, here was a model of human behaviour as logical and goal-orientated which confirmed post-Enlightenment ideas of the rational, self-governing subject (Hayles 1999, 86). On the other, the theory dissolved any notion of human consciousness as unique, exalted, or God-given, some variant of which had traditionally been the basis of such an idea. However, the former implication largely held sway in early expositions of the theory (Hayles 1999, Chapter 4). As applied to concrete poetry, cybernetics partly provided the grounds for a series of futuristic pronouncements on the poem as akin to an intelligent machine, as in the Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’: ‘Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making’ ([1958, 1968] 1970, 72). But analogies between poems – or rather, poets – and machines were really ways of defining human beings as positively and rationally intelligent, perceiving and acting upon objective information patterns in their environment to achieve logically defined goals. In short, if humans were like machines, then human society was compelled towards some form of order – rather than, say, the disorder of global 45

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conflict and ethnic genocide – and concrete poetry could aid that process by maximising efficiency of interaction between people, facilitating rational human communication on a global scale. Again, this idea can only be properly understood in its post-war context. The idea of human thought and behaviour as logical and mechanically predictable was borne out in ‘information aesthetics’, a set of theories extrapolated partly from information theory, partly from various pre-existing fields of semiotics, mathematics, and philosophy, which offered algebraic formulas for objectively determining the aesthetic content of a given artwork, based on the relationship it instantiated between pattern and randomness. The German philosopher, mathematician, and concrete poet Max Bense was partly responsible for establishing information aesthetics as a coherent field. He applied the formula M = O/C, with M as aesthetic measure, O as order, and C as complexity (Klütsch 2012, 68).23 Bense was based at the Technischen Hochschule in Stuttgart from 1950 onwards, establishing the Studiengalerie des Studium Generale in 1958 to showcase the creative work produced there (Klütsch 2012, 65). His writing on aesthetics directly informed his poetry and that of the Stuttgart Group, as well as his editorship of a journal, Augenblick (1954–61) and a book series associated with concrete poetry, Edition Rot (1960–97).24 During 1954–58 Bense was an instructor on Ulm’s Information Course, and in 1959 Haroldo visited him in Stuttgart, subsequently becoming a visiting lecturer at the institution (Walther-Bense 1996, 353). This relationship was one factor behind the Noigandres’s development, in the early 1960s, of ‘semiotic poetry’, which used pictographic symbols and codes in place of words and letters, as if to imply that information content might be enhanced by the development of new language systems. In short, then, information aesthetics, and the work of Bense in particular, exerted a significant influence over the early development of concrete poetry. Information aesthetics posited the same predictability for the reader– viewer’s overall aesthetic encounter with the poem as information theory seemed to promise for their engagement with its semantic content, and its adoption – and in this case theorisation – by concrete poets speaks to the same set of concerns. But when conceived more directly in relation to aesthetics, the idea of rationally quantifying human thought and emotion implicit in some adaptations of information theory took on a more obvious relevance to the cultural legacy of fascism. As the computer artist and former Stuttgart Group member Frieder Nake recalls (2012, 74): 46

t h e i n t e r n at ion a l sc e n e Such a radically anti-subjective program for aesthetics must be understood as a reaction against the horrors of Nazi Germany. For many intellectuals, it seemed to be impossible to allow for any irrational or emotional aspect in aesthetics. Too successfully had the Nazi regime used aesthetics (sensual cognition) in their manifestations of supremacy and power.

In an editorial discussion printed in his book Ulm Design, ex-Hochschule für Gestaltung student and industrial designer Herbert Lindinger suggested that a similar principle underpinned the school’s entire philosophy (1990, 77): The dominance of rationality at Ulm has a number of sources: firstly, we could all remember Fascism, with its attempts to rob human beings of their reason, to make deliberate use of symbols and unreason to enslave them. In total contrast to this, we believed that the world could be made a better place; we believed in reason, and we believed that there was a place for us within the Enlightenment tradition.

In a sense, information aesthetics attempted not just to rationally define but also to curtail the power of aesthetic experience, which had been used in such insidiously powerful ways at the Nuremberg Rallies, for example. We might even say that the very lack of thematic and formal depth in some early concrete poetry – its boringness, to put it irreverently – represented a conscious repulsion of intense aesthetic experience as an instrument of populist inculcation. Besides these points of topical relevance, interpretations of concrete poetry based on information theory and its associated discourses now seem highly prescient, as the style has been celebrated above all else for anticipating the arrangement of information in online and digital environments quantifiable through evolved versions of such theories. These discourses are also useful for critics seeking to counter perceptions of the concrete poem as naively dependent upon visual recreation of its object, as they tend to divert attention towards that other impression of objectivity involving accuracy of semantic communication. Information theory can also explain the visual element of the concrete poem itself as a means of generating such accuracy, as words or signs were often taken to convey their meaning more efficiently – with less extraneous information content – when linked by visual association rather than as elements of linear syntax. But the critical expedience of citing information theory, cybernetics, and information aesthetics as influences on concrete poetry should not be confused with the extent of their significance at the time. 47

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Clearly, these were vital intellectual contexts for many first-generation concrete poets, particularly in post-war Germany. But a glance at the broader sweep of evidence suggests that, rather than constituting a master-influence configuring all others and resolving any appearance of stylistic anachronism, they were among a whole range of innervating factors. Moreover, the further concrete poetry spread from its initial geographical bases the more noise entered the channel, as it were, and the less these influences seem to have held. Certainly, English and Scottish concrete poets engaged more infrequently and obliquely with information theory than their international comrades, perhaps because of their relative distance from an intellectual hub such as Ulm or the Stuttgart Hochschule.25 We must also acknowledge the flaws of early information theory as a compositional and interpretive rubric for poetry. On Shannon’s terms, information content could only be objectively defined when the thematic content of a message was either non-existent – as in the case of electrical engineering – or was pragmatically overlooked for the sake of collaborative discussion, as at the Macy Conferences. Far from being identical with semantic content, information in this context, as Hayles puts it, was ‘a mathematical quantity weightless as sunshine, moving in a rarefied realm of pure probability, not tied down to bodies or material instantiations. The price it pays for this universality is its divorce from representation’ (1999, 56). Once information content was reattached to representative content – and in linguistic communication, the two are effectively indistinguishable – the shifting grounds of transmission and reception had to be reintroduced as factors determining the ‘content’ of a message. As such, any notion of a poetic meta-language capable of producing universally intelligible linguistic statements necessarily and pre-emptively evaporated. What early concrete poetry provides, in its graphic constellations of interrelated words, its clarity, its formal restraint, is rather a series of metaphors for objective semantic communication, whose interest in retrospect relies precisely – and ironically – on some awareness of the context for the poems’ composition: a post-war impulse towards transnational communication, a conceptualisation of the human being as a rational, mechanically intelligent animal whose desires were logical and whose aesthetic experiences were not capable of inducing it to barbarism, and a desire to update modernist and constructivist notions of objective aesthetic form. First-wave information theory cannot be employed in unadulterated form to explain concrete poetry half a 48

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century on, nor cited to shut down other routes of engagement with it. In particular, the visual element of concrete poetry cannot be explained away as a means of maximising communicative efficiency because the gesture of rendering language as a visual entity bears so many other entrenched connotations, notably ones placing the style in a genealogy of post-constructivist art, not to mention millenniaold associations between visibility and truthfulness in Christian and Platonic metaphysics. These connections were perhaps particularly significant for English and Scottish poets, who were more likely to lack a deep grounding in contemporary semiotics, and thus to take the visual element of concrete poetry at face value. Speaking more broadly, semiotic and semiological accounts of concrete poetry generally fail to clarify how the concrete poem can convey its content in a uniquely efficient or intelligible way. Indeed, the perceived failure of semiotic proofs for concrete poetry’s social efficacy is one possible reason for the movement of many poets away from the style’s initial principles by the late 1960s, and for the dissolution of any coherent concrete movement by around the same time. A more practical problem, as I have suggested, was the difficulty of continually reproducing that skilfully balanced impression of referential objectivity and object-like presence that characterises poems such as ‘Silencio’ and ‘LIFE’. Moreover, by the late 1960s, the post-war epoch in which concrete poetry had taken hold was being redefined in various ways. Stephen Scobie has argued that ‘the best date for [concrete poetry’s] demise is, ironically, 1967–8, the year of its apparent triumph, with the publication of the three major anthologies. … The very definitiveness of these collections “froze” concrete poetry in its historical moment’ (1996, 146). Stephen Bann offered a similar argument in a 1977 article, albeit with a clearer emphasis on concrete poetry’s arrière-garde responsiveness to early twentieth-century avant-garde programmes: In retrospect, the entire development of the phenomenon … can be seen to have perpetuated a strange illusion … that concrete poetry was a novel artistic or poetic form, still in its primary stages, which would acquire its basic ‘grammar’ and then proceed to the task of large-scale achievement. Thus the concrete epic might be expected to succeed in due time, in the same way as Pound’s Cantos or Williams’ Paterson have been seen as the epics of imagism. In effect, it would be more realistic to stress the fact that, from the outset, concrete poetry could be characterised not as a beginning but as an ending (or at least the beginning of an ending) not as a grammar but as a mannerism. The concrete poets were completing a

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Adapting Bann and Scobie’s narrative slightly, we might say that one version of concrete poetry, orientated around the classical stylistic model and defined by its engagement with certain literary modernisms, constructivism, post-war architecture and design, and a spirit of cultural reconstruction loosely tethered to a newly assertive global capitalism, had indeed spent its energies by the late 1960s. We might attribute this to the failure of information theory and semiotics to validate its methods, to the fading of its enabling cultural atmosphere, or simply to the lack of long-term viability in its compositional models. Some critics, more attentive to concrete poetry’s relationship to cybernetics and information theory, might argue that it was simply incorporated into a more enduring wave of semiological and computer-based art and literature of the kind showcased at Jasia Reichardt’s 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity. But, whatever the reasons behind this demise, it did not prevent the continued, indeed increased, use of the term ‘concrete poetry’ throughout the 1970s and beyond. Other Concrete Poetry By the end of the 1960s, that is, the term ‘concrete poetry’ had been appropriated and adapted to refer to a dizzyingly wide, internationally dispersed array of creative practices, including the Lettrist poetry of Isodore Isou and his compatriots in mid-century Paris; French, Swedish, and North American variants of sound poetry and voice-based musical composition developed from the 1950s onwards; William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up poetry; language-based art practices rooted in pop, conceptualism, and abstract expressionism; the aleatoric graphic scores of Christian Wolff and Cornelius Cardew; the book art of Tom Phillips and the Fluxus movement, and more besides.26 Most of these practices are best defined by terms other than ‘concrete poetry’. But within the incoherent mass of activity to which the label was attached it is possible to identify a distinct and related set of projects undertaken in knowledge of and response to the style’s original tenets, but which imbued it with an alternative, even oppositional, set of principles. Some of these practices were developed in response to the creative and theoretical blind-spots of early concrete poetry, especially the various notions of ‘objectivity’ that 50

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underpinned that work. This was not merely a stylistic realignment but implicitly an ideological one. Though little of the work associated with this formal sea-change was theoretically informed, it occurred in tandem with the politically charged querying of the authorial voice in late 1960s post-structuralist discourse and often bore the same connotations of an assault on the vested interests of linguistic authority.27 This, in turn, connects concrete poetry to a broader period of counter-cultural ferment mainly concentrated within Western Europe and North America. In this sense, these new usages of concrete poetry correlate with a geographical shift whereby the style became more associated with the established centres of Western cultural and political power. In stylistic terms, this other concrete poetry can be broadly defined by its tendency towards linguistic and expressive complexity, simultaneity, and excess, spontaneity in composition, improvised live performance, a related emphasis on the use of sound, and a pronounced sense of concrete poetry’s multi-media possibilities: that is, its capacity to incorporate art-forms other than literature. In short, there is a stylistic cohesiveness to this other approach to concrete that has not been sufficiently acknowledged, partly because it is hidden within the larger mass of disconnected practices listed above but also, perhaps, because of the chaotic outward characteristics of much of the work associated with it. However, tracking the development of concrete poetry from, crudely speaking, the classical model into this other style is one convincing way of framing the terms of its development in England and Scotland. The roots of this other concrete poetry are in an alternative set of early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde movements. Reflecting on the style’s ongoing development in 1972, Edwin Morgan attributed the wilder stylistic tendencies of much recent concrete poetry – specifically that of the French poets Julien Blaine and Jean-François Bory – to ‘a fall back on concrete’s secondary sources in Dada and Futurism’ ([1972] 1974, 25). In fact, a larger proportion of early twentieth-century art and literature that had explored language’s visual, sonic, and material edge was wedded to dadaist and futurist ideas of expressive ambiguity, freedom, and excess than to the clarity of form and function associated with constructivism. This is probably because so much of that work took its cue from Dada and Futurist poetry itself, and from the comparable exemplar of Apollinaire’s calligrammes.28 Poets seeking to transform concrete poetics across the 1960s and 1970s could thus turn to a whole raft of pre-defined formal effects with which visual and sound-based poetries had been associated since 51

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the 1910s. Discussing early twentieth-century Russian, French, and Italian typographic experiment, Johanna Drucker (1994) associates these qualities – spontaneity, expressionistic composition, the impression of a violent assault on language – with certain underlying ideals: a sense of opposition to romanticism, to ideas of ‘high art’, and to the languages of mass media; and, most importantly, the notion that presenting text as a visual entity formed the basis for revolutionary modes of social being: We can understand typographic experiment as a modern art practice which participated in many of the same operations as literature and art: the blurring of lines between high and low (so called) cultural practices, the challenge to the romantic subject, the assertion that the transformation of symbolic systems was a politically significant act, and the proposition that a new aesthetic form would bring about, construct, envision, a new utopian vision of the world. (Drucker 1994, 11)

Importantly, some of the ideological impulses that Drucker identifies here were shared by the first concrete poets. But, stylistically speaking, their work was defined by its opposition to the range of effects with which those impulses were instinctively associated by the 1960s – essentially those of Dada and Futurism – precisely to set concrete poetry apart from established ideas of how a visual and sonic poetry ought to read, look, and sound. This meant that, by embracing a wilder or freer compositional style, a new generation of concrete poets could re-emphasise the ideological positions Drucker describes in what seemed a reawakening of repressed possibilities. Like the first concrete poets, however, these new concrete poets – accepting a strong degree of blurring and interaction between the two categories – were not simply enacting a return to avant-garde origins. Instead, they were involved in a similar arrière-garde activity, though undertaken with more of the iconoclastic energy of the avant-garde, reconceptualising a range of existing creative approaches in response to new historical contexts. At a surface level this often meant combining concrete poetics with the stylistics of contemporaneous North American intermedia art, and a sense of the value and function of mixed-media art practice connected to the ideologies of the Western counter-culture. The reconceptualisation of concrete poetry as intermedia art is epitomised by Dick Higgins’s description of the genre in a 1969 article as an ‘intermedium, … between poetry and the fine arts’, a statement with limited connection to São Paulo or Ulm (1969, 2). Emmett Williams’s influential Anthology of Concrete Poetry, published in 1967 by Higgins’s

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New York-based Something Else Press, incorporated a range of work that would probably have been considered beyond the remit of the genre just a few years previously, much of it selected based on some impression of intermedia form. Higgins’s genre-defining manifesto ‘Intermedia’ gives some sense of the revolutionary potential that concrete poetry might have assumed as an intermedia practice:29 The concept of the separation between media arose in the renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought – categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers – which we call the Feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach continued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolutions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation … . However, the social problems that characterize our time, as opposed to the political ones, no longer allow a compartmentalized approach. We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant. (Higgins 1966, [1])

Higgins’s final sentence epitomises an understanding of concrete poetry that was already widespread by the time his manifesto appeared in 1966: the idea that, by occupying the space between literature and other media, concrete poetry either stood for or literally constituted an attack on social structures of various kinds. Higgins’s statement thus epitomises a related and frequently drawn connection between concrete poetry and the Western counter-culture. Without attempting to define that culture in the abstract, I am taking it to have at least been prevalent in Europe and North America from around 1958 until around 1974, that period which the social historian Arthur Marwick (1998) refers to as ‘the long sixties’. I am also assuming that it partly gained traction, in England and Scotland and across much of the West, through collective opposition to the excesses of Cold-War realpolitik, especially the development of nuclear arsenals by the Western superpowers following the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the campaign of US-led anti-communist military interventions, most significantly in south-east Asia, which marked the following two-and-a-half decades. These touchstone issues epitomised the Cold-War stand-off that had gripped global politics before the era of transnational communication

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in which the first concrete poets sought to operate had ever had a chance to take root. I am also assuming that counter-cultural sensibilities found expression through jazz, folk, and beat culture, the establishment of alternative cultural and educational institutions and movements such as the ‘anti-university’ and ‘anti-psychiatry’ movements in Britain, and the international wave of student-led protests that marked the summer of 1968. In his thesis/memoir Bomb Culture, published that year, the English writer and artist Jeff Nuttall, a fellow-traveller of the concrete poets, traced the development of what he called ‘underground’ culture along similar lines, summing up its ‘fundamental purpose’ as follows ([1968] 1970, 174): [T]he current technological/commercial/industrial/rational civilization is suicidal, it must be destroyed; a new culture, based on total freedom, extended sensibility, and spirituality of some kind re-established in the place of politics must be developed at breakneck pace and spread among the people; human communication must be freed of the limitations of language; people must be induced to identify with humanity rather than with class or nation; fear for security must be shifted from the centre of human affairs and aspiration towards human fulfillment in terms of vitality, ecstasy, and delight be put in its place.

From accounts such as Nuttall’s we can infer that counter-cultural ideology involved, in some cases and among other things, a sense that Western society might, and ought to, evolve or revert into some condition of organic communalism, liberated from pre-ordained or externally imposed rules and structures and from divisive commitments to ‘class or nation’. In a sense, this sounds like an exaggerated version of the first concrete poets’ ideals of transnational cultural communication. But for Nuttall and others this was a condition that could only be brought about by revolution: the forcible dismantling of current social institutions. In particular, the equality for which the ‘underground’ stood seemed to necessitate the collapse of capitalist economics. Nuttall’s statement also implies that this revolution would involve the development of heightened creative functions of some kind, potentially involving forms of collective, non-orthodox spirituality. A related aspect of this ideology, which I am pragmatically calling ‘anarchist’ in spite of this spiritual inflection, was the idea that modes of subjective thought and expression formed the nucleus around which patterns of social organisation cohered rather than vice versa. This idea was given various forms of intellectual gloss but in some cases it had 54

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roots – sometimes fairly shallow ones – in contemporary post-structuralist theory. As Marwick states: [I]f we are to penetrate to the core of structuralism and post-structuralism with respect to what was indicated in terms of political action, the fundamental point, taken up by student protestors and other activist groups, was that mere political revolution, a mere seizure of power by progressive forces, would not be enough: the very belief structures, and therefore the language systems which controlled them, must be destroyed, and totally replaced. (1998, 315)

Without applying the details of Marwick’s particular account on an overall scale, the general notion that revolutions in thought and expression were necessary to incite social revolutions is a common one in countercultural literature. The Scottish situationist Alexander Trocchi, in his 1963 manifesto ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, expressed the idea in terms of an inversion of Marxist base–superstructure models (1963, 34–35): We are concerned not with the coup-d’etat of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup-du-monde, a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse … . The cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them.

In practical terms, Trocchi’s manifesto calls for the establishment of a network of underground educational and cultural institutions to advance the ‘cultural revolt’ he describes. The British anti-university movement mentioned above was one result of this campaign. But the document is really significant in encapsulating a social paradigm wherein art-forms that challenged norms of creative expression and interpersonal communication – by occupying the boundaries between language and other media, for example – were conceived of as means of subverting an unjust political status quo. The potential significance of concrete poetry on these terms hardly needs to be spelled out. It is also clear why concrete poets who imagined their work along these lines might attempt to radically reduce the role of semantic expression within the concrete poem and to present their work as evading the constraints of medium rather than as a branch of literature. The emphasis that many later concrete poets placed on improvisatory live performance can also be understood in this context. It was a way of undermining the impression of linguistic and conceptual stasis 55

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potentially conveyed by the poem as object in favour of the ephemerality and relativity of form implied by the time-bound medium of sound. A gradual shift in the stylistics and ideology of concrete poetry can be traced across various independent developments throughout the world during the 1950s–1970s, with a broadly though not exclusively northern European and North American bent. Many of these developments reflect the influences of intermedia art and counter-cultural ideology, but they bear a geographical and chronological breadth not quite captured by that causal model, suggesting that a more universal motivating factor might have been some tangential relationship to Dada and Futurism as stylistic precedents. As early as 1954, the Swedish poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström had developed a language-based art practice that he called ‘concrete poetry’ in isolation from the German–Brazilian model and prior to the intermedia pronouncements of Higgins or the visible growth of an international counter-culture.30 Fahlström’s poetry was fundamentally concerned with the sound of language, and with multiplying and complicating semantic meaning through morphological play. A few years later, in Brazil in 1959, the poet Ferreira Gullar published a ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ ([1959] 2011) reacting against various qualities of rationalism and abstract functionalism imputed to existing forms of concrete art, implicating the Noigandres group among others. By the late 1960s French poets such as Julien Blaine and Jean-François Bory had turned, as Edwin Morgan noted, to ‘collage, photomontage, fragments of newsprint, and roughly written words and letters’, ‘far more expressionistic data than constructivist-minded critics would allow’ ([1972] 1974, 25). In Canada around the same time, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and others began composing what they called ‘dirty’ concrete poetry, to distinguish it from an earlier, ‘clean’ style. Steve McCaffery has described ‘dirty’ concrete as involving: [A] preference for textual obliteration rather than manifestation, and the use of found objects as notation for sound performance. [It] describes the productions of the majority of Concrete in Canada (the mimeographic overprinting of bill bissett, my own and Nichol’s investigations into Xerox disintegrations). … I believe Scobie’s schema [McCaffery credits Stephen Scobie with coining the terms ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’] can be amplified somewhat to include a different tendency towards openness and closure. It was the closure of the text, its reified condition as object, framed and/or paginated that was frontally engaged in Canada by the performed sound poem and its attendant cabaret sociology. The creative propulsion too was more emotive than rational. (Jackson et al. 1996, 400)

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These developments, McCaffery notes, were influenced by Bob Cobbing and other London-based poets, and by a ‘spirit of contestation with canonic Concrete’: ‘[b]y the early 70s the feeling had arisen that concretism had become overly precious and inordinately narrow in its range; that it had ossified into a school at the very moment it seemed to be opening up tremendous new territory’ (Jackson et al. 1996, 401). At the same time as these developments were unfolding, various other theoretical and creative contexts for the composition of concrete poetry were also emerging. While not necessarily attributable to the same causes, they nonetheless contributed to the diffusion of interpretive frameworks around the style by the 1970s. The ideas of aural and visual culture and ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media outlined by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), in response to newly pervasive audio-visual technologies such as television, became important reference-points for certain concrete poets, including Edwin Morgan. So too did the notion of subjective reality as the projection of a language game in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, first published posthumously in 1953 in English translation, and particularly significant for Houédard’s conception of concrete poetry as apophatic expression.31 In a different vein, several evolving strains within post-war North American modernist poetry, including Black Mountain, neo-objectivist, and even beat poetry, none of which were initially associated with concrete poetry, were increasingly perceived as analogues and precursors for the genre. Notably, all the written sources just referred to are Anglophone, again suggesting that this reorientation was concentrated within the Western and especially English-speaking world.32 It is also worth picking out, from a raft of potentially relevant technological developments – including the mass rise in TV ownership across the 1950s, a subject returned to in Chapter 4 – the advent of offset lithography by the mid-1960s. Offset was a cheap new printing method that involved ‘burning’ photographic images onto a metal plate covered in ink, from which they were transferred onto a rubber blanket and pressed onto a sheet of paper (Dair 1967, 37). Printing essentially became a form of photography, allowing language to be displayed in all the visual formats which that method allowed. The benefits of this to a literary style as preoccupied with visual form – and as reliant on self-funded publication – as concrete poetry were enormous, making the production and circulation of work far easier, especially the more visually adventurous printed work common by the close of the 1960s. Indeed, the design theorist Carl Dair (1967) argued that offset lithography, along 57

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with the new availability of letter-transfer kits by the early 1960s, was partly responsible for the explosion of little-magazine and small-press printing that the 1960s witnessed.33 The rest of this book, particularly my chapters on Houédard and Cobbing, deals extensively with examples of this ‘other’ concrete poetry. As such, and in the interests of space, I am going to allow this introductory definition of it to be tested against later close readings rather than analysing any specific examples of it at this point. It is worth emphasising, however, that this new concrete poetry was not immune to fallacies of objective expression like those that characterised the classical style. Indeed, in many cases, the gnostic or esoteric connotations of an urge towards wordless expression, often cultivated under the aegis of counter-cultural spiritualities, led to mystical renunciations of referential sense, whereby poetry was implied to have merged or melded with its object in a far more ostentatious way than had previously been suggested. In stylistic terms this also resulted in a range of poetic practices that, by any conventional definition, cross over into the realms of visual and sonic art and/or music. In sociological terms, moreover, this reorientation of concrete practice involved the rewiring of genuinely novel international and inter-regional networks of modernist exchange through the established cultural centres of the post- and neo-imperial West. São Paulo, Ulm, and Edinburgh made way for New York, Paris, and London. Within Britain this realignment manifested itself in a shift in the geographical base of concrete poetry from Scotland to England, a process with mild overtones of cultural colonisation. Nonetheless, in introducing the practice of concrete poetry in England and Scotland we cannot simply refer back to the style’s mid-century origins. Putting aside the Scottish agendas it came to serve – discussed over my next two chapters – the reception of concrete poetry in England and Scotland mirrored and contributed to a worldwide alteration in the term’s aesthetic and ideological connotations that can be traced by assessing the work of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard, and Cobbing in turn. At the same time, what the following chapters also reveal is that these poets’ work cannot be neatly contained by any overarching interpretative frameworks: it must be assessed on its own terms.

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Notes 1 Originally published in Garnier’s journal Les Lettres earlier in 1964, the manifesto boasted 25 signatories in all, from Germany, Austria, England, Belgium, Brazil, Scotland, Finland, France, Holland, Japan, Portugal, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and the United States (Garnier 1964, 4). 2 The word ‘material’ in this context does not indicate a ‘materialist’ reading of the socio-economic bases of literary and artistic production, though these are clearly at stake throughout the book. 3 Some critics have sought to qualify this origin narrative, including Eduardo Kac (2015), who has stressed a precedent for the Noigandres’s work in that of the Carioca poet Wlademir Dias-Pino. 4 In an evocative biographical note recounting a 1958 trip to Ulm, the composer Mauricio Kagel recalled: [A] spartan life, marked by a pragmatic kind of idealism and the quest for an aesthetic whose realisation must be of relevant practical use to society. The instructors and the students pursued the objective of a comprehensive visual education that would one day achieve the right design for every one of the objects that surround us. (Qtd. in Lindinger 1990, 48–49) 5 See, for example, Michael Erlhoff (1990, 44–45): [O]ne might extend the catalogue of contradictions and ask why the American occupation authorities – and those closest to High Commissioner McCloy, in particular – chose to fund the setting-up of the HfG with what at that time was an unimaginable sum of money; or why the same circles were obviously involved in the refounding of the Social Research Institute in Frankfurt [in 1951]. One thing that is certain is that they did not intend these institutions to be what they then became: centers of intellectual debate and dissent, test beds for new kinds of interaction and intervention … . At the same time, those same institutions were shaped by their own contradictions; they suffered from the dictation, and the inbuilt restrictions that they received from their American (and also German) sponsors. Hilder discusses the development of concrete poetry worldwide in relation to the spread of free-market capitalism through the Marshall Plan and the networks of economic and cultural exchange that it established (2016, 77, 113). 6 An important early event in the emergence of this scene was the publication of the single-issue art journal Arturo in Buenos Aires in 1944. The project brought together a number of young concrete artists, leading to the formation of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invencíon by Tomás Maldonado and others the following year, and the Arte Madí group in 1946. Similar collectives soon sprang up elsewhere across the continent, such as Grupo de Arte No Figurativo in Montevideo, Uruguay, Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro, and Grupo Ruptura in São Paulo, whose members had extensive connections to the Noigandres poets (on which see Clüver 2007). These three groups were all formed in 1952, a year after a large retrospective of Max Bill’s work in São Paulo cemented his reputation among Latin-American concrete artists. 7 According to Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier’s unrealised project for Rio consisted of ‘a coastal highway, some 6 kilometers in length, elevated 100 meters above the

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bor de r blu r s ground and comprising fifteen floors of “artificial sites” for residential use stacked beneath its road surface’ (qtd. in Bessa 2008, 8). Hilder’s (2016) third chapter compares the architecture of Brasília and Las Vegas as analogues for different compositional modes within the concrete movement. 8 It is also worth noting that, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, none of the nations in which concrete poetry initially took hold were located behind the Iron Curtain, effectively established in 1955 through the signing of the Warsaw Pact and the formation of Soviet vassal states across Eastern Europe. The idea of transnational communication that the concrete movement espoused was thus one largely restricted in practical expression to the capitalist world, in spite of the era of relative Soviet cultural liberalisation – the so-called ‘thaw’ – ushered in by the death of Stalin and assent to power of Nikita Khrushchev in 1953. 9 Take Gabo’s Kinetic Construction of 1920, for example, which neatly demonstrates the principle of the ‘standing wave’. 10 At its logical threshold, within the Productivist faction associated with Alexander Rodchenko and Alexei Gan, this led constructivism away from the fine arts towards utilitarian crafts and processes such as architecture and industrial design. 11 The best example of this serial approach is Albers’s Homage to the Square (1950–76) – admittedly completed several years after his tutelage of Bill – a dispersed series of hundreds of variations on the basic motif of three or four coloured squares set inside one another. 12 Whereas the constructivist fellow-traveller Van Doesburg associated objective expression with the erasure of subjective creative impulses, calling for artworks ‘receiv[ing] nothing from nature’s given forms, or from sensuality, or sentimentality’ ([1930] 1974), Brandon Taylor associates Bill’s concrete art with a ‘less agonistic, more liberal appeal’ (2014, 86). Gomringer himself noted Albers’s capacity to link ‘rationality with sensibility’ through ‘the psychic effect of autonomous colour’, again suggesting the idea of innate compositional and interpretive capacities (1968, 8). 13 The formalist theories of the OPOJAZ Group or Moscow Linguistic Circle could be seen as attempts to realise constructivist concepts of literary creation. More whimsically, in a 1923 manifesto, Van Doesburg’s Dada alter-ego I.K. Bonset prophesied the pitfalls of a functionalist literature with his warning that ‘[y]ou cannot brush your teeth with art’ (Van Doesburg [1923] 1974, 110). 14 Take Jamie Hilder’s analysis of Gomringer’s poem ‘Wind’, for example, which focuses on the coherence of the word ‘wind’ in several languages at the expense of the ‘banal’ but undeniable fact that the letters of the poem look as if they are being blown around by the wind (2016, 88–89). 15 The term ‘Noigandres’ appears in Canto XX, an apparently untranslatable word from the Provençal troubadour poetry of Arnaut Daniel. In one of the autobiographical passages that punctuate the early Cantos, the student Pound travels to Freiburg to ask the Provençal scholar and lexicographer Emile Lévy for help translating a passage of Daniel’s work (Pound 1996, 89–90): And he said: ‘Now is there anything I can tell you?’ And I said: I dunno, sir, or ‘Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?’ And he said: Noigandres! NOIgandres!

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t h e i n t e r n at ion a l sc e n e ‘You know for seex mon’s of my life ‘Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself: ‘Noigandres, eh, noigandres, ‘Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!’ 16 As Barthes puts it, ‘Mallarmé’s typographical agraphia seeks to create around rarefied words an empty zone in which speech, liberated from its guilty social overtones, may, by some happy contrivance, no longer reverberate’ (1953] 1970, 75). 17 Marjorie Perloff (2007) distinguishes the Noigandres’s early work from Gomringer’s on the basis of this Joycean verbal invention. 18 See, for example, Susan Stanford Friedman (2017). Haroldo de Campos’s critical writing often explores the relationship between Brazilian and European modernist traditions. In ‘Anthropophagous Reason’, he defines a Brazilian literary tradition based on a ‘modal’ rather than ‘ontological nationalism’, characterised by a perpetually shifting, ‘differential’ relationship with an external (European) centre ([1981] 2007, 161). 19 My own account is largely based on Hayles’s in How We Became Posthuman, itself based on Norbert Wiener’s ‘The Impact of Communication Engineering on Philosophy’ (Hayles 1999, 300). Wiener’s conception of information theory largely concurs with Shannon’s, and the cluster of shared ideas is often referred to as the Shannon–Wiener theory (Hayles 1999, 52). Hilder offers an overview of the post-war development of information theory, cybernetics, and computer coding following Alan Turing’s development of the Enigma code-breaking machine during the Second World War (2016, 51–66). 20 To expand on these points – based on Hayles (1999) and Nake (2012) – when all the signs in a given repertoire are equally likely to be selected, the information content of each sign can be expressed as I = log2 n, with I as information content and n as the number of signs in the repertoire. When certain signs are more likely to be selected than others, the signs in the repertoire are given individual selection probabilities which collectively add up to 1 (equivalent to 100%). For example, a repertoire might contain two signs with a selection probability of 0.25, and four with a probability of 0.125, meaning two have a 25% chance of being selected, and four have a 12.5% chance. The information content of a chosen sign is then calculated by dividing 1 by that sign’s selection probability (which produces a larger number, for example, 1 ÷ 0.25 = 4, or 1 ÷ 0.125 = 8) and finding the logarithm to base 2 of that number. In this scenario, the less likely-to-be-selected signs have higher information content, because the higher the number reached by that last calculation the higher the value of the logarithm needed to equal it. In this case, the information content of the sign with 0.25 (25%) selection probability is 2 (2 × 2 = 4), whereas the information content of the sign with 0.125 (12.5%) probability is 8 (2 × 2 × 2 = 8). This principle can be expressed algebraically as I = log2 1/p(si), with p(si) as the selection probability of the sign selected. That formula was also expressed in an alternative way, by finding the logarithm to base 2 of the selection probability itself (for example, log2 of 0.25, making -2) and ‘minusing’ that number to produce the equivalent positive (in this case 2). This can be expressed as I = - log2 p(si). A lengthier version of that last formula was used to approximate the overall information content of particular sources or repertoires: the probability of every sign in the repertoire was multiplied by its

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bor de r blu r s logarithm to base 2, the results were added together, and the minus value of the total was taken as the overall information content. 21 For example, messages sent from a repertoire containing four signs with probabilities of 0.25 will have higher average information content than messages sent from a repertoire containing two signs with 0.4 probability and two with 0.1 probability. This is because logarithmic increments increase exponentially, so increases in information value taper off as a sign’s selection probability decreases. Thus, the increase in information content generated by a less predictable sign does not compensate for the loss of information content generated by the equivalently more predictable sign whose presence it necessitates. 22 Christoph Klütsch (2012) discusses various works of computer-generated art that served as graphic expressions of formulas arising from information aesthetics. 23 This formula was taken from George David Birkhoff’s 1920s work on aesthetic measure (Klütsch 2012, 67). Another important figure associated with information aesthetics was the French physicist and psychologist Abraham Moles (Nake 2012, 65; Klütsch 2012, 67). 24 Publication dates from www.stuttgarter-schule.de. 25 This is not a totally watertight claim. Bronać Ferran (2017a) has written convincingly of the relationship between concrete poetry, information theory, and early computer technology, including in England and Scotland. Ferran discusses, for example, Houédard’s correspondence with Margaret Masterman, founder of the Computer Language Research Unit in Cambridge, which ‘made a pioneering contribution to experimentation within the then emerging field of natural and machine language processing’ (2017a, 139). Edwin Morgan recalled similar ‘connections’ during the 1950s–1960s ‘with MIT, the Cambridge Language Research Unit, and the Computing Laboratory at Glasgow University’ (2006, 38). 26 On Lettrism, which often employed the rebus principle of ancient proto-phonetic languages, see Bohn (2001, Chapter 11). 27 At the risk of raking over old ground, I have in mind here works such as Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Barthes’s famous assertion that ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’, a reader ‘without history, biography, psychology’ ([1967] 1977, 148), can be read in light of the political climate of late-1960s Paris: In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. (Barthes [1967] 1977, 147) Barthes’s statements on the ‘anti-theological’ task of literary criticism must be interpreted in relation to the wider querying of the inherited assumptions of structuralist linguistics and anthropology at this time. This partly involved a newly pronounced sense of the slippage between different instances or usages of language and social custom (conceived as differential structural systems on the terms previously established by Saussure and Lévi-Strauss). Derrida’s critique of the idea of the transcendental signified – as applied to Saussure’s description of writing as a secondary sign system – in Of Grammatology ([1967] 1978), and of Levi-Strauss’s

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t h e i n t e r n at ion a l sc e n e distinction between the ‘engineer’ and the ‘bricoleur’ – in Writing and Difference ([1967] 1976) – are key reference points here. 28 The breadth of the early twentieth-century field just alluded to might seem to prevent this kind of generalisation on its origins. Certainly, it encompassed a huge range of Russian and European literary avant-gardes – Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, Ultraism, Vorticism, Imagism – as well as individual writers such as Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Pound, Stein, cummings, and Joyce, painters and collagists whose work incorporated text – Cubists such as Picasso and Braque, Dadaists such as Schwitters and Hausmann – and others who developed visual pseudo-grammars, including Kandinsky and Klee. Nonetheless, as regards the development of visual literature, Willard Bohn has emphasised the particular importance of Apollinaire and the Italian Futurists, describing their work as ‘the source of all subsequent experiments … during this period’ (1986, 9). Bohn notes that Apollinaire’s experiments with syntax responding to visual effects go ‘at least as far back’ as his 1912 poem ‘Zone’, in which the collaging of overheard speech ‘imitate[s] the Cubist painters who decomposed an object into its parts, seen from different angles, and regrouped them in two-dimensional patterns’ (1986, 17–18). Italian Futurist poetry had been exploring similar effects since Marinetti’s definition of ‘parole in libertà’ in his ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (1912), and arguably since his first manifesto of 1909, most famously in ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ (1912–14) (Bohn 1986, 16). Initially, Bohn notes, ‘most of the typographical effects are not pictorially oriented but concerned with sounds and/or relationships’ (1986, 16) – the statement refers to Futurism but also applies to Apollinaire’s work – but the Futurists’ Spring 1914 trip to Paris was the catalyst for Apollinaire’s first visually ‘figurative’ poem ‘Lettre-Océan’, and for the first of Carlo Carrà’s so-called ‘word-paintings’ (Bohn 1986, 9). As regards work that emphasises language’s sonic dimensions, a still-useful historical survey by Steve McCaffery backdates the ‘second phase’ of sound poetry – following the ‘vast, intractable area of archaic and primitive poetries’ – to 1875 ([1978], 6). But McCaffery cites only ‘isolated pioneering attempts’ by Christian Morgenstern and others prior to the emergence of ‘the Russian Futurists Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, the intermedia activities of Kandinsky, the bruitist poems of the Dadaists … and the “paroles in liberta” of the Italian Futurist Marinetti’ ([1978] 6). An important period here is 1912–13, during which Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s Declaration of the Word as Such and Marinetti’s ‘Technical Manifesto’ both appeared. The advent of Dada sound poetry can be associated with the first Cabaret Voltaire performances of 1916. Recounting the origins of Dada aesthetics in his memoir, Hans Richter admitted that it had ‘swallowed Futurism – bones, feathers and all’ ([1966] 1997, 33). 29 The definition of ‘intermedia’ employed throughout this text is drawn to a large extent from Higgins’s statements and manifestos on the term issued through the Something Else Newsletter between 1966 and 1973. 30 Fahlström first described his work as ‘concrete poetry’ in his 1954 manifesto ‘Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy’ (Bessa 2008, 135–43), named after a line of dialogue from Winnie the Pooh (Bessa 2008, 158). His use of the term was thus initially as unrelated to its use by the concrete poets as, for example, Pierre Schaeffer’s term ‘musique concrete’. However, other factors suggest that Fählstrom later reframed his work in response to Gomringer and the Noigandres’s

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bor de r blu r s terminology. He only added the subtitle ‘Manifesto for Concrete Poetry’ to his 1954 statement, for example, when it appeared in his poetry collection Bord, published in 1966 (Bessa 2008, 5), after he had acquired some knowledge of the international movement (though the poems themselves were composed during 1952–55). Nonetheless, Fählstrom worked in isolation from the concrete movement until at least the early 1960s, and had ‘no direct impact’ on its development worldwide (Björck 1996, 317). In the first chapter of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing, Antonio Sergio Bessa compares Fählstrom’s sound-based concrete practice with Gomringer and the Noigandres’s visually oriented, ‘Bauhausian-constructivist’ model (2008, 3). 31 Finlay named his 1968 collection The Blue and the Brown Poems after Wittgenstein’s preparatory sketches for the Investigations. On this connection see Perloff (2010a). 32 Décio Pignatari translated McLuhan’s Understanding Media into Portuguese in 1969. 33 The Letraset business, founded in London in 1959, produced dry-transfer decal kits that could be used to create near professional standard printed copy.

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Order and Doubt Ian Hamilton Finlay Ian Hamilton Finlay

In March 1963, around nine months after Morgan had shown him Melo e Castro’s note in the TLS, Ian Hamilton Finlay printed a single page of poems by the Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Pedro Xisto, and Marcelo Moura in the sixth issue of his literary magazine Poor.Old. Tired.Horse (POTH). Finlay’s first collection of concrete poems, Rapel: 10 Fauve and Suprematist Poems, appeared that same spring, his own experiments with the genre having begun the previous winter. This made him, as he sometimes pointed out, both the first publisher of concrete poetry and the first published concrete poet in England or Scotland. However, within about five years Finlay was pugnaciously dissociating himself from the style, in dismay at its increasing association with a set of aesthetic and ideological positions anathema to his own and because the interaction of linguistic, visual, and sculptural elements in his work was developing beyond the terms of concrete poetry as he had interpreted it. The relationship between Finlay’s work and the spectrum of approaches to concrete poetry posited in my last chapter is thus a complex one. In many ways, Finlay’s concrete poetry represents the most concerted attempt within Scotland or England to adhere to a classical, mid-century conception of the style – certainly, his work was in no sense ‘neo-dada’, a description Finlay used as a term of disparagement – and yet it bears complexities of form and theme that cannot be accounted for by earlier models of concrete practice. It was partly the exacerbation of some of these points of tension, and not just Finlay’s unease about the connotations of the label ‘concrete poet’ by the late 1960s, that ultimately led him to reject it. Complicating the picture further, we must also assess 65

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Finlay’s concrete poetry in relation to contemporaneous debates around Scottish literature and culture, as his adoption of it was in part a means of placing his work in opposition to dominant strains within early 1960s Scottish literary culture, especially the literary and ideological positions he associated with Hugh MacDiarmid. Stylistically, Finlay’s work can be seen to involve the realisation of thematic duality through formal duality. The term ‘thematic duality’ here indicates Finlay’s ability to generate striking or unexpected associations between different objects, concepts, and phenomena, sometimes drawn from a single cultural context or imaginative environment, sometimes from entirely separate or contrasting ones. By ‘formal duality’, I mean Finlay’s combined emphasis on the linguistic elements of a poem and on its visual, physical, and/or sonic elements. Often, it was only by combining the linguistic and non-linguistic registers in this way – by presenting a poem in which language and image, for example, played an equally central role – that Finlay was able to generate or enhance the analogies he sought. This poetics, which often involved positing connections between disparate cultures, epochs, and environments, and between different artistic media, seems to express some deep-seated need for moral and emotional consistency: for a human and natural universe that would display certain dependable, perceptible patterns. Assuming we can connect compositional impulse with authorial temperament, we might try to explain this in something like sociological terms. Although Finlay’s 1960s poetry retreated from topical or political content, like all the concrete poets he worked in the wake of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, when the need to bring some degree of moral and rational order to subjective experience – to build a private cognitive universe which ‘made sense’ in some way – was perhaps a widely felt response to the irrational violence of recent human activity on a global scale. In Finlay’s case, we might say that this need was borne out in appeals to natural law of some kind, rather than the scientistic theories of human thought and behaviour as rational and logically quantifiable that were so important for the first concrete poets. But there is something idiosyncratically insistent about Finlay’s appeals to order, perhaps rooted in personal trauma – a subject returned to below – perhaps even, as Alec Finlay implies, emanating from some deep layer of the national-cultural psyche. Certainly, they reflect at some level that ‘political idealism … infused with antinomian violence’, those ‘radical and reactionary tendencies’, that Alec identifies as surprising points of affinity between 66

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his father’s authorial persona and that of Hugh MacDiarmid (Alec Finlay 2012, 24). In any case, in his concern with ordering and concentrating the value of linguistic signs by emphasising their visual and formal properties, Finlay was piously faithful to what he felt were the founding ideals of concrete poetry. But the way in which his work often drew together such disparate contexts and expressive registers also seems to acknowledge some possibility of ultimate and eviscerating disorder: a sense of the symbolic order established by the poem as an act of will, even violence, rather than formal logic, which sets his practice apart from, say, Gomringer’s. Again, it is not clear if that impression of disorder should be explained in sociological, eschatological, or psychological terms, but in any case, as Anne Moeglin-Delcroix notes, the use of ‘metaphor’ in Finlay’s work is not simply a gesture of control: it acknowledges ‘both the distance itself and the effort required to abolish it’ ([1997] 2010, 59). The frailty of the order established by the poem is generally complemented in Finlay’s 1960s work by its brevity, and its self-conscious naivety of form and tone, rather than the allusions to military aggression and authoritarian politics – to the physical defence of order – that start to appear by the 1970s. Besides this point of pre-emptive departure from an earlier version of concrete poetics, we also need to consider what Stephen Bann calls the ‘dynamic transformations’ in the formal aspects of Finlay’s practice across the years in question (1977, 7): the way it migrated from the page to increasingly large three-dimensional environments and, finally, out into the landscape. These formal transformations provided Finlay’s route out of concrete poetry. For that reason this chapter is structured around a series of them: first his movement in 1962 from linear to concrete verse, reflecting an increasingly pronounced concern with language’s visual and phonetic aspects; then his construction of card sculpture-poems and booklet-poems from the mid-1960s onwards, through which those concerns are complemented by a new emphasis on the poem as physical and tactile entity; thirdly, his turn to three-dimensional poems set in glass, plastic, and wood, whereby that emphasis became increasingly pronounced; and, finally, his creation of still larger, sculptural, and land-based works from the late 1960s onwards, poems which interact with the – carefully managed – natural world around them. This final alteration set Finlay on the course he would follow for the next forty years, cultivating and constructing his extraordinary poet’s garden at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh. 67

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Across the course of these transformations we can sense an increasingly pronounced distance or contrast between the linguistic and non-linguistic elements of Finlay’s work. Though they remain associated through their use in the same poems – through the formal duality of Finlay’s practice – their individual functions are increasingly clearly distinguished. In short, the use of language as image, or as material form, gives way to the use of language in combination with visual, sculptural, and other formal elements. This eventually led to the total separation of linguistic and non-linguistic effects in the late 1960s sculptural work, and thus to a clear break from concrete poetry as Finlay interpreted it, already set apart from the work that had influenced it by that impression of latent disorder just described. Equally significant, however, as a catalyst for Finlay’s turn from concrete poetry was his sense of alienation from the poets who he felt had co-opted the style by the close of the 1960s, and the growing sense of isolation and hostility associated with this process is also traced across the chapter. To sum up, then, following Finlay’s turn to concrete poetry as a means of bringing symbolic order to an essentially disordered universe – and of setting his practice apart from dominant strains within Scottish literary culture – he began almost immediately to distance his work from concrete style itself, partly in response to its perceived co-option by enemy forces. Before outlining this narrative in more detail, it is worth considering how the styles and themes of Finlay’s concrete poetry are predicted by his prose and poetry of the 1940s–1950s and early 1960s. The following section is not simply a preamble to the relevant work, therefore, but an overview of all that was ‘concrete’ in Finlay’s practice before he came to define it as such. Resonant Objects: Early Stories and Poems In 1947 Finlay finished a three-year period of non-combatant military service that had taken him across Germany and Holland. From then until around 1956 he worked as a labourer and shepherd, mainly in rural Perthshire, and wrote plays and short stories, publishing some of the latter in The Sea-Bed and Other Stories ([1958]). Finlay’s early short stories are generally extremely brief and structurally simple, and often gently comic. Many describe moments of implied aesthetic or moral revelation, displaying various qualities that would emerge again in his concrete poetry. In particular, they reflect Finlay’s unique propensity to locate or posit the characteristics of one culture, often a foreign or exotic 68

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one, within another, generally a synthetic version of the author’s rural, Scottish habitat. They also seem engrossed by that same compendium of physical objects and entities – of an enigmatic, quasi-spiritual significance – which he would remain preoccupied with throughout the 1960s, though by this point he was generally representing them in visual or sculptural form. In this sense, the stories predict the qualities of thematic and formal duality just defined. But despite this emphasis on revelation or symbolic transfiguration, a tone of sadness or terror sometimes seems to consume the narratives, predicated on an inability to bring the objects of physical reality under symbolic control, and generating a subtly persistent mood of doubtfulness or anxiety. Taking these points in turn, an affinity is often implied between the landscapes and cultures of the stories and those found in nineteenthcentury Russian prose, including the work of Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. This influence is self-consciously conveyed by a line from ‘The Potato Planters’, when a ‘gay young tinker’ lashes his tractor with a ‘long, imaginary whip. Plainly, he was imagining himself to be a Cossack or something’ (Finlay [1958], 39). But more often, it is impressed at subtler levels of theme and form. Finlay’s portrayals of antagonistic power relations in the rural Scottish economy – between a trespassing fisherman and a vindictive groundskeeper in ‘Encounter’, for example – are reminiscent of the altercations between landowners and serfs in Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album ([1852] 1990) and in Chekhov’s shorter prose.1 The narrative architecture of the stories, often built up around a single scene or tableau – so that they seem like extended descriptions of single moments in time – is highly reminiscent of the typical Russian short story’s brevity of plot. Finlay drew similar parallels – also encompassing Scandinavian writers and artists such as Strindberg – in his early correspondence, positing a trans-historical, pan-European, ‘Northern’ sensibility from his own work was drawn. In an undated letter to the literary critic Derek Stanford, probably from 1950, Finlay remarked:2 Northern Europe is a spiritual category quite other than S. Europe … . There is an obvious affinity between such as Luther, Rembrandt, Kierkegaard, and so on, a precise note of feeling which is struck again and again … . Is it accidental that the Northern landscape has its own (protestant) mystique? Did the mountains and pines, the mists and the dim Northern light, determine the spiritual life of Northern Man, or did he graft onto them his own interior spirituality so that landscape merely seems a tangible extension of soul? (Finlay [1950?])

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Like his later feeling of kinship with northern European concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer, Finlay’s sense of ‘Northernism’, perhaps feeding off his memories of youthful travel with the non-combatant corps – and surely reprised in his later, unsettling explorations of Third Reich iconography – provided the grounds for a series of expansive metaphors linking up the cultures and landscapes of Scotland with the northern European mainland. It thus facilitated, or comprised, a kind of thematic duality; in all likelihood, it also betrayed his suspicion of the ‘Northern’ identity most readily available to Scottish writers during the 1940s and 1950s. In an undated letter to the poet J.F. Hendry – written between 1947 and 1956 – Finlay contrasted his conception of Northernism with that of ‘our Gaelic North’, about which ‘I care little’ (Finlay 1947–63): probably a veiled reference to Hugh MacDiarmid’s (1931–32) definition of ‘Gaeldom’ as a projected source of Scottish and Pan-European identity. Unlike Finlay’s concrete poems, of course, the short stories lack an integrated visual dimension. The first edition of The Sea-Bed was, however, illustrated with wood-cut prints by Yugoslavian artist Zelkjo Kujundzic, whose expressionistic, folk-art quality subtly enhances the ‘Northern’ aesthetic.3 Moreover, Finlay was a painter during the 1940s and 1950s, though he later destroyed the majority of his work. In any case, the stories are certainly characterised by ekphrasis in the broad sense: detailed descriptions of a recurring roster of visual objects and entities – including animals – that seem to possess a certain, self-evident moral or emotional significance. The image of a row of fish on string, for example, recurs across several stories, as when the twelve-year-old protagonist of the 1953 story ‘The Blue-Coated Fishermen’ is presented with a gift by one of the title characters: [A] dozen little trout with shiny red spots which somehow made the boy think of wild strawberries. The fish were in good condition, fat and clean. The fisherman picked out six and began to thread them together on a length of string. They looked like coloured clothes pegs dangling on a line. (Finlay 2004, 10)

The row of fish partly seems a resonant object because it reminds the protagonist of others within his personal imaginative environment – wild strawberries, clothes pegs – generating a sense of aesthetic continuity within the immediate fictional world opened out for the reader. But its resonance also subtly transcends that environment, appealing to our assumed familiarity with religious symbols: fish are images of the New Testament, an association enhanced by the fisherman’s act of Christian 70

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generosity. By both means, such objects become talismans of the formal, moral, and emotional order that Finlay’s work would continue to evoke, though by the early 1960s, as noted, he was making rather than describing such objects. Even putting aside the concrete poems, one of the best-known of the small wooden sculptures that he constructed during the early 1960s – what he called his ‘toys’ – is a row of coloured wooden fish on string (Finlay [1965?b]). Some of the objects and entities that preoccupy Finlay’s protagonists seem to repel this kind of symbolic mastery, however – this transformation into a talisman or icon – most disturbingly the ‘great cod’ in ‘The Sea-Bed’. In this, the title-story of Finlay’s 1958 collection, a young boy fishing off a sea-wall in a coastal Scottish village suddenly sees a large fish stirring beneath the surface of the water, and its appearance prompts a sudden feeling of disorientation: ‘[he] suddenly felt that his skin no longer fitted him. His heart stopped beating for a second as he watched the great cod’ (Finlay [1958], 2–3). The boy’s interaction with the animal, reminiscent of the young protagonist’s battles with salmon in Neil Gunn’s Highland River, unfolds as a kind of visceral disturbance, involving ‘sensations that in his twelve years of life, in a fishing family, in a small town he had not hitherto experienced. He tried to sort them out methodically, … he tried to turn the sensations into thoughts’ (Finlay [1958], 4). These and similar passages introduce an alternative material universe, of brute physical matter impervious to the symbolic projections of the ego, periodically threatening to disrupt them. They thus generate an underlying quality of disorder that is just as characteristic of Finlay’s oeuvre as the harmonious impressions invited by the safely captured little fish. In Lacanian terms, such descriptions might be intimations of the Real, though the Finlayan term would be the Sublime. In any case, a similar impression of the psychologically impalpable quality of material things would counterbalance their use as signs and symbols in his concrete poems. Finlay’s first collection of poems, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in Autumn 1960, after he had moved to Edinburgh around 1956. By the time of publication, Finlay’s mental condition had deteriorated, a nervous illness setting in which would not fully lift until the 1990s. ‘The Sea-Bed’, he remarked in an undated letter sent to J.F. Hendry around 1959–60, ‘seems to be about my breakdown, long before I knew the experience’ (Finlay 1947–63).4 Finlay’s early 1960s correspondence suggests the decentred mental state against which the stabilising symbolic patterns of his writing were imposed: ‘[i]t is as if I would be annihilated by things, which are other’, his letter to Hendry continues, whereas 71

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‘previously, through art, I could make a world where everything was related, and joined’. We can speculate, then, that the role of formal and thematic duality in Finlay’s 1950s work was partly to mitigate a quality of depersonalised experience – borrowing psychiatric terminology – that was personally and painfully felt. Art as a source of stabilising patterns remained important to Finlay throughout the period represented by The Dancers, though in many instances the geographical setting of the work has shifted north. During the winter of 1955–56 and the spring of 1959 Finlay spent short periods of time on Rousay, one of the Orkney Islands (Peebles 2011), and the landscape and character of this location increasingly came to permeate his writing. As Alistair Peebles has suggested, Finlay saw Rousay ‘as a place where he might be able to be happy’ (2011, n.pag.), perhaps a place where, because of the island’s diminutive scale and few defining features, things could be ‘related and joined’. It is worth acknowledging the similarities between Finlay’s early 1960s poetry and that of North American contemporaries such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker. Finlay became aware of their work in 1960 through Gael Turnbull, a Scottish poet and doctor based in California whose transatlantic little press Migrant, co-managed with Michael Shayer, based in Worcester in the English Midlands, would go on to publish The Dancers. In a letter sent to Turnbull on April 25, 1961, Finlay remarked: The more I see of American poems, etc. the more I feel that they have arrived at much the same conceptions as I have, in my own wee way, rather home-made, and AGAINST everything I was taught to do by other Scotch writers. I think Lorine Niedecker’s poems are superb. I am fair touched … . [P.S.] I have just realised how wonderful Creeley is! Terrific! (Finlay 1961)

This sense of kinship is worth noting: not as evidence that The Dancers was influenced by the poets Finlay refers to here – it was written before he had any real knowledge of their work – but as an indication of what Ross Hair calls an ‘entirely fortuitous’ stylistic affinity (2016, 67) and as a further example of Finlay forging international creative alliances, perhaps partly imaginary in their scope, in opposition to what he perceived as the stifling literary culture of his own country.5 These writers also clearly influenced his subsequent approach to concrete poetry: the quietly musical register and tone of intimate or loving address characteristic of Niedecker’s 1961 collection My Friend Tree, for example – published by Finlay and Jessie McGuffie’s Wild Hawthorn Press – are highly reminiscent of qualities found in subsequent collections of Finlay’s, notably Telegrams from My Windmill ([1964e]). 72

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The most significant presentiment of the thematic duality of Finlay’s concrete poetry in The Dancers is in the way analogies are drawn between material objects. These analogies initially seem comically surreal, but gradually unfold to the reader a childlike world, based partly on Rousay, wherein intuitive formal affinities between things, of a kind obscured by an adult sense of their function, are still evident. ‘The Chief Crop of Orkney’ begins ‘As everyone is well aware, the chief crop of Orkney is/ wireless-poles’ (Finlay 1960, 19); elsewhere, the protagonist of ‘Problems of an Orkney Housewife’ laments the difficulty of keeping ‘a clean moon’ – ‘We have to polish ours THREE times a week’ (1960, 20) – and the little sailing vessel in ‘The Island Beasts Wait for the Boat’ becomes ‘a little foal’, ‘all long legs’ (1960, 26). Most memorably, in the folksy doggerel of ‘Catch’, lobsters are transformed into helicopters (1960, 29): There once was a fisherman of Scrabster Caught in his pot a gey queer lapster. Thought he, this lapster’s a sure sellar, A tail it has, and a wee propeller, ….

The sense of enveloping formal harmony established by these analogies is heightened by their bridging the divide between the natural and the human-made: crops and telegraph poles, moons and kitchen floors, foals and boats, crustaceans and aircraft. This generates a reassuring sense of ontological stasis, whereby the transposition of human environments onto natural ones – and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that parts of the Orkneys were planted with wireless poles – does not fundamentally alter the qualitative nature of the poet’s perceptual universe. At the same time, as models of order, these metaphors and similes seem somehow fragile, evidence of a fear or disorder only temporarily overcome: because of the poems’ brevity, but also because of the vulnerable-seeming, naively comic narrative voice. At a more basic level, many of these analogies reflect that same fascination with physical objects – and animals – also evident from the stories, predicting in this respect the formal duality of Finlay’s later work. But that burgeoning quality can be sensed more clearly in his next collection, Glasgow Beasts, An A Burd, published in September 1961, the first product of Finlay and Jessie McGuffie’s Wild Hawthorn Press. A poetic bestiary a little like Apollinaire’s Parade of Orpheus, infused with pop-Buddhist references to reincarnation, each verse of this poem shares its page with a paper-cut illustration by the artists John Picking 73

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and Pete McGinn, which dominates the visual frame and adds some essential quality of mannerism or movement to the animal described: the poem can thus be truly described as both visual and linguistic in effect. Glasgow Beasts is equally interesting, however, in the interplay it establishes between transcribed speech and phonetic sound. The sequence is composed in a demotic Glaswegian dialect adapted, as Alec Finlay notes, from the ‘vernacular of music hall and folk-song’ (2012, 24). A jocular, infantile narrator recalls the times he ‘became’ different animals, including a ‘sleekit’ fox – a nod to Burns’s ‘sleekit, cow’rin’ mouse – a bedbug, a fish, and ‘a zebra/ heh heh/ crossin’ (Finlay [1961] 1962, [19]). The comic, childish mode of address partly seems a conscious affront to the erudite, etymologically preoccupied variant of Scots favoured by MacDiarmid, and by later Scottish-Renaissance poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith. But in its own way Finlay’s is also a curiously impenetrable voice, generating strings of exaggerated speech fragments that seem to oscillate between language and noise.

Figure 1: From Glasgow Beasts, An a Burd ([11, 23]) 74

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The Highland Cow verse ([1961] 1962, [23]; Figure 1), for example, establishes a dense pattern of echoes between the oo sounds that appear at various points: in the assonant ‘hooch’ and ‘coo’, the subsequent ‘hoo hoos’, and the joke that caps off the poem, ‘ferr feart/ o ma/ herr-do’ (my italics). The sound of a mooing cow is effectively buried beneath the semantic register, periodically surfacing as the reader’s inability to process the language as language leaves only its sound in place. That impression is enhanced by a strange, perpendicular lineation – based on a Japanese Tanka form, Jessie Sheeler (née McGuffie) notes (2003, 13) – which dislodges individual letters such as the s above from their encompassing lines, converting them from sense-carrying units of language into little particles of transcribed vocal noise. Finlay’s concrete poems would utilise phonetic and grammatical patterning in a similar way, to emphasise the purely sonorous or musical dimensions of language. In such work language seesaws, we might say, between the effects of semantic expression and sheer sonic materiality, establishing a kind of formal duality led by the sound (rather than the look) of words and letters on the page. Finlay’s Flytings Finlay’s early poetry and prose, then, predicates his concrete poetry in its engagement with various qualities of thematic and formal duality – including a formal duality involving phonetic sound – and in generating periodic impressions of disturbance or disorder similar to those that would later distinguish his concrete work from an earlier, more purely formalist version of style. An equally important context for Finlay’s engagement with concrete poetry, however, was his sense that it provided a means of self-definition against dominant currents within early 1960s Scottish literary culture. In the autumn of 1961, when Glasgow Beasts was published, a dispute was coming to a head between a group of young Scottish writers including Finlay and Edwin Morgan and another, slightly older group, taking Hugh MacDiarmid as its de facto figurehead, that continued to expound the principles associated with the so-called Scottish Renaissance. The Scottish Renaissance was a loosely collective movement in Scottish literature, visual art, and other media that, since the 1920s, largely under MacDiarmid’s tutelage, had come to stand for the yoking together of a transnational modernist aesthetics with various strains of

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Scottish-nationalist and Marxist politics. Margery Palmer McCulloch offers a useful practical summary of its origins:6 This post-1918 situation was the context in which a new Scottish modernism – … literature-led and ideological in nature – was born. It was given impulse by the journalist and poet C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) who returned from war service in Europe determined to make a name for himself as a writer of consequence and determined also to find a way to regenerate both his country’s literature and its capacity for self-determination. The little magazines he edited from the small east-coast town of Montrose on his return from the war soon generated a group of activists willing to support him in his self-appointed task, including the writers Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, and in the 1930s Lewis Grassic Gibbon, together with the musician Francis George Scott and the painters William McCance and William Johnstone … . (McCulloch 2009, 5)

Finlay’s dispute was, to a large extent, not with the writers and artists listed above (with the notable exception of MacDiarmid) but with a younger group of poets who rose to prominence during the 1940s and 1950s, including Sydney Goodsir Smith and Alexander Scott. In practical terms, the fracas was incited by the 1959 publication of Honour’ d Shade, a bicentenary anthology for Robert Burns felt to be unfairly dominated by their work and by that of the older Renaissance poets. A cassette called Dishonour’ d Shade appeared, featuring readings from the work of poets left out of the anthology, followed by various denouncements in newspapers and journals. MacDiarmid published an incendiary pamphlet, The Ugly Birds without Wings, early in 1962, attacking Finlay and ‘Scotland’s self-pitying jeunes refusés’ (1962, 6) for mediocrity, opportunism, and iconoclasm, and the whole debacle concluded with an infamous confrontation between MacDiarmid and Alexander Trocchi at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference.7 The work that Finlay was producing at this point – in its comic brevity, its cosmopolitan name-dropping, its attempt to transcribe a spoken Scottish language – seems in many ways designed to contrast with the curious blend of esotericism and parochialism that the Renaissance had come to represent for many writers of his generation. In particular, it was partly a product of his frustration with the Renaissance writers’ advocacy of forms of written Scots that bore little relation to the language actually heard day-to-day in any part of the country, instead composed – at least in the case of MacDiarmid’s 1920s–1930s poetry – from spliced-together lexicons culled from historical dictionaries.8 76

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Various poets, including Finlay and Morgan, also complained of an increasing lack of awareness among Scottish writers of developments in contemporary world literature, a wilful ignorance that ran ironically counter to the internationalist, self-scrutinising spirit of poems such as MacDiarmid’s ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ ([1926] 2004). A related context for Finlay’s early 1960s poetry was the emergence by the late 1950s of a lively beat and folk scene in Edinburgh, energised by the ongoing growth of the annual Festival Fringe since its establishment in 1947 and centred on the Paperback Bookshop, opened in Autumn 1959 and managed by the North American impresario Jim Haynes. The Paperback quickly became ‘a cultural hub, hosting readings, exhibitions and performances’, stocking a range of contemporary American and European texts, and offering support to little magazines and presses (Smith 2010, n.pag.)9 Also in 1959, the poet Alex Neish published an ‘American’ issue of the Edinburgh University review Jabberwock, introducing William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder to a young Scottish audience (Neish 1959). Neish would go on to edit two issues of a beat-influenced magazine, Sidewalk (1960–61), whose transatlantic spirit was evident from its name (Smith 2010). In short, the international counter-culture of the postwar had arrived, in some form, in Edinburgh. Like Finlay, the beatniks and folk-revivalists increasingly drawn to the city were antagonised by the group around MacDiarmid, and for a time Finlay forged a pragmatic alliance with them, publishing his poetry in Sidewalk and in journals inspired by its example, such as Bill McArthur’s Cleft.10 Finlay also printed the work of beat-influenced English poets such as Pete Brown in early issues of POTH and in the single issue of his sound poetry pamphlet Fish-Sheet (1963a). However, even by this stage, Finlay’s deep concern with an idea of formal, emotional, and moral order connoted a certain wariness of ‘protest art’ which made many aspects of this new counter-culture suspect. His attitude to the very idea of a counter-culture is summed up in an undated letter to Dom Sylvester Houédard, probably from 1963, in which Finlay criticises the beat poet Mike Horovitz’s magazine New Departures: ‘it is too much a reaction AGAINST, with the other things always there, by implication, … protest lives off complacency, and art should stand on beauty alone’ (Finlay 1963–65). We can sense in this statement the germ of Finlay’s later anger at the perceived appropriation of concrete poetics by a similarly ‘complacent’ counter-cultural faction.

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Becalmed: Concrete Poetry Writing to Derek Stanford on August 2, 1968, Finlay recalled the period between the publication of Glasgow Beasts in September 1961 and his introduction to concrete poetry in May 1962 as one of creative torpor: [A]fter my ‘The Dancers Inherit The Party’ … and ‘Glasgow Beasts’ … I became very perturbed about what I called ‘syntax’ or WAY of putting words together. The sense of movement with which my poems had always begun, was simply absent, … ‘Glasgow Beasts’ in fact used language in a rather concrete way – and then I did a wee fold-out thing called ‘Concertina’ which joined pictures (graphics) and words. At the same time I started making toys, which were really (though models of boats, windmills, or whatever), models of poems, since they had the qualities I was seeking – they weren’t cold but neither were they ‘confessional’, ‘self-expressive’, loud, blatant, confused, involved, fussy … . (Finlay 1967–71)

The fact that Finlay later associated this period with stasis or blockage perhaps reflected his brief turn to toy-making, the results of which (such as the ‘Toy Cow’ shown here [Finlay (1962–64?); Figure 2]) epitomise the ‘avant-folk’ aesthetic that Ross Hair (2016) associates with Finlay’s early 1960s practice.11 The toys seem to indicate a wholesale abandonment of literary creativity in favour of a process of wordless modelling. This, in turn, implies that Finlay was unable to reconcile the two impulses until his discovery of concrete poetry, which, as it were, allowed him to model language itself. There is some truth to this narrative, but the letter also indicates how creatively active Finlay remained during the period in question, publishing the illustrated booklet-poem Concertina in April 1962 and continuing to edit POTH, both projects revealing an increasingly pronounced sense of the visual and formal possibilities of the poem on the page. Concertina hones the kinds of connection between human and natural environments drawn in The Dancers, as the below section of the booklet shows, with its analogies between hedgerows and jazz bands, etcetera (Finlay 1962a; Figure 3). Concertina also makes more central use than had Glasgow Beasts of illustrations, this time by Picking. That said, the subsequent influence of concrete poetry remains clear, in that the visual and linguistic elements of this poem are clearly distinguished – in the style of comic-strip and caption – rather than language itself being used as image; nor is the curious phonetic play characteristic of the following year’s Rapel in evidence.

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Figure 2: Toy Cow ([1962–64?]) Finlay’s letter to Stanford of August 2, 1968 continues: ‘around this point, via Edwin Morgan, I saw my first Brazilian concrete poem – and I read their manifesto, which had much to say about syntax, or rather, about replacing it with “pure” juxtapositions of words’ (Finlay 1967–71). Writing to Houédard on July 14/15, 1964 in response to a request for information for his 1964 TLS article ‘Paradada’, Morgan recalled that, as well as contacting Melo e Castro after reading his note, he had ‘told IHF about the letter’ (Morgan 1964b). Morgan must also have passed on Augusto de Campos’s address, as by July 17, 1962 the Brazilian poet was replying to an introductory letter from Finlay, thanking him for ‘your offer of publication’ and enclosing copies of the ‘Pilot Plan’, along with ‘the last anthology of our poems, edited in Lisbon’ (the same one Melo e Castro had sent to Morgan). ‘I should be very glad to see issues of P.O.T.H’, Augusto goes on, ‘(especially those which contain poetry from Scotland, and Cuba, Poland, Hungary, Russia … )’ (Augusto de Campos 1962). Writing to Robert Creeley on January 8, 1963, Finlay recounted his first attempts at creating concrete poems, connecting the compositional impulse with toy-making: 79

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Figure 3: From Concertina 80

i a n h a m i lton f i n l ay I tried to write a couple myself, partly because on Christmas Day (which was a right disaster, with no cigarettes, and one tin of Heinz beans), I made a wee red sled out of cardboard, and suddenly thought, how nice it was to have just the simple object, the toy, which also brimmed with feeling, if you cared to really look. (Qtd. in Alec Finlay 2012, 29)

Finlay’s conversion to concrete poetry was swift and almost religious in its connotations: his longtime friend and critic Stephen Bann has described it as a ‘Road to Damascus moment’ (personal interview, January 10, 2011). What drew Finlay to the poems that Augusto de Campos had posted to him? Again, the answer may be partly biographical. Certainly, that loss of linguistic movement described in his letter to Stanford implies a kind of alienation from the conceptual mastery over external reality and inner mental life that semantic language could offer. Some sense that language expresses the logic of its own construction rather than the essence of its referents is of course integral to the whole enterprise of literary modernism: as Marjorie Perloff puts it, ‘the fear that the word will no longer adhere to the object haunts the poetics of modernism’ (1991, 31). But in Finlay’s case it might also have indicated a sense of loss-of-self triggered by psychological traumas that had continued well into the 1960s. Some vertiginous feeling of non-identity is a common facet of breakdown, after all, and subjective identity is co-extensive with an instinctive affinity for language as a tool of self-mastery and external communication. In a later letter to Stanford – September 19, 1967 – Finlay recalled being ‘haunted by inklings of a much purer method, the poem-as-thing’, to which concrete poetry must have seemed uncannily adapted (Finlay 1967–71). We might partly consider the re-emergence of language in his work as a collection of ‘things’ – a set of static markers, possessing immutable, unshakeable values – as a means of securing various elementary linguistic concepts by which to reconstruct an emotionally inhabitable universe. Leaning on biography, however, should not distract us from placing this development in Finlay’s poetics in its wider, creative context. The precise term ‘creative’ is right here, as, for all the resonances of concrete poetry as a sociological phenomenon, Finlay’s affinity for it, and the sense of international kinship associated with this, was compelled more by a sense of its relationship to artistic and literary history than by any self-conscious awareness of its pertinence to contemporary culture, politics, economics, or technology. Though the very notion of an

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international literary movement that he was able to intuit was facilitated by the emergence of a tangible global culture after the Second World War – as discussed in my last chapter – to talk of Finlay’s concrete poetry as, say, an attempt to develop a transnational mode of communication in response to the binding global threat of nuclear war, or to the emerging condition of the ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1962), captures a curiously peripheral, or at least unselfconscious, aspect of it. Finlay’s poetry and art of the early 1960s seems, by contrast, intensely responsive to other poetry and art, its deliberate insulation from wider social contexts compelled by that quest for self-sufficient beauty – ‘beauty alone’ – outlined in that 1963 letter to Houédard. Stressing a similar point in an undated 1965 letter to Edwin Morgan – who had written on November 22 that a form of politically engaged concrete poetry ‘must be attempted … if we are to avoid formalism and (in the end) triviality’ (Morgan 1965–68) – Finlay responded that ‘a love of form is AS human as a loathing of injustice’ (Finlay 1964–66). One upshot of this position is that Finlay’s poetic worldview might seem, as Drew Milne puts it, ‘conspicuously reticent about the social and economic structures of modern society’ (2001, n.pag.). Accepting the resultant limits on the terms of Finlay’s admiration for it, what literary and artistic contexts configured his love of concrete poetry? In part – contra the implication that formal beauty stands apart from social context – the adoption of what probably seemed, in one sense, a conspicuously avant-garde literary idiom, borrowed from poets working in South America and continental Europe, was partly a further means of self-distancing from the insularity that defined post-Renaissance Scottish literary culture. At the same time, the application of that idiom to the same rustic and bucolic subject matter found in Finlay’s early stories and poems is a further instance of his reimagining native environments by appeal to foreign artistic tropes. We can also link Finlay’s engagement with concrete poetry to the engrossment with visual form evident from the stories and, perhaps most significantly, his newfound enthusiasm for North American poets such as Robert Creeley, whose early 1960s poetry breaks up linear syntax into similarly temporally, conceptually distinct parts. In this last respect, Finlay’s route to concrete typifies a common approach among British and North American poets of the 1950s and 1960s working in the wake of the Pound–Williams literary-modernist idiom. In this context, the visual arrangement of words on the page was often initially seized upon as a means of scoring the music and 82

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temporal placement of speech, especially geographically specific speechtypes rendered inaudible by the standard versification techniques of English language poetry. The North American concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt, for example, came to the idea of graphic–linguistic arrangement via a critical engagement with lineation and phrase-placement in Williams’s later poetry. In a 1983 essay, Solt argued that the visual idiosyncrasies of Williams’s poetry on the page reflected his attempts to translate into writing the ‘variable foot’ that he had crafted in order to capture the ‘rhythmic movement and pace of American speech’. For Williams, the ‘longer speech (prose) cadences’ of the North American demotic ‘could not be forced to conform to rules and concepts of prosody formulated to accommodate British English and derived from the study of poems written in that “foreign language”’ (Solt [1983] 2010, 151). Finlay’s first concerted exploration of the aesthetic potential of word placement occurred, of course, via his mapping of another speech-type excluded from the conventions of ‘British English’ prosody: the Glaswegian demotic of Glasgow Beasts. By that stage, this exploration was also informed by his love for contemporary poetry such as Creeley’s, which, Finlay must have realised, was carrying Williams’s emphasis on graphic– linguistic arrangement as encoded speech rhythm one step further. From here, for Finlay as for Solt, it was only a short step to engagement with ‘graphic space as structural agent’ on the terms outlined in the Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’.12 This Anglophone frame of reference is summed up in Solt’s description of concrete poetry as ‘part of the legacy [Williams] left’ ([1983] 2010, 155). However, putting aside the Anglo-American bias of such an analysis, it is important to emphasise that Finlay also placed concrete poetry in a broader historical trajectory largely orientated around early twentieth-century modern art. More specifically, he often expressed – implicitly through his work and explicitly in his correspondence – a feeling that concrete poetry could grant some form of imaginative closure or resolution to the mixed-media experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, an intuitive sense of concrete poetry as ‘arrière-garde’ that is outlined in more detail at the close of this chapter. It is worth noting, finally, that Finlay seemingly composed his first collection of concrete poems, Rapel (1963b), without any knowledge of Eugen Gomringer’s work. On May 29, 1963, in what seems to be his first letter to Houédard, Finlay asks for Gomringer’s address and for details of his Konkrete Poesie pamphlet series, adding ‘[a]ll my poems since a long while are “concrete” (of a sort), and I am good friends with 83

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the Brazil ones’, ‘but I have no European contacts’ (Finlay 1963–65). Previously, on April 15, he had written to J.F. Hendry, announcing ‘I have written several more concrete poems … enough for my book Rapel’ (Finlay 1947–63). This apparent ignorance is surprising, as that collection’s emphasis on private emotional states is more akin to the intimist mood of Gomringer’s early constellations than to the more outwardly focused, often politically motivated, acerbically comic early work of the Noigandres group. Words as Pictures: Rapel and Telegrams from My Windmill Finlay published Rapel: 10 Fauve and Suprematist Poems in Spring 1963, naming the collection after the snippet of transcribed music-hall lyric printed on its cover-sheet: ‘Rapel moon was shining/ above ra green mountings’ (1963b, n.pag.) The collection represents a break, in at least two ways, from Finlay’s previous work. Firstly, the method of syntactical construction is new, involving patterns of grammatical and phonetic permutation that seem to string words together by shared sounds and shapes, implying qualitative links between the objects and concepts they signify. Secondly, whereas earlier collections had combined text and illustration, Rapel emphasises the visual qualities of written language itself. That more literal concern with the appearance of the poem is implied by the presentation of the collection as a set of loose cards in a folder, like fine-art prints or oversized novelty postcards. The first of these techniques, clearly indebted to the use of grammatical permutation in the Noigandres’s early work, is vital to the poem ‘An Eatable Peach’ (Finlay 1963b, n.pag; Figure 4), in which the words ‘table’, ‘eatable’, and ‘apple’ are repeated in a circle around the centre of the page. This poem generates its impression of formal patterning not only through this circular visual arrangement but through the reappearance – and partial re-sounding – of ‘table’ in ‘eatable’, the implied visual rotation of p into b – from ‘apple’ to ‘(ea)table’ – and the words’ common visual and phonetic closure in e. The different components of the little domestic scene evoked – self-consciously reminiscent of a Cubist still life – seem bound together by the formal linkages between the words used to describe them, implying a qualitative affinity between the objects themselves similar to that evoked in the short stories. We might say that formal duality, in this case involving an emphasis on both the visual and the sonic features of language, renders thematic duality. 84

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Figure 4: ‘An Eatable Peach’ As well as using a new kind of sonically and graphically led syntax, Rapel employs language as a visual-compositional material in a more explicit and macrocosmic way, through a combined range of pictorial and abstract visual effects. Finlay acknowledged the distinction between the figurative and non-figurative aspects of the collection’s visual aesthetics with his titular reference to ‘Fauve and Suprematist Poems’, alluding, on the one hand, to the stylised pictorial forms of the Fauvists – and perhaps of their disciples the Scottish Colourists – and on the other to the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich’s monolithic, non-figurative icons. Finlay’s pictorial or Fauvist arrangements of words are the more significant to my analysis, as they already prefigure his movement away from a strict concrete style by creating visual images that can be interpreted independently of the words used to construct them, just as Apollinaire’s famous calligramme would look like the Eiffel Tower whether or not the words constituting the image hinted at the pictorial reference. These poems thus sever the interdependent relationship between visual form and semantic meaning stressed by the first concrete poets. 85

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Figure 5: ‘m’ If poems such as ‘Homage to Malevich’ (Finlay 1963b, n.pag.) – a black block of letters formed from the phrase ‘black block’ – indicate Finlay’s stricter Suprematist tendencies, the untitled poem above (1963b, n.pag.; Figure 5) expresses the underlying Fauvist impulse in his early concrete poetry.13 This poem recreates in visual form an analogy between rushing burn-water and harmonica music previously used in Concertina. A rill of 86

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blue-green ms and xs meanders down the right-hand side of the page, visually representing a stream of water, with the different-coloured letters recreating its shifting tones, the alternating serif and sans-serif letters the eddies at its surface. A phrase bobs up towards the bottom of the page – ‘this is the little burn that plays its mouth organ by the mill’ – the semantic metaphor enhancing, and enhanced by, the pictorial form, while, by association with the mill, m and x are subtly transformed into a neat pictograph showing water flowing towards a wheel. Though the distinction might seem trifling, Finlay’s use of language to create pictures (literally) indicates an important point of departure from the early work of Gomringer or the Noigandres, in which the visual arrangement of words functions as a form of non-linear syntax or as wholly abstract visual design. In essence, the poems in Rapel indicate both Finlay’s use of formal duality to render thematic duality and his immediate sense that language and image would often have to play separate roles in the generation of concrete-poetic meaning. In the late spring of 1963 Finlay seemingly inaugurated a correspondence with Gomringer, recalling receipt of his first letter from the Swiss poet in a note sent to Houédard on July 16 (Finlay 1963–65). It was probably also during 1963 that Finlay contacted poets such as Ernst Jandl in Vienna and Pierre Garnier in Amiens, entering into those international networks of communication and circulation, often linking up far-flung and seemingly culturally inconspicuous corners of the globe, which still characterised the concrete poetry movement at this point. His discussions about concrete poetry with other Scottish and English poets, including Edwin Morgan – whose first concrete poems were published in Finlay’s Fish-Sheet in June 1963 – and Houédard, also became important. Finlay published ‘A Valentine’ (1963c) in the Aylesford Review, a literary magazine run by liberal members of the Carmelite religious order, in Summer 1963, presumably through Houédard, whose work often appeared in the review at this time (this was probably the first concrete poem published in England). Finlay’s work also began to appear in European journals during 1963, while Houédard’s article ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’ (1963c), the first on concrete poetry published in Britain, appeared in Typographica that December, featuring sections of the Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’ translated into English for the first time. Finlay’s next page-based collection, Telegrams from My Windmill ([1964e]), appeared in Autumn 1964 in the context of this burgeoning visibility. Thematically speaking, Telegrams is different from Rapel in that, as Finlay wrote to Morgan on July 21, 1964, it contains ‘all 87

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love poems’ (Finlay 1964–66). Stylistically it is different in that it was composed on the typewriter, the even letter-widths and spaces allowing words to be patterned and entwined in ways that emphasise the kinds of formal and thematic linkage found in Rapel, a technique perhaps owing something to Finlay’s creative exchanges with Houédard. What Finlay calls ‘love’ in this collection consists of a kind of moral and emotional certainty rooted in an accord between poet and lover, which is sometimes presented in implied opposition to the ideas and opinions of society at large. Love thus becomes the talisman of what Finlay calls, in a letter to Mike Weaver – September 16, 1964 – ‘a spiritual language stripped of worldliness’ (Finlay 1964c). The collection’s opening poem sums up this idea: a triangle of vertical columns, formed at its widest point, on the left-hand side of the page, from the word ‘they’, the constituent word shifts halfway across the page to ‘you’, as the columns are tapered down, until the final, right-hand line, consisting of just one word, the more intimate, German second-person singular ‘du’ (Finlay [1964e], [7]). Perhaps invoking a northern European spiritual sensibility – the romantic–religious second-person address of Rilke’s Book of Hours, perhaps, or even Gomringer’s 1953 poem ‘Du Blau’ (Bann 1967, 34) – Finlay’s final ‘du’ seems to seal a shift in focus from the voices of the outside world – what ‘they’ say – to a closed, dyadic relationship between unnamed poet and second-person lover (‘you’/‘du’), whose union ensures the integrity of both minds or souls. This emphasis on an unwavering, even aggressive singularity of mind is enhanced by the visual image of a finely hewn point and by the phonetic brevity of the closing word. In

Figure 6: ‘roses’

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Figure 7: ‘eve’ a sense, the binding together of poet and lover is like the emotionally palliative analogies established between objects in Rapel. As in Rapel, phonetic and grammatical echoes between words are also used to emphasise the parallels drawn between things and people, in this case by crossing words over at points where they share letters, and other techniques of visual patterning only possible on the typewriter. The impression of poet and lover as psychological correlates is sharpened in Finlay’s ‘roses’ poem by the merging of ‘you’, ‘yes’, and ‘roses’ to create the amalgam ‘us’ ([1964e], [9]; Figure 6). ‘You’ and ‘us’, linked by the mediating sound of ‘yes’ and by their visual merging, stand for the emotional congruence of the individual subjects evoked, while the crisscrossing lines also hint at the word ‘Rousay’, suggesting the emotional significance of that location to the author. In other poems, a frailerseeming love is evoked, an underlying note of doubt or fear continuing to puncture the surface of Finlay’s work even – or especially – when its compositional components have been reduced to an absolute minimum. The poem above (Finlay [1964e], [31]; Figure 7) highlights the presence of ‘eve’ in ‘never’, as if suggesting some essential parallel between the close of the day and a diminishment of possibility or contentment, but also suggesting an unrequited longing for a female lover, an ‘Eve’. In the love poems of Telegrams, then, we can sense another of the impressions 89

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most emphatically conveyed by Finlay’s early concrete poetry: that sense that the order established by the painstaking work of poetic metaphor is somehow provisional and tenuous, constantly subject to forces of erosion and dispersal. A Tangible Image of Goodness and Sanity: Concrete Poetry and Social Order By the end of 1964 Finlay seemed to have established the full range of effects that concrete poetry in its existing forms could bring to his work. These possibilities were precise, and finite, mainly involving the concrete poem’s capacity to create or enhance thematic analogies by emphasising the visual and sonic dimensions of written language. In both Rapel and Telegrams, we can also sense those aspects of Finlay’s practice that would distinguish it ever more clearly from earlier variants of concrete style over the coming years. By 1964 concrete poetry was attracting surprising levels of critical and public attention in England and Scotland. Though its coverage in Scottish literary journals other than POTH remained scant, it was attracting some attention, admittedly often scurrilous, in Scottish newspapers; in 1965, a special issue of the Scottish magazine Extra Verse was published on Finlay’s work (Black 1965). In England, concrete poetry’s reception within mainstream literary culture was more striking and swift, perhaps reflecting the larger scale of England’s publishing infrastructure. On August 6 and September 3, 1964 two special issues of the TLS appeared entitled ‘The Changing Guard’, focusing on recent developments in modernist literature and paying particular attention to concrete. A number of Finlay’s poems appeared in the first issue, alongside works by Morgan, Houédard, John Sharkey, and others (Figure 8).14 That same summer Finlay was visited in Edinburgh by two young critics based at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Bann and Mike Weaver. Weaver and Bann would help to curate the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Phonetic, and Kinetic Poetry at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge that November – the first concrete poetry exhibition held in Britain – and began writing articles on concrete poetry and on Finlay’s work almost immediately. This third-party engagement surely helped Finlay to clarify his own sense of the scope and significance of his practice. But it also seemed to dispel some of the enticing mystique that had initially surrounded concrete poetry for him. The first signs of the style’s co-option, as Finlay 90

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Figure 8: Spread from the first ‘Changing Guard’ Times Literary Supplement (August 6, 1964). This copy, from the Scottish Poetry Library’s Edwin Morgan Archive, shows Morgan’s corrections to his poems. 91

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saw it, by a usurping group of ‘neo-dada’ poets, more concerned with repeating than responding to the iconoclastic artistic and literary projects of the early twentieth century, was also becoming a matter of genuine concern. As early as November 8, 1965 Finlay was writing dejectedly to Houédard having received the catalogue for Jasia Reichardt’s concrete poetry exhibition Between Poetry and Painting, then running at the ICA: ‘[c]oncrete has become something very far from my own aspirations (I don’t say achievements) … . I think it would be best, and perhaps essential for me, to work away on my own and forget movements, critics, responses etc.’ (Finlay 1963–65). The letter implies a second reason, besides the formal evolution of his own practice, for Finlay’s movement away from concrete poetry: his sense that the style was being hijacked by poets and artists who simply wanted to parody and subvert notions of linguistic truth and authority by breaking apart and destroying words. At an underlying level this dispute can be defined as an ideological one. Just as many of the poets who adopted a ‘neo-dada’ approach to concrete were breaking apart words in order to enact the unbinding of broader systems of control and categorisation – generally from radically egalitarian or anarchist perspectives – so Finlay’s emphasis on the ordered alignment of objects within the poet’s purview, and of the combined expressive lexicons used to set them in place, stood in part for some kind of appeal to social order. Of course, Finlay’s 1960s poetry is never outwardly didactic and any such ideological position was therefore manifested indirectly, via an endorsement of order at an aesthetic level that transposed itself in certain contexts into an endorsement of order as a characteristic of societal organisation. In this sense, it seems crass to define that position using the left/right distinctions that might usefully frame the work of a more explicitly politically engaged poet. What is more feasible is to tease out various implicit ideological perspectives through inductive engagement with the work itself, and with Finlay’s statements on it. It is important to point out that the combination of artistic media in Finlay’s concrete poems, unlike for a poet such as Bob Cobbing, did not stand for any implied extension or reconstitution of the basic symbolic frameworks of literary and artistic expression. The combination of linguistic and pictorial symbols in his first collections of concrete poetry, and in the card-poems analysed below, for example, is not intended to break down the boundaries between those media but to sharpen the reader–viewer’s sensitivity to their individual repertoires of effect through their use in new combinations. Such a position segues into an obliquely sociological one in Finlay’s famous ‘Letter to Pierre Garnier, 1963’, in his 92

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assertion that, ‘though the objects might “make it,” possibly, into a state of perfection, the poet and painter will not. I think any pilot-plan should distinguish, in its optimism, between what man can construct and what he actually is. I mean, new thought does not make a new man … ’ (Solt [1968] 1970, 84). While Finlay’s investment in an idea of self-sufficient beauty allowed the artwork to ‘make it, possibly’ into a kind of Platonic realm of ideal forms, this did not correlate with any implied extension of the poet or painter’s underlying cognitive or spiritual faculties, nor any implied ability to construct new cultural or social realms. We can draw both comparisons and contrasts between this ideological position and the political credo attached to T.E. Hulme’s proto-imagist verse of the 1910s. The analogy is apt not just because imagism predicts, in certain cases, concrete poetry’s focus on the poem as image and its exaggerated linguistic minimalism but because Hulme’s poetry, like Finlay’s early to mid-1960s concrete poetry, combines innovative formal presentation with a coded rejection of the idea that such presentation transcended inherited literary convention. Rather than attempting to forego such convention, poems of Hulme’s such as ‘Above the Dock’ and ‘Sunset’ (Jones 1972, 48–49) refocus the reader’s attention on its finite range of possibilities by using them in concentrated forms: essentially through the distillation of linguistic metaphor in the ‘image’. For Hulme, as for Finlay, this literary aesthetic – defined by Hulme as ‘classical’ – partly reflected suspicion of ideas of ‘the new man’, associated in Hulme’s case with romanticism. This idea is expressed in his lecture of 1911–12 on ‘Romanticism and Classicism’: Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress. One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinary fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him. (Hulme 2003, 70–71)

The sentiment expressed here is reminiscent of Finlay’s trepidation in his letter to Garnier, except that its implications are more explicitly sociological, and that, unlike Finlay, Hulme associated such an ideology with a binding political ethos, the ‘Tory Philosophy’ expounded in his 1912 lecture of that name: ‘[t]he Tory side, I asserted, depends on the conviction that the nature of man is absolutely fixed and unalterable, and 93

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that any scheme of social regeneration which presupposes that he can alter is doomed to bring about nothing but disaster’ (Hulme 2003, 167). We can sense a similar fear of disaster, perhaps informed in Finlay’s case by traumatic memories of war, in his comments to more anarchistic concrete poets. In his November 1965 letter to Houédard, having described the most recent publication of Houédard and John Furnival’s press Openings as ‘hideous’, Finlay wrote: ‘I really feel that you would all praise Auschwitz if it was presented to you as “a happening”, and the hydrogen bomb if it was presented as a piece of auto-destructive art’ (Finlay 1963–65). But, in contrast to Hulme’s Tory philosophy, Alec Finlay has described his father’s politics – admittedly with reference to the 1980s – as ‘those of a poet, party of one’ (2012, 55), with the implication that worldly descriptors such as ‘Tory’ fail to capture the largely literary and artistic origins of Finlay’s interest in order – even if its implications extended into a kind of informal sociological discourse – and the resultant idiosyncrasies of any political position that can be ascribed to this position. Nonetheless, Finlay’s antagonism towards the neo-dada concrete poets did not represent an arbitrary or self-contained aesthetic aversion, but a sense of the value of order with ideological ramifications largely at odds with the prevailing spirit of the decade. Even by the mid-1960s, his hostility to the counter-culture indicated a postlapsarian sense of the inherent limitations of human character and a feeling that the removal of social order – whether literally, or metaphorically via the neo-dada poem – stood for chaos rather than liberation. As Finlay put it in his letter to Garnier, therefore, ‘“concrete” by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity’ (Solt [1968] 1970, 84). No Ideas but in Things: Card-Poems and Booklet-Poems Finlay’s love of order is evident from the card sculpture-poems that he began constructing from 1963 onwards, which indicate not only an expansive sense of the formal gestures available to the concrete poet but also a clear awareness of the necessary distinctions between the work of visual and linguistic expression. This, in turn, reflects both Finlay’s immediate pull away from classical concrete style and his suspicion of the radical ideologies of intermedia art as it was increasingly being theorised. The first of these points comes across especially clearly from two of Finlay’s early works in the ‘standing poem’ format, Standing Poem 2: Apple/Heart ([1964d]) and Standing Poem 3: Hearts Standing Poem ([1965a]). Rather than using the visual arrangement 94

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of language-forms as a kind of syntax – a substratum to semantic communication – these pieces train the reader–viewer’s attention on the elementary conventions of pictorial communication itself, which is used independently, though in careful combination with linguistic message, to convey poetic meaning. Standing Poem 2 is a rectangular card with vertical covering flaps that, when pulled back, create a triptych of white panels. The central panel contains two columns of red apples, which transform over four appearances into hearts. This visual transformation is accompanied by an incrementally transforming four-part phrase: ‘l [or I] /lo/lov/love’ (Finlay [1964d]; Figure 9). We might note the recurrent theme of love in Finlay’s 1960s work, but what is more significant stylistically is that the thematic association between love and apple is established by a graphic sequence that operates independently of the linguistic one, reliant upon conventional visual symbols. Standing Poem 3 works in a similar way: another standing triptych, this poem’s panels are covered with blue and green heart-shapes, whose visual connotations are established by an accompanying key (Finlay [1965a]; Figure 10). The impression of formal parallels between different aspects of a scene or landscape – between a

Figure 9: Standing Poem 2: Apple/Heart 95

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Figure 10: Key and (overleaf) detail from Edwin Morgan’s copy of Standing Poem 3. 96

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heart-shaped pond, an owl’s plunging brow-line, the v-neck of a jersey, etcetera – will be familiar from Finlay’s earlier concrete and verse poems. But in this case the connections are conveyed by visual symbols that operate separately from semantic language – though in conjunction with the key – to generate the metaphors and analogies in play. An increasingly self-conscious sense of the connotations of this reseparation of media – quite different from the classical concrete ideal of visually arranged language-forms – becomes apparent in slightly later works through an impression of ironic detachment from what Yves Abrioux calls the ‘synaesthetic fantasies of early modernism’ (1987, 10). We get this impression, for example, from 4 Sails ([1966a]), a red standing card whose inner pages are divided by diagonal fold-lines to create four triangular sail-shapes (Figure 11). Each triangular section contains a phrase, built up around one or more Scottish port-codes, of the kind printed on boat hulls – ‘SY’ for Stornoway, ‘A’ for Aberdeen, ‘K’ for Kirkwall, ‘PD’ for Peterhead, ‘BK’ for Berwick, etcetera – highlighted in descending capitals. The nonsensical quality of these little letterfragments, were they presented verbatim, would mimic the effect of, say, Kurt Schwitters’s ‘letter poems’. But Finlay subtly foregoes the 97

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abstruseness of Dada sound poetry by giving the letters coded meanings – revealed by a key on the back cover – and by working them into little, lyrical phrases: ‘roSY fAr blacK’, ‘PatcheD BroKen fAded’. As Finlay wrote to Stanford – October 23, 1967 – ‘the concrete poets who are pleased by AZ, bore me, and I much prefer FR or BK, because they stand for ports and are worn by fishing boats. That is to say, I like the point where systems and worlds impinge’ (Finlay 1967–71). Finlay gently critiques the idea that the imaginative world opened out for the reader–viewer through conventional symbolic expression could be transcended or supplanted by new-minted, avant-garde sign systems. Instead, the sound poem – and by implication the concrete poem – is recuperated into a world of communicative symbols familiar and comforting to the poet, a kind of localising, nostalgic qualification of avant-garde technique. Of course, Finlay’s card sculpture-poems extend the boundaries of concrete poetics in the very process of over-running them: not only through their use of visual effects but in their small-scale, sculptural presence. His booklet-poems perform a similar task, though they seem less concerned with the sculptural possibilities of the concrete poem than with the symbolic possibilities of reading itself as a physical activity. A booklet-poem as I am defining it can be distinguished from a booklet of poems in that a single verse is spread across its pages, and turning those pages divides distinct phases of the reading process and is itself a carefully solicited and symbolically loaded aspect of that process. Interpreting the booklet-poem thus involves paying attention to the tactile and proprioceptive aspects of our encounter with it, as well as the layers of semantic, sonic, and visual connotation by now familiar from Finlay’s work. As with the card sculpture-poems, however, the bookletpoems indicate not only an extension of Finlay’s technical repertoire but also his movement away from early concrete poetics, as the effects of the different media employed are so carefully distinguished, even in the process of being combined. Canal Stripe Series 3 (1964b), one of Finlay’s first booklet-poems, serves as a useful example here. The linguistic component of the poem is created from four words: ‘haystack’, ‘houseboat’, ‘windmill’, and ‘cathedral’. The first three are formed from syllables that make sense as individual words – ‘hay’ and ‘stack’, for example – allowing Finlay to create two cycles of new words by attaching the second syllable of each portmanteau-word to the first syllable of that preceding it in the sequence above, the unchanging word ‘cathedral’ inserted at the second point in each cycle. These two word-cycles are spread across the first 98

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Figure 11: 4 Sails

eight right-hand pages of the booklet; the illustration below shows the first of them (1964b [6–13]; Figure 12). As in Rapel and Telegrams, a sense of formal echoes between different components of a landscape is established by the phonetic intermingling of the words used to describe them. Simultaneously, a newly pronounced spiritual overtone is generated by the regular reappearance of ‘cathedral’, suggesting the abiding presence of the religious edifice among the shifting structures on the canal-bank—though, given the landscape’s Dutch associations, there may also be an allusion here to Finlay’s travels in Holland with the non-combatant corps, and thus to the cathedral’s constant visibility in a landscape of long horizons. Complementing the permutational linguistic sequence is a precise visual effect. Each word, after its first appearance, reappears in reduced size on the following left-hand page. This creates a subtle, almost cinematic sense of time-lapse and physical movement, the reader metaphorically transported along the canal, objects homing into view as their craft approaches, then receding as another draws near. Finally, crowning this repertoire of semantic, sonic, and graphic effects is a subtle physical analogy. Turning the page seems to initiate each stage of our movement along the waterway, shifting the position of the objects and perhaps even enacting the stroke of an oar, transporting us a few more metres and seconds further on our journey. The way Finlay extends the symbolic and sensory dimensions of the reading process through pieces such as Canal Stripe 3 indicates an ever 99

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Figure 12: Canal Stripe Series 3 ([6–13]) 100

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Figure 13: Canal Stripe Series 3 ([28–29])

more ambitious sense of the formal parameters of the concrete poem. By this point his work is not only combining language with visual, sonic, and sculptural effects to convey its thematic analogies but also renders our bodily engagement with the poem-as-object a subsidiary source of metaphor. At the same time, the precision with which each medium or channel of expression makes its separate contribution to the overall effect can be contrasted not only with spontaneous mixing of media in neo-dada concrete poetry but also, more subtly, with the earliest examples of concrete style, which tend to imply the convergence rather than combination of the linguistic and non-linguistic registers. Suitably enough, then, the metaphor of the water-bound journey, which in the avant-garde poetry of Mallarmé and Rimbaud alludes to the restless aesthetic spirit, is endowed with a final, arrière-garde sense of resolution over Finlay’s last four double-pages, as the phrase corrects itself (‘haystack … cathedral … houseboat …’) (1964b, [23–27]). The final word of the reconstituted sequence, ‘windmill’, is preceded by the other three across the final double-spread, in a crescendo of bold font (1964b, [28–29]; Figure 13). Some of the formal and ideological concerns expressed through Finlay’s card-poem and booklet-poem projects seem to find consolidation in the fifth and final instalment of his Ocean Stripe series (1967a). The reseparation of visual and linguistic elements in this poem, involving collaged photography and text, suggests an unprecedentedly clear sense of the ideological implications of that split and a related and newly pronounced scepticism regarding avant-garde poetics which is also expressed at a thematic level. Ocean Stripe 5 makes use of the same 101

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Figure 14: Ocean Stripe 5 ([11])

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association between port-codes and sound poems as 4 Sails; but in this case the codes are not worked into poetic phrases, maintaining their original placement on the hulls of fishing boats. Photographs of these boats, cut from Fishing News, appear on each of the booklet’s thirteen pages, alongside snippets from manifestos on concrete and sound poetry by Kurt Schwitters, Ernst Jandl, and Paul de Vree, originally printed in Form magazine. One early frame juxtaposes Schwitters’s statement ‘The basic material is not the word but the letter’ with a picturesque image of a fishing trawler cutting through calm waters. The boat’s port-code is clearly visible, standing by implication for the non-semantic linguistic material of the sound poem (Finlay 1967a, [11]; Figure 14). Image and text are related in this sense. However, as the sequence proceeds, the photos and quotes expand and diminish in size, as if enacting a duel to become the primary vessel of poetic meaning: as Stephen Bann puts it, the two are ‘not associated in harmony but in counterpoint’ (1968; 49). This apparent friction between text and image suggests a more direct acknowledgement of the separate roles of language and visual form in the concrete poem than we have so far encountered in Finlay’s work. More broadly, the images of the boats seem to mount a wordless critique of the impetuous cultural ambitions represented by the manifestos. The proclamations of new modes of creative expression are somehow muted by the silent expanse of the ocean, undermined by an impression of the timeless circularity of human activity conveyed by the boats’ habitual journeys. As in 4 Sails, the picturesque imagery of trawlers and harbours also indicates a certain self-distancing from the ‘fashionable’ or ‘worldly’ sensibilities that the manifestos probably represented to Finlay by this point, sensibilities increasingly evident in the cultural scenes associated with concrete poetry. Thematically and formally, the piece thus plays out an imaginative return to pre-established, historically and geographically rooted patterns of expression and behaviour, a restorative manoeuvre with ideological as well as aesthetic implications, signifying a drift from concrete poetry both in the classical, constructivist sense and in the sixties, neo-dada sense. However, Finlay’s critique is not dogmatic. As the boats enter stormier waters on later pages, the statements become broader in scope and seem less ironically wielded: ‘It is impossible to explain the meaning of art; it is infinite’ (1967a, [29]). The tension between text and image – and, by implication, between the forces of revolution and continuity in art and society, which would both claim the port-code/sound poem as their own metaphor – appears to resolve itself into a deeper congruence, as 103

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if suggesting the enduring need for artistic expression as a means of symbolically navigating human experience, notwithstanding the fictions of forward movement – of social progress – used to justify it. The stormy sea beneath, by extension of the metaphor, comes to stand for the unyielding or impervious universe of physical matter evoked a decade earlier in ‘The Sea-Bed’. The final effect is of equivocation as much as polemic. As Finlay wrote to Stanford on September 19, 1967: I am gently satirising the sound poets. But again, the text MIGHT be taken seriously. And yet again, the boats are so dignified that the total effect cannot be neo-dada … perhaps the whole thing is really a poem about fishing boats, in a kind of triple-wrapping of semi-transparent disguise. (Finlay 1967–71)

Bough-House: New Material Forms and Land-based Works By 1967, concrete poetry was approaching the height of its cultural prominence in England and Scotland. Stephen Bann’s Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology appeared from London Magazine Editions early that year, followed by Emmett Williams’s larger, more editorially adventurous North American volume. A slew of exhibitions followed Reichardt’s 1965 ICA show, including a series held at Arlington Mill in Gloucestershire during 1966–68, organised by Houédard and other poets based in south-west England. An important concrete poetry show, curated by Stephen Bann, was also staged during the 1967 Brighton Festival – documented by Finlay in the 24th and penultimate edition of POTH – for which a number of poem-sculptures were placed in situ across Brighton city centre. Ken Cox’s majestic sculpture-poem The Three Graces was even moored out at sea. In spite or because of its new popular profile, by this point Finlay was largely estranged from the concrete poetry movement, which he felt had been commandeered by poets blindly wedded to the destructive spirit of Dada. The first concrete poets, Finlay often argued in his letters, had been responding to the Dadaists’ and Futurists’ iconoclastic emphasis on language as brute matter from a more reconstructive, historically minded view of Western culture, attaching contrasting associations of iconicity and objectivity to the visual–sonic–linguistic grammars developed earlier in the century, and thus, to borrow a phrase of Yves Abrioux’s, ‘civilising Dada’ ([1985] 1992, 198–99). Writing to Stanford on August 14, 1967, Finlay noted that:

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i a n h a m i lton f i n l ay [S]ome of the old delight has gone, partly because [concrete poetry] has become fashionable (and has been taken up by some deplorable people), and partly because I always feel most enthusiastic when making fresh starts in a state of total innocence … . Believe me, a few years ago, the concrete movement was a delightful one to belong to, for all the poets seemed to be gentle and erudite, interested in the past as well as the present – but this is no longer so. (Finlay 1967–71)15

This letter indicates both Finlay’s ideological objections to the new cultural connotations of ‘concrete poetry’ and, more subtly, the evolution of his own work beyond the style’s original formal parameters. This search for ‘fresh starts’ partly involved the exploration of concrete poetry’s sculptural possibilities. Finlay’s experiments with larger three-dimensional formats for the concrete poem reflect both these concerns. On the one hand, by around 1967 his construction of poems on a grander physical scale indicated a newfound sense of affinity with the architect or landscape gardener over and above the avant-garde poet: with artists and craftsmen whose work was ‘political’ in directly endowing physical space with cultural value, rather than in presenting parasitic critiques of the social structures upon which its existence depended. Finlay’s first letter to Morgan from his new home at Stonypath Farmhouse in the Pentland Hills – October 3, 1966 – indicates these new influences: ‘my feelings are getting more classical. The first big project I want to start is a very formal pond with wave/rock carved in stone, right across the end of it (as a low wall). I have been reading a lot of books on architecture and it’s all very fascinating’ (Finlay 1964–66). What this letter also reveals, of course, is that constructing poems in three dimensions, on large physical scales, required space. In this sense, we cannot overstate the significance of Finlay’s relocation from Edinburgh to a series of rural farmsteads from the spring of 1965 onwards: first Gledfield Farmhouse in Ardgay, Ross-shire, then a smaller dwelling in Coaltown of Callange in Fife in the early summer of 1966, and, finally, Stonypath by September of that year. It was at Stonypath, later rechristened Little Sparta, that Finlay’s plastic-poetic sensibility found its most virtuosic expression, but he was already constructing land-based works and digging ponds at Gledfield. Moreover, Finlay’s physical isolation from society from 1965 onwards – his agoraphobia, a symptom of his nervous illness, increasingly prevented travel away from his rural homes – undoubtedly compounded some feeling of isolation from the new milieux attaching themselves to concrete poetry, and from sixties culture generally. 105

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On the other hand, as the example of his standing poems shows, Finlay’s small-scale experiments with sculptural forms predate this process of isolation or unmooring, and, in any case, that process can also be seen as one of self-compelled stylistic evolution. A significant early development in this sense was Finlay’s commission for his first work in sand-blasted glass, in Summer 1964, a version of To the Painter, Juan Gris (1964f). Finlay felt that his glass poems represented a unique extension of the aesthetic possibilities of concrete poetry, as he noted in a letter to Morgan on June 3, 1966: ‘if one stands them against the light, the area that is equivalent to the paper becomes a pearly floating space, while the letters – clear glass, washed with blue – shine softly … . It is not mechanical, like electric-lighted or neon things, but more “natural”’ (Finlay 1964–66). His description suggests a kind of spiritually rooted faith in the form of visual perception invited by the glass poem, as if it were a means of accessing a truth beyond words, specifically via an engagement with light, emblem of religious illumination throughout the history of Platonic and Christian metaphysics. Indeed, a glass poem such as Wave/Rock (1966c) implies the conceptual self-sufficiency or immaculacy of words in a manner quite distinct from Finlay’s other concrete poems of this period, which more often establish symbolic order through metaphor and inter-association.16 One way in which the glass poems do predict the general development of Finlay’s poetics by the late 1960s, however, is by making the physical movement of the reader around the poem a vital aspect of engagement, generating variations of tone and colour depending on the angle at which light is refracted through its etched rear surface. Finlay’s larger sculptural works grant the concrete poem a similarly significant physical presence. Some of the earliest of these, including Acrobats, and a new version of To the Painter, Juan Gris, were conceived as wall poems, constructed from coloured cork letters, and grouted to the harled walls of Gledfield Farmhouse. A 15-foot column version of the poem Ajar, meanwhile, was placed in the house’s stairwell, while the booklet-poem Canal Stripe Series 4 – based around the phrase ‘little fields long horizons’ – was reconstructed on its grounds as a triangular arrangement of fence posts.17 Most of these early sculptural works are updated versions of earlier page-bound poems: as such, they suggest the capacity of threedimensional rendering to enhance an existing poem’s range of meanings and associations without altering its linguistic component. In this sense, Finlay’s turn to the sculpture-poem granted his concrete poetics greater longevity, extending the ways in which formal duality could enhance 106

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Figure 15: Starlit Waters

thematic duality. However, his sculptural works also came to stand for a final, irrevocable separation of the linguistic and visual or materials elements of the poem, and thus as milestones on his route away from the style. Just as Finlay’s standing poems are partly defined by the separation of language and visual symbol, that is, by the late 1960s his sculptural works had generally ceased to comprise physically rendered languageforms and were instead independent material structures onto which – or into which – written messages were inscribed or engraved. The point can be clarified by comparing Finlay’s 1967 poem-sculpture Starlit Waters – part of the Boat Names and Numbers series – with his Four Seasons in Sail sundial, constructed for installation at Stonypath the following year. Starlit Waters (1967b) consists of a boat name constructed two-and-a-half metres long in dark green painted wood (Tate Gallery 1978, 91–93), ‘underlined’ by a thin blue wooden base (Figure 15). The function of the name as a kind of synecdoche for the absent boat is enhanced by its rendering as a large wooden structure and by the nautical associations of the green fishing net wrapped around it. At the same time, the net connects the image, by a further visual hint, to two other images also implied by the name: the meshwork of shimmering stars above the vessel and their reflection on the starlit waters below. Through a series of entwined visual and sculptural allusions Finlay gathers together the various objects and phenomena already brought into implied comparison or association by the title-word. Formal duality enhances thematic duality. Equally 107

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importantly, this poem entails a large, three-dimensional rendering of a piece of language: language as sculpture. The Four Seasons in Sail (1968b) – later the basis of a page-bound poem (Finlay 1973; Figure 16) – invites quite a different set of inferences. The sculptural component of this work consists of a marble sundial constructed by the stonemason Maxwell Allen and placed in the front garden at Stonypath. Along the edges of its flat, square surface four phrases are inscribed (1968b; Figure 17). The crux of this poem is the phonetic echo between ‘seas’ and ‘season’, emphasised by a line-break that reveals one word within the other. This establishes a thematic analogy between sea and land enhanced by the phonetic connection, but also by the pairing of each season with a boat or boat-type: ‘spring-clipper’, ‘summer-mumblebee’, etcetera. The sculptural form of the sundial extends and enhances the range of thematic associations, bringing in allusions to Greco-Roman culture – an increasingly important theme for Finlay by this time – but also consolidating the linguistic metaphor with a pictorial flourish: the triangular gnomon, that is, subtly resembles a sail. Putting all this aside, the most significant quality of The Four Seasons as compared to Starlit Waters is that this is not a poem-sculpture but a poem set into a sculptural structure, whose function and cultural significance are implied independently of it. If this shift in the relationship between the linguistic and non-linguistic elements of the sculpture-poem suggests one way of tracking Finlay’s final movement beyond concrete poetry, a more striking narrative is suggested by his development, around the same time, of the landscape poem. Assessing the early stages of this development in a contemporaneous article, Stephen Bann notes a particular aptitude of the genre, whereby ‘[a] fragment of language suggests a link between objects originally outside the “poem”, and in this way formalizes them’ (1969, 80). In other words, Finlay’s poems begin to incorporate, and thus to enter into a symbiotic, symbolic relationship with, elements of the natural landscape: specifically the landscape around Stonypath. This took Finlay definitively away from the use of language as visual or physical form and towards the interaction of text with physical and visual context, at the same time granting him access to a vast palette of naturally occurring signs and symbols with which to ‘compose’ his poetry. One important early landscape poem is Cloud Board (photograph in Cutts 1969, 14), whose construction-in-progress Finlay described to Derek Stanford on September 19, 1967:

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Figure 16: ‘The Four Seasons in Sail’. Honey by the Water

Figure 17: The Four Seasons in Sail. Photograph by Stephen Bann 109

bor de r blu r s I have spent today working on a new poem … a little wooden tub, in a circle of stones, and – by the tub – a board on which the word C L O U D appears, in white Rousseau-esque letters, plus 2 hands, rather Rene Magritte, one pointing up, and one down into the tub. (Finlay 1967–71)

The pointing hands make the cloud above the board, and its reflection in the tub of water below, signs for themselves, and for each other, by honing the reader’s focus upon two elements of the natural scene surrounding the poem. Finlay extended the implied analogy between water and sky by planting two kinds of seasonal aquatic flower in the tub: the water-lily, flowering in summer, became a metaphor for the billowing clouds above, while the smaller white flowers of the starwort performed the same task for the fainter clouds of the winter sky. This beautiful little poem presages the ambition of Finlay’s later landscape work, both in framing existing features of the natural landscape as elements of the poem itself and in physically altering that landscape to better serve the poem’s themes – somewhat as eighteenth-century English gardeners had altered the grounds of country houses to better resemble neo-classical paintings by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. Indeed, it was partly through an extensive remodelling of the land around Stonypath, undertaken in collaboration with Sue Finlay, that Finlay’s most exceptional sculptural and land-based works would be realised across the following decades. Poetry, to paraphrase a comment from one of his later letters, would all come down to digging. Avant Cottage Gardener: Conclusion Cloud Board is not a concrete poem in any easy sense. By this point Finlay had abandoned any attempt at a mode of poetic composition whose objectivity would be staked on the convergence of linguistic and visual communication as the first concrete manifestos had called for. Instead, language and image revert to their separate, long-established roles in signifying and ordering the world beyond the poem – which is not to downplay the formal developments within Finlay’s practice between 1962 and 1968. By the latter date his poetry, as well as incorporating a wide range of visual, phonetic, sculptural, and other effects, was opened out onto the world itself, literally incorporating – and so symbolically transforming – elements of the natural environment. Nonetheless, the example of Cloud Board indicates one aspect of Finlay’s turn from concrete poetry: his partitioning of the poem’s

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linguistic and non-linguistic registers. Recalling his self-conscious break from the concrete poetry movement to Robert Nye on January 20, 1970, Finlay acknowledged this stylistic motive, but also hinted at the cultural alienation that had compounded his estrangement: Now that the 60s are over – ‘Concrete Poetry – A Movement of the 60’s – one has a splendid feeling of being retrospective, and in a kind of chronological foreign country, where all is up to the New Lot (whoever they are)! Of course, I have made a special point of talking knowingly of Post-Concrete Poetry ever since about 1967 … . I am an 18th Century poet anyway, and not avant-garde in the least. Avant Cottage Gardener, is about my stretch. (Finlay 1970)

Finlay’s isolation from the cultural scenes that ‘concrete poetry’ had come to denote, connected here to sixties culture generally, was by this point too profound for him to accept any further association with it, unless the term was prefixed with the (pleasingly pastoral) word ‘Post’. Those other positions will come more and more into focus over the remainder of this book; as for Finlay, his relief at the closure of the decade, and at the sense of order that came with viewing literary and artistic movements in retrospect, is palpable. As I suggested in my previous chapter, Marjorie Perloff’s theory of concrete poetry as ‘arrière-garde’ (2007) offers an illuminating perspective on the style as a whole. But it is perhaps especially useful in suggesting Finlay’s ultimate sense of, and contribution to, concrete poetics. The idea that concrete poetry consolidated the multi-media experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes by presenting their results in condensed, self-reflexive forms chimes well with the sentiment expressed by Finlay – though with an added ethical implication – to Derek Stanford on August 2, 1968: [T]he special contribution of concrete poetry is (for me) that it embodies the sense that the age of experiment (in general) is over, & that the real problem in every area is to try to formulate, not a ‘wider’ conception of reality … but an idea of what a decent world might be. (Finlay 1967–71)

If the development of Finlay’s work beyond the formal boundaries of concrete poetry stood for a return to the inherited conventions of linguistic, pictorial, and sculptural expression, his related ideological turn reflected a sense that, by the late 1960s, concrete poetry had reverted to an ironically outmoded spirit of rebellion against those conventions. In losing sight of their history – in failing to pay attention to ‘the past as well as

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the present’ – a new generation of concrete poets had failed to recognise the unprecedented responsibilities of the poetic arrière-garde. For Finlay, this sense of responsibility would increasingly be defined in ethical as well as literary and artistic terms, taking as its animus a desire not just to bring about a mythic reconciliation between the forces of revolution and tradition in art history but to defend Western cultural heritage more generally from the forces of destruction that the self-proclaimed inheritors of the avant-garde – ‘the New Lot’ – now represented. In this context, Finlay’s recasting of the poem by the late 1960s as a material structure, set in a landscape redefined by the poem’s presence, denotes a kind of defensive expansionism. As the realm of order that his work invoked seemed increasingly in retreat all around him, he created an ever-more enveloping simulation of it, culminating in the private poetic universe of Little Sparta. Fredric Jameson’s comment on the prerequisites of a late-modernist literary aesthetic in the age of post-modernism – that it requires a ‘time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms’ (1991, 315) – evokes the garden’s transportive atmosphere well in this sense, though the era to which the garden wanderer is tempted back is perhaps more neo-classical than late-modernist. Having said all this, the fundamental quality that concrete poetry lent to Finlay’s work – that impression of a relationship between thematic and formal duality – would continue to animate his practice for the next forty years. Passing between the inscribed stone slabs, bridges, and columns of Little Sparta, the visitor engages in a form of sensorily enhanced linguistic encounter directly connected to the multi-sensory reading processes invited by the concrete poem: realised on the scale not of the constellation, but of the classical epic.

Notes 1 Ken Cockburn notes this affinity with Russian literature (Finlay 2004, xvii). The lingering vestiges of a feudal economy in parts of rural Scotland across the first half of the twentieth century perhaps seemed to justify these associations. 2 The estimated date of the letter is based on Finlay’s reference to an article on W.S. Graham in Nine magazine, a copy of which ‘Crombie showed me … (my own has not yet arrived)’ (Finlay [1950?]) This must be Edwin Morgan’s article ‘Graham’s “Threshold”’, printed in Nine 2 no. 2 (May 1950), shown to Finlay by the poet Crombie Saunders.

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i a n h a m i lton f i n l ay 3 Ross Hair (2016, Chapter 2) notes the influence of Russian folk chapbooks or Lubki on Finlay’s early illustrated books, passed down via Russian ‘Neoprimitivist’ artists such as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. 4 This letter is speculatively dated based on Finlay’s references to ‘the clinic’ in Edinburgh that he was then visiting: presumably the Davidson Clinic, where, according to Alec Finlay (2012, 16), his father underwent a course of psychiatric treatment. The dates of various letters from Finlay to Gael Turnbull stored at the National Library of Scotland suggest that this was during 1959–60. 5 Hair also quotes Niedecker’s warm comments on Finlay’s poems in The Dancers: ‘[c]ertainly one-third of them have simply set me free’ (qtd. in Hair 2016, 68). Hair places Finlay and Niedecker among an international network of regionally located ‘avant-folk’ poets and small-press publishers, brought together in the early 1960s by their shared interest in ‘incorporat[ing] modernist poetry forms and strategies with discerning uses of regional dialect, demotic culture, and craft practices’ (Hair 2016, 3). 6 McCulloch’s (2009) preferred term for the experiments of the Scottish interwar period is ‘Scottish Modernism’. For McCulloch, the term ‘Scottish Renaissance’ has tended to give an inaccurate impression of an introspectively nationalist movement, dominated by MacDiarmid. 7 The fourth issue of New Saltire (Summer 1962) captures the mood on both sides of the conflict, containing, among other things, a book review in which Finlay (1962b) attacks the parochialism of post-MacDiarmid Scottish literary culture and an article by Maurice Lindsay (1962) that castigates the ‘anti-renaissance’ poets for petulance and shallowness. For transcripts of the five days’ discussion at the conference, including Trocchi’s lecture on ‘The Future of the Novel’ and his argument with MacDiarmid, see Bartie and Bell (2012). On the conflict more generally see – among many recent sources – Hair (2016, 70–74), Alec Finlay (2012, 19–26), and McGonigal (2013) and others’ contributions to Bell and Gunn’s The Scottish Sixties. 8 McCulloch notes that MacDiarmid’s poems often ‘started from “words” as opposed to a preconceived “idea”’. She also acknowledges the extent of his ‘dictionary-raiding for Scots-language vocabulary’, particularly in composing the short, mellifluous, imagistic lyrics in 1925’s Sangschaw (2009, 32). 9 See Bartie (2013) on the Paperback Bookshop (93–99) and on this new Edinburgh scene more generally (chapters four and five). 10 ‘Orkney Interior’ appeared in Sidewalk 1 (Neish 1960, 48) and the concrete poem ‘The Practice’ in Cleft 2 (McArthur 1964, 17), along with an excerpt from the Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’. For an overview of MacDiarmid’s battles with the folk revivalists see Gibson (2013; or 2015, Chapter 1). 11 See Boulton (2009) for beautiful watercolour paintings of the toys, with an accompanying commentary by Jessie Sheeler. 12 Solt herself was introduced to concrete poetry by Finlay in Summer 1962, at the tail-end of a year-long trip to Britain ([1983] 2010, 155): Meeting Ian Hamilton Finlay … in Edinburgh just before we returned to the United States was another important milestone, for on that occasion Finlay introduced me to the concrete poetry of the Noigandres Group of Brazil. Finlay too had made a concrete poem called, I think, ‘Accordion’ [Concertina] … . What I had learned from Williams about the structural use of space made it

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bor de r blu r s possible for me to grasp immediately the importance of this fascinating work and to enter a new territory of the poem that would come to dominate my work for many years. 13 Even ‘Homage to Malevich’, however, seems to push against its concretising compositional principle, the first letters of ‘black’ and ‘block’ cut off at the left-hand side of the square to create the more ambiguous, plaintive phrase ‘lack/lock’. 14 Versions of ‘Acrobats’ (1964a) and Canal Stripe Series 3 (1964b) appeared, along with a photograph of Finlay’s first glass poem, a version of To the Painter, Juan Gris (1964f; figure 8). 15 Finlay’s letters to Stephen Bann during 1964–69 (Bann 2014) trace the gradual development of this sentiment. It is likely that Bob Cobbing, to whom Finlay dedicated a ‘Barking Fish-Carrier’ in A Boatyard (1969), was one of the ‘deplorable’ ones. 16 Wave/Rock (1966c) is a visual poem set into a low, rectangular glass tablet, though a page-based version was published in 1968 in The Blue and the Brown Poems (1968a, [19]). While the pond-side version of the poem mentioned in Finlay’s letter to Morgan never materialised, another version was constructed in concrete for a 1969 exhibition at Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline (photograph in Cutts 1969, 15). 17 The column version of Ajar, and another column-poem, constructed by John Furnival for Between Poetry and Painting, are discussed and reproduced by Bann (1966). An article published in The Scotsman on April 30, 1966 contains images of the wall-poem versions of Acrobats and To the Painter, Juan Gris, and the fence-post version of Canal Stripe Series 4 (Finlay 1966b). Most of these poems were constructed by Jessie McGuffie’s new partner Dick Sheeler. The two lived with Finlay and his new partner and collaborator Susan Swan at Gledfield until March 1966 (Sue Finlay n.d).

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ch a p ter four

Off-Concrete Edwin Morgan Edwin Morgan

The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘off-concrete’ in the subtitle of his poem ‘Canedolia: An Off-Concrete Scotch Fantasia’, composed on December 26–27, 1963, one of his earliest written in response to the new poetic style he had discovered the previous year through E.M. de Melo e Castro’s letter.1 Across this chapter I use the term more broadly than Morgan perhaps intended, to evoke the character of his concrete poetry in general, which is defined not just by an enthusiastic receptiveness to early, northern European and Brazilian variants of concrete style but also by a certain recoil from some of its stricter imperatives. More specifically, the term indicates Morgan’s tendency to combine concrete poetry’s typical compositional features – grid-based or visual syntax, exaggerated phonetic and grammatical patterning – with formal and thematic qualities that adapt them to specific communicative and descriptive tasks. Across the spectrum of Morgan’s off-concrete styles, for example, we can posit a persistent desire to access worlds of cognition and communication beyond the conventionally human: from the minds of animals and computers to various extraordinary scenarios extending the boundaries of human thought and language itself, notably set in outer space. We can also sense, across the sweep of Morgan’s concrete practice, an underlying interest in integrating characterised narrative voices into the concrete poem’s de-individuating syntactical frameworks. These voices are often polemical, sometimes intensely emotionally expressive, often engaged with issues of Scottish identity. These tendencies – involving, in short, the integration of theme and narrative voice into the concrete poem – might seem so self-evidently 115

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necessary to the long-term viability of any poetic genre as to barely merit comment. But given the peculiar constraints of concrete poetics they do seem worth mentioning. Moreover, in Morgan’s case these impulses are sufficiently mercurial in their expression – in terms of his movement between multiple voices and themes – to indicate a unique authorial temperament. As a whole, Morgan’s poetry conveys the idea that the value of any poetic style is contextual rather than innate, dependent upon its ability to represent specific types or instances of communication rather than any implied quality of universal validity. This is evident not only from his development of various subcategories of the concrete poem – from the pictorial to the permutational or ‘emergent’ poem, from the found poem to the exaggerated dialect sequence – but from the fact that concrete poetry was only ever a limited, bracketed aspect of his creative output. It was, in fact, one of various poetic genres with which he experimented during the 1960s and 1970s, including sound poetry, science-fiction poetry, what he called his ‘instamatic’ and ‘social’ poetry, and so on. In fact, though Morgan’s ‘concrete phase’ lasted longer than Finlay’s, he also demarcated it in retrospect, assigning it in a letter of March 10, 1987, for example, ‘mainly to the 1960s and 1970s, and especially to the period from 1963–70’ (Morgan 1987a). By the start of the shorter period just indicated, Morgan was already hooked up to the various networks of communication and exchange that linked poets and artists in England and Scotland with the concrete scene worldwide. His early 1960s correspondence with the Noigandres poets seems a particularly significant source of inspiration.2 But this introductory summary should already imply some of the incongruous and irreverent aspects of Morgan’s response to the international work. The extent to which he appeared to let the theme of the concrete poem define its form, rather than vice versa, emphasised the contingency of linguistic communication upon material circumstance in a way that resisted drives towards universal linguistic systems. We might tentatively describe Morgan’s concrete poetry as more post-structuralist than structuralist in this sense. In a different but related vein, the polemical quality of much of his work – contingent on the presence of theme and narrative voice – seems to forego the idea that concrete poets could have some indirect social efficacy by forging a global, poetic meta-language. More often, Morgan opts for what Colin Nicholson calls – with reference to the anti-apartheid poem ‘Starryveldt’ – ‘activist intervention’ into the genre, engaging with specific topical issues (2002, 91). 116

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Morgan’s concrete poetry, then, tests the outer limits of what could be accomplished, thematically and formally, while still utilising something like the poetic models developed in Brazil and Germany in the 1950s. For all that it can appear ephemeral or throwaway, Morgan’s off-concrete poetry, in probing manifold scenarios and voices, and in its polemical and sometimes emotional expressiveness, primes the genre both for an emerging post-structuralist consensus and for the challenges of a sixties culture in which the need to speak directly of and to the world was felt increasingly strongly. We also need to consider Morgan’s concrete poetry, like Finlay’s, in relation to debates within 1960s Scottish literary culture. For Morgan, concrete poetry was not simply a means of defying post-Renaissance literary culture but a way of redefining an outwardly focused, Scottish modernist poetics pointedly distinguished from the Anglo-American literary-modernist canon. This chapter touches on the most pertinent examples of Morgan’s off-concrete poetry, emphasising its promiscuous, polemical, and emotionally expressive qualities, allowing detours to take in national and nationalist contexts. I initially discuss the scrapbooks that Morgan compiled across his youth, evidence of a visual-linguistic impulse yet to find poetic expression. I then consider Morgan’s engagement with concrete poetry as evidence of a McLuhanite responsiveness to the sensory dimensions of modern communication – and thus of his sense of the relationship between cognitive states and material context – and as one facet of his attempt to define the kind of Scottish modernism just outlined. I then turn to the various sub-categories of concrete style that Morgan developed from 1962 onwards, from comic early 1960s picture poems evoking the expressions and movements of animals, or attempting to ventriloquise the thoughts of the computer, to visual and sculptural projects from across the decade and, finally, to various off-concrete styles developed between the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Across the course of these developments an initial scepticism regarding concrete poetry’s homogenising linguistic impulses – counterbalanced by an ambitious engagement with its visual possibilities – is resolved by turning concrete poetry to contextual purpose. Towards the end of the chapter I consider Morgan’s exploration of the sound-based possibilities of concrete in relation to his engagement with the international sound poetry movement and with new Scottish poetry in dialect. Morgan’s ‘sonic concrete’ poetry brought theme and narrative perspective to the sound poem just as his off-concrete poetry had contextualised the effects of the classical concrete poem. 117

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Emblems of Identity: The Scrapbooks After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, Morgan returned to Glasgow to complete a degree in English Literature.3 Shortly after graduating he took up a lectureship in the same department he had studied in at Glasgow University. By the early 1960s he still held this position, having developed his practice as a poet and translator across the intervening years. Little of Morgan’s published roster from this period suggests the nascent impulses of a concrete poet. Collections such as The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) and The Cape of Good Hope (1955) are better assessed in relation to the neo-romantic vogue of mid-century British poetry, often adopting a lonely, tortuous lyric voice that, in retrospect, seems to codify Morgan’s feelings of social isolation as a closeted gay man. However, in The Whittrick (1973b), a set of eight imaginary dialogues between artists, intellectuals, and fictional characters composed during the late 1950s and early 1960s, we can sense a movement towards the multiple voices, styles, and themes that would characterise his later work, as well as Morgan’s first creative responses to computer technology.4 Morgan’s ‘scrapbooks’, assembled mainly across this period, provide a far more obvious set of clues as to his future concrete-poetic persona. Morgan began compiling the scrapbooks – sixteen enormous volumes filled with collaged newspaper and magazine cuttings, photographs, poems, reproductions of artworks, and handwritten annotations – in 1932, when he was just eleven or twelve years old (Morgan 1932–66; Figure 1). The project ran as an adjunct to his literary practice until 1966, by which time the creative impulses it expressed had perhaps been transferred to his concrete poetry, especially to the collage-based newspoems, which he had begun making the previous year (Morgan 1987b). Though never published in his lifetime – they are now stored with his University of Glasgow Papers – Morgan saw the scrapbooks as an important element of his creative output and sought publishers for them at various times. Indeed, in an article analysing the scrapbooks as ‘emblems of identity’, James McGonigal and Sarah Hepworth describe them as ‘among [Morgan’s] most significant early work’ (2012, 3). Although the sheer range of linguistic and visual data that the scrapbooks contain, and their shifting function – from picture-diary to social documentary to surrealist visual collage – should discourage overly tendentious readings of their significance, we can certainly pick out information, images, and evidence of formal experiment highly relevant to Morgan’s concrete phase. 118

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Figure 1: From Morgan’s scrapbooks In rare cases, clues can be found as to the origins of particular concrete poems. Scrapbook 15 – compiled 1959–65 – includes a photograph from a magazine showing ‘the entrance to the pilot [channel] tunnel on the English coast’ (Morgan 1932–66, 3223), the rock-face bearing the botched workman’s inscription which was reworked in the concrete poem ‘O Pioneers!’ (Morgan 1965e, [24]): ‘THIS TUNNEL WAS BEGUBNUGN IN 1880 WILLIAM SHARP’. More commonly we can find collaged fragments of found text, often cut from newspapers, which indicate the general topical contexts for disrupted or distorted communication that Morgan’s concrete poetry would explore. Scrapbook 14, from 1956–62, features a Daily Express article from November 4, 1957 about Laika the dog’s ‘space shot’ onboard Sputnik 2. The headline, ‘BLEEP-BLEEP, BLEEP-BLEEP’, refers to the ‘beep-beep’ equipment which sent back punctuated wave-signals from early Russian satellites (Morgan 1932–66, 2782). Though these signals had no linguistic content, the idea of isolated units of sound in transmission back from space perhaps inspired the syncopated syntax of Morgan’s poetic homage to Laika’s mission, ‘Spacepoem 1’ (1968b, 75). 119

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The photographs that populate the scrapbooks cover a range of subjects similarly relevant to Morgan’s concrete poetry, notably modernist architecture: collaged images of monolithic functional buildings, constructivist or brutalist in style, abound in later volumes. These images resonate not just because of the legacy of constructivist architecture in 1950s Ulm and São Paulo, but also because of the regeneration of Glasgow itself during the 1950s–1970s through the breakneck construction of multi-storey, concrete social housing.5 Scrapbook 12 (1954–60) features a panoramic shot from 1954 of a new high-rise council estate at Moss Heights, Scrapbook 15 the ‘lights of the first multi-storey housing block in the Hutchestown-Gorbals development scheme reflecting on the river Clyde’ (Morgan 1932–65, 2324, 3042). That second picture is from 1962, the year Morgan moved into a new-build, low-rise council block in Anniesland. One photograph from the same volume, showing tower blocks under construction in Paisley in 1959, gives a sense of the dizzying speed at which the Glasgow skyline was changing around this time, the caption announcing ‘15 storeys completed in 30 working days’ (Morgan 1932–66, 3051). This suggests a strong topical resonance of the word ‘concrete’ for an inhabitant of 1960s Glasgow, as Morgan would later acknowledge in his autobiographical poem ‘Epilogue: Seven Decades’, connecting ‘Saõ/ Paulo’s poetic-concrete revolution’ with ‘another concrete revolution’ in his home city (Morgan 1990a, 594). The scrapbooks also indicate Morgan’s awareness, prior to May 1962, of the range of visual and phonetic effects employed in modernist poetry. In later books we find cut-ups by William Burroughs and Sinclair Beiles pasted in from their 1960 book Minutes to Go alongside excerpts from ee cummings’s 95 poems, some of which pre-empt Morgan’s interest in using the visual arrangement of letters to capture the skittish movements of animals. The books also served as workshops for formal experiment, often honing techniques later turned to concrete ends. Spatial arrangements of image and language generate the kind of concise, visually oriented conceptual associations typical of concrete poetry; phrases spliced together from newspaper headlines suggest the same interest in manipulating and rearranging found language as the newspoems (Morgan 1987b). Although McGonigal and Hepworth are correct, then, to connect the conscious compositional style of the scrapbooks with surrealist collage and renaissance emblem books rather than concrete poetry – which was ‘unknown to Morgan in the post-war period when he continued to build the scrapbooks’ (2012, 11) – it is not surprising that Morgan’s curiosity was piqued by Melo e Castro’s letter on or shortly after May 25, 1962. 120

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Out into the World: Concrete Poetry Morgan must have written promptly to E.M. de Melo e Castro upon reading his note in the TLS, as by June 3 the Portuguese poet was already responding: Dear Sir Thank you very much for your letter and for the interest you take in POESIA CONCRETA. By the same post I am sending you a copy of a short Anthology just published in Lisbon through the Embaixada do Brasil, but of course it includes only brasilian poets. For further information you can write to Mr. AUGUSTO DE CAMPOS… (Melo a Castro 1962a)

Morgan only took up that offer around nine months later, writing to Augusto on March 6, 1963: Dear Augusto de Campos I thought you might be interested to see some of my ‘concrete poems’ – the ones I enclose have not yet been published … . I would be greatly pleased to hear what you think … . There are one or two Scottish words in them which I shall explain if you are unfamiliar … . (Morgan 1963a)

Augusto replied on March 21: ‘I was thinking to ask Ian H. Finlay about your address when your letter arrived – a nice surprise’ (Augusto de Campos 1963). Finlay, of course, had contacted Augusto the previous summer, offering to publish his work. Morgan’s relative nonchalance regarding personal acquaintance suggests a less immediate and heartfelt engagement with the work that he and Finlay had discovered at the same time, and the slimmer emotional emphasis he placed upon group membership. In a lecture probably delivered in late 1964, Morgan described concrete poetry as ‘a sideline which I find useful & rewarding for producing certain effects’ ([1964a]).6 Accepting this modest appraisal, concrete poetry certainly provided Morgan with a new way of expressing some of his keenest creative concerns during the early 1960s. As well as providing an outlet for the graphic-linguistic sensibility evident from his scrapbooks, the style seemed vitally engaged with the dynamics of communication and sensory experience in the new, technologically mediated urban consumer culture of the post-war period. In expressing the contingency of communicative and cognitive impulses on shifting social and technological circumstance, 121

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it also stood in striking contrast to the introversion and pessimism that, Morgan felt, characterised responses to the urban environment in much Anglo-American and Scottish literary modernism. In this sense, his engagement with concrete poetry was one aspect of a broader attempt to define a new Scottish modernist poetics that would be pointedly cosmopolitan in theme and form, while maintaining a clear nationalist impetus. In his 1964 lecture, Morgan argued that ‘the battle between linearity & spatiality which concrete reflects is something that is in life itself & is going to have far-ranging consequences.’ He offered two ‘practical illustrations’ of this point: I) when you enter a very modern newly designed shop or a large open-plan house … you don’t see the familiar signposts & you don’t quite know where to go or what to do – this is because the concept of space has taken over and it needs some adjustment … II) recent agitation in universities for seminars as against lectures … the underlying & probably unsuspected reason is that the lecture is linear & the seminar is spatial & the younger generation senses this & wants the spatial! (Morgan [1964a])

Putting aside Morgan’s perhaps idiosyncratic reference points as a university lecturer – though universities were, in fact, hubs of concrete poetry practice in Britain – his affinity with the ‘spatiality’ of concrete poetry partly reflects a responsiveness to the sensory stimulations offered by a burgeoning consumer culture. The spirit of that culture is captured in the image of the open-plan department store, with its competing, spatially dispersed linguistic and visual allures. In related, theoretical terms, Morgan seems to be responding to Marshall McLuhan’s analysis in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) of the ‘spatial’ dimensions of information transmission in the ‘electric’ age. The ground-breaking contention of McLuhan’s text was that changes in communication technology were active determinants of the prevailing state of social and psychological development at any one point in human history, rather than passive markers of this development. Such technological changes had the effect of ‘outering’ or ‘extending’ one sense, generating modes of thought and communication dominated by its effects. More specifically, McLuhan distinguishes between the ‘visual’ condition brought about by the phonetic alphabet and the printing press and the ‘oral’ or ‘aural’ cultures of pre- and non-literate societies. The former is defined by the perception of reality as ordered threedimensional space, the pursuit of linear causal links between objects 122

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and events, and the endowment of the individual with rational power and self-awareness. In oral cultures, three-dimensional space is not recognised in the same way, thought is formed in passive, emotionally configured response to external stimuli, and the individual does not distinguish themself so clearly from the social mass: ‘[t]he visual makes for the explicit, the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. The non-literate modes are implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, whether in the primitive past or the electronic present’ (McLuhan 1962, 57). As this closing flourish indicates, McLuhan felt that the advent of electronic communication technology was beckoning in a new oral age for the West – his terminology is confusing given our focus on a visual poetics responsive to this new culture – albeit one mediated by the extant technologies of the visual: ‘any Western child today grows up in this kind of magical repetitive world as he hears advertisements on radio and TV’ (1962, 19). Though both these technologies had been on the market for some decades, the paradigm shift to which McLuhan was responding was a mass rise in TV ownership across the 1950s.7 In any case, in postulating a ‘battle’ between linearity and spatiality, Morgan is almost certainly leaning on McLuhan’s idea of an overlap between visual and oral epochs, and of the cognitive friction resulting from this.8 Though hailed as a proselytiser for new media, McLuhan’s treatment of both the visual and oral ages is critical, and his theories would not simply have facilitated a new, celebratory poetics of the oral. While the visual age had led to a narcissistic entrancement by the linear logic of print, the new oral culture had the capacity to drag humanity back into an irrational tribalism, though manifested on an infinitely larger scale than in the pre-literate past (McLuhan’s famous phrase ‘the global village’ in fact sounds a Eurocentric, Conrad-esque note of caution on that front). However, the peculiar opportunity of the new, visually mediated oral age was to facilitate modes of communication that would combine the oral and visual sensibilities, allowing the modern mind to hold the information channelled through both in a kind of sceptical tension, preventing the ‘hypnosis’ arising from ‘the dominance of one sense’ (McLuhan 1962, 73). The final chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy, ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’, outlines how such a receptiveness might be cultivated by literary means. It initially constitutes a survey of visually and sonically orientated literary oeuvres and styles, from Blake’s engravings to Joyce and the symbolists. Bringing these developments together under Ruskin’s term 123

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‘the grotesque’, McLuhan describes the underlying compositional mode as involving ‘a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order’ (1962, 267). In such writing, neither the visual nor the oral mode is given primacy, their effects – those of linear and spatial textual arrangement, for example – held in a mutually relativising balance, indicating to the receiving mind that neither presented an objective rendering of reality. Assuming that Morgan’s concrete poetry was responsive to such ideas, it can be seen as keenly receptive to the communicative paradigms of modern, technological consumer culture, but without simply acquiescing in that culture. This receptiveness was, nonetheless, probably one aspect of what Morgan defined in a 1965 article on concrete poetry for Peace News as ‘post-existentialism’ (1965a, 7). Much of Morgan’s concrete poetry, that is, seems to proceed almost light-heartedly from the assumption that there is no metaphysically definable basis or function for human consciousness – perhaps from the idea of consciousness as ‘néant’ defined in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness ([1943, 1958] 2003)9 – and that it was thus integrally shaped by its material environment. In the early 1960s the contingency – or what Sartre called the ‘facticity’ – of human consciousness was perhaps driven home by the reorientation of language and cognition around the demands of a newly voracious media and advertising culture. Morgan contrasted the post-existentialism of concrete poetry – its relative ease with such a condition – not just with the more anguished response to the facticity of human consciousness in existentialism so-called – ‘the world of Kafka and Eliot and Camus and Sartre’ (Morgan 1965a, 7) – but specifically with the overlapping Anglo-American literarymodernist tradition exemplified by The Waste Land. In interviews Morgan often took issue with Eliot’s portrayals of alienated human consciousness in the urban environment, taking them to betray a theologically rooted belief in an innate human spirit defiled by that environment, and an accompanying reactionary politics. Speaking to Marshall Walker, Morgan renounced the ‘considerable element of repulsion in the view of life taken in [The Waste Land]’: ‘[w]hat an extraordinary thing to say that London is an unreal city! This is the kind of thing that really riles me about Eliot!’ ([1976] 1990, 66, 68). Morgan seemingly saw the English Movement poets as inheritors of this anti-urban ennui. In a later interview with Michael Gardiner, he recalled ‘not getting anything’ from their work (1994, 54), and his introduction to Sovpoems, a collection 124

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of translations from contemporary authors in Communist countries, pointedly places Larkin’s work among the progeny of Eliot’s ‘dying charm’ ([1961], 4). Embracing a style so conspicuously foreign in its geographical origins and stylistic qualities as concrete poetry was also a means of placing his work in opposition to the studied ignorance of global and especially modernist literature that became associated with the Movement. To that end, concrete poetry was among various styles that Morgan imported to Britain by circuitous routes from the late 1950s onwards, including beat poetry and the work of the Russian ‘redcats’ such as Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. To Gardiner, Morgan recalled attempting to define ‘a thing that spread out across countries—Scotland America and Russia for example’, rather than ‘relating Scotland to what was happening in England’ (1994, 54). Indeed, his sense of affinity with the Noigandres poets was bolstered by the shared enthusiasm for Russian poetry revealed by his introductory letter from Augusto de Campos (March 21, 1963): Really, your collaboration in P.O.T.H attracted my attention [including] your translations from Mayakovsky and others … . In the Brazilian group of Concrete Poetry … there are some students of Russian language; among them my brother Haroldo de Campos and myself. Haroldo … has made brilliant translations of Mayakovsky … . Also Khlébnikov … . We are very interested, too, in the young Russian poets Evtuchenko and Voznesensky … . (Augusto de Campos 1963)

As well as expressing a McLuhanite or post-existentialist materialism, Morgan’s turn to concrete thus allowed him to project the idea of a new poetic culture within Britain that would forego the anti-urban bias of Eliot and the Movement poets, responding to the challenges of an international socialist modernist vanguard.10 Equally importantly, however, as a cultural nationalist Morgan was determined that this would not just be a British literary movement but specifically a Scottish one. At the same time, he was not content to pursue the aims just outlined as they had been defined during the Scottish Renaissance. In too many instances, Morgan felt, Renaissance writers had fallen prey to misanthropic and parochial impulses of their own: a hostility to modern urban experience, in this case indicating an anachronistic Marxist perspective, and a bigoted nationalism cut off from the MacDiarmidian internationalism that had initially nourished it. Morgan often referred exasperatedly to the critical treatment that Scottish cities, 125

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particularly his own, had received at the hands of Renaissance authors, including Marxians and Marxists such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and MacDiarmid.11 Morgan would later criticise MacDiarmid’s gruesome representation of city life in his unpublished poem sequence ‘Glasgow 1938’: MacDiarmid expresses what he sees of the Glasgow of the 1930s through strong images of disgust. The place is dead, it is cold, it is stupid, it is vulgar, it is mindless, it is ugly, it is impotent. The main point he makes (apart from the emotion of disgust) is that Glasgow’s people have sold their soul to business, to the abstractions of commerce and a go-getting philosophy … . (Morgan 1984, 4–5)

Behind the Marxist critique of alienated labour, Morgan suggests that the sentiment expressed in MacDiarmid’s poem – a bitter retort to the image of Glasgow projected for the 1938 Empire Exhibition (Duchateau 2012, 40) – was simply ‘a suspicion and dislike of cities in themselves, if they are large, modern and industrial’, indicating as much knee-jerk revulsion at its inhabitants as concern for their welfare under industrial capitalism (Morgan 1984, 5). This, in turn, betrayed an essentialising, ruralist, anti-industrial vision of Scottish society overriding any precise critique of the economic logic of urbanisation. To the extent that the Scottish Renaissance’s Marxist critiques were in earnest, Morgan also warned during the early 1960s of their inability to account for the new forms that capitalism had assumed across the post-war West. The social historian Arthur Marwick (1998) explores the state-mediated free-market models that imposed themselves across much of Europe after the Second World War, characterised by increased white collar employment and thus by the erosion of the industrial worker– employer model of orthodox Marxist analysis. This new capitalism also proffered the limited redistribution of wealth and the fairer distribution of its benefits through enhanced welfare systems, free health-care, higher wages, and improved working conditions. Fuelled by innovations in technology and travel, it also made consumer goods and lifestyle perks more widely available and affordable.12 Morgan’s image of the open-plan department store sums up something of the buoyant spirit of this new social paradigm. These new conditions neither eradicated economic inequality nor mitigated the sins of late British imperialism, a subject that Morgan’s concrete poetry often dealt with. However, as the social historian John Seed points out, they did point by the late 1950s – in combination 126

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with the increasingly naked imperialism of the Soviet Union – to the possibility, indeed the necessity, of ‘a “third way” between the rigidities of Stalinism and the pragmatism of right-wing social democracy’. Even the discussions inaugurated by the neo-Marxist New Left (a movement closely associated with Peace News) reflected some sense that ‘British capitalism in the 1950s was … new and required analysis’. By the early 1960s, the more mainstream paradigm of Wilsonian socialism had emerged, promising, in the language of the Labour Party’s successful 1964 election campaign, to harness the ‘white heat of technology’ to power a state-mediated free market for the benefit of all (Seed 1992, 26–27). There was thus perhaps a brief window during the late 1950s and early 1960s when a form of Keynesian market economics seemed to be saving British society from the iniquities of capitalism while simultaneously allowing it to revel in capitalism’s benefits, not least in the myriad of stimulating objects and experiences that a mushrooming consumer culture could offer.13 My thesis, in short, is that it was partly within this brief political moment that Morgan advanced his case, in the era-defining essay ‘The Beatnik in the Kailyard’ (1962), against the outmoded MacDiarmidian Marxism of the Renaissance. This ethos, Morgan argued, ‘ha[d] allowed life, both in Scotland and elsewhere, to move on rapidly and ceaselessly in directions it chooses not to penetrate’ ([1962] 1974, 174). Too many Scottish writers were reluctant to: [M]ove out into the world with which every child now at school is becoming familiar – the world of television and sputniks, automation and LPs, electronic music and multistorey flats, rebuilt city centres and new towns, coffee bars and bookable cinemas, air travel and transistor radios, colour photography and open-plan houses, paperbacks and water-skiing … . (Morgan [1962] 1974, 175)

Such ‘material differences in society’, Morgan concludes, ‘imply spiritual, moral and aesthetic differences’ that poets were obliged to acknowledge ([1962] 1974, 175). What is striking is not only the post-existentialist acceptance of a causal relationship between socio-technological environment and human consciousness but also the palpable excitement with which a socialist poet enumerates the delights of a supercharged consumerism (as well as major projects of post-war social democracy such as ‘rebuilt city centres and new towns’). ‘The Beatnik in the Kailyard’ thus represents a rejection of the anachronisms of the Renaissance comparable to – while obviously 127

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different from – Morgan’s criticisms of Eliot and Larkin. But the essay stakes out its ground on a nationalist as well as a socialist basis. MacDiarmid’s ‘double aim’ for the Renaissance, Morgan recalls, was that it would be both ‘modern, in the sense that it would risk dealing with contemporary subjects and would experiment with new forms’, and ‘unmistakably Scottish’. This is an aim attributable to Morgan himself as concrete poet and, as he notes, ‘MacDiarmid’s own poetry is a good enough guarantee that [it] can be realized’ ([1962] 1974, 172). But Morgan also laments the increasing failure of Renaissance literature to achieve the first of these criteria, a failure reflecting partly its desire to cling to its interwar achievements and partly the inhibitions and resentments – especially Anglophobia – inevitably stemming from ‘union with a more powerful partner’ ([1962] 1974, 166). This manifested itself not just in the stifling compulsion that some writers of Morgan’s generation felt – unlike MacDiarmid – to write exclusively in Scots but also in an increasing ignorance of literary developments abroad: There is a new provincialism – in a movement which, in MacDiarmid at least, stretched out internationally and fought the philistines. Almost no interest has been taken by established writers in Scotland in the important postwar literary developments in America and on the Continent. Ignorance is not apologized for. (Morgan [1962] 1974, 174)

Pulling these strands of analysis together, the poetic culture that Morgan sought to revive through concrete poetry would be defined by an urbane, technologically alert, socialist modernism expressing both a cool awareness of the contingency of communication and cognition upon shifting material circumstance and a distinctly nationalist animus. At the same time, it would oppose the anti-urbanism and introspectiveness not just of recent Anglo-American poetry but of some Scottish literary culture itself. Reviving MacDiarmid’s ‘double aim’, it would move Scottish poetry out – back out – into the light of the modern world. Calligrammes and Computers: Early Concrete Poems In June 1963 Morgan published his first concrete poems, ‘Dogs Round a Tree’ and ‘Original Sin at the Water-Hole’, in the single issue of Finlay’s poetry pamphlet Fish-Sheet (Finlay 1963a). By July he had published four more – ‘Summer Haiku’, ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake’, ‘Chinese Cat’, and ‘Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly’ – in the third issue of the Brazilian magazine Invenção, edited by poets connected to 128

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the Noigandres group, and a flurry of European journal publications followed across 1964 (Whyte 1990, 200–02). It is notable, given the ambitions just attributed to Morgan’s concrete poetics, that most of these early pieces are playful, somewhat throwaway picture poems, many depicting the movements and behaviour of animals. Towards the end of 1963, Morgan began a series of satirical ‘computer poems’, whose effects are similar in many ways. All of these early forays into concrete style, that is, imply a certain scepticism regarding some of its underlying principles, particularly the idea of a universally coherent language system grounded in a logic of visual composition. Having considered Morgan’s general motives for engaging with concrete poetry, then, we should re-emphasise at this point his sense that the style constituted a ‘sideline’ and note the distance he immediately sought to establish between his work in this area and concrete poetry’s founding principles. Arguably, this evasive movement exemplified the more general, perhaps inevitable pull of many writers and artists – including the first concrete poets themselves – away from those principles across the 1950s–1970s. Morgan’s first collection of concrete poems, Starryveldt (1965e), was published by Eugen Gomringer’s eponymous press in January 1965. It contains many of Morgan’s early animal poems, their pictorial qualities somewhat reminiscent of Apollinaire’s calligrammes. In thematic terms, they might have been influenced by Apollinaire’s bestiary The Parade of Orpheus ([1911] 1964), some of which Morgan translated for POTH 11 in 1964. The consciously ephemeral appeal of Morgan’s early concrete poems threatens to embarrass overly earnest reading of their formal effects. Nonetheless, in his first letter to Morgan – March 21, 1963 – Augusto noted the pictorial visuals as a matter of genuine theoretical significance: [O]ur manifesto … make[s] a distinction between the phases of development of concrete poetry … . A poem like Dogs round a tree would belong to the first phase [‘organic form and phenomenology of composition’]; Chinese cat and Unscrambling the waves at Goonhilly, to the second [‘geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism)’]. Please, understand me, this is not to lessen the poems of the first phase; we believe physiognomy, that may reach to a high abstracted form, a valuable form of expression; we mean rather a clarification of the process, for the first phase links concrete poetry to a whole tradition: that of Mallarmé’s ‘A Throw of the Dice’. (Augusto de Campos 1963)

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‘Dogs Round a Tree’ (Finlay 1963a, n.pag.; Figure 2), republished in Starryveldt (1965e, [4]), exemplifies Morgan’s use of ‘organic form and phenomenology of composition’: that is, pictorial visual effects. Although the poem’s two-word lexicon and absence of linear grammar seem authentically ‘concrete’, Morgan makes subtle use of visual mimicry to convey his subject matter, in contravention of classical concrete poetics. Lines of exclamation marks denote tree-trunks, while the expanding and contracting lines of ‘bowwows’ trace the dogs’ erratic paths around them. The resultant poem bears little of the compacted conceptual resonance of, say, Gomringer’s ‘Ping Pong’ – suggesting an allusion to the dogs sniffing round a tree at the start of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, signifying his intention to ‘make a start, / out of particulars’, is perhaps pushing it – which might make it not worth bothering with, except that the impression seems somehow deliberate. Through its specificity and apparent insignificance of theme, the piece seems to respond to the idea of a poetic meta-language rooted in the non-figurative visual arrangement of language-forms with a good-natured sense of bathos, instead using visual expression as a conventional, indeed childlike, representational tool. However, such poems also serve a more serious and engaging purpose, in training the reader’s attention on non-human sentience and behaviour. That purpose comes across more clearly in Morgan’s other contribution to Fish-Sheet, also republished in Starrveldt (1965e, [12]), ‘Original Sin at the Water-Hole’ (Finlay 1963a, n.pag.; Figure 2). A coil of sibilant adjectives, this visual portrait of a snake entails a linear narrative, describing a group of thrashing ‘shehippopotamuses’ disturbed by ‘alittlefloatin/g/ asp!’ Perhaps inspired by one of the exotic wildlife photographs pasted from popular science magazines into Morgan’s scrapbooks, the first and last lines of the poem are identical. It therefore mimics an emblem for infinity – the ouroboros, a serpent consuming its own tail – while also suggesting that the phrase, by looping back into itself, could be repeated indefinitely. That implication of endless repetition generates an enveloping freeze-frame or photographic still of the subject matter: the brute physical and sensual activity comprising animal life, the ‘original sin’ for which the snake also stands. The poem thus gestures towards that hidden universe of non-human sentience that so much of Morgan’s poetry attempts to access, and which concrete poetry, in stripping out the conventional rhythms and syntax that stand in for human speech, perhaps seemed uniquely able to penetrate. As the accompanying reference to ‘sin’ suggests, this manoeuvre was partly undertaken in opposition to 130

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Figure 2: ‘Dogs Round a Tree’ and ‘Original Sin at the Water-Hole’ in Fish-Sheet. Concrete poems by Anselm Hollo and Ian Hamilton Finlay are also visible. conceptions of human consciousness – especially Christian ones – as unique, exalted, or immutable, which would refuse to countenance the vast range of non-human contexts in which cognition is also embodied. At one level, then, these early animal poems convey a subtly materialist engagement with the idea of consciousness, a concern Morgan expressed more directly by using concrete poetry to depict what Eleanor Bell 131

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calls the ‘mindscape’ of the computer (2012, 116). Morgan was aware, during the early 1960s, of the experiments in computer-shuffled poetry being undertaken by Max Bense in Stuttgart, and by the Italian artist Nanni Balestrini. In 1965 Morgan translated Balestrini’s 1961 poem ‘Tape Mark 1’ for John Sharkey’s magazine Lisn.14 In Summer 1964, as Morgan wrote to Houédard – July 14/15, 1964 – he recorded radio talks on ‘The Computer and the Critic’ and ‘The Computer and the Creator’ with Jack Rillie, a colleague from the University of Glasgow (Morgan 1964b). Recalling the 1950s–1960s in a 2006 article, Morgan referred to ‘a “Cybernetics” file of cuttings from newspapers and magazines which I started in 1949’ (Morgan 2006, 38). He would certainly have been enthused, then, by the comparisons drawn in the Noigandres’s ‘Pilot Plan’ between poetic composition and cybernetic feedback, ‘the poem as a mechanism regulating itself’ (Noigandres [1958, 1968] 1970, 72). However, Morgan’s own sequence of computer poems, which merely mimics computer composition, seems partly concerned with sending up the ideas of linguistic accuracy for which such metaphors stood.15 The first poem in this sequence, ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ – composed December 1963 – opens on its childlike protagonist ‘scanning a semantic as well as formal “store” (all the words relating somehow to the context of Christmas cheer)’ to locate an appropriate Christmas greeting. The computer’s word-choices are restricted by a grammatical rule, each line consisting of ‘two words each having consonant-vowel-double-consonant-y’ (Morgan [1968] 1970). The ticker-tape shape approximates early computer print-outs, while the tabular, typewritten appearance seems bereft of the tone of human enunciation (wherever possible, Morgan published his computer poems as lithographs of typewritten originals for this reason). But the implied extraction of human subjectivity from the composition process leads not to trans-subjective accuracy but to infantile babble. The computer, lacking the motive to pick out any particular phrase from its word-bank – which would require some individuation of perspective – trawls through various arbitrary arrangements (Morgan 1965e, [18]): jollymerry hollyberry jollyberry merryholly happyjolly jollyjelly ….

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In a sense, the sequence offers a comic critique of first-wave information theory as applied to human communication. Accepting that optimal information value depends on the interplay of pattern and randomness, and thus on a repertoire of more- and less-likely-to-be-used signs, the presence of pattern – of more-likely-to-be-used signs – depends upon the motive to send a particular message, and thus upon some kind of characterised sender, whose relationship to the signs used will necessarily be different – differently embodied, to use Hayles’s (1999) language – from that of the receiver. Tellingly, Morgan’s youthful protagonist does eventually make a choice, but one that bucks its pre-programmed grammatical formula, implying some such process of characterisation (1965e, [18]): merrymerry merrymerry merryChris ammerryasa Chrismerry asMERRYCHR YSANTHEMUM

To wish someone a ‘Merry Chrysanthemum’ might simply seem a childish error. But as Morgan noted, the chrysanthemum is actually an ‘emblematic good-luck flower … one might buy or give at Christmas-time’ ([1968] 1970). The computer finds a semi-meaningful phrase, then, but only by turning to the kind of idiomatic language implying partiality or subjectivity of perspective. Meaningful communication – the conveyance of information – is thus shown to depend not on the eradication of individuality from the communication process, but precisely upon its presence within it. In this sense, the computer poems express a logical scepticism of a poetics whose universal intelligibility was to be predicated on a movement beyond subjective authorship. Such theories, Morgan light-heartedly implies, sever a Gordian knot between information and material embodiment: ‘[i]n poetry, you get the oyster as well as the pearl’, as he put it: ‘the pursuit of purity is self-defeating’ (qtd. in Reichardt 1965, 71). But this critique was ethical as well as logical, as another poem from Starryveldt implies by suggesting the pitfalls of a poetic language stripped of the power of topical reference. ‘Instant Theatre Go Home’ mimics the sound and shape of Gomringer’s poem ‘Ping Pong’ but works outwards from that poem’s sound-source to 133

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evoke a particular subject matter, specifically – and oddly enough – the protracted withdrawal of the British empire from south-east Asia (Morgan 1965e, [17]; Figure 3). Echoes of the word ‘Ping’ ricochet down the central column of letters, including ‘Penang’, a north-west Malaysian province and former capital of the British Straits Settlement. Unlike other former areas of British Malaya – which was disbanded after 1945 – Penang retained full colony status until the Federation of Malaya, the successor to the imperial state, gained independence in 1957. In 1963 Penang became part of the new state of Malaysia, seen by many in the region as a neo-colonial puppet-state. Other permutations produce ‘half-pennying’ (split in half by ‘Ping’), an odd term suggesting half-measures or short changing. The underlying phrase, ‘A Half-Pennying in Penang’, seems to critique the tortuous and reluctant British withdrawal from the region, made bloody by the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60, a war of independence waged by the guerrillas of the communist Malaysian National Liberation Army against Commonwealth forces. In the context of this encoded anti-colonial polemic, the embedded phrase ‘ping pong’ seems slightly sheepish. Certainly, the poem takes aim at Western avant-garde literature and art movements that, in staking their claims of social efficacy on the development of new modes of communication, forget the writer or artist’s duty to respond to the

Figure 3: ‘Instant Theatre Go Home’ 134

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complexity and violence of the world in its current state. Just as that sardonically timed closing ‘pong’ implies the inadequacy of a poem such as Gomringer’s to a subject like this, so the term ‘happening’, picked out in capitals, probably refers, with similar irony, to the spontaneous mixed-media performances of the Fluxus movement. By association with the title, that is, the idea of the ‘happening’ takes on grim and bathetic relevance to the very different ‘instant theatres’ created by guerrilla skirmishes in the Malaysian jungle. Clearly, then, Morgan’s early concrete poems were concerned with both the logical flaws and potentially depoliticising effects of classical concrete poetics. But, ironically, these poems also reveal Morgan’s sense of concrete poetry’s unique ability to convey some of the broader ideological positions underpinning those concerns. By simulating non-human thought and language, that is, the concrete poem could express the contingency of consciousness on material circumstance, thus implying the potentially endless multiplicity of cognitive states, undermining ideas of a universally valid, poetic meta-language. By exploiting the concrete poem’s potential tone of neutrality or disinterestedness for the purposes of deadpan polemic, Morgan could also make it an unlikely tool for political satire. Sculptures and Streamers: The Visual Element Throughout the 1960s Morgan undertook a series of ambitious projects exploring the graphic and sculptural possibilities of the concrete poem. Perhaps indicating his sense of the resonances of spatiality in McLuhan’s new oral age, these experiments further suggest that Morgan’s response to concrete poetry consisted in more than reactionary satire. Even his composition of concrete poems on the typewriter activated a minimal visual impulse, by spreading letter-forms across an invisible grid. Similar sensibilities were expressed on a grander scale by various plans for threedimensional and poster poems hatched across the decade. Something of the ambition of these plans comes across in a letter sent on July 13, 1964 to Mike Weaver, who was then soliciting poem-sculpture proposals for the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Phonetic, and Kinetic Poetry, opening in Cambridge that autumn. Morgan suggested several, including a version of the Starryveldt poem ‘French Persian Cats Having a Ball’ set on a series of horizontal platforms suspended in water: ‘I can envisage … looking into a box or tank where the four parts of the piece are suspending or moving, at different depths, in relation to one another, in a kind of dance’. He also imagined motorised, moving versions 135

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of ‘Dogs Round a Tree’ and another Starryveldt poem, ‘Orgy’, noting that the latter poem’s ‘narrative order’ ‘could be broken by movement, and indeed the severe alphabetic restriction that gives all the lines a certain common character begins to demand such a displacement, “play”, rearrangement, or (again) dance. The idea of a dance of components interests me particularly’ (Morgan 1964c). These ideas for sculptural, mechanical, and kinetic poems, involving dispersed elements potentially moving or ‘dancing’, indicate Morgan’s interest in extending concrete poetry’s lexicon of visual techniques beyond mere pictorial device, and in overriding narrative sequence through spatial arrangement, in accordance with the aims of the first concrete manifestos. Around the same time, Morgan and John Sharkey were even discussing plans for a ‘concrete film’, which, as Sharkey described it to Morgan – September 8, 1964 – would feature stills of poems by Finlay, John Furnival, Houédard, Morgan, and Sharkey over a soundtrack composed from statements by the various poets collaged in ‘musique concrète pattern’ (Sharkey 1964–66). All of the plans just outlined fell through, largely because of a lack of funds.16 However, three years later Morgan did see a striking off-the-page poem-project realised. His Festive Permutational Poem (1967c; Figure 4) was created for Stephen Bann’s concrete poetry exhibition at the 1967 Brighton Festival. In linguistic terms, the poem consisted of a series of 54 words, half of which, as Morgan explained in an accompanying note on the piece, concerned the city’s ‘egghead’ associations, half its ‘pop’ associations. The words were then divided into 18 surreal, three-word phrases, which were printed on psychedelic coloured streamers and displayed in the windows of shops and busses throughout the festival (Morgan 1967b). Assuming a kind of atomised spatial presence across the city, and inviting chance encounter rather than linear engagement, this poem sought, in its own whimsical way, to assume the ambient presence within the urban environment taken in early concrete manifestos as the means of renewing poetry’s ‘organic function in society’ (Gomringer [1954, 1968] 1970). The more general sentiment that this range of projects seems to express – an excitable sense of the potential range of spatially configured encounters with poetic language – counterbalances the comic scepticism regarding concrete poetry and the pull back towards narrative sequence and authorial perspective more evident in Starryveldt. In combination, these two aspects of Morgan’s concrete poetics show him working towards a linear–spatial poetics alert to McLuhan’s post-visual oral age, inscribed with the formal effects of the various communicative modes at play in the modern mind. 136

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Figure 4: From Festive Permutational Poem

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Off-Concrete: Permutational, Emergent, and (more) Animal Poems Morgan conceived many more subcategories of the concrete poem between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, from permutational and ‘emergent’ poems to the bestiary sequence The Horseman’s Word (1970b). Many of these pieces have the same kind of comic veneer as the work just discussed, prompting us to re-emphasise that concrete poetry never entirely consumed Morgan’s creative energies. But in many cases they also seem to resolve the competing concerns underlying Morgan’s earliest work in concrete style, reconciling his wariness regarding concrete poetry’s homogenising linguistic impulses with his sense of its unique ability to express a diverse range of communicative paradigms and his interest in its spatial possibilities. This led, by the late 1960s, to Morgan’s most effective ‘off-concrete’ poems, which adapt concrete grammar to a range of polemical, fantastical, and emotionally expressive ends. What I am calling Morgan’s permutational poems might better be called ‘permutational-esque’, in that, rather than being composed by shuffling a small, pre-defined group of words, they merely give the impression of such restrictive compositional formulae, through close phonetic and grammatical linkages, while in fact ranging over wide lexical landscapes. Such poems are often effective vehicles for polemic, allowing far-ranging expositions on topical themes while the impression of random shuffling, and the implied absence of an authorial voice, generates a kind of camouflage of neutrality. As in some of the Noigandres’s early work, striking shifts in semantic meaning are achieved through minute phonetic and grammatical alterations – think of Augusto de Campos’s Luxo Lixo (‘Luxury/Junk’) (1966) – generating a complementary, sardonic humour. The title-poem from Starryveldt is a case in point (Morgan 1965e, [19]; Figure 5). This poem’s strict rules of formal composition – alternating monosyllabic and polysyllabic lines, mainly one word long, using an s…v… construction rule – give the impression of a highly restricted lexical field. But the poem covertly spans a wide range of terms and allusions to tackle another topic connected to contemporary anti-colonial struggle, the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, when South African police opened fire on anti-apartheid protestors. Across the poem’s ten opening lines, the capitalised word ‘SHARPEVILLE’ seems to set the scene and sound. Phonetically and thematically associated words appear to ripple outwards from it, including ‘southvenus’, a pun, Colin Nicholson notes, on ‘parvenus’, referring to the European settlers whom the black 138

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population must ‘serve’ (2002, 91). At the same time, a linear narrative can be traced across the radiating lines, the appearance of ‘SHARPEVILLE’ seeming to herald the onset of the massacre, interrupting the grinding routine implied by ‘slave’ and ‘serve’ with sudden ‘shoves’ and ‘swerves’. Further on, the refrain ‘starve … strive’ seems to widen the time-frame, as if predicting a long struggle for enfranchisement, while the final line achieves an acerbic yet ambivalent narrative conclusion: ‘so: VAEVICTIS’ (‘woe to the vanquished’). Through the incorporation of theme and polemical perspective into the permutational poem, concrete abstraction seems to be submerged in anti-colonial polemic. But the poem does not dispense with concrete principles. Indeed, the oddly fatalistic tone of that closing line – the disenfranchised, Morgan suggests, have no rights – almost seems like an ambient effect of the formal constraints, the reduced syntax and insistent phonetic rhythm generating a correlative emotional coolness. Whatever we make of that uncharacteristically pessimistic authorial message, the poem exemplifies one aspect of Morgan’s off-concrete sensibility, combining concrete techniques with a range of devices that adapt those techniques to topical themes in a manner that is in turn tempered by the tonal effects of concrete grammar. A similar back-and-forth interplay between concrete and non-concrete effects is achieved in Morgan’s Emergent Poems (1967a), though in this collection the associated tone is more emotive or expressionistic than polemical. This set of poems, published as an instalment in Hansjörg Mayer’s Futura poster-poem series, was created by repeating and partially erasing passages of found text.17 As well as achieving the effects of thematic specificity and narrative perspective just outlined, many of the poems seem to tug at the sense of their source-phrases, an impression complemented by the visual suggestion of letters dispersed or atomised across the page. This suggests an erasure or slippage of meaning antithetical to the initial aim of concrete poetry: to clarify and pare down semantic meaning through visual arrangement. However, as with ‘Starryveldt’, these effects are generated within – and made more pronounced by – concrete compositional restraints. The sequence conveys a rhetorical and emotional intensity reflecting the ‘strongly emotional impulse’ under which Morgan later recalled writing the first emergent poem (1987a), ‘Message Clear’, on a bus journey home after visiting his terminally ill father (McGonigal 2010, 157). This poem consists of variations on the line attributed to the crucified Christ in the Gospel of John: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. Repeated 55 times over as many lines, different letters are erased from all but the last 139

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Figure 5: ‘Starryveldt’ 140

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iteration of the phrase, creating a long, spatially atomised narrative that reveals its origin only at the poem’s conclusion (Morgan 1967a, n.pag.; Figure 6). Adopting, with a certain wilful iconoclasm, the voice of Jesus, Morgan’s poem opens on a cry of anguish and self-doubt that undercuts the source-phrase’s impression of divine self-sufficiency: i am the resurrection and the life I am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the resurrection and the life … i am the resurrection and the

The lines read ‘am i[?]/ if/ i am he/ hero/ hurt/ there and/ here and/ here/ and/ there’. The impression of mortality and vulnerability is complemented by the visual form, the dispersal of letters seeming to transcribe the stuttering intonation of the dying, but also of an uncertain prophet. The missing ending to the question ‘am i[?]’ is presumably ‘the resurrection and the life’, generating a tone of doubt that is resounded further down the page: i am i am i am i am i am i am i am …

the the the the the the the

resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection

and and and and and and and

the the the the the the the

life life life life life life life

The correct reading – ‘i die/ a mere sect/ a mere section/ of/ the life/ of/ men’ – implies an incomplete task of religious conversion, while acknowledging the relativity of religious doctrine, that prophets create ‘mere sects’. However, visual effects nuance the scanning process, the repeated, conjoined am – created by the coagulation of letters at certain points – inviting the alternative scans ‘i am resect’ and ‘i am [a] resection’, references to the surgical removal of organs, suggesting self-sacrifice, the 141

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Figure 6: ‘Message Clear’. This copy, from the Scottish Poetry Library’s Edwin Morgan Archive, shows Morgan’s corrections.

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absorption of sin for the benefit of a larger whole. Another hinted-at line – ‘i am erect’ – suggests an upright, suspended body, cultivating the same images of an embodied figure as the following section – ‘i am here/ i act/ i run/ i meet’ – without extinguishing its subtle homoerotic energy by directly presenting itself. The complex sentiments generated across the poem come to rest through a final unfurling of meaning that reveals the narrator as simultaneously mortal and immortal: i i i i i i i

am am am am am am am

the the the the the the the

resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection resurrection

and and and and and and and

the the the the the the the

life life life life life life life

As well as having the power to ‘resurrect a life’, the protagonist remains human, ‘in life’. We might speculate that Morgan was equivocating over the implications of his materialist worldview for a religious faith that his early verse shows him struggling to cast off, unsure whether to forego the solace it might offer in moments of crisis.18 Not just the poem’s specificity of theme but the characterised complexity and emotional wroughtness of the voice seem antithetical to concrete poetry’s reductive impulses. But vital to those qualities are the layered metaphors and grammatical patterning generated by the poem’s visual arrangement: ‘Message Clear’ in fact makes concerted use of ‘graphic space as a structural agent’, but for different ends from those for which that technique was conceived. At the same time, the emotional intensity of the voice is more striking because of its emergence from within the rigid framework of the concrete poem. Morgan’s ongoing interest in using concrete poetry to depict non-human cognition and communication comes across in his last exclusively concrete collection, The Horseman’s Word (1970b). This animal-poem sequence re-establishes an earlier thematic conceit, but whereas Morgan’s early 1960s animal poems seemed to employ that theme partly for its very insignificance – and thus to parody classical concrete poetry – this collection seems more earnestly concerned with giving voice to its subjects. To that end, it relies more unambiguously on concrete techniques, particularly those dependent on typewriter composition. While still comic in spirit, the poems in The Horseman’s Word depict equine thought and 143

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communication in a manner that is really concerned with emphasising the material bases of human thought and language, by challenging conceptions of consciousness as an exclusive, divinely ordained capacity. That impression is reinforced by the constant shifts in perspective – from horse to human – that propel the sequence forward. The collection’s name is highly appropriate in this sense, referring to the fabled, interspecies language practised by the Society of the Horseman’s Word, an ancient fraternal order of ‘horsemen, ploughmen, farrowers and blacksmiths centred on north-east Scotland’ whose meetings had been attended in the early 1950s by Morgan’s friend Hamish Henderson (Neat 2009, 4).19 Given his more earnest desire to make the subjects of these poems ‘speak’, Morgan attempts more subtle means of bridging the human– equine cognitive divide than the pictorial letter-arrangements used to depict animal behaviour in Starryveldt. In their place we find graph-like constructions, vaguely allusive of genetic code-charts, which seem to relay the underlying biological characteristics and developments generating the creatures’ outward appearance and behaviour. The poem ‘Eohippus’ makes the clearest use of this visual connotation: as John Holmes notes in a study of poetic responses to Darwinism, the piece comprises a truncated, tabular survey of the evolution of horse genera from the prehistoric, ‘diminutive [and] undistinguished’ Eohippus or ‘dawn horse’ – the poem’s four-letter lines a homage to its four-toed feet – to the ‘swift, tall, handsome, one-toed Equus’, the genus encompassing the modern horse (Holmes 2009, 29). A set of seemingly random letterconstructions suggest DNA codons, alluding to the evolutionary leaps and cul-de-sacs between prehistory and present (Morgan 1970b, 7): e e p u k i k a h u ….

t r t t f

l i l l f

The final line, ‘h o r s’, its letters accrued across the previous three lines, suggests the eventual inception and proliferation of the successful genus. But the poem doubles as an onomatopoeic impression of the noises and movements of an actual horse, snorting and trotting – ‘kitl katl huff’ – as if expanding suddenly and rapidly in size. While mimicking a scientific (human) language for ordering and categorising the natural world, then,

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the poem also presents a direct if imaginative auditory rendering of that world. ‘Newmarket’ also relies on onomatopoeia for thematic effect, initially creating a series of syncopated impressions of a racehorse’s strides (Morgan 1970b, 5): tk-tke tk-tke tk-tke tk-tke tk-tke tk-tke tk-tke hs-hss hs-hss ….

But human and equine expression are once again merged, first through the blending of hoof-beats into whip-cracks – ‘tk-tke’ to ‘hs-hss’ – and later by their transformation into the jockey’s cajoling, rewarding voice (Morgan 1970b, 5): km-kmm km-kmm km-kmm k-monn k-monn k-monn k-monn a-tsit

In attempting to imaginatively blend the languages, expressions, and bodies of Equus and Homo sapiens, Morgan explores both the possibilities of mythology – one of his poems’ protagonists is a Centaur – and the defamiliarising effects of dialect. ‘Kelpie’, whose title refers to a ‘lowland Scots water-spirit usually appearing as a horse’ (Nicholson 2002, 93), initially reads as a string of onomatopoeic noises, evoking the writhing and munching of a horse-like creature in a swamp (Morgan 1970b, 8): och laich loch hoch heich moch smeuch sauch souch ….

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But many of these ‘noises’ are in fact arcane Scots terms. The closing line, ‘stech enuech’, for example, can be translated as ‘gorged enough’ (Nicholson 2002, 93). Thus, they do not merely transcribe the movements and expressions of the creature, but also offer a covert semantic description of it. The playful merging of human and animal worlds throughout The Horseman’s Word reveals one of the serious purposes behind Morgan’s off-concrete style: to depict a universe animated by sentient beings exceeding the merely human, thus codifying a materialist, indeed post-humanist – in Hayles’s sense (1999) – conception of consciousness as a product of physical embodiment. More generally, the poems surveyed across this section, in their use of concrete techniques – grid-based visual arrangement, permutational and grammatically insistent syntax – in combination with effects of theme and narrative perspective to relay subjects and messages that are in turn qualified by the effects of concrete grammar, exemplify the playful, evasive compositional manoeuvres animating Morgan’s off-concrete style. Putting that style to a range of polemical, emotive, and philosophical ends, these poems push the boundaries of classical concrete poetry, perhaps indicating the movement of many concrete poets away from the style’s stricter formal imperatives by the close of the 1960s. A Universe Full of Voices: Sonic Concrete Poetry In August 1969, just before composing The Horseman’s Word, Morgan wrote the poem ‘Blues and Peal: Concrete 1969’ for a 1970 issue of Nicholas Zurbrugg’s magazine Stereo Headphones portentously subtitled ‘The Death of Concrete’. A series of word-pairs that teeter between sense and nonsense, the poem generates suggestions of energy both replenished and extinguished (Morgan 1970a): concrete is dancing concrete is trying karting is daunting karting is tiring dying is karting dying is tiring ….

‘Blues and Peal’ partly seems like a postscript to concrete poetry – certainly, Morgan made fewer and fewer forays into a visually orientated 146

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concrete style across the 1970s – and perhaps to a decade of countercultural energy: ‘dancing is tiring/ trying is daunting’ (Morgan 1970a). But the poem ends on a curious rising note, vaguely suggestive of a launch into orbit – ‘concrete is whing’ – from which various messages might be extrapolated. The implied lift-off might suggest that concrete poetry’s eccentric resistance to the gravitational pull of language had propelled it beyond the possibility of continued use. Or it might indicate Morgan’s interest in using concrete poetry to envisage the evolution of human consciousness in extra-terrestrial realms. Morgan explored this theme primarily through the sound-based variants of concrete poetry with which he began experimenting in the 1960s, utilising them more exclusively by the 1970s. Morgan’s sonic concrete poetry was influenced both by the worldwide growth of the sound poetry movement and by new types of Scottish poetry in dialect, which anchored exaggerated phonetic effects in specific auditory and social environments. Morgan’s sonic concrete poetry, I will suggest, contextualises the formal effects of the sound poem in topical and polemical ways, just as his off-concrete poetry contextualises the effects of the concrete poem. The primary characteristic of sound poetry as it was defined during the 1950s–1970s was an attentiveness to the sonic dimensions of spoken language similar to concrete poetry’s focus on the visual dimensions of written language. However, as Stephen Scobie suggests, because of the more evanescent, time-bound nature of its material – the spoken word, and vocal utterance generally – sound poetry tended more than concrete poetry towards ‘the open-ended, the improvisational’, ‘mov[ing] into the flux and uncertainty of language set free’. For Scobie, this ensured its survival in the culture of deconstruction which, by the end of the 1960s, was already toppling concrete poetry’s logocentric foundations: ‘[s]ound provides the “post” (perhaps the last post) for Concrete Poetry on the edge of postmodernism’. Thus, following the disintegration of any coherent concrete movement by around 1970, sound poetry ‘flourished in the 1970s, culminating in a series of major international festivals (Toronto, 1978; New York, 1980)’ (Scobie 1996, 151). As internationalist in outlook as the concrete movement, the sound poetry movement was primarily connected to Britain via London, thanks largely to Bob Cobbing and Writers Forum.20 But it also reached Glasgow, where Tom Leonard had been creating tape recorder-based poetry since the late 1960s after hearing a radio broadcast of Cobbing’s poem ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’ (Leonard 1986, 44).21 In 1978, Leonard and Joan Hughson organised Sound and Syntax, a three-day international 147

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sound poetry festival in Glasgow, at which Morgan appeared on a bill with the Viennese sound poets Ernst Jandl and Gerhard Rühm, also designing the festival’s poster. This provides some practical context for Morgan’s increasing engagement with concrete poetry’s sonic possibilities by the late 1960s. But the work associated with this development cannot be accounted for solely with reference to the aesthetics of sound poetry. The sound poets’ deconstructive self-reflexivity regarding the material bases of semantic sense, that is, tended to be counterbalanced by – perhaps even to generate – a compulsion to access a pre- or trans-semantic dimension of vocal expression which, foregoing language entirely, would communicate to the listener through a kind of deep sensory empathy. This impulse tended to dull sensitivity to the local and contextual resonances of particular phonic effects and phonetic constructions. Morgan’s sonic concrete poetry, by contrast, always evokes specific speech patterns and sound-worlds, often Scottish ones. This aspect of his work is better understood in relation to the poetry being composed by young Scottish writers such as Leonard during the late 1960s, which shared sound poetry’s zeal for defamiliarising phonic constructions but used these constructions to recreate – often in stylised forms – the language of real, geographically rooted communities. In Leonard’s case, the orthographic contortions required to bring these voices to the page indicated their exclusion from the institutional conventions of writing, and thus a broader predicament of social marginalisation.22 This wave of activity was centred on the University of Glasgow, where Morgan supported it as a critic and teacher, praising Leonard’s work in particular for its ‘compression-pump injection of whole miniature sociologies and philosophies into real and rude Glasgow speech’ (Morgan 1984, 5). Morgan also captured the new scene as editor of the anthology Four Glasgow Poets (Morgan 1967d), and as co-editor of Edinburgh University’s annual Scottish Poetry series between 1966 and 1972. The origins of Morgan’s sonic concrete poetry in fact extend back beyond either of the developments just outlined, to early 1960s poems that owe much to the MacDiarmid of ‘Water Music’ (1932), and thus indirectly to Joyce. But by the late 1960s this aspect of Morgan’s practice could be defined in relation to both the abstract vocal soundscapes of, say, Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin, and the more ideologically loaded phonetic play of Leonard et al. The obvious pleasure these poems take in the noisiness of speech belies a fundamental concern with capturing the effects of dialect within that noise. By dialect in this context I 148

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mean characteristics of oral language contingent on specific material circumstances: either on the socio-geographical origins responsible for the development of dialect in the normal sense, or on extraordinary, imaginary scenarios in which human grammar mutates and expands. As regards the first of these definitions, Morgan’s more phonetically playful poetry had been ranging over Scottish soundscapes since the early 1960s – take the comic, punch-drunk phrases of ‘Meeloney’s Reply to McBnuigrr’ (1963b) – but only in the late 1960s was such work incorporated into his roster of published concrete poetry. This was perhaps in response to that shifting and expanding sense of concrete style outlined in my second chapter, one upshot of which was a blurring of the boundaries between sound and concrete. Morgan’s breakthrough collection The Second Life (1968b) includes pieces such as ‘Canedolia’, his ‘Off-Concrete Scotch Fantasia’, which was composed in 1963 but held back from publication in Starryveldt. ‘Canedolia’, which opens the first of the grey-paged sections that mark out concrete poems from the rest of the collection, consists of a sequence of musical flurries of place-names, many of them Gaelic, with a call-and-response format involving interview-style questions (Morgan 1968b, 21): who saw? rhu saw rum. garve saw smoo. nigg saw tain. lairg saw lagg. rigg saw eigg. largs saw haggs. tongue saw luss. mull saw yell. stoer saw strone. drem saw muck. gask saw noss. unst saw cults. echts saw banff. weem saw wick. trool saw twatt … .

Grouped together by formal or emotive association rather than semantic logic, these place-names, though ‘real’, take on something of the neologistic aura of sound poetry. But the use of intelligible geographical references prevents a purely nonsensical effect. Instead, the poem’s noisiness encases specific evocations of space and place, as in the word ‘Canedolia’ itself, a mangled version of ‘Caledonia’, the Roman term for the unconquerable northern half of Britannia. Bearing in mind this allusion, the Celtic place-names perhaps become subtly triumphant markers of Scotland’s historic resistance to empire. By the time Morgan published his next major collection, From Glasgow to Saturn (1973a), the visual-concrete phase documented in Starryveldt and The Second Life had largely passed, but it had been superseded to some extent by more musical, sonorous variants of the style. Poems from that collection, such as ‘The First Men on Mercury’ – composed January 1970 – though still comic in import, clearly imply the political significance 149

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of grafting dialect onto sound-poetry effects, making the ‘noisiness’ of language a marker of unfamiliarity or suppressed usage (Morgan 1973a, 63): – We come in peace from the third planet. Would you take us to your leader? – Bawr Stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stretterhawl? – This is a little plastic model of the solar system, with working parts. You are here and we are there and we are now here with you, is this clear? – Gawl horrop. Bawr. Abawrhannahanna! ….

As in ‘Canedolia’, a call-and-response format personifies the sound poem’s protagonist, and again, the conversation – this time between RP-speaking Earthmen and Mercurians whose speech is littered with the tics and slang of Scots – alludes to colonial encounter. In this case, there are implications for the uneasy modern union of Scotland and England. Both poems thus combine some of the generic effects of sound poetry with formal devices that localise those effects, granting it narrative and thematic specificity and polemical vitality. If these poems convey Morgan’s interest in dialect in the normal sense, in other cases ‘dialect’ becomes the marker of more immediate and dramatic material influences on speech. This is certainly true of Morgan’s ‘spacepoem’ series of the mid-1960s, which expressed a long-standing fascination with extra-terrestrial travel. ‘With space exploration’, Morgan recalled in interview with Robert Crawford, ‘it was as if for the first time life was really catching up with science fiction, and somehow it seemed to be more of a subject for poetry’ ([1988] 1990, 134). Perhaps more specifically, it was a subject for concrete poetry, whose unconventional grammatical and syntactical constructions could relay the new frontiers of communication and mental experience that space travel would open out. Morgan’s stargazing also indicated a political stance: on the one hand, here was another scenario in which consciousness would reveal itself to be integrally shaped by material circumstance; on the other, it is notable that Morgan’s space and sci-fi poems feature cosmonauts rather than astronauts. Whatever the excesses of Soviet Cold-War realpolitik, space travel was still to be celebrated as the achievement of a collectivist rather than an individualist society. In terms of formal technique, some of Morgan’s spacepoems use the page-space emphasised by the concrete poem’s activation of visual 150

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perception as a metaphor for intergalactic space. Morgan mused on this comparison in Peace News, noting that ‘concrete poetry takes space as a key-word, whether it’s the use now being made of space in poetry and art, or the actual exploration of space which sets Gagarin as the Adam of a new era’ (1965a, 7). That metaphor is borne out in ‘Spacepoem 3: Off Course’ (Morgan [1966] 1973), in which units of text seem to break apart on the page in a state of zero gravity.23 But Morgan’s first instalment in the spacepoem series, ‘Spacepoem 1: From Laika to Gagarin’ (1968b, 75) – composed July 28, 1964 – relies more on phonetic than graphic effect, as Morgan explained to the concrete poet and editor of Tlaloc magazine Cavan McCarthy on January 26, 1965. McCarthy had written suggesting that a draft of the poem be made more visually striking, citing John Furnival’s Tower of Babel text murals as an exemplar. But Morgan, as he explained, was: [D]oing something different: to me the words and sounds are important and must emerge clearly, to JF they are more like bricks with which he builds and often they are set askew or overlaid so that they cannot be read … . Be not afeard, the isle is full of voices (or noises) – I wanted a succession of different noises/voices mechanical human scrambled/clear all the way through … . (Morgan 1965c)

Despite its focus on the mutation of human communication in space, ‘Spacepoem 1’ explores dialect in both the senses outlined above, using the techniques of sound poetry to suggest the alteration rather than eradication of linguistic origins in extraordinary new environments. Composed in tribute to the Soviet Union’s first canine and human space flights – Laika went up in 1957, four years before her human successor – ‘Spacepoem 1’ opens on a string of phonetic fragments dissecting and repeating the Russian words for rocket, ‘raketa’, and satellite, ‘sputnik’. The line also mimics the punctuated transmission systems used in early space voyages, suggesting both the geographical origins and chopped-up vocal messages of the orbiting cosmonaut.24 The repetition of ‘ra ke ta’ also conspicuously references the ‘rakete bee bees’ and ‘rakete rinnzeketes’ of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, placing the poem in a genealogy of avant-garde phonic verse (Morgan 1968b, 75): ra ke ta ra ke ta ra ke ta ra ke ta ra ke ta ra ke ta sputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsputsput nik lai nik bel nik strel nik pchel nik mush nik chernush nik zvezdoch akakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakaka ….

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Of course, the first line here also seems rather like a dog’s bark, suggesting that the poem’s protagonist might not be human. That impression is perhaps confirmed on the third line, which lists in abbreviated form, and by order of mission, the Soviet ‘space dogs’ Laika, Belka, Strelka, Pchelka, Mushka, Chernushka, and Zvezdochka. Across the next seven lines, various compound-words are forged from these names – ‘nikka laika kalai kanikka kanaka kana sput’ – and the bridge that follows contains a series of shuffled English translations: ‘barker’ (Laika); ‘whitie’ (Belka); ‘arrow’ (Strelka); ‘bee’ (Pchelka); ‘spot’ (Mushka); ‘blackie’ (Chernushka); ‘star’ (Zvezdochka) (Morgan 1968b, 75). Notwithstanding its semi-canine voice, Morgan’s first stanza is concerned with exploring both the evolution and endurance of human language in an extra-terrestrial setting. His second stanza, moreover, shifts focus to Laika’s human successor. Punctuated with sounds and syllables referencing Gagarin’s flight on the Vostock 1 – ‘dakakvos’, ‘davostok’ – the repetition of ‘dada’ is another obvious literary-historical allusion (1968b, 75): dakakvos dakakvos dakakvos dakakvos dakakvos davostok davostok davostok davostok davostok davostok dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada daga daga daga daga daga daga daga daga daga daga daga ….

Finally, across the close of the poem, new and used syllables are strung together to create a sequence of mock-heroic exclamations (Morgan 1968b, 75): vostok! mir! vladi! yuri! mir! vladi! vladimir! vladivostock! yurimirny vladimirny! yurilaika! nikitaraketa! balalaika! raketasobakaslava! vladislava!

‘Raketasobakaslava’ is a welding together of ‘raketa’ (rocket), ‘sobak’ (dog) and ‘slava’ (glory); ‘Balalaika’, as well as being a Russian stringed instrument, seems like an amalgam of ‘Belka’ and ‘Laika’. These rackety neologisms exemplify the way in which geographically and culturally specific references punctuate the whole piece, generating a sonic concrete poetry that imaginatively synthesises the effects of geographical origins and transformative physical environments on cognition and communication. ‘Spacepoem 1’ thus conveys a materialist impression of the relationship between linguistic communication and embodied context, while 152

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simultaneously expressing Morgan’s wide-eyed yet ideologically charged fascination with Soviet space travel. More generally, Morgan’s sonic concrete poetry contextualises the effects of the sound poem for the same polemical and topical ends as those for which his off-concrete poetry had adapted the concrete poem. Despite its ostentatious intertextual references, Morgan’s ‘spacepoem’ is, after all, not just a sound poem: it is a sound poem set in space. Into the Constellation: Conclusion Reflecting on the ‘Origin and Nature of Concrete Poetry’ in his 1972 essay ‘Into the Constellation’, Morgan took issue with the puritanical view of the style that he felt Mike Weaver had propagated through his 1966 article ‘Concrete Poetry’ (Weaver 1966):25 How expressionist may a constructivist poem be? Where must the axe fall? Mike Weaver … took his position firmly, and it might be argued too firmly, when he wrote ‘Concrete Poetry is an aesthetic movement in poetry, only indirectly concerned with moral, social, and psychological values. This is not to say that concrete art and poetry are not fully committed to the improvement of the environment, but only the Brazilians and the Czechs have shown any inclination for social or political engagement.’ Well, that ‘only’ is pretty bland, considering the very widespread impact and distinctive qualities of these two schools of poets, and in any case one cannot brush aside ‘moral, social, and psychological values’ so long as the medium in question is linguistic. (Morgan [1972] 1974, 24)

The sentiment expressed here is the same expressed across the whole sweep of Morgan’s off-concrete oeuvre. Combining classical concrete poetry’s key formal characteristics – those rooted in the constructivist, literary-modernist, and structuralist influences that Weaver approved of – with various devices re-establishing subject matter and narrative perspective, Morgan customised the concrete poem to meet a wide range of communicative paradigms. At the same time, the themes he broached were integrally altered by the rhetorical and metaphorical effects of concrete poetry itself. Indeed, for all that he occasionally seemed to poke fun at the style – and for all that his work in the style can fall back on throwaway humour and simplistic pictorial effects – Morgan’s engagement with concrete poetry reflected a genuine and prescient sense of its relevance to a whole gamut of new cultural, social, and technological paradigms: its capacity to reinvigorate Scottish literary

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modernism; to respond in materialist or post-existentialist fashion to the communicative frameworks of McLuhan’s post-visual ‘oral’ age; to relay a range of non-human intelligences from a proleptic post-humanist perspective, one highly appropriate to the era of first-wave cybernetics; and to make pithy Scottish-nationalist and anti-colonialist interventions on contemporary political themes. Morgan’s interest in contextualising the effects of the concrete poem was perhaps configured by two underlying sentiments. On the one hand, it indicates a clear sense of the contingency of language and thought on spatio-temporal circumstance; at the same time, as his comments on Weaver’s essay reveal, Morgan’s concrete poetry often encodes deep ethical commitments. As I suggested at the start of this chapter, in pursuing these aims in tandem, Morgan pushed classical concrete poetry to the limits of its powers, adapting it to the requirements of both a nascent post-structuralism and the activist tone of much sixties art and literature. But the two aims might also seem subtly contradictory. The cool sense of language and thought as products of material circumstance, that is, seems somehow to undermine his work’s polemical qualities, which imply an authorial value system conceived of as more than the arbitrary product of such circumstance. Indeed, this is a tension played out across Morgan’s entire body of work, one which is never obviously resolved; interpreting that tension positively, we might see it as the creative catalyst that sustained his practice across five decades, and the guarantor of its whittrick-like appeal. Much of Morgan’s poetry, that is, seems animated – to adapt his own terminology – by a kind of dance of emotive impulse and qualifying technical device. In this sense, it is no criticism to suggest that his concrete poems are the first in which we sense that playful, contradictory voice for which he is now celebrated.

Notes 1 Composition dates for Morgan’s poems are based on the holograph and typescript collections stored with his University of Glasgow papers. 2 Many of Morgan’s correspondences with international concrete poets are stored with his University of Glasgow papers. Several of these letters have since been published by McGonigal and Coyle (2015). 3 After initially registering as a conscientious objector, Morgan eventually decided he would ‘play a part in the war effort, but in a non-violent capacity’ (McGonigal 2010, 61).

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e dw i n morg a n 4 Morgan later recalled that one of these dialogues, ‘between neurophysiologist Grey Walter and poet Jean Cocteau … envisaged a sophisticated robot as [an] interface between two strongly held divergent views of human creativity … . The poem expressed something of the new-toy optimism about computer potential’ (Morgan 2006, 37–38). 5 Glendinning and Muthesius note that ‘in Glasgow from 1961 to 1968’, ‘multi-storey flats … accounted for a staggering 75% of all new public housing’, a uniquely high figure within Britain (1994, 4). 6 This transcript, now stored with Morgan’s University of Glasgow Papers, was perhaps written for a talk given in Glasgow in December 1964, to which McGonigal refers (2010, 165). Sections are identical to the archived transcript for a radio talk dated December 1964 (Morgan [1964] 1965) broadcast on the Third Programme on January 24, 1965 (according to a letter of February 14, 1965 from Morgan to Charles Cameron [Morgan 1965b]). This transcript, in turn, formed the basis for Morgan’s articles entitled ‘Concrete Poetry’ in Peace News (1965a) and in Bernard Bergonzi’s Innovations (1968a). 7 In Britain, the BBC had been operating as a radio broadcaster since 1927, launching the world’s first regular television service in November 1936. But Asa Briggs notes that radio licensee numbers in Britain still dwarfed the figures for combined ‘Sound and Television’ subscribers in 1955: ‘the figures at the end of March … had been 9,414,224 as against 4,403,766’ (Briggs 1961–95, vol. 4: 919). Following the launch of Independent Television (ITV) that year, these figures quickly reversed: [I]n 1956–57, … while there were still around 171/2 million listeners who depended exclusively on sound programmes, the BBC estimated that in 1962 … there would be as few as 3 million ‘sound only’ listeners as compared with ‘possibly twelve million combined licences’. The estimate proved remarkably accurate, although the 12 million figure had not quite been reached in time. (Briggs 1961–95, vol. 5: 30) 8 Eleanor Bell also argues that Morgan’s concrete poetics is influenced by McLuhan’s terminology (2012, 116–17). 9 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines the mode of being which characterises human consciousness (being-for-itself) as an absence or negation of the pure, undifferentiated being of the inanimate universe (being-in-itself). The prerequisite of human consciousness is thus not any essential quality or function but the negation or nihilation of a prior state, meaning, among other things, that human consciousness has to be defined as arbitrary or non-necessary, lacking any pre-determined metaphysical purpose (Sartre [1943, 1958] 2003). 10 The convergence of all these impulses can be sensed in Morgan’s early 1960s Scots translations of Mayakovsky (Morgan 1972). 11 As Sylvia Bryce-Wunder notes, there was some accuracy to Morgan’s complaints: ‘writings by MacDiarmid, Gibbon, [Edwin] Muir and [George] Blake paint a bleak picture of Glasgow that taps into and reinforces existing stigmatised views of the city, revealing that the early twentieth-century Scottish Renaissance was at least partially “built” on an anti-urban concept of modern Scottish cultural identity’ (2014, 87). 12 Marwick defines rising living standards and economic security as key factors in the advent of sixties culture, even suggesting that the counter-culture was fuelled by an explosion in youth entrepreneurship (1998, 17–18).

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bor de r blu r s 13 Seed (1992) notes that the early optimism of Harold Wilson’s Labour government of 1964–70 was shattered by economic crisis and its support for the US in Vietnam, after which left-wing politics increasingly migrated to the non-institutional outlets of the counter-culture. 14 Balestrini’s poem consists of quotes from Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, Paul Goldwin’s The Mystery of the Elevator, and the Tao Te Ching, shuffled on the Lombard Provinces Savings Bank Computer in Milan using ‘head-codes’ and ‘end-codes’ to narrow the range of possible phrase combinations. Morgan enclosed his translation with a letter sent to Sharkey on August 20, 1965 (Morgan 1965d). It seems that no issues of Lisn were ever published, but Morgan’s translation appeared in Jasia Reichardt’s exhibition catalogue for her 1968 computer art exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (Reichardt [1968] 1970, 55–56). 15 Morgan later explained that ‘[s]ince existing examples of “computer poetry” were at best surrealistically quirky and at worst dully mechanical, I thought an imaginative, simulated approach could open up the subject and let it shake its feathers for general speculation’ (2006, 39). 16 Sharkey did, however, finish a different film-poem, OPENWORDROBE. According to an undated letter to Fred Hunter (Sharkey 1964), the film was shown without sound at the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Kinetic and Phonetic Poetry in Cambridge in November 1964. A piece entitled ‘Stills from OPENWORDROBE’ was published in the ICA Bulletin two years later, and again in Williams’s 1967 anthology (Sharkey [1966] 1967). Sharkey’s biographical note in that anthology refers to ‘finishing the film-poem OPENWORDROBE in 1964’ (Williams [1967] 2013, 340). 17 Mayer’s Futura series ran between 1965 and 1968, publishing work by a range of European, South American, North American, English, and Scottish poets, also including Finlay and Edward Lucie-Smith. Each issue was printed in Futura type, and most unfolded to form a six-panel poster-poem or poem-sequence, with biographical and publication information on two left-hand panels. 18 See, for example, the 1952 poem ‘Sleight-of-Morals’: ‘May judge and witness sweeten on the apple,/ See through the braille of good and evil’ (Morgan 1990a, 29). 19 McGonigal notes, paraphrasing Alec Finlay, that Morgan and Henderson might have used references to the society’s homosocial ceremonies to ‘hint at gay subculture’ (2010, 335). 20 The seventh, eighth, and ninth International Festivals of Sound Poetry were held in London during 1974–76, part of the series whose final, North American instalments Scobie (1996) refers to. The festivals were organised following the radical takeover of the Poetry Society documented by Peter Barry, who provides a first-hand account of the seventh festival, and notes that the first six – 1968–73 – were held in Stockholm, the tenth – 1977 – in various locations across Europe (2006, 42–43). 21 On Cobbing and Leonard’s creative relationship see Beckett (2012b).

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e dw i n morg a n 22 The resultant poems thus bear a pugnacious energy, as markers of alienation from literary communities seen as complicit in this marginalisation: as in Leonard’s ‘Good Style’ (1968): helluva hard tay read theez init stull if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then gawn get tay fuck ootma road …. 23 A similar effect is used in Morgan’s unpublished ‘Spacepoem 2’ – composed January 6, 1966 – in which os seem to become moons or stars (Morgan 1966): space o o espace o o pass o past o silence o o o distance o o islands moons antlers asteroids stalagmites mastodons diamonds glaciers mountains dolmens fogbanks deadseas …. 24 If we accept this reading, the poem utilises a certain degree of creative licence, as the ‘pulsebeats’ emitted from early Sputnik satellites were ‘pure information, without any linguistic character’ (Hilder 2016, 133). 25 Perhaps not coincidentally, Weaver had previously criticised the ‘literary jokes and formal triviality’ of Morgan’s concrete poetry in a letter published in the TLS on March 7, 1968 (Weaver 1968b). Morgan was clearly upset by the attack, writing to Finlay three days later, on March 10: ‘what on earth has got into Mike Weaver? I was astonished by his attack on me’ (Morgan 1965–68).

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Apophasis Dom Sylvester Houédard Dom Sylvester Houédard The earliest examples of Dom Sylvester Houédard’s concrete poetry date from the start of 1963. These include the first of his ‘typestracts’, virtuosic geometrical constructions built up from letter-forms and diacritic marks utilising the graphic capabilities of his Olivetti Lettera 22 Series portable typewriter. These compositions were partly inspired by the international concrete poetry that Houédard had discovered via E.M. de Melo e Castro the previous year. After reading the Portuguese poet’s note in the TLS, Houédard also began corresponding extensively with many of the concrete poetry movement’s representatives worldwide, incorrigibly propagating his own approach to the style through a ceaseless stream of lectures, essays, and letters. It was with this frenzied activity in mind that John Sharkey, introducing his concrete poetry anthology Mindplay, described Houédard – along with Finlay – as one of the two ‘seminal personalities’ associated with the style in Britain (1971, 14).1 Houédard was influenced by the concepts initially associated with concrete poetry to the extent that his work employs language as a fundamentally visual medium and conveys a certain quality of methodical or rational design. Beyond that, relatively little binds it to the Brazilian and German work discussed in my second chapter. Whereas the first concrete poets emphasised the visual appearance of letters and words to enhance or methodically alter linguistic meaning, the visual arrangement of language-forms in Houédard’s work more often entails the erasure of semantic sense. In his typestracts, letters and diacritic marks are transformed into abstract architectonic motifs, language in its semantic capacities retained only in the form of occasional annotative or explanatory phrases. This anti- or trans-linguistic impetus was influenced 159

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less by classical concrete poetry than by a range of early twentieth-century and contemporaneous artistic and literary genres, including Dada, intermedia, and auto-destructive art, and various strands of contemporary North American poetry, as well as Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. In stripping the concrete poem of explicit referential value, Houédard also found a way of associating the reader’s encounter with the poem with an ideal of non-authoritarian social interaction. In this sense, his work represents a more concerted movement than so far considered towards the new uses made of concrete poetry via the influences of Dada and Futurism, intermedia art, and counter-cultural ideology. To state this without qualification, however, is perhaps to miss the most striking and integral feature of Houédard’s work, one that makes it somewhat resistant to generic interpretative models: the work frequently represents an attempt to express what might be called a state of union with God. This imperative connects his poetry to his other vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian – the ‘Dom’ prefixing his name is short for ‘Dominus’, a title given to certain members of Catholic religious orders – and more specifically to various traditions of apophatic or negative theology that stressed the need to renounce all subjective accounts of God’s nature in order to cultivate an awareness of it. Often, this involved abandoning linguistic sense: as Houédard noted in an interview with Colin Wilson, ‘God is better described as nothing rather than something; indeed if you use the word nothing you already have a concept’ (1982, 170). For this reason, introducing Houédard’s work involves turning in the first instance not to his literary or artistic criticism – of which reams were produced – but to his theological writing, which refers to – and in a sense emerges from – a global spiritual tradition reflecting what Houédard called ‘the wider ecumenism’ (1965f). His posthumous Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons (2000), compiled from lectures presented to the Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi Society in 1990, offers an exemplary rather than authoritative account in this regard, but nonetheless provides one speculative point of access to his poetics. The Commentaries draw continuous parallels between their primary subject, the Christian mystic Eckhart (1260–ca.1327), and figures from a range of world religions, primarily the Sufi mystic Ibn ’Arabi, outlining two ‘paradoxes’ explored by both thinkers. Firstly, Houédard is concerned with ‘the paradox of perpetual creation’: ‘that we are continuously receiving being without any interruption, and this being is the self-gift of God. So we have the paradox as to whether we can say it is God’s Being or our being; He gives it to us as ours’ (2000, 4). The 160

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most inner aspect of the human mind, beyond subjective consciousness, is, according to Houédard, actually a facet of God, separated from his elementary, indivisible state so that he can recognise and celebrate himself: his ‘self-gift’. This inner aspect can thus be defined as both human and God – or, in a state of union with God. Secondly, Houédard considers ‘the paradox of what St. Paul calls epectasy, which is the continuous advance of the mind to God, which goes on through time and through eternity so that we never reach God but we always journey towards him’ (2000, 4). The mind in its outer, subjective aspect can never inhabit this state of union, passing out of it in the very act of reflecting on it, rendering the union an object of thought rather than a state of being. This outward movement is identical with the moment of cognition, and thus of all communication, including poetry. Houédard’s writing often presents this problem as one of temporality, the impenetrability of inner mind coextensive with the impenetrability of the present moment: [T]he future, as everybody is aware, becomes the present and the very instant that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past and this point where this arrival and departure of being takes place has no extension at all. So, though we truly receive being which is the self-gift of God, we retain it for zero-time but we do so perpetually. (Houédard 2000, 5)

The only way for the subjective mind to achieve some intimation of inner mind, the Commentaries imply, is to cultivate an awareness of it as an ungraspable other, a state for which Houédard glosses various terms: ‘[i]n English at least we have the word “awareness” – St Augustine used the word “contuition” and Tibetans use the word rigpa’. In a state of awareness, ‘[t]he mind is perfectly aware that … it cannot be known by any actual act of knowing’ (2000, 5). For Houédard, one of concrete poetry’s fundamental aptitudes was its capacity to transcribe and hone this ‘awareness’ – this sense that the mind is united with God, but that that state is unknowable – by making that state of union its ultimate object while not showing or telling the reader–viewer anything about it. His own work attempts this through a process I call ‘negative representation’. The conversion of language into abstract visual design is one of two primary techniques involved in it, although, as I clarify below, that process can be better defined as involving the coexistence of visual and linguistic forms. The other technique reflects the impossibility of creating a poem, whether linguistic or visual in form, that literally refers to nothing. Often, therefore, Houédard shifts the focus 161

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of the concrete poem to something conceptually related to, but distinct from, its ultimate object, namely the process of prayer, thought, or ritual by which union with God is reflected upon. Such poems scrupulously avert their gaze from their object while covertly evoking it by thematic association. Importantly, this process of negative representation does not somehow transcend normal representative methods, rendering some mystical state of expressionless expression. Rather, his method works through the conspicuous absence of part of the content one might expect of the poem. It is thus reliant for effect upon simultaneous and implicit definition of that poem’s object, often through some subtly ‘positive’ aspect of the work – such as the annotative phrases mentioned above – and/or the reader’s pre-existing awareness of the broader scope and themes of Houédard’s practice. In assessing Houédard’s concrete poetry, then, we might seem required to hold two unrelated contexts in focus. On the one hand, his work stands for the general development of concrete poetry across the 1950s–1970s from a minimalistic, constructivist-orientated style into one more connected to neo-dada aesthetics, associable in many instances with intermedia art and counter-cultural ideology. On the other, Houédard’s poetry was a means of notating a private spiritual impulse reflecting a highly unique set of biographical circumstances. However, what we might call the secular and religious contexts for Houédard’s work are less detached than they might appear. Approached from either angle, the principle of negative representation is defined by an imperative of selflessness: a will to renounce the self-affirming character of language that is explicable both in terms of egalitarian counter-cultural politics and its associated art-forms, and as a kind of ascetic spiritual function. Moreover, in Houédard’s worldview these two contexts were not clearly distinguished: he did not see the capacity for religious awareness that his work expressed, that is, as exclusively available to the adherents of any particular faith, but as innate in human consciousness as such, and therefore expressible via a range of alternative spiritualities, including, importantly, those he attributed to the counter-culture. Moreover, the way in which Houédard defined the counter-culture – as we will see – as a kind of global spiritual awakening was itself exemplary of his era, reflecting, among other things, the permeation of Buddhist thought across that culture. It was, in fact, the close association between concrete and the counter-culture that meant that, by the close of the 1960s, more and more poets were using the style, as Jamie Hilder puts it, to seek ‘a spiritual experience via the merging of logos and imago’; and, while Hilder asserts that such work ‘should not be 162

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read as exemplary of the movement’ (2016, 27), the adaptation of concrete poetry to theological and religious ends seems, in retrospect, to be one of the style’s defining applications. Thus, while this chapter focuses closely on a theological poetics, my argument does not enter a backwater. Connections are noted throughout with the broader artistic and cultural paradigms at stake in this book. After touching briefly on Houédard’s poetry of the 1940s to early 1960s, I explain his engagement with concrete poetry by stressing his sense of its ability to enhance the negative or apophatic capacities of contemporaneous literary styles – including beat and objectivist poetry – as well as concrete poetry’s Wittgensteinian resonances. These factors underpin a reading of Houédard’s first concrete poetry collection, Kinkon (1965d), which is followed by an exploration of the connections between Houédard’s mid-1960s poetics – particularly his ‘machinepoems’ – and counter-cultural politics. The final part of the chapter considers another, related aspect of Houédard’s 1960s poetics, discussing the typestracts in relation to their engagement with Buddhism and Hinduism, especially Tantric mythology and ritual, a spiritual affinity that, again, was exemplary of its time and culture. Jeux Théologiques: Early Poems Houédard was born and brought up in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, by a family of French heritage (Verey 2017). Between 1941 and 1949 he attended Jesus College, Oxford, though his studies were interrupted by a period of work for the Ministry of Food and the Intelligence Corps in Asia during 1944–47 (Verey 2017). Upon graduating Houédard joined Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire as a novice monk, taking his vows in 1951 before spending three years working on a licentiate degree at Sant Anselmo Benedictine College in Rome, completing a thesis on ‘liberty in Sartre’ (as he recalled in a 1972 biographical note [Verey 1972, 26]). Returning to Prinknash, Houédard was ordained as a priest in 1959 and remained at the abbey until his death in 1992. At Oxford, Houédard later recalled, he had written ‘poems aiming at newform’, ‘mostly [in] French’ (Verey 1972, 26); as a native of the Channel Islands he was bilingual. His 1950s poetry he characterised in retrospect as ‘metaphysical. beat. apophatic’ (Reichardt 1965, 51). Poems from 1948–63 were gathered together under the title Jeux Théologiques (Houédard [1963?f]). Houédard later described this work as ‘leading from opposition to accepted images

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to opposition to all images’, noting that it was variously called ‘neometaphysical’ and ‘beat’ (Verey 1972, 26).2 While often narrowly theological in theme and arguably shallow in terms of their formal delivery, these poems are interesting in adopting comically outlandish metaphors for the protagonist’s relationship to God, perhaps reflecting an ‘opposition to accepted images’ prefiguring the negative poetics of concrete. These metaphors might be interpreted in relation to surrealist poetry, even the metaphysical conceit, but they are probably best viewed as reworked motifs from Catholic mysticist verse, tempered by the informal grammar and lineation of the beats, as in his 1950 poem ‘The God Pie’ (Houédard [1963?f], n.pag):3 in the oven of the spirit my soul is cooking the blessed trinity in a pie eager to tell if it is getting brown or even done it yet refrains itself from peeping for to open the door of that dark oven would be to let in cooling air and light and draughts that might blow out the flame of love ….

This idiosyncratic analogy partly constitutes a colloquial allusion to pregnancy – the idea of having ‘one in the oven’ – reworking the barely latent metaphors of sexual insemination that characterise descriptions of the relationship between God and subject in the poetry of, say, St John of the Cross. In this respect, the poem seems like an attempt to freshen the narrator’s sense of that relationship, but the obvious absurdity of the image also suggests some whimsical authorial detachment from it. Humour is often used as a distancing device in this way in Jeux Théologiques, as if to acknowledge the impossibility of linguistically expressing the relationship between supplicant and deity. By around 1962 Houédard seemed briefly to feel that he had found a way of expressing that relationship, through a kind of grammatically truncated poetry, arranged in perpendicular strings of minute lines. Reflecting on this work in a later biographical note, he described it as ‘not just increasingly shorter but increasingly self-referent’ (Verey 1972, 6). As if withdrawing from direct expression of their object, these poems relay, with the minimum possible linguistic impediment, the act of

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prayer, while their peculiar lineation partially draws attention away from semantic meaning towards the ulterior, non-referential visual presence of lines on the page. Informal grammar and punctuation and short overall length cultivate an associated sense of brevity and lightness and partly suggest the continuing influence of beat poetry. But those qualities seem more primarily to respond to a new generation of mainly British-based poets, such as Anselm Hollo, who were inspired by the beats and whose work Houédard referred to as ‘Afterbeat’ (1963a). These qualities can be sensed in the following unpublished poems, both dated April 17, 1963 (Houédard 1963d; 1963e): every image of god i see is me & most of all the one of him as nothing eaten by a nothing image in my mind i’m endlessly inside my endless inside me

These poems seem to evoke the condition of ‘epectasy’ – the endless approach of the mind towards God and its passage out of him in the moment of cognition – thus gesturing towards God as an unspeakable absence. The diminutive overall length, and tiny lines suggestive of restless forward movement – as if to remain on one for too long would be to get stuck in the past – seem like qualities appropriated from ‘afterbeat’ poetry to the same end, implying a pointed withdrawal from further expression. At the same time, the curious visual appearance – which, like the impression of momentarily transcribed thought, represents a point of affinity with Robert Lax’s early 1960s poetry – diverts part of the reader’s attention away from semantic meaning altogether, partially reframing written language as an arrangement of nonfigurative marks or strokes

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that seem to possess some mute expressive force. In deferring expression of their object by focusing on the act of prayer, and in terms of their burgeoning visual significance, coextensive with a reduced linguistic element, these poems seem in retrospect to anticipate the more striking non-linguistic work to follow. Coexistentialism: Houédard’s Concrete Poetry In his TLS article ‘Paradada’ (1964d) Houédard stated that he, like many other English and Scottish poets, had discovered concrete poetry through E.M. de Melo e Castro’s letter in the TLS on May 25, 1962. Like Edwin Morgan, however, Houédard’s creative response seems to have been deferred: around a year passed before his first work in a recognisably ‘concrete’ style and his first interactions with others working in the same field. The latter seemingly began in Spring 1963: a letter from Gomringer dated July 5, almost certainly from that year, seems to respond to an introductory note from Houédard: ‘i never expected any interest in kp from England’ (Gomringer [1963]). The earliest of Houédard’s letters from the De Campos brothers is dated July 26, 1963 (Haroldo/Augusto de Campos 1963) while, as outlined in my third chapter, Houédard had begun corresponding with Finlay slightly earlier. Over the same period Houédard also began accumulating contacts in the West Country, drawing together the constellation of writers and artists reputedly christened the ‘Gloup’ – short for ‘Gloucestershire Group’ – by the North American poet Jonathan Williams. In 1963 Houédard attended an exhibition of text-art by John Furnival in a gallery space attached to Gloucestershire College of Art’s Cheltenham campus. A meeting was arranged at which Houédard introduced Furnival to the work of Finlay, Gomringer, and the Noigandres poets, and their press Openings was formed the same day (Furnival, personal interview, May 15, 2012). Houédard met the Bristol-based poet, curator, and editor John Sharkey and the artist Kenelm Cox around the same time, the former through Bristol’s poetry and art scene (Sharkey, personal interview, June 24, 2012), the latter through Furnival, Cox’s teaching colleague at the Stroud campus of Gloucestershire College (Furnival, letter to the author, January 24, 2011). In January 1966 the German concrete poet Hansjörg Mayer, a skilled typographer who had studied with the information theorist Max Bense in Stuttgart, began working at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham (Ferran 2017b, 38), bringing a new level of design expertise and theoretical nous to the West-Country scene. 166

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Another important collaborator was the poet and editor Charles Verey, based between London and the West Country in the mid-1960s, who recalls first meeting Houédard at a poetry festival in Nottingham in 1965 (Verey n.d., 1). From 1968 onwards Verey shared a flat in Dorset with the poet Thomas A. Clark (Verey n.d., 3), who had been visiting the West Country since the mid-1960s (Clark 2007) and whose first encounters with Houédard date from 1964–65 (Clark, email to the author, October 23, 2014). The loosely associated activities of these poets and artists from around 1963 onwards indicate a working environment distinct from that of the more geographically isolated Scottish concrete poets, and it precedes by several years the comparable collaborative networks that would develop in London by the close of the 1960s. Thus, despite the attention paid to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London as hubs of concrete practice within Britain, it was in and around various towns and cities in the West of England – Bath, Bristol, Stroud, Cheltenham – that something approaching a British concrete poetry movement first developed, thanks largely to Houédard’s galvanising energy. The stylistic evolution of Houédard’s work from linear to concrete verse is more difficult to trace than this gradual accrual of contacts, partly because many of his earliest visual-linguistic poems were circulated privately with letters.4 But, clearly, the unpublished poem ‘Can Yr Typewriter Waggle its Ears’ – dated April 1, 1963 – was written at a time when the underpinning ideas were in ferment (Houédard 1963b): my t’writer s got real inside interiority it types the logos into smudges thru ribbon images with a feeling of assurance writes innerness poetry with a note of authority performs poetrygraphs & eyepoems with absolute unrepeatability its junkey prayerlife is the total silence of a contemplative nothing construction shooting out the din of its soul at work ….

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Concrete poetry’s myriad attractions to Houédard were perhaps all subsidiary to his sense of its capacity to express ‘prayerlife’, a quality dilettantishly described in this poem as ‘junkey’ [sic]. The following section of this chapter focuses on Houédard’s interpretation of concrete poetry as a means of extending the negative-representative capacities of contemporaneous literary genres, and the relationship he posited between concrete poetry and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. At the same time, I stress the connections between Houédard’s theological interpretation of concrete poetry and global developments in the style during the 1950s–1970s, and I briefly assess the critical work Houédard undertook during the early to mid-1960s to trace historical parallels and analogies for concrete poetry. At one level, Houédard’s interest in concrete poetry reflected his sense of its ability to concentrate the qualities of self-referentiality – of scrutiny on the signifier – that he found in a range of other post-war poetic genres. In his Aylesford Review article ‘To Freshen Our Sense of the Language We Do Have’ – named after a line from a Charles Olson letter – Houédard presents concrete poetry as an advance on two styles in particular: 3 things in postwar poetry – the beats/redcats (ginsberg-corso-yevtushenkovossnesensky – the newpoetry of olson zukofsky creely [sic] & the cidevant-blackmountaineers – la nouvelle poésie of gomringer-rot-kpnoigandres of ianhamiltonfinlay & maxbense of henrichopin bernardheidsieck bryongysin. (Houédard 1964g, 154)

In a later passage Houédard reduces the ‘nouvelle poésie’ category to ‘concrete’ and also removes the reference to the Russian ‘redcats’. In essence, the article traces an incremental stylistic development between three genres: beat poetry, ‘new poetry’ (incorporating Black Mountain verse and objectivism), and concrete poetry. This development, Houédard states, involved an increasing emphasis on the ‘expression of ch’i rather than self’, evoked as a movement ‘up thru the purgativa via of beat – [to the] illuminativa of the new – to the unitiva of concrete where “the syllable turns solid” (zukofsky in letter) & the poem communicates not some tertium quid but its own self poemly’ (1964g, 154). ‘Ch’i’, a Taoist term meaning inner breath or energy, perhaps allusive of Olson’s poetics of breath, seems to indicate some mental essence exceeding subjective cognition, an idea comparable to Houédard’s notion of inner mind. The phrases ‘via purgativa’, ‘via illuminativa’, and ‘via unitiva’ are references to the stages of ‘theosis’, a process of personal development into God’s likeness outlined in the writing of St John of the Cross. In short, the ‘via 168

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purgativa’ involves a purgation of selfish desires, the ‘via illuminativa’ a subsequent, illuminating awareness of God, and the ‘unitiva’ a resulting state of unity, one that Houédard implies to be uniquely expressible through concrete poetry, associating the ‘purgative’ and ‘illuminative’ steps with beat and ‘new’ poetry respectively. In practice, the process that Houédard outlines involves an increasingly pronounced emphasis on the gap between language and its objects, entailing a coextensive emphasis on the non-referential, visual, and material qualities of language itself. This culminates in the wholly self-referential poetics of concrete, which lacks any object other than its own material form. Divorced from its theological context, this might merely seem a slightly over-generalising exposition on the development of modernist poetry in the post-war West, especially in North America. But the analogy with theosis connects the notion of concentrated self-referentiality with a kind of spiritual insight, a blossoming awareness of some inexpressible component of consciousness, around which contemporary poetic language was increasingly orientated, but which could only be alluded to by ever more pronounced means of non-reference. If the theological aspects of this rubric force us to acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of Houédard’s approach to concrete poetry, the genealogy into which he inserts the style indicates the widespread influence of mid-century North American literary modernism over British poets during the 1960s. Indeed, while not leaning on the new precedents and analogies for concrete posited towards the end of my second chapter – Dada and Futurism, intermedia art – Houédard’s 1964 Aylesford Review article does reflect the more general drift of concrete style away from its initial stylistic and geographical bases, exemplifying a related tendency to tether creative and critical responses around North American reference points. Moreover, other articles written during this period, notably ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’ (1963c), place the negative poetics of concrete in a broader historical trajectory that is more clearly associable with the alternative stylistic lineage outlined in my second chapter. In Houédard’s article on Finlay, however, the picture is again complicated, as the historical role ascribed to concrete poetry is to resolve the competing constructivist and dadaist tendencies within modern art and literature, rather than to enact a shift in emphasis from one to the other. Houédard presents the negative-representative character of concrete poetry as a means of resisting or circumventing an anachronistic emphasis on trans-referential expression evident across a whole swath of modern art, including a range of work responsive to both Dada and 169

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constructivism. Offering a typically ambitious chronological sweep, the article posits ‘2 tendencies in modern art since Napoleon III’s Salon des Refusés 1863’ (an event that Houédard often took as the point of origin for conceptions of the avant-garde). Firstly, there is ‘the largely pre-WW/1 move to the authentic & non-mimetic’, a category Houédard subdivides into ‘CONSTRICTIVE CONTRACTIVE’ and ‘CONSTRUCTIVE’. The first of these sub-categories incorporates artistic styles that attack or undermine existing expressive registers, including the ‘the necessary negative anti-past (but still creative) épurations [purges or purifications] of eg the Dadaists & surrealism’. The ‘constructive’ subcategory indicates the ‘affirmative pro-future creativeness on each side of the emotional/ cerebral (heart/mind or expressionist/cubist &c/&c) split’. This includes art and literature that attempts to construct new representative modes possessing an authenticity lacking in previous ones, an ideal often staked on somehow moving beyond representation altogether. This sub-category incorporates, but is not limited to, the tradition of ‘constructivism’ so-called (Houédard 1963c, 47). Houédard’s second ‘tendency’, with which he associates concrete poetry – though he also finds ‘constrictive’ and ‘constructive’ elements within it – is ‘the largely post-WW/2 overspill to coexistentialism & mutual interpenetration, rejection of divides & borders, delight in accepting ambiguity/ambivalence: alive blurring of frontiers between art & art, mind & mind, world & world, mind art & world … . SPATIAL COEXISTENTIAL’ (1963c, 47). The coexistentialism of post-1945 art and literature, Houédard suggests, involves the merging of artistic media in a manner that playfully demystifies their collective workings while avoiding an outright rejection of any of them. Such work, for Houédard, acknowledges almost light-heartedly the universal and inevitable failure of artistic expression to relay its objects, at least with the kind of ‘non-mimetic’ accuracy previously sought. The development the article posits, then, is from a concern with representative systems that would express their objects with a fidelity surpassing reference towards a whimsical acceptance of their failure to do so. Concrete poetry, by this account, entails a convergence of written language and visual expression, implying their common containment in a kind of limbo-realm of signs. By this means, his theory strips the concrete poem of any power of reference as either language or image. In this sense, the text-based visual constructions that constitute so much of Houédard’s concrete poetry are best conceived of as entailing a mutually relativising coexistence of linguistic and visual form, rather than as 170

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abstract images constructed from letters and diacritics. Thus, while the emphasis placed on the synthesis of media in ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’ can be associated at a surface level with a neo-dada approach to concrete poetry, the underlying aesthetics of ‘coexistentialism’ seem closer to a nascent post-modernism. Importantly, however, for Houédard the non-representative character of concrete poetry was not a means of expressing the chimerical nature of representative systems per se, but of implying their inadequacy in relaying the particular, divine object of his work. This point can be clarified by touching on the influence of Wittgenstein, especially the Philosophical Investigations, on Houédard’s poetics. First published posthumously in 1953, Philosophical Investigations recanted the central proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921: the idea that there was an essential structure to linguistic propositions from which the essential structure of ‘the world’, reality, could be deduced. Language is re-envisaged in the Investigations as a ‘spatial and temporal phenomenon’, a series of instances or examples structurally determined by the circumstances of their use to construct a workable impression of a particular object or scenario (Wittgenstein [1953, 1958] 1972, 47). Language, by this account, lacks any essential, commonly discernible structure. Moreover, because the supposition of some such structure in the Tractatus had been the basis of the inferred essence of ‘the world’, that world, reality, vanished, at least as a set of fixed essences. Reality rather became the meshwork of impressions that thought, given usable shape by language, comprised: ‘what looks as if it had to exist, is part of the language. It is a paradigm in our language-game’ ([1953, 1958] 1972, 25). In conceiving of a common component of the human mind shared with or indivisible from God, Houédard was clearly positing an essential, non-linguistically derived aspect of reality of precisely the kind Wittgenstein’s theory challenged. At the same time, Houédard’s sense of the contingency of thought and communication upon their enabling linguistic mechanisms reflects his deep engagement with Wittgenstein’s writing during the early 1960s.5 In fact, Houédard’s apparent sense of the incapacity of language to express the relationship between subject and God, culminating in the negative representation of concrete, might partly be framed as a theistic response to the challenge of Wittgensteinian linguistics. Certainly, Houédard’s early 1960s critical writing concurs with the idea of language as a ‘spatial and temporal phenomenon’ bearing no consistent or essential aspect, and thus no possible connection to a reality beyond itself. In ‘Paradada’ Houédard 171

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asserts that concrete poetry, ‘logically postwittgenstein treats language as matter’ (1964d). But the notion of an essential reality lying beyond the parameters of the language game, rather than vanishing entirely from his work’s conceptual remit – the gesture that might define a post-modernist poetics – is reframed through a series of literal blanks or gaps in the visual forms of his work. These visual silences, as it were, gesture towards a cognitive space inaccessible to cognition, of which the poet must remain silent for any true awareness of it to be conveyed. Taking all the preceding points into account, we must first re-emphasise the extent to which Houédard’s concrete poetics was influenced by an apophatic theological sensibility. At the same time, that poetics bears a relationship, though not an easy or generic one, to the development of concrete style worldwide across the 1950s–1970s. The idea of withdrawing from language, and of attempting to combine a range of different media in the composition of the concrete poem, ties in stylistically with neo-dada and intermedia variants of the genre, and indirectly with its appropriation for the ends of counter-cultural ideology. But that connection is complicated in various ways: not just by the tenets of Houédard’s faith but by the North American poetic genealogy posited in ‘To Freshen Our Sense of the Language’; by the idea of ‘coexistentialism’ in ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’, which transcends the constructivist–dada dichotomy entirely; and by the relationship posited at various points in his prose between concrete poetry and Wittgenstein. Before turning to Houédard’s concrete poetry itself, it is also worth acknowledging the extensive critical work he undertook during the 1960s to trace historical parallels and precedents for the style. Given that Houédard took the condition of ‘awareness’ outlined in his theological writing to reflect an innate human capacity, but also as uniquely expressible through concrete poetry, it is not surprising that he quickly became concerned with positing the style’s ancient, trans-cultural roots. The findings of this archaeological work are most exhaustively documented in his remarkable essay ‘Between Poetry and Painting: Chronology’ (1965a), published as a catalogue insert for Reichardt’s 1965 ICA exhibition. The broader relevance of this remarkable and unwieldy chronological survey is in indicating a newly expansive sense of concrete poetry’s historical affinities that challenged mid-century conceptions of the style as in some sense formally novel. Its more precise relevance is in covertly arranging a set of contemporaneous and historical examples to support Houédard’s particular interpretation of the value of concrete 172

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poetry: its capacity to express a mutually relativising coexistence of artistic media and thus to gesture towards a perpetually absent object.6 The essay also reflects the extent to which Houédard placed his own poetic practice in a vast historical trajectory, making it difficult to assess that work exclusively in relation to short-term precedents within the concrete poetry movement. Indeed, in a 1975 biographical note he described his work as contributing to a tradition of Benedictine literature and art, a heritage responsible for its underlying ascetic tendencies: inevitably i feel my own work as the continuation of the unbroken tradition of benedictine poets & artists – beginning with the monastic literati of the ancient west who created civilization … even for part of [a later] period tho not right up till napoleon III’s salon des refusés there is a wu-wei quality of playing the stringless lute in benedictine baroque as contrasted with the jesuit. (Qtd. in Murphy, Vinson and Kirkpatrick 1975, 729)

The idea of covert expression evoked here – ‘playing the stringless lute’ – might call to mind, for example, the grid-based poems or ‘carmen cancellatum’ of the Carolingian Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856), in which a mesostic ‘intextus’ is highlighted within a larger, rectangular poem set against a religious background image. The intextus, as Dick Higgins notes, is thus ‘“cancelled out” from the background text’ (1987, 230). The reader’s visual attention is solicited not in order to supplement the linguistic message with a visual one – as in Ancient Greek technopaegnia, for example, where a poem will assume the shape of wings, or an egg – but to divert attention away from or through that message to another, sequestered within it. The biographical note just quoted includes a brief timeline, placing ‘hrabanus maurus (concrete)’ alongside other poet-monk ‘concretists’ such as Saint Aldhelm and Saint Dunstan. Kinkon: Kinetic and Phonetic Poems Houédard began publishing concrete poetry prolifically in 1964,7 his first collection of concrete poems, Kinkon, appearing from Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press in June 1965. That collection’s longer alternative title, ‘op and kinkon poems/and some non-kinkon’, gives a reasonable sense of the scope of Houédard’s work at this point: besides ‘non-kinkon’ poems similar to those in Jeux Théologiques, there are various examples of what Houédard called ‘optic’ and ‘kinetic’ poetry (1965d, [3]). The former are essentially typestracts, and thus discussed by implication later in the chapter. This section focuses on the ‘kinetic’ poems more unique 173

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to this period, curious permutational sequences perhaps named with reference to contemporary kinetic artists such as Liliane Lijn, Takis, and David Medalla. In these poems, language-forms either occupy a series of distinct visual frames or seem to build on each other through phonetic modulation. We can pragmatically subdivide them into three categories, discussed in turn below: minimalistic, object-like poems, defined by formulaic visual rearrangement; permutational phonetic poems composed of neologisms or non-words, associable with a Wittgensteinian sense of language-creation as play; and visual kinetic poems orientated around an internal gap or blank. The poem ‘Thalamus Sol’, or ‘Sun Bridesroom’ (Houédard 1965d, [31]; Figure 1), is a good example of the first category. It reworks the metaphors of romantic liaison, bride and bridegroom, which signify the relationship between God and subject in Houédard’s earliest poems. Across eleven lines, the two title-words gradually swap position within a visual frame containing a diagonal shaft or beam made up of letters from the two words. The letters seem to enter and intermingle within the beam – at one point producing the suggestive composite-word ‘shoal’ – before emerging on the other side. The metaphor of the sun passing through a bridal chamber is taken from Psalm 19.5, as Houédard explained to Morgan in an undated note (Houédard 1964c) attached to a 1964 version of Thalamus Sol sent as a Christmas card (Houédard 1964f). In the 1966 Jerusalem Bible, on which Houédard worked as an editor and translator, the psalm reads as follows: ‘High above, he pitched a tent for the sun,/ who comes out of his pavilion like a bridegroom,/ exulting like a hero to run his race’ (The Jerusalem Bible 1966, ps. 19.5: 801).8 The central rectangular shaft thus represents the passage of God, envisaged as sun or solar deity, as well as bridegroom and charioteer, through the mind, soul, or, by extension of the metaphor, ‘tent’ or ‘bridesroom’ of the supplicant. There is a by-played reference here to sexual liaison, or rather to the virgin conception, which explains the poem’s use on a Christmas card and which Houédard alluded to in an earlier letter to Morgan – July 26, 1964 – providing a detailed overview of the poem’s themes: the thalamus is either the bridechamber meaning the canopy over the bride ie the sky – or the underworld out of wh the sun comes … in anthem sol is xpt [Houédard’s term for Christ, based on the Christogram or Greek Χριστός] & thalamus is mary or israel – or xpt as sol … comes from heaven (canopy) but more basically is idea of A from B thru C to us (yinyang yabyum & all other myth bases). (Houédard 1964c)

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Figure 1: ‘Thalamus Sol’ As well as standing for the bridal chamber or virgin womb of the inner mind, the ‘Thalamus’ is therefore also the earth, sky, or Israel, over which the sun, God, passes from eastern sunrise to western sunset. Houédard adds that the ‘original psalm is babylonian to god SHAMSH & later adopted to EL (YHWH)’, indicating an interfaith resonance suiting his wider ecumenism (1964c).9 What is interesting, besides the trans-cultural resonance and rich layering of the metaphor, is that the poem revives the kind of ‘accepted image’ for the God-subject relationship that Houédard’s work was abandoning by 175

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this point. This suggests that he saw concrete poetry, in some instances, as uniquely capable of revivifying such metaphors, as if the formal qualities of the concrete poem made it capable of capturing or transcribing the essence of its referents. Certainly, the freeing of words from linear syntax, and the space-separated letters, seem to render this poem a set of objects in space rather than a series of lines in implied temporal sequence. That impression also relies, of course, on the poem appearing as a single visual image, of sunbeam and bed-chamber, its figurative content clarified by the title. At the same time, temporal progression is subtly implied at the close of each line by the programmatic rearrangement of letters. The overall suggestion is of a series of consecutive, overlaid static impressions of a scene or landscape in flux: specifically of a bed-chamber or tent over the course of a day, as a sunbeam moves ‘kinetically … east to west thru the thalamus’ (as Houédard put it in his Christmas-card note [1964c]). In short, the various visual and grammatical tricks just outlined imply that the poem has somehow become what it describes, presenting rather than representing the interacting forces and objects its title evokes. This is the same quality conveyed by much early Brazilian and German concrete poetry, of course, and it is complemented by various effects borrowed from classical concrete poetry: a minimal, two-word lexicon and the precise, cyclical nature of the visual sequence. ‘Thalamus Sol’ thus indicates the limited extent to which Houédard’s work at this time was informed by the early idioms of concrete poetry. In another type of kinetic poem, by contrast, phonetic permutation seems more vital to the overall effect. Houédard’s ‘Birhopal Takistract: Eyear Poem for Takis Vassilakis’ (1965d [27]; Figure 2) is dedicated to the Greek kinetic artist better known as Takis. This poem consists of a string of nonsensical, percussive letter-arrangements formed into two interlocking triangles. Importantly, the compositional ‘programme’ used to create this sequence is also presented as part of the poem. Thus, we learn that, to create the two triangles of letters, the three consonants of ‘Takis’ have been arranged in all six possible combinations, organised first in alphabetical then reverse-alphabetical order, to create the following lines: KST KTS SKT STK TKS TSK/ TSK TKS STK SKT KTS KST. The two vowels have then been ‘infold[ed]’ into these lines, occupying odd letter-positions across the first and even letter-positions across the second. Finally, the resultant compositions have been arranged into triangular structures ‘rhopalically’, each line containing one more letter more than the previous line – though that process is reversed in the second triangle. 176

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Figure 2: ‘Birhopal Takistract: Eyear Poem for Takis Vassilakis’ The details of this compositional formula are perhaps less significant than what its incorporation into the poem tells us about that poem’s thematic scope. Were it not included, the piece might simply convey a playful interest in the raw phonic material of language, perhaps also emulating the sounds generated by electromagnetic waves in Takis’s ‘musical sculptures’. By contrast with ‘Thalamus Sol’, the absence of semantic sense, and of any figurative pictorial element, concentrates our attention on language’s phonetic qualities. However, making the compositional programme part of the poem itself introduces a series of further allusions. In part, the effect seems a conspicuous nod to the instructional programmes used by artists and poets such as Nanni 177

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Balestrini and Max Bense to create computer-shuffled cut-up poetry. It may even allude to contemporary aleatoric scores, with their lists of imperatives and variables. But, perhaps above all else, the inclusion of a set of rules for creating the poem implies a connection to the Wittgensteinian notion of the language game. As noted, Houédard’s poetics of negative representation can partly be conceived of as a theistic response to Wittgenstein’s notion of a linguistically derived reality. But it is also worth emphasising that Houédard’s 1960s critical writing enthusiastically embraces Wittgenstein’s work for the reality-shaping power it seemed to grant to the poet as a shaper of language, as in ‘The Third Bridge’: art is in a wittgenstein phase – words (poems: ikons) arnt what we put ideas into – ideas are what we have if we know the rules of the wordgame or ikongame – the poet as maker … of the rules never preoccupied wittgenstein – it preoccupies max bense & the noigandres – hence semiotic poetry. (Houédard 1965e, 24)

Houédard was interested in the idea that by forging new language systems – as the Invenção group were then attempting with their pictographic ‘semiotic poems’ – concrete poets might actively extend the range of ideas and experiential states that comprised subjective reality, a reality generated entirely within the frameworks of language. Houédard also associated this capacity to ‘create the rules of the game’ with sound-based variants of concrete poetry, taking Bob Cobbing’s non-linguistic performance poetry, for example, as evidence that ‘language is anything we think in’ (1966c, 3). The ‘Takistract’ metaphorically plays out a similar idea, generating a kind of pseudo-lexicon of vowel–consonant arrangements: a set of words in waiting. Poems such as ‘Thalamus Sol’ and ‘Birhopal Takistract’ indicate the formal and thematic range of Houédard’s mid-1960s work. But the most striking and prescient kinetic poems in Kinkon are those in which a sequence of visual shapes, built up from repeated written characters, frames a shifting gap or blank. In such work, the visual-linguistic construction is not the ultimate object of attention but a representation of thought orientated around an inexpressible object represented by the empty space. These pieces employ both the techniques of negative representation posited in my introduction: the use of a non-semantic, visual-linguistic mode of expression and the indirect evocation of the true poetic object through a diverted focus on the process of thought or prayer cultivated in response to it. 178

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‘Four Stages of Spiritual Typewriting’ (Houédard 1965d, [9]; Figure 3) serves as something of an exemplar of the form. Four disintegrating yin/ yang-like constructions, composed of dots and forward slashes, are set in conjoined squares picked out in full stops. A key identifies the left-hand dot in each square as ‘Je’, the right-hand dot as ‘Moi’, terms Houédard used to indicate ‘mind’ as the means and object of thought respectively.10 The first of the four squares shows outer mind, ‘Je’, focused through the lens of its own thought, represented by the forwards slash, upon inner mind, ‘Moi’. In the second and third boxes ‘Moi’ and ‘Je’ disappear in turn, implying a process of theosis whereby the insights and mechanisms of subjective cognition are cast aside in turn. Finally, in the last box, the slash or screen by which the aware subject both approaches and is divided

Figure 3: ‘Four Stages of Spiritual Typewriting’ 179

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Figure 4: ‘4’

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Figure 5: ‘Om’

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from itself, disintegrates. The resultant blank space suggests not so much an immersive union with the divine as the impossibility of inhabiting or communicating that state. Not only is semantic language abandoned in order to convey this message, but the visual-linguistic mode of expression instated in its place is also required to avert its gaze. The empty space thus framed is reframed throughout the sequence, as in the untitled poem above (Houédard 1965d, [21]; Figure 4), consisting of three rows of rectangles formed from the ideographic symbol for the number four, punctured by an internal gap that seems to flit across their surface. The visual or implied temporal development might suggest electronic or neural impulses, or possibly the feedback loops of the cybernetic circuit: the squares are representations, perhaps, of moments or states of mind. The repetition of a single written character, ideographic rather than phonetic, removes any trace of semantic meaning and also strips the poem of any implied sonic or phonetic quality. Taken in the broader context of Houédard’s work, these qualities indicate the incapacity of mind to relay its object, an object represented here not by the ranked blocks of type but by the peepholes that move in predetermined patterns across their collective face, drawing the eye inwards. The nuancing feature of the poem, however, is the budding of that gap in the bottom-central rectangle, which suggests some momentary communication of inner mind to outer: a void blinking in affirmation. In the similar poem printed on the following page (Houédard 1965d, [23]; Figure 5), the rectangular gaps that puncture the squares of ms convert them into os, or rather oms, reincorporating phonetic sound in an approximation of Buddhist mantra. Again, however, subtle visual features nuance the thematic scope of the piece. The first of the two vertical columns shifts its position as it descends around a stationary gap that, through a kind of op-art trickery, seems to be moving. In the second column the gap really does move, by the same increments. The contrast between actual and implied movement suggests a distinction between true awareness of an object and its substitution with a subjective impression of that object: between meditation and self-projection. Holy Pagans: Concrete, Ecumenism, and the Counter-culture If the above reading of Kinkon compels us to focus on the theological aspects of Houédard’s poetics, it is worth reiterating their relationship to a broader set of cultural and social paradigms during the mid-1960s. As I have suggested, the quality of selflessness that his poetry conveys 182

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can be taken to manifest not only an inwardly directed spiritual impulse but also an outwardly focused, egalitarian social ideology closely related to the counter-culture. More precisely, we can see that quality in Houédard’s thought as emerging from a dialogue between his faith and counter-cultural politics, facilitated by strains of thought both within sixties culture itself and within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. The following section expands on this point with (eventual) reference to Houédard’s ‘machine-poems’. At a practical level, Houédard’s first forays into concrete poetry coincided with his early interactions with the British wing of the international counter-culture. As I noted in my second chapter, for writers such as Jeff Nuttall that culture was predicated on an idea of ‘total freedom’ germinating in the sphere of creative expression, where it would be characterised especially by freedom from ‘the limitations of language’ and from established boundaries between artistic media (Nuttall [1968] 1970, 174). The freedom generated within this sphere of activity would then permeate outwards to encompass broader social systems of organisation that would, by an analogous process partly connected to the disruption of the metaphysical authority of language, become more plural and fluid in some way, less dependent on imposition by ideological and physical force. In short, this was a culture in which a boundary-defying artistic practice could form the basis of a radical, anarchistic political ideology. Houédard’s critical writing consistently grants such power to concrete poetry, taking its integration of the visual and linguistic registers, and its abdication of semantic expression, as means of rejecting the limits imposed on poetic meaning by language and medium. The ambiguities of the resultant mode of expression would invite the reader–viewer’s involvement in ‘co-creating’ the poem, a collaborative process instantiating a microcosm of non-authoritarian social interaction. As Houédard put it in a 1966 essay on auto-destructive art: ‘merely to present the gap seems to constitute the lightest & briefest of fingers on the trigger – the least fascist invitation to engage spectator interest & participation – & so create a primitive human selfregulating society’ (1966a, 49). Again, what makes this position unique is the extent to which it was informed by Houédard’s faith, as the selfless interaction with the other rendered by ‘presenting the gap’ was the product of a spiritual awareness geared towards curbing the projections of the thinking self. This interaction of religious mysticism with counter-cultural politics reflected a general dynamic within the latter, which in many instances depended on spiritual rather than materialist definitions of the self. 183

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Nuttall’s call for a ‘spirituality … reestablished in the place of politics’ ([1968] 1970, 174) encapsulates a paradigm wherein the policies of the post-Christian capitalist West on the one hand, and those of state and party communism on the other, were equally anathema. The cultural historian Alf Louvre notes that by the end of the 1960s ‘radicals east and west’ had ‘noted parallels between American and Soviet interventions abroad, the imperialistic invasion of client or satellite state, and the complicity of erstwhile progressive forces in the repressive actions of the state (exemplified by the French Communist Party, the British Labour Party and the American Democratic Party …)’ (1992, 62). As well as constituting a rejection of state-sanctioned atheism in common with the blandishments of state religion, this sense of what Louvre calls the ‘simultaneous failure of capitalist and communist regimes’, more importantly, called institutional politics as such into question, transferring the demands of social change onto the individual subject (1992, 67). As a result, in many cases that subject was theorised in effectively non-materialist terms as a wholly autonomous entity, and thus as a potential agent of social change rather than merely the encoded manifestation of a particular socio-economic system: In positing a subject who had been ideologically and psychologically invaded by the ethos of corporate capitalism (or for that matter, the Stalinist state), radical theorists of the 1960s assumed the possibility of an essential self, a clean free agent, who could be, the powers of domination once removed, the basis of a transformed society. (Louvre 1992, 62)

Though Louvre is referring here to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a ‘biological foundation for socialism’ ([1969] 1972, 10) – and thus to a materialist account of the human subject – the idea of the self as a ‘clean free agent’, embracing the idea of an innate, non-contingent aspect of the human character, was clearly open to spiritual framing. Whether or not the above account fits with Houédard’s own conception of the self, the apparently unqualified acceptance of his faith within countercultural networks certainly typifies a broader openness to the insights of unorthodox religiosity. Similarly, in North America, denizens of the beat community that prefigured the counter-culture, notably Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton, were more or less explicitly influenced by a Catholic mysticist heritage inflected by an interest in Zen Buddhism.11 To a limited extent, the dialogues that Merton and Houédard established between Christianity and the counter-culture also expressed 184

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the contemporary spirit of the Catholic Church.12 Both worked in the early 1960s against the backdrop of the Second Vatican Council – 1962–65 – an event associated with, or at least relatively tolerant of, a spirit of ‘aggiornamento’ (‘bringing up to date’). This was expressed especially through the paradigm of ecumenism: increased interaction and dialogue with other world religions. Houédard’s distinctive contribution to what he called ‘Vat II’ culture was a concept dubbed ‘the wider ecumenism’, which grew from his research into the historical and philosophical connections between Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism.13 In a 1965 Aylesford Review article on ‘The Wider Ecumenism’, Houédard asserted that ‘god has spoken in a variety of ways [to] all humanity’: [S]o that our basically jewish-greek-northeuropean synthesis feels its limitations as sacred history & feels the need to incorporate the sacred history of the regional insights of african-indian-eastern genius, as well as the nonregional insights of technological mentalities that are today’s mental theophanies. (1965f, 118–19)

The category of ‘nonregional insights’ outlined here is especially significant: as well as encompassing the ‘technological mentalities’ associated with contemporary discourses such as cybernetics, it would also have incorporated various forms of non-institutional spiritual faith, including those Houédard attributed to the counter-cultural worldview. As he put it in an unpublished poem dated April 28, 1963 (Houédard 1963h): this holy paganism of a post xn world is precious fortunately not in the eyes of the pious but of the lord

The way in which poets and artists gravitated around Prinknash Abbey during the 1960s – ‘pilgrims/ in … holyblue/ atheist pants’, as Houédard described them in one poem (1965d, [49]) – was one product of this wider-ecumenical dialogue.14 Houédard’s theological concrete poetics can thus be associated with a more broadly prevalent conception of concrete poetry. This is not just 185

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because of the associations he drew between its expression of ascetic attentiveness and a counter-cultural sense of the value of non-semantic and mixed-media art but because counter-cultural politics itself was fundamentally influenced by various forms of unorthodox spirituality. This argument suggests the possibility of a differently orientated reading of almost all of Houédard’s concrete poems, but to the author himself the idea of ‘presenting the gap’ seems to have been especially pertinent to the machine-poems that he and other West-Country poets were designing during the mid-1960s. A machine-poem in this context can be defined as any poem that abdicates authorial control over the reading process by allowing reading order – or the more multi-faceted, linguistic, visual, and/or tactile processes constituting interaction with the poem – to be determined by a reader-controlled or automated mechanism. By the mid-1960s poets and artists based in the West of England, such as John Furnival and Kenelm Cox, were creating a range of such works, including Furnival’s vending machine-like Babacus ([1964?]), ‘read’ using handles on its sides to produce different word combinations, and Cox’s trio of motorised, rotating poem-mobiles The Three Graces (1966–68). Both Furnival and Cox were inspired by the rotating Poem Machines exhibited in Paris earlier in the decade by Liliane Lijn, who was the first artist to present and define work in this style.15 Houédard designed a huge number of similar pieces during the 1960s, often involving very simple readercontrolled mechanisms. They included his origami fortune-teller version of Frog Pond Plop, his translation of a famous Basho haiku, whose three constituent four-letter words (‘frog/ pond/ plop’) appear in sequence as the reader manipulates the paper handles to reveal the fortune teller’s three four-part faces (Houédard [1965?b]).16 But few machine-poems were ever constructed. In a 1972 biographical note Houédard referred to various ‘unfolding & opening poems’ designed from 1963 onwards, resulting in ‘28 kinetic poem projects for cambridge 1st international of kinkon – none made’ (Verey 1972, 27). Writing to Stephen Bann on January 17, 1967 about Bann’s upcoming show at the 1967 Brighton Festival, Houédard lamented that since the Cambridge exhibition in November 1964 he had produced over 50 further designs, none of which had been realised (Houédard 1967b). As such, any discussion of the effects of this work must remain largely theoretical. Houédard’s description, for example, in a later letter to Bann – March 24, 1967 – of his Book of 12 Mudras, a collection of

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paper sculpture-poems designed for reader assembly, gives some sense of the reader–viewer experience the machine-poems were meant to solicit:17 these are totally wordless completely abstract GESTURE POEMS in paper … a point where POETRY PAINTING SCULPTURE ALL merge & identify … all total sheets using the total area – flaps & traps cut in are flexed & distorted out of the 2-d plane & slot into either themselves or slits provided) … its like what cant be described in prose OR in poetry words – except in the reader–participation act of putting one of my mudra-poems together. (Houédard 1967b)

Houédard associates the mudra-poems with the condition of ‘primitive human selfregulating society’ by virtue of their multi-media, non-linguistic form – ‘a point where POETRY PAINTING SCULPTURE ALL merge & identify’ – and because they solicit the reader–viewer’s involvement in constructing the poem’s meaning, a meaning which ‘cant be described in prose or poetry words’. At the same time, the interpreter would have a more literal role in co-creating the poem by physically assembling it: inserting the flaps into the traps, and so on. In this case and others, that physical process of co-creation perhaps stands as a metaphor for the more nebulous, ideologically charged process of collaborative meaning-making the machine-poems were designed to initiate. Houédard’s utopian ambitions for such work surely outstrip by some distance any conceivable benefit to be derived from actually engaging with it. A more moderate way of expressing this scepticism might be to call such work more interesting in concept than manifestation: inevitably, perhaps, as so few of his machine-poems were ever made! But even if the primary benefit of such projects was to serve as the catalyst for Houédard’s precocious critical expositions on the relationship between concrete poetry, multi-media art, and counter-cultural politics, they served an important purpose, contributing to a broader shift in interpretative approaches. Indeed, Houédard’s prolific critical writing during the mid- to late 1960s did much to generate a conception of concrete poetry within England and Scotland, which stood in fruitful contrast to the more structuralist, constructivist-orientated accounts of critics such as Stephen Bann and Mike Weaver. Tantric Auto-Destruction: The Typestracts Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘typestract’ in a letter sent to Houédard on or around November 20, 1963, as he later recalled on January 10, 1978 187

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to Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Morgan was attempting, unsuccessfully, to have the word added to the next edition of the dictionary: Houédard sent me some of his ‘typewriter poems’ (there was as yet no term for them), and I wrote back enthusiastically about them, referring to them as typestracts. The term arose swiftly and spontaneously in the course of writing the letter, but I suppose it was a portmanteau word from ‘typewriter’ and ‘abstract’. (Morgan 1978)

The typestracts are the consummate expression of Houédard’s concrete poetics, with their extraordinary, hallucinatory renderings of threedimensional space and complex geometrical designs built up through repeated typewritten characters.18 As with the visual-kinetic poems discussed above, the real object of attention in this work is not the constructions themselves but the enveloping, permeating void whose presence they imply. The typestracts thus convey by newly ingenious means the two aspects of negative representation considered in relation to some of the kinetic poems in Kinkon: a visual-linguistic mode of expression that not only foregoes semantic communication but itself offers only an indirect or covert representation of its object. A full account of the typestracts’ influences and precursors would have to include Arabic calligraphy – Houédard’s catalogue note for Reichardt’s Between Poetry and Painting exhibition refers to a prototypical form of the typestract, a kind of ‘typewriter arabesque’, developed in Bangalore during his time with military intelligence (Reichardt 1965, 51)19 – and early twentieth-century typewriter art, especially the so-called ‘tiksels’ of the Dutch printer–painter H.N. Werkman.20 But the influence of Tantric art is especially significant. Besides the obvious hint of titles such as Tantric Poems Perhaps, the annotations accompanying many of the typestracts are full of references to Tantric mythology. Particularly relevant are the ‘yantras’ used in Tantric ritual: visual or sculptural diagrams showing series of mental and bodily states to be passed through in order to integrate the viewer with an ongoing cosmic creation process. Writing of the influence of Tantric art in his preface to Tantric Poems Perhaps, Houédard noted ‘ive done yantras [‘(like calligraphed om or a mandala)’], mantras [‘(like sound om)’] and mudras/ these are yantras’ (1967c, n.pag.) Again, delving into this spiritual context for Houédard’s work might seem to narrow our focus were it not for the widespread engagement with world religions, and with Buddhism in particular, that characterised so much of 1960s culture. 188

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The art historian Phillip Rawson defines Tantra as a wide body of practices and mythologies with roots in both Hinduism and Buddhism. The Tantric creation principle, Rawson asserts, holds that the entire universe is generated by: [T]he active play of a female creative principle, the Goddess of many forms, sexually penetrated by an invisible, indescribable, seminal male. In Ultimate fact He has generated Her for his own enjoyment. And the play, because it is analogous to the activity of sexual intercourse, is pleasurable to her. (Rawson [1978] 2010, 9–10)

The relationship posited here is comparable to that posited by Houédard between God and inner mind: an indivisible, albeit more overtly sexualised union, responsible for the existence of the entire perceptible universe yet impalpable to the individuated mind. In this sense, the Tantric creative principle perhaps provided Houédard with an alternative or additional way of quantifying the condition of union with God towards which his work was directed. The energy of this creation process is concentrated at certain points in the body and world. The aim of Tantra, Rawson notes, is to merge subjective being with that process through a practice focused around these points of energy called ‘sādhana’: ‘i.e. psychosomatic effort, assimilating [one’s] own body to higher and higher levels of cosmic body-pattern’. ‘In the end’, the participant in sādhana ‘may become identical with the original double-sexed deity, which is involved, without beginning or end, in blissful intercourse with itself’ ([1978] 2010, 14). Much sādhana involves mimicking the creation process, occasionally through ritual sex. The role of Tantric art is to provide ‘maps of the system, together with detailed instructions for working the mechanism’: diagrams indicating the geographical and bodily locations of these points of concentrated energy, providing coded instructions on how to interact with them (Rawson [1978] 2010, 14). Yantra is simply that portion of Tantric art that is visual in effect, the best-known variant being a circle of concentric patterned rings set inside square perimeters: sometimes referred to as a mandala. These rings signify successive ‘stages or “sheaths” of inwardness’ that must be passed through in turn, set around a central point ‘where all the original radiating energies are finally focused’ (Rawson [1978] 2010, 72). Comparable visual forms can be found in Houédard’s typestracts, but the influence of yantra relates more to function than appearance. If we take it that the yantras indicate locations that contain a divine energy, then they, and the typestracts, might seem to attempt to capture 189

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or transpose that energy somehow. But by Houédard’s account the yantra really represents a series of psychosomatic states that must be passed through to attain an ultimate state of union or convergence with creation that is necessarily unrepresentable. In a lecture on ‘Apophatic Art’ presented at Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium in September 1966, Houédard stated that ‘to “find” the centre of the mandala isnt to look FOR it – but to BE it in the gradual process of destroying the mental mandala from edge towards centre’ ([1966] 2017). The final state of ‘satori’ achieved by engagement with the yantra, that is, occurs only at the point of its metaphorical destruction: just as the auto-destructive artwork did not comprise, say, the canvas on which Gustav Metzger painted with hydrochloric acid, but the fleeting moment of the canvas’s disintegration. Houédard credits a similarly fleeting state of transcendent experience, certainly, but one inaccessible to subjective cognition, inexpressible in its terms of reference. In this sense, the connection Houédard drew between yantra and concrete poetry complemented his notion of negative representation. The typestract, like the yantra, is not a representation of the creator or the creation process but an image of the mental or physical state that responds to it. One practical context for Houédard’s engagement with Tantric mythology was the ecumenical culture permitted by the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, the role of ‘Vat II’ in facilitating Houédard’s interfaith activities was strikingly direct. Charles Verey notes that ‘[i]n the wake of Vatican II an office was established by the papacy to set in motion a programme of monastic interfaith dialogue: Sylvester was enrolled as a committee member in Britain.’ This led, among other things, to a meeting with the Dalai Lama and to a lifelong engagement with Buddhist communities in Britain that ‘extended far beyond the call of duty’ (Verey [2012] 28). At the same time, the fact that Houédard felt justified in discussing Tantric art at a symposium on auto-destruction indicates the connections he drew between the principles and rituals of Tantra and a whole range of Western art and literature since ‘the collective satori Europe experienced through the Dadaists’ (Houédard 1976, 7).21 That sense of affinity was partly legitimised by the broader engagement with global religions that defined the Western counter-culture. In his history of Western Buddhism, James William Coleman points to a decisive uptake stemming from North America after the Second World War, in part symptomatic of – and manifesting itself as a challenge to – the ‘psychological contradictions’ of a triumphant consumer capitalism that had failed to sustain the emotional contentment it advertised (2001, 190

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61). At the same time, economic and educational barriers to alternative lifestyles were pulled up through the very abundances that capitalism generated, while the redoubled onslaughts of scientific rationalism and immigration fragmented ethnic and religious hegemonies. The beats presented the first ‘vehement rejection’ of the new ‘conventional American culture’, and ‘it was among this group that Buddhism found its first broad appeal in the West’. This was partly because of the beats’ sympathy with Buddhism’s emphasis on spontaneous behaviour and rejection of social mores as ‘meaningless, arbitrary and unreal’, partly because they found analogies between chemically induced insight and ‘the ecstatic descriptions of Zen satori, which seemed to them a kind of ultimate high’ (Coleman 2001, 62). Kerouac, who converted to Buddhism in 1953–54, and Gary Snyder are key figures in this context, though the intellectual bedrock for the beat-Buddhist phenomenon was provided by popular philosophers such as Merton, D.T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts. Over the course of the 1960s this new culture evolved into the hippie movement, which found a perhaps shallower set of parallels between satori and the effects of LSD.22 Geopolitical turmoil also played a part in the advent of Western Buddhism in ways that affected Houédard directly. The 1950s saw the violent consolidation of Chinese control over Tibet, culminating in the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959, spreading a new diaspora of Tibetan monks and teachers across Europe and North America by the 1960s. Among them was the meditation master Chogyam Trungpa, who in 1959 ‘led a party of about three hundred refugees in a dramatic escape to India’ before moving to England to study at Oxford (Coleman 2001, 74). In 1967 he and another refugee, Akong Rinpoche, were invited to run the newly established Kagyu Samye Ling Buddhist Monastery in Dumfries and Galloway.23 Verey notes that Houédard was introduced to Chogyam Trungpa and Akong Rinpoche in 1962 ([2012], 28), establishing a relationship that seems to have taken Houédard back to southern Scotland on occasions, on trips also encompassing Little Sparta. Houédard’s engagement with Tantra via the typestracts thus exemplifies the spiritual syncretism of the counter-cultural worldview – conflated here with the beat and hippie movements – that had substantially reframed concrete poetics by the late 1960s. Some of the products of this engagement were presented in Tantric Poems Perhaps, a folder of loose sheets published in May 1967 by Writers Forum. This collection seems preoccupied with an aspect or quality of Tantric ritual identified by a contrast drawn in its preface between ‘tantric’ and ‘zen’ 191

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poetry. Houédard’s ‘Apophatic Art’ lecture ([1966] 2017) defines ‘zen and tantra’ as ‘the sudden and slow schools of satori’ respectively, suggesting an emphasis in the latter case on an incremental rather than a sudden process of cognitive or spiritual enlightenment. That emphasis may be borne out in the preponderance of sequences of shapes in this collection, as opposed to the single images more common in A Book of Chakras, published earlier in the year (Houédard [1967a]). Many of Houédard’s tantric poems feature sets of ascending, interlocking forms, such as the typestract below, dated February 7, 1967 (Houédard 1967c, n.pag.; Figure 6), which depicts a circular shaft passing upwards through what looks like a series of square bolts or screw-threads. The left-hand bolt is differently orientated in its implied three-dimensional space to the cylinder passing through it, perhaps suggesting – or encouraging – some momentary slippage or schism of perception, a temporary unravelling or unbinding of subjective cognition. Another piece (Houédard 1967c, n.pag.; Figure 7) shows a waterfall of brackets rushing downwards over a series of flat planes outlined in dashes. In these and other cases, reiterative, permutational forms generate a sense of sequential or incremental spiritual progress, though, of course, one upshot of the typestracts’ withdrawal from semantic or

Figure 6: ‘070267’

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Figure 7: ‘020467’ overt pictorial communication is that they largely resist ‘close reading’. The salient point is that these are visual-linguistic representations not of a creator or creation process but of mental or psychosomatic states orientated in response to that process. Some of the typestracts are removed from this realm of abstraction by linguistic tags that reframe them as diagrams of specific Tantric creation schemas. The piece below, for example, presents a ‘Visualisation of Idapingala Staircases with Mount Meru Up the Middle’ (Houédard 1967c, n.pag.; Figure 8). The reference is to a series of energy channels called ‘nadīs’ located within the ‘subtle body’: the body as envisaged in a rarefied, spiritually defined state aloof to empirical study. An equivalent image in Tantric art would indicate various psychosomatic states to be passed through by engaging with points on those energy-channels called ‘chakras’, cultivating greater and greater intimacy with the energy of creation. ‘Ida’ and ‘pingala’ are two of the nadīs within the subtle body, spiralling upwards from left- and right-hand positions around a central spinal nadī or ‘suṣumna’, shown in the middle of the page. All of the nadīs have associative qualities and locations: ida connected to femininity, the moon and the Ganges River; pingala to masculinity, the sun and 193

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the Yamuna River; and suṣumna to the central point of the universe in Tantric mythology, the sacred, five-peaked Mount Meru. But the real significance of such works is not in the details of the creative schemas they relay but in exemplifying the principle of negative representation underpinning Houédard’s poetics, as well as the ecumenical or syncretic inflections of that poetics, indicating a broader paradigm within the cultures attached to concrete poetry by the late 1960s. Houédard continued to compose typestracts prolifically until the early 1970s, achieving an amazing degree of technical precision by the time his next full collection, Like Contemplation (1972), appeared. This collection features none of the tags or annotations found in Tantric Poems Perhaps,

Figure 8: ‘Visualisation of Idapingala Staircases with Mount Meru up the Middle’ 194

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Figure 9: Cube typestract 195

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Figure 10: Screen typestract

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and thus lacks any conceptual anchorage in semantic language. This implies an emphasis on ‘contemplation’ as such, preceding specific terminologies and traditions, which makes the pieces resistant to critical analysis. Nonetheless, they do reveal a predisposition towards particular visual motifs. Many of the typestracts feature aligned sequences or gatherings of cubes, platforms or screens, as in the two pieces above (Houédard 1972, n.pag.; Figures 9 and 10). Again, such incremental compositional forms tend to suggest sequences, steps, or enclaves of contemplation. Interpretation is also aided by some pre-existing awareness of Houédard’s poetics and theology. The shrinkage of screenshapes in the second piece, for example, seems redolent with associations of Platonic metaphysics and Christian mysticism: the idea of reality as a projection of shadows, or the gradual renunciation of subjective thought as coextensive with some burgeoning spiritual awareness. Border Blurs: Conclusion Houédard’s concrete poetics continued to evolve across the 1970s, notably through his development of an ingenious alphabet of reversible or rotatable letters used to compose the ‘reversible’ poems published on transparent pages in Begin Again (1975a). But in various respects the typestracts represent the culmination of his creative project. It is also worth admitting that, by any conventional definition, these are works of visual art rather than literature; accepting the preponderance of a temporal logic to the viewing process that is in many cases somewhat akin to that of reading (it was perhaps partly with this in mind that Edwin Morgan noted the ‘lingering literary hookup’ vital to the typestracts’ effect [qtd. in Murphy et al. 1975, 729–30]). Similar accusations of non-literariness were levelled at the time of the typestracts’ composition, often by purer-minded critics concerned that the broader swath of multi-media work for which they seemed to stand – not to mention their slightly queasy new-age connotations – threatened concrete poetry’s status as a legitimate branch of modernist literature. Mike Weaver, writing to the TLS on March 7, 1968, criticised the ‘absurd idea’ that concrete poetry was ‘somehow Between Poetry and Painting’. For Weaver, as for many of the first concrete poets, the term ‘concrete’ indicated ‘an aesthetic rather than a medium, … intra-medial much more importantly than it is inter-medial, … a constructive method for all the arts separately rather than an “intuitive” means of mixing them’ (Weaver 1968b). The debate implied here – between, roughly speaking, 197

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critics who endorsed a mid-century conception of concrete poetry as a literary style influenced by concrete art and those whose interpreted it as a neo-dada art-form – is broader in scope than any implied reference to the typestracts that Weaver might have been making. But we might speculate that they were at the forefront of his mind as he composed his letter. In an article published two months later he criticised Houédard’s work more directly, lamenting the tendency of concrete poets to fall into the kind of ‘transcendental trap’ ‘out of which Houédard, mandala-mad, never troubled to climb’ (Weaver 1968a). As Weaver’s bracing analysis might suggest, Houédard’s work had achieved a certain degree of notoriety in Britain by the late 1960s. Weaver’s criticism also betrays the extent to which Houédard’s practice had contributed to a reorientation of critical approaches to concrete poetry: by conceiving of the concrete poem as a non-semantic, multi-media form, and through the references embedded in his poetry and critical writing to unorthodox spirituality, intermedia theory, and counter-cultural ideologies. In conclusion, however, and perhaps counterintuitively, it is worth emphasising once more the unique tincture that Houédard’s faith brought to his poetics. A great deal of work that had adopted similar compositional principles by the late 1960s involved a spontaneous melding of artistic registers by which, it was implied, a communicative space beyond their shared confines could be accessed. For all the liberatory language surrounding its composition, Houédard’s concrete poetry in some ways implies an antithetical point, using the combination of visual and linguistic media to indicate their mutual containment in a web of representation generated in and through subjective thought. Ironically, this reflected his more self-aware belief in a transcendent plane of existence that was religiously defined, and thus recognised as fundamentally inaccessible in some way. It was perhaps the resultant ascetic, self-corrective compositional impulse that was responsible for the extraordinarily meticulous visual appearance of his typestracts. In any case, regardless of the generic category in which we place them, the ingenuity and originality of Houédard’s concrete poems undeniably make them a significant contribution to late twentiethcentury British literature and art.

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Notes 1 On Houédard’s role as organiser and figurehead within the concrete movement and ‘guru of the British counter-culture’ see Simpson (2017, 14). 2 A fragmented typescript is stored with Houédard’s papers at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, the version referenced here. 3 Houédard’s interest in metaphysical poetry has been noted by his friend the poet Hayden Murphy, who edited the Dublin-based magazine Broadsheet in the 1960s–1970s, the first magazine in Ireland to publish concrete poetry (Murphy, personal interview, September 18, 2012). 4 Houédard’s article ‘Beat and Afterbeat’, published in Summer 1963, refers to ‘my typoems and wordsmudges’ as examples of ‘EYEVERSE’ (1963a, 149), while Kinkon (1965d) contains work that might be described as concrete poetry dated February 1963. Houédard’s earliest published concrete poems include the card-poem Yes/No ([1963i]), composed September 9, 1963 and, according to a publication list assembled by Houédard, published later that year (Verey 1972, 22). His first published typestract might be that printed on the back cover of the ICA Bulletin in May 1964 (Houédard 1964a). 5 References to Wittgenstein punctuate Houédard’s critical writing from this period. Hayden Murphy states that Houédard read Wittgenstein’s work ‘again and again and again’ throughout his life (personal interview, September 18, 2012). 6 The article itself widens the titular theme by periodically replacing the word ‘poetry’ with broader terms such as ‘writing’ and ‘logos’. The article contains three sub-sections, each focusing on a different creative possibility inherent in visual language. The headings for these sections never quite sit still, but they can be paraphrased as ‘painting becoming writing’, ‘painting and writing tending to equal terms’, and ‘writing becoming painting’. All three display a striking breadth of historical knowledge and audacity of conceptual association: one exemplary paragraph from the first section connects the mnemonics and pictographs of pre-phonetic writing systems – ‘knotches, knots, quipus and wampam … pictographs ideographs, hieroglyphs’ – with the pictorial ‘writing’ of early twentiethcentury expressionist and abstract painting (Houédard 1965a, 2). But the second category stands most clearly for that coexistence of language and image central to Houédard’s concrete poetics. Unsurprisingly, he associates this capacity to merge the qualities of writing and painting – to create ‘an abstract nonsemantic/nonfigurative semiotic poetry which will become the exact centre where ikon and logos identify’ (1965a, 7) – with concrete poetry in particular, especially the ‘semiotic poetry’ of the Invenção Group and the so-called ‘machine-poems’ then being created by poets in the West Country. 7 Houédard’s ICA Bulletin typestract (1964a) was followed by various pieces in the sixth, seventh, and eighth issues of Link, while two pieces appeared in the first ‘Changing Guard’ issue of the TLS on August 6, 1964. Further poems appeared across the year, as stand-alone publications – such as Rock Sand Tide (Houédard [1964e]) – and in journal issues including POTH 10 and Henri Chopin’s OU 22. 8 Houédard’s official role on the Jerusalem Bible – whose editorial team also included J.R.R. Tolkien – was as New Testament literary editor, but an earlier letter to

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bor de r blu r s Morgan – July 26, 1964 – suggests that his work extended to translating passages from Psalms, an Old Testament chapter: ‘its HARDEST work of all/ putting things like that into acceptable prose’, ‘ie cutting pious fuck & all the THEE/ THOU shit’ (Houédard 1964c). It is possible, then, that the above translation bears traces of Houédard’s influence. 9 Hayden Murphy suggests a connection between Houédard’s interest in the ‘Babylonian’ roots of Christianity and his time in Asia with military intelligence: ‘his connections within the various strands of what was remaining of Zoroastrianism were quite significant when it came to his work on the Jerusalem Bible’ (personal interview, September 18, 2012). The 1966 Jerusalem Bible became famous for the kind of historical–critical approach to scripture that Houédard’s letter to Morgan reveals, perhaps partly owing to Houédard’s involvement. 10 See Houédard’s letter of March 1, 1975 to Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, in which he recalls realising as a child: how absurd it was to talk about my body & my mind & my ‘soul’ &c &c while making no provision for the ‘I’ that owned them [so] i formulated the distinction between the JE & the MOI which i still find the most helpful insight into Buddhism & yoga … in other ways too – especially in apophatic theologies. (Houédard 1975b) 11 This comes across in Kerouac’s definition of ‘Beat’ in ‘The Origin of the Beat Generation’ (1959) as shorthand for a Catholic idea of ‘beatitude’: [I]t was not at the insistence of any of these ‘niks’ and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat” anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church … the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific. (Qtd. in Fisher 1989, 237) 12 The biographical circumstances of the Trappist monk Merton were strikingly similar to Houédard’s, both writers engaging remotely with the counter-culture and global religions from the confines of a monastery. Texts such as Zen and the Birds of Appetite (Merton 1968) are comparable in theme, if not in prose style, to Houédard’s writing on Christianity and Zen Buddhism. 13 The development of the concept can be traced across various Aylesford Review articles: ‘Heathen Holiness’ (Houédard 1960), ‘East and West – New Perspectives’ (1961), and ‘Men-Men and Right Mind-Minding’ (1963g). 14 As Hayden Murphy points out, the abbot of Prinknash was less accommodating than Houédard, and imposed vows of silence and isolation on him during the late 1960s to discourage these relationships (Murphy, personal interview, September 18, 2012). As a result, the West Country scene partly sustained by Houédard’s tireless activities had largely disintegrated by the close of the decade (Furnival, letter to the author, January 24, 2011). 15 Furnival’s Babacus ([1964?]) was exhibited at the Second International Concrete Poetry Exhibition at St Catherine’s College, Oxford in June 1965, and was among the exhibits thrown into the river by drunk students. Lijn’s Poem Machines were first exhibited at a solo-show in Paris in 1963, and in Britain for the first time at Signals Gallery in 1964. Both Furnival and Cox saw the Poem Machines at

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d om s y lv e s t e r hou é da r d Signals and later told Lijn of her influence on their work (Lijn, personal interview, January 16, 2018). 16 On the different realisations of Houédard’s Basho translation see Simpson ([2012], 43–48). 17 Though Houédard’s description suggests that the Book of 12 Mudras was due to be published, I have been unable to locate a copy of it. 18 As noted, Houédard began composing the works later known as typestracts around 1963. But early works in the style (ca. 1963–65) tend towards simple, two-dimensional, and textural effects, rather than the precise impressions of threedimensional space more typical of the form. 19 Or see the fuller account in a 1979 exhibition note: ‘[d]uring 1945 I realised the typewriter’s control of verticals and horizontals, balancing its mechanism for release from its own imposed grid, offered possibilities that suggested (I was in India at the time) the grading of Islamic calligraphy from cursive (naskhi) writing through cufic to the abstract formal arabesque’ (Houédard 1979). 20 Named after the Dutch infinitive ‘tikken’ (‘to type’), the tiksels, produced by Werkman during the 1920s, are generally characterised by the use of repeated letterforms to build up two-dimensional, textural effects rather than the geometrical three-dimensional shapes typical of the typestracts (Purvis 2004). There is, in fact, no definitive evidence that Werkman or any other early twentieth-century Western artist influenced the typestracts’ composition. 21 The connection lay, as Houédard stated in a letter printed in Studio International, in an admission of the limits of subjective expression emphasised through non-representation or the ‘principle of nothingness’, as in ‘the silence pauses gaps of Cage, Lamonte Young, Phillips and Tilbury – the zones of pure possibility of Nul, Zero, Nart and DIAS …’ (Houédard 1976, 7). 22 As Coleman notes, ‘[t]he psychedelic counterculture seemed to have a natural affinity for the almost hallucinatory gods of the Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist pantheons, and images of Shiva and Krishna soon became staples of psychedelic art’ (2001, 66). 23 Chogyam Trungpa moved to the USA in 1970, later founding the Naropa Institute in Colorado.

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Abstract Concrete Bob Cobbing Bob Cobbing During the autumn of 1964, apparently while channelling the psychoactive effects of a bout of flu, Bob Cobbing completed his alphabetic poem sequence Sound Poems (1965a), published the following spring through his press Writers Forum. Sound Poems is the first of Cobbing’s publications to make extensive use of what can be called ‘concrete’ techniques; yet, at the time of its composition, according to Cobbing himself, he was unaware of concrete poetry as a pre-existing style, only becoming so in the process of circulating the collection to other writers, artists, and publishers. As this delayed point of contact might imply, the concrete poetics that Cobbing cultivated over the next few years is the most resistant, of the practices considered in detail in this text, to analysis by recourse to the earliest conceptions of the style. This is not to cast an aspersion on Cobbing’s work, simply to draw an obvious qualitative distinction based partly on his own statements on concrete poetry, which present an integrally altered sense of the term with expanded stylistic and historical boundaries incorporating everything from medieval pattern poetry to the French ‘poésie sonore’ that had influenced Sound Poems. In fact, the extensive influence of sound poetry – besides a whole range of other artistic and literary genres – on Cobbing’s work makes the presentation of that work solely as ‘concrete poetry’ somewhat difficult. It is also worth acknowledging that I am applying the term exclusively to Cobbing’s sound-based and visual work of the 1960s–1970s, not to his practice as a whole, nor to the more semantically oriented, found and cut-up poetry that he continued to compose across that shorter time-frame.1 Bearing these qualifications in mind, I will provisionally ascribe two key characteristics to Cobbing’s concrete poetry. 203

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Firstly, by emphasising the visual, sonic, and otherwise material elements of language, Cobbing, like Houédard, often radically reduced the role of semantic sense in the concrete poem. For Houédard, this generally meant fashioning letters and diacritical marks into precise architectonic constructions. For Cobbing, more often, it meant breaking down words, letters, and phonemes into their constitutive visual and sonic particles through various forms of spontaneous and improvisatory composition, including performance as composition. The resultant impression of an explosion or atomisation of linguistic sense granted much of his work a teeming, chaotic quality antithetical to that of Gomringer’s pristine ‘constellations’, for example. Secondly, this breakdown of linguistic signs was simultaneously the means of constructing a new ‘poetic’ grammar out of the abstract visual and sonic motifs thrown up by that process: from incantatory patterns of vocal noise to fragments of letters and other remnants of the printed page. Poetry on Cobbing’s terms, therefore, should not be understood as a primarily linguistic medium, but as one moving equally freely through the realms of visual and sonic gesture (as well as bodily movement and dance, though that topic is not covered here). As Cobbing memorably put it, ‘[a] fundamental mistake is to regard poetry as a branch of literature. It is not. It is best regarded as one of the performing arts’ (1985). Somewhat like the first concrete poets, then, but by very different means, Cobbing aimed to present rather than represent the object of poetry, converting the poem into a material entity or phenomenon coterminous with that object which could somehow be directly, viscerally experienced. Although this often involved a turn from linguistic to visual and sonic modes of expression, one important aspect of his poetics was that, rather than presenting his work as fundamentally visual and/or sonic in character, from the late 1960s onwards he generally described it as evading the boundaries of medium per se, on similar terms to Dick Higgins’s description of ‘intermedia’ art. This seems to reflect a sense that not only did the use of semantic language prevent immediate experience of the poetic object but so too did the categorisation of the resultant mode of poetic communication according to the conventional boundaries of sensory expression. Cobbing’s statement on ‘The Shape and Size of Poetry’, dated 1969, captures this idea in a colourful, sixtiescum-symbolist language at a point when it has just fully flowered: Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually. Visual poetry can be heard, smelt, has colours, vibrations. Sound

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bob c obbi ng poetry dances, tastes, has shape … . Poetry in these forms is closer to physical being, at least one step nearer to bodily movement. Gone is the word as word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements. (Cobbing 1970b)

Not only is semantic communication transcended according to this model, but the divisions between the remaining, sensory aspects of poetic communication are overrun: sound has shape, visual form can be heard. Unlike semantic language, however, these less referential means of expression can still be utilised by the concrete poet, who is somehow able to wield them outwith the boundaries of their respective media. Metaphors of physical movement – and even smell – imply that by breaking free of such constraints an intermedia concrete poetry would approach the condition of a living, breathing entity, a ‘physical being’. Rather than writing off this idea as high-sixties hyperbole, it is worth positing some of the motives underpinning it. Cobbing’s concrete poetry can be understood as attempting to evade a pervasive and insidious condition of inauthenticity seen to define semantic language, and to replace semantic language with a more objective, or truthful, mode of communication. This was to be staked on the extra-semantic dimensions of vocal (and bodily) expression, presented as elements of an intermedia poesis that would ultimately forego medium entirely. This, in turn, reflected a sense of the relationship between creative experiment and cultural revolution similar to the counter-cultural positions discussed at earlier points in this text: the idea that language, as a human-made, naturalised system of distinctions and prohibitions, like the inherited boundaries between media, could uphold or enforce repressive social structures; and that literary and artistic expression that defied those conventions could thus have more broadly disruptive effects. Cobbing was generally reluctant to discuss the political implications of his work, but he occasionally broached such an idea quite directly, describing concrete poetry in a late interview as a ‘political act’, a means of ‘protesting, if you like, about the misuse of language by politicians, priests, and so on, who seem to me to be distorting language in order to take power over the people’ (1993). To the literary historian Wolfgang Görtschacher, around the same period, Cobbing stated that ‘my politics, if I had to express them in any other way than through my poetry, would be anarchist’ (1995). At an underlying level, Cobbing’s anarchist, intermedia poetics seems to rest on a belief in an innate human essence or value-set that would

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communicate itself from poet to receiver at an essentially pre-rational level, once the human-made, referential layers of poetic expression had been stripped away. This idea of a universal human subject, waiting in a kind of deep-freeze state to reveal itself through acts of creative transgression, was common to sixties counter-cultural discourse, and might therefore be defined by recourse to the theories which informed that discourse, perhaps especially the writing of the ex-Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse. Through his work at the University of California, San Diego during the 1960s, Marcuse became a figurehead to various student activists. In his Essay on Liberation of 1969, dedicated to the student revolutionaries of 1968, Marcuse forwarded the idea of an ‘organic’ self that, freed from the ideological, bureaucratic, and potentially violent constraints placed on it by capitalist socialisation, would reveal biologically determined patterns of communalist social interaction. The aim of political activism was thus to: [A]ctivate … the elementary, organic foundation of morality in the human being. Prior to all ethical behaviour in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a ‘disposition’ of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve ‘ever greater unities’ of life. We would then have, this side of all ‘values,’ an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society … . (Marcuse [1969] 1972, 19–20)

This idea of a benign human subject (defined here partly in Freudian terms) situated beyond language and signification – ‘this side of all values’ – is very accommodating of Cobbing’s poetics. Indeed, in glossing one of Cobbing’s statements on his own practice, his most engaged critic Robert Sheppard implies that the aim of Cobbing’s 1960s work was to release a kind of Marcusian, biologically determined, socialist subject: ‘Cobbing’s formal activity [was,] in Marcuse’s sense, asserting its refusal of the given social reality by destroying and re-creating its constituents, … by rupturing the linguistic sign’ (1992, 177–78).2 However, while acknowledging the pertinence of Sheppard’s reading, I want to raise the irksome possibility that statements such as ‘The Shape and Size of Poetry’ might also have roots in a kind of unorthodox spirituality. As I noted in my previous chapter, the idea, so common in sixties discourse, of a benevolent human spirit that could make its presence felt in the material world by divesting itself of the shackles 206

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of socially mediated language and custom was as likely to trace its origins to some form of religious mysticism as to a Marxist or anarchist humanism. Such a reading, moreover, would acknowledge the lack of theoretical grounding to Cobbing’s 1960s statements, as well as the air of shamanistic insight – offset, admittedly, by a healthy degree of absurdist humour – that tended to emanate from his performances during this period. The debate sketched out here is returned to at various points in this chapter. In any case, it is fair to say that Cobbing’s work in certain senses represents the endpoint of a global reorientation of concrete poetics. In its urge towards a form of wordless expression evading the strictures of artistic medium, his practice reinterprets concrete poetry along similar lines to those implied by intermedia theory; coupled with his emphasis on spontaneity, performance, and the use of sound in the concrete poem, Cobbing’s approach also codifies a re-engagement with that alternative set of early twentieth-century precedents, orientated around Dada and Futurism, discussed in my second chapter. The political imperatives of Cobbing’s work, moreover, embody a related set of assumptions about the relationship between creative and cultural revolution exemplary of the counter-cultural worldview. This chapter posits an incremental development in the ‘abstract’ character of Cobbing’s work between the early 1960s and early 1970s, taking us from a page-bound, language-based poetry to a visual and sonic poetry rooted in a paradigm of improvisatory performance.3 The initial source for this discussion is Sound Poems (Cobbing 1965a), followed by Cobbing’s second concrete poetry collection Eyearun (1966). Between these publications we can trace a shift from a sound-based to a visual compositional style, and an increasingly pronounced emphasis on breaking down the basic, sense-carrying units of language, which therefore seems to be led at the visual level. I then turn to the most striking and exciting development in Cobbing’s 1960s poetics: his presentation of non-semantic visual poems as scores for oral performance. This new performance paradigm, which I assess by reference to a handful of printed collections from the late 1960s and early 1970s, radically increased the remit of abstraction in Cobbing’s work, the requirement to find improvised sonic equivalents for non-semantic visual marks generating theoretically endless versions of single poems. Before turning to any of these subjects, however, it is worth noting the parallels for Cobbing’s concrete poetry in his earliest writing and visual art.

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Are Your Children Safe in the Sea? Early Artwork and Poetry After holding various menial jobs as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, in 1948 Bob Cobbing enrolled at Bognor Teacher Training College, taking up a job as an art teacher at Barnfield Secondary School in Barnet, north London, the following year. He held that position until 1963, producing a huge number of prints, paintings, and poems in the meantime. The compositional style of this work, in a sense, both predicts and fails to predict the character of his subsequent work. It suggests a profound interest in the abstract and sensory aspects of linguistic and visual communication, and in probing the thresholds between media, but does not imply any developed awareness of recent or contemporary experiments in related fields of literature and art.4 Cobbing’s early prints and paintings can be compared to his visual concrete poetry in their use of abstract visual motifs, many of which seem in retrospect to have subtly orthographic qualities, given their use of repeated, stencilled shapes.5 The print below, retrospectively entitled ‘Crabtree’ (Cobbing 1990a, 48; Figure 1), is a good example, one of a series of eight composed in 1955 based on a recurring set of shapes vaguely suggestive of fossilised or ancient organic life-forms. Indeed, many of Cobbing’s early prints and paintings would later be reconceived as poems; the ‘Crabtree’ series, for example, reappears in his 1990 collection Improvisation Is a Dirty Word. From 1956 onwards, Cobbing was also composing cut-up poems, some of which later appeared in Cygnet Ring (1977); Cobbing’s introduction to that book outlines the method used to create them:6 [D]ecide on the number of lines, clip out the newspaper lines of the required number, and paste them up in an effective order. Success was to use all the lines, failure to have one or more left over which did not fit in. … The sources … were mainly newspapers … . Art and music magazines were also used, a catalogue of Roneo accessories, and company reports. (Cobbing 1977, [7])

In 1960, Cobbing composed the first in a comparable series of permutational poems, some of which also appear in Cygnet Ring. In these poems, incremental grammatical alterations are exacted on lines of found text, gradually undermining or complicating their semantic meanings. The cut-ups and permutational poems show Cobbing concertedly exploring the visual and sonic dimensions of poetic expression for the first time. Perhaps more significantly, in their treatment of found text, these poems cast the same kind of scrutiny on semantic language 208

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Figure 1: ‘Crabtree’ 209

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– perhaps specifically on its use within contemporary consumer culture – as Cobbing’s concrete poems. This is clear from the cut-up poem ‘Lies like Truth’, for example, which splices the registers of advertising and journalism (Cobbing and Rowan 1963, [8]): today new beauty comes within your grasp those qualities which reveal sensibility of vision and imply a personal philosophy an agency is an advocate and a wise advocate will never lie but has a true country-fresh flavour that the falsification is deliberate is most unlikely for it does wash whiter than white ….

Portentous phrases, perhaps plucked from broadsheet editorials, are undercut by association with the fatuous persuasions of the billboard or television screen – ‘a wise advocate will never lie/ but has a true countryfresh flavour’ – as if suggesting some deep and insidious complicity between the two (indeed, given the ostensibly chance-based method, the polemical content of some of this work is fairly bald). Without necessarily over-stressing their interest, these poems suggest a trenchant suspicion of semantic language – especially the uses made of language in the new media and advertising culture of post-war Britain – that would be borne out more strikingly a few years later in Cobbing’s turn from the linguistic sign. The permutational poems intensify this kind of scrutiny, magnifying single lines of found text through repetition, while processes of grammatical shuffling prise out bathetic and counterintuitive messages. ‘A Line from the Observer’, composed in 1960, interrogates the gentle demagoguery of public-interest journalism, the grammatical modulations mimicking the insistent intrusion of the line on the reader’s psyche, while also suggesting its investigation by the poet from every angle (Cobbing and Rowan 1963, [7]): Are Are Are Are Are

your your your your your

children safe in the sea? children safely in the sea? children safe? In the sea children. Safe in the sea children. Safe? In the sea?

What the cut-ups and permutationals suggest in general, in their dismantling and dismembering of printed text, is a loosely culturally 210

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contextualised suspicion of semantic language. Some of the socialhistorical contexts and creative parallels for this impulse are considered below; suffice to say for now, like Houédard’s early poems, these pieces seem in retrospect to prefigure a movement away from the medium in question. The New Sensibility: Towards Sound Poems In Autumn 1964 Cobbing left his final full-time teaching position at Alder Secondary Modern in Finchley, a job he had inherited from his friend and fellow teacher Jeff Nuttall the previous year. Cobbing taught part-time until January 1965, by which point he was working at Better Books bookshop in central London, and had moved from north London to Maida Vale. The previous November he had composed the majority of Sound Poems while processing ‘the strange sounds that were going through my head as a result of the flu’ (Cobbing 1996). However, the composition dates given for Sound Poems in a notebook of poems stored with Cobbing’s British Library Papers suggest that the first few pieces in the sequence were written across the preceding spring (Cobbing [1960–70?]). Either way, Cobbing clearly composed Sound Poems without extensive knowledge of concrete poetry as a pre-existing style, and quite possibly without any knowledge of it at all. Assessing the influences on the collection is thus a useful way of tracing the distinctions between Cobbing’s concrete poetry and that which preceded it, and of outlining some of the alternative reference points for visual and sound-based poetries during the early to mid-1960s. One vital influence on Sound Poems, as its name suggests, was the contemporaneous sound poetry movement, especially the work of French ‘Ultralettrist’ poets such as Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and Bernard Heidsieck. Cobbing later recalled in interview that: What really started me off was a visit from France by Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck. They did performances at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. I’d been toying with the idea of doing something along those lines myself, but that visit prompted me to work on my ABC in Sound. (Cobbing 1996)

The performances Cobbing refers to were probably part of an event held at the ICA on May 12, 1964, the second in a two-part series during which Houédard presented his two-part lecture ‘Eyear’ (1964b), the first event having been held at the Royal College of Art on March 2. Chopin 211

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and Heidsieck either performed or had recordings of their work played at the ICA event; it is notable that Cobbing’s first three ‘sound poems’ (‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’) were written shortly afterwards.7 Writing to Edwin Morgan in July 1964, Houédard described the second part of his lecture – delivered at the ICA – as ‘the ear part’ (1964c). The relevant section of the lecture transcript – a copy of which is held with Morgan’s papers at the University of Glasgow – focuses on French sound poetry, with German and Brazilian concrete poetry having been covered at the RCA event, which Cobbing either missed or did not subsequently comment on. It is possible, then, that Houédard’s statements on poésie sonore at the ICA provided Cobbing’s critical introduction to the whole field of sound and concrete poetries: when we come to the 3rd group centred in france on the mag CS [Cinquième Saison, later OU ] ed by hc [Henri Chopin] the scenery changes a little – a) EAR or noise verse – not eyeverse b) & human not machine/instrument noise … . the deepdown interest here is in human life – in poetry as human communication of any sort – thru gesture dance mime movement (charlie chaplin as poet) – as well as thru sound & sight – music painting sculpture – for some reason that isnt immediately clear EYEVERSE is a much less central concern – perhaps because alphabets are felt to have been exhausted as an avantgarde tool … . (Houédard 1964b)

A later section of the transcript defines the ‘interest in human life’ referred to here as an ‘interest in the human voice, not as a tool or medium for conveying cartesian ideas from mind to listener – but … as matter materia’ (1964b). Whether or not Cobbing’s engagement with sound and concrete poetries was mediated by this description, almost all the characteristics of ‘EAR or noise verse’ posited by Houédard can be ascribed to Cobbing’s subsequent work in this area: the mistrust of ‘Cartesian’, referential language; the presentation of non-referential vocal sound as poetic material (‘voice as matter’); the reframing of poetry ‘as human communication of any sort’; and the implication of a ‘deepdown interest in human life’, an ultimate goal of cognitive or spiritual empathy between poet and audience, achieved through untrammelled self-expression. The points of similarity between Cobbing’s mid-1960s work and poésie sonore – a connection returned to below – are perhaps more obvious than the influence of beat poetry on Sound Poems, but the latter reflects a more long-standing creative interest. Bulletins of Hendon Arts Together (HAT) – an umbrella arts organisation co-founded by 212

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Cobbing in June 1952 – reveal that the beats had been discussed and performed at Writers Forum events since around 1958, while archived press cuttings document three readings of beat poetry, organised by HAT, held at North Finchley Library between January and December 1961. At these events, Cobbing and others read out the work of contemporary North American poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, William Burroughs, and Robert Creeley, while beat-influenced English poets such as Pete Brown, Adrian Mitchell, and Spike Hawkins performed their own work. The use of live jazz accompaniments at at least one of these readings may be one precedent for Cobbing’s development of musical effects within the performed poetic line. Another was the prose of Jack Kerouac, especially his 1959 text Old Angel Midnight, which Cobbing frequently referred to in interviews as a source of inspiration, and in which, he felt, Kerouac had imparted the qualities of jazz music to written language: ‘he is really writing bop jazz there, actually writing it on the page, using words’ (Cobbing [1977] 2000, [16]). The exaggerated rhythms, alliteration, and neologisms of Kerouac’s poetic prose text – a rambling, mythopoeic visionary sequence set at the author’s windowsill, lapsing in and out of natural observation – are comparable to many of those found in Sound Poems: ‘this is a mysterious yak the bird makes, yick, – wowf wow wot sings the dog blud blut blup below the Homestead Deer – red robins with saffron scarlet or orange rud breasts make a racket in the dry dead car crash tree’ (Kerouac [1959] 1979, 15). A related influence was cut-up poetry, especially the work of William Burroughs. Cobbing had of course been composing cut-ups prior to encountering Burroughs’s work in this style, which was first published – along with poems by Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin – in Minutes to Go in 1960. But, unlike Cobbing’s mid-1950s collage poems, Burroughs’s cut-ups are characterised by the division of sourcephrases through words and syllables, often using a set formula whereby pages of printed text were separated into quarters using incisions along their vertical and horizontal axes, the four constituent parts of the page then rearranged. The effect of this more extreme, chance-based method was to debar authorial critiques of the source-text like those found in Cobbing’s cut-ups, instead suggesting a more complete or integral collapse of language and the emergence of a new language or protolanguage spreading virally across its cells: as in Burroughs’s ‘Cancer Men … These Individuals are Marked Foe … ’ (Beiles et al. [1960] 1968, 12):

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Cobbing read from Minutes to Go at the second North Finchley beat evening, and the influence of Burroughs’s work is obvious from poems such as ‘Burroughs Welcome’, written on September 4, 1962 (Cobbing [1960–70?]), probably in response to Burroughs’s recent appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference (the event at which Trocchi and MacDiarmid had locked horns). This poem’s cut-lines, unlike those of Cobbing’s earlier cut-ups, cut, Burroughs-style, through words and sentences (Cobbing [1960–70?]): Urn with an ecstasy gemlike persistent sheer egotistical write his Auto-bio her keeper by Mr. Ut-en-a-revie (crypto-American) Nev-I-essed Scott ….

The staccato rhythms and nonsensical word-fragments of this poem predict the percussive soundscapes of Sound Poems, while the impulse conveyed by that later sequence – not simply to break down phonetic language, but to rebuild its fragments into an alternative poetic grammar possessing some arcane power misplaced or corrupted within the original – seems partly to feed off the impression of deep, esoteric meaning conveyed by Burroughs’s cut-ups. The influences of poésie sonore, beat, and cut-up poetry have very little to do with concrete poetry in the first instance. To the extent that Sound Poems was later interpreted as a work of concrete poetry – as it was, by Cobbing and others – these influences rather suggest a reorientation of the style according to a new set of literary reference points and around a different set of cultural and geographical coordinates. Among other

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things, Cobbing’s mid-1960s work offers some context for the increasing tendency to associate concrete poetry with contemporaneous North American modernist poetry. However, we must also place the attitude to language and artistic medium evident from Sound Poems in broader cultural and sociological context, specifically in relation to Cobbing’s increasing interaction by the mid-1960s with the British wing of the international counter-culture. For Cobbing’s former colleague Jeff Nuttall, the counter-culture, or ‘underground’, cohered initially around an instinctive, collective sense of repugnance at the Western military actions that had brought the Second World War to a close. After the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ‘moral values, thought absolute, were now seen to be comparative, for all social entities around which morality had revolved were now called into doubt and nothing of morality remained’ (Nuttall [1968] 1970, 19). The new culture was further galvanised by similar reactions to the campaign of US-led military interventions that punctuated the following two-and-a-half decades, most significantly the botched campaign in Vietnam: ‘the underground’, Nuttall concludes, ‘was simply what you did in the H-bomb world if you were, by nature, creative and concerned for humanity as a whole’ ([1968] 1970, 160). As noted in previous chapters, this was a social paradigm wherein semantic language, and the inherited boundaries between media, were often conceived of as insidious means of reinforcing the interests of political and economic power, while modes of creative expression that defied those conventions were potential catalysts of revolutionary change. Given the conduciveness of Cobbing’s work to a Marcusian reading, however, it is perhaps worth restating the idea just outlined with specific reference to Marcuse’s critical writing. Marcuse’s 1960s texts, from One-Dimensional Man (1964) to An Essay on Liberation ([1969] 1972), respond to the same post-war epoch of statemediated consumer capitalism that had influenced Morgan’s ‘Beatnik in the Kailyard’. But, in contrast to Morgan’s – qualified – excitement at the new parameters of sensory experience that this culture seemed to be establishing, for Marcuse the nominal benefits of the new capitalism – which complicated the worker–employer model of orthodox Marxist analysis and proffered the limited redistribution of wealth and the wider distribution of its benefits – simply masked the perpetuation of inequality: which, through the globalisation of economic markets, was now more evident on an international than a national scale. Indeed, in this new context, the task was not so much to conceive of practical 215

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means of dismantling the Western capitalist socio-economic hegemony – although Marcuse notes that recent technological advances made an end to global economic inequality, at one level, newly conceivable8 – as to wean the subjects of capitalism off the psychological and material benefits that it seemed to have accrued for them. This was particularly necessary in the case of a newly docile, socially conservative working class, who must still ultimately be compelled to act as the ‘historical agent of revolution’ (Marcuse [1969] 1972, 25). This task was attempted by presenting the new perks of capitalism that had quelled revolutionary fervour within that class and elsewhere – household gadgets, exotic lifestyle experiences – as evidence of a form of character manipulation, an introjection of ‘false needs’ by a system seeking the conditions of its own survival, aided by a newly pervasive advertising culture: ‘False’ [needs] are … superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole … . Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. (Marcuse 1964, 4–5)

Thus, the task of resistance became primarily a psychological one: this was the ‘Great Refusal’ of consumer consciousness that Marcuse associated with various non-class-based progressive movements of the 1960s, and especially with a newly politicised student base ([1969] 1972, 11). The Great Refusal – to bring the discussion back to concrete poetry – was borne out partly in assaults on the linguistic and symbolic systems seen to communicate and condition the needs and desires of the socialised subject, and partly in attempts to define alternative modes of creative expression and interaction. In this context, art and literature, particularly that which adhered to some kind of avant-garde credo stressing formal rupture and experiment, could play a greatly enhanced role in political activism. The second chapter of Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, ‘The New Sensibility’, is concerned precisely with how new modes of artistic expression might guide or entail the construction of a new, collective, experiential realm: 216

bob c obbi ng The new sensibility and the new consciousness which are to project and guide such reconstruction demand a new language to define and communicate the new ‘values’ (language in the wider sense which includes words, images, gestures, tones). It has been said that the degree to which a revolution is developing qualitatively different social conditions and relationships may perhaps be indicated by the development of a different language: the rupture with the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with the vocabulary of domination. (Marcuse [1969] 1972)

In the counter-cultural moment crystallised in this statement, the act of breaking down language into its constitutive phonetic particles, and of refashioning them into a grammar of abstract sonic and visual effects, was not merely a refusal to make sense. It was potentially a refusal to collude in the construction of a subject whose existence perpetuated the structures of economic inequality, a half-mute gesture towards the possible conditions of a utopian society. The repeated appearance of Cobbing’s name throughout Nuttall’s counter-cultural memoir Bomb Culture reflects Cobbing’s practical involvement with many of the most iconic events and projects associated with the Underground in Britain. Cobbing is present, for example, at a memorable scene set at Braziers Park, a country house outside London where various artists, poets, and cultural organisers had gathered together to devise the details of Project Sigma, Alexander Trocchi’s ill-fated plan for a network of underground educational and cultural institutions. The famous June 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, meanwhile, a high-water mark of counter-cultural visibility, was organised at Better Books during Cobbing’s time there, after a short-notice reading at the shop by Allen Ginsberg (Nuttall [1968] 1970, 228). Bearing in mind these practical connections, we can certainly interpret the movement beyond semantic sense in Sound Poems as partly expressing that same sense of a causal relationship between creative experiment and cultural revolution differently defined by Marcuse and Nuttall. In short, in composing Sound Poems, Cobbing was responding to a gamut of influences extending beyond – and probably excluding – concrete poetry so-called, that were manifested in a non-linguistic or quasi-linguistic mode of poetic expression involving an exaggerated use of sonic and rhythmic effects. Finally, on the subject of influences, it is worth acknowledging that Cobbing’s early concrete poetry in many ways enacts a return to the phonic poetics of Dada. Though he spoke more readily of Chopin and Heidsieck, in various ways his mid-1960s 217

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practice is more reminiscent of Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’ ([1920] 1995) than the mechanically reduced vocal matter of, say, Chopin’s ‘Sol Air’ ([1961–64] 1965): in retaining the basic auditory and grammatical units of speech and writing, for example – a contrast explained below – and in its attachment to an atavistic notion of ‘primitive language’. More generally, many aspects of Cobbing’s aesthetics of creative revolt were pre-empted by the Zurich Dada poets, as a few snippets from Ball’s ‘Dada Diary’ Flight Out of Time might indicate: [I]n these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge … . Language as a social organ can be destroyed without the creative process having to suffer. In fact, it seems that the creative powers even benefit from it. (Ball [1974] 1996, 71, 76)

Not only does Sound Poems redefine concrete poetry according to a new set of contemporaneous reference points, then, but, at an underlying level, it represents a kind of dadaist siege on the style’s constructivist foundations. Earverse: Sound Poems Sound Poems is not characterised by that wholesale movement beyond semantic language that defined much of Cobbing’s later work. Instead, letters, syllables, and words are arranged in ways that emphasise their sonic, rhythmic, and intonational effects over their linguistic values. In general, the sound of language seems a more fundamental concern than the look of language at this point, the performance instructions printed at the back of the book suggesting that the whole sequence was meant to be heard aloud. Cobbing’s emphasis on linguistic sound often involved the use of foreign words and phonemes – some borrowed from non-firstworld languages – whose semantic meanings were obscure or buried. At the same time, Cobbing’s vocal collages are punctuated with coherent linguistic allusions, setting Sound Poems apart from the poésie sonore that had influenced it and suggesting the scope of developments still to come in terms of the ‘abstract’ character of his work. ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ are among six of the Sound Poems that use French words and syllables, perhaps indicating – albeit rather superficially – the influence of French poets such as Chopin. Indeed, these three pieces were composed shortly after Chopin’s performance at the ICA (Cobbing 218

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[1960–70?]), and the ‘C’ poem below was even dedicated to Chopin, according to Cobbing’s notes for a late 1960s radio broadcast (Cobbing 1964–90): Cri Zok cri zok cri zok Rinkle stammen rinkle stammen Tak tak tak tak Gros temps gros temps gros Temps temps temps tempe Temps terre temps terre Plume de ma tante Tu dors tu dors To two too door A door adore Toc toc toc toc Tu dors tu dors Zzzzzz Zzzzzz Z (Cobbing 1965a, [7])

This nursery rhyme-like sequence is reasonably characteristic of Sound Poems as a whole. Indeed, it might be worth acknowledging, as in relation to Morgan’s first concrete poems, the apparent disparity between the grand ambitions attributable to such poetry and the whimsical, childlike character of the work itself. Cobbing arranges a set of mainly French words and word-sounds according to various phonetic and rhythmic patterns, though we can also spot bilingual, homonymic puns such as ‘Tu dors two door’. If Cobbing’s emphasis on the phonic rhythms and textures of language reflects the influence of French sound poets, the breakdown of semantic language in Sound Poems is nowhere near as comprehensive as in those poets’ contemporaneous work. To borrow a distinction of Henri Chopin’s, extrapolated by Steve McCaffery, Cobbing’s ‘C’ poem is, like much Dada, Futurist, and Lettrist poetry, ‘phonic’ in character. Language is broken apart into pieces still large enough to function as, or give a non-functional impression of, speech: often words and syllables, never smaller than phonemes. McCaffery describes such work as ‘still largely a word-bound practice’, since it ‘preserved a morphological patterning that … upheld the aural presence of the word’ (McCaffery 1997, 155). By contrast, the ‘sonic’ poetry of ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Chopin dissociates vocal sound from speech more completely through mechanical manipulation of the recorded voice and non-verbal vocal effects such as breathing, clicking, 219

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and smacking of the lips and tongue. Chopin’s early 1960s practice, for example, involved decelerating recorded vocal sound on magnetic tape to the point where a kind of granular patterning was revealed within single, stretched-out phonemes. From these experiments, Chopin discovered a notional sub-phonemic unit called the ‘micro-particle’, which became the basic compositional motif of his work. The effects can be heard in pieces such as ‘Sol Air’ ([1961–64] 1965), in which microseconds of vocal sound are stretched over huge durations, overlaid multiple times. One way of measuring the difference between such work and the phonic poetry of Sound Poems is that, whereas Sound Poems can be easily reproduced in writing, ‘Sol Air’ really only exists in recording or performance. This distinction might seem to signify Cobbing’s less ‘advanced’ adaptation of an avant-garde poetic idiom. But in various ways his work’s lingering attachment to semantic sense allowed him greater creative freedom than the poets to whom he was responding. Many of the foreign-language sections of Sound Poems are punctuated with translatable, illustrative words and phrases: his ‘I’ poem, for example, includes various words from its Japanese source-language evoking travel and writing, including ‘jibiki’ (‘encyclopaedia’), ‘iki’ (‘journey’), and ‘kaku’ (‘passage of literature, stroke of written character, to write/scratch/ draw’) (Cobbing 1965a, [19]): iji, iji-baru ijo iki iki iki-jibiki ika ikaku ikakucho ikana ikagono ikasama ….

Those sections of Sound Poems that use non-first-world chants and phrases, meanwhile, convey that impression of speech that McCaffery also associates with phonic poetry. Combined with their lack of actual semantic meaning, this endows these poems with something of the quality of a lost ancestral language, or a voice of religious possession, subtly evoking some of the ideological and, perhaps, spiritual subtexts of Cobbing’s practice. Two of these poems – ‘H’ and ‘T’ – are based on chant-patterns from tribal communities, lifted from the classical scholar C.M. Bowra’s Primitive Song (1962), a study of the origins of creative expression that compares such chants to the ritual oral practices of stone age societies, because they are ‘less organized and elaborate than modern songs’ and are produced in ‘conditions in many respects close to those of the late Paleolithic age’ (Bowra 1962, 3).9 220

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Cobbing’s poems use chant-patterns of the Patagonian Selk’nam tribe and the Vedda of Sri Lanka, both of which, according to Bowra, consist of ‘unintelligible, emotive noises’ set to a fixed tune, the Selk’nam song also being associated with a specific time of day, morning. In Bowra’s text, the Selk’nam fragment reads ‘Ha-ra-xe-u-ka ha-ra-xe-uka ha-ra-xe-u’, the Vedda fragment ‘Tan tandinanan tandinane/ Tanan tandina tandinane’ (1962, 58–59). Cobbing builds two poems around these fragments, using fixed patterns of grammatical permutation. The ‘H’ poem opens on a straight rendition of the Selk’nam line; on the next line, the first letter of each hyphen-separated section is replaced with the next consonant in the alphabet, except for the fourth, vowel-based section, which is replaced with a random, expostulatory noise (Cobbing 1965a, [17]): Ha-ra-xe-u-ka ha-ra-xe-u-ka ha-ra-xe-u Ja-se-yeh-ee-la Ja-se-yeh-ee-la Ja-se-yeh-ee Ka-ta-zeh-umm-ma Ka-ta-zeh-umm-ma Ka-ta-zeh-umm La-va-beh-oh-na La-va-beh-oh-na La-va-beh-oh ….

According to Cobbing’s performance notes, the performance of this piece should be ‘monotonously rhythmical’ (Cobbing 1965a [55]); his own recordings of the piece use a consistent, syncopated beat. In this sense, the poem comprises a purely musical, percussive phonetic sequence. But through that impression of syntax that McCaffery identifies, reliant on the repetition of certain phonetic features and interrelations, it also implies a kind of buried or unbroachable sense, suggesting a heightened state of spiritual awareness or the components of a misplaced tribal language. In emulating ‘primitive song’, such poems play out an atavistic flight or recoil from the socially mediated communicative systems of modern culture that arguably has relatively little to do with the critical interrogation of those systems which Marcuse’s writing seems to call for. Admittedly, Marcuse’s conception of the ‘New Sensibility’ is itself vague. But it is qualified by an acknowledgement that, while human nature might naturally manifest itself along ‘socialist’ lines, it could also be so pervaded by the ‘false needs’ introjected by capitalism that the most instinctual-seeming behavioural patterns might seem to express those needs: ‘changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological” dimension and modify organic behaviour. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behaviour, it is not 221

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only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behaviour’ ([1969] 1972, 20). In a paradigm where human character was considered to be so saturated by false consciousness, the poet’s task might seem to have involved a greater acknowledgement and examination of the dynamics of socially mediated communication than Cobbing offers with his – almost escapist – evocations of pre-semantic ritual and play: perhaps through the ‘techniques of indeterminacy and discontinuity, of collage and creative linkage, of poetic artifice and defamiliarization’ that Robert Sheppard associates with the writing of the British Poetry Revival (2005, 2).10 The processes of cognitive friction invited by some of the work that Sheppard is referring to here – whereby the reader is compelled to acknowledge the trenchancy of the languages expressive of introjected need in order to establish the mental dialogues capable of ‘rupturing’ them – are rarely invited by the author of Sound Poems. By contrast, the poetics encoded in lines such as ‘Ja-se-yeh-ee-la Ja-se-yeh-ee-la Ja-se-yeh-ee’ seems curiously inattentive to the historical contingencies of human character and communication. In any case, in stylistic terms, Sound Poems indicates a less pronounced degree of abstraction than we find in Eyearun, Cobbing’s collection of visual concrete poems published the following year. This suggests that the total breakdown of semantic language which characterises his late 1960s work initially manifested itself on the visual plane, but in a way that fed into his sound-based practice. However, it is important to re-emphasise that Sound Poems was primarily intended to be heard, either in performance or recording; and, in its various auditory renditions, the sequence already attests to an increasing abstraction or multiplication of the poem as formal entity. Each recording or performance of Sound Poems is unique in more or less audacious ways, troubling conceptions of ‘the poem’ as singular orthographic or auditory form.11 Even the performance prompts at the back of the text encourage a certain slippage between the written and spoken poem, inviting the reader to choose ‘any path’ from the first to the last line of a particular verse, for example, or to ‘read several times each time a different route’ (Cobbing 1965a, [55]).

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Cobbing and Concrete In a 1973 interview with Eric Mottram Cobbing recalled that he became aware of the work of other concrete poets while distributing advance copies of Sound Poems: E.M. At what point did you sense that what you were doing was part of a widespread thing, stretching from the Noigandres group in Brazil through to people like Dûfrene and Chopin in France, and Heissenbüttel in Germany? B.C. I can tell you exactly: November, 1964, … I had a flu and a very high temperature, and I had finished off in that week my ‘ABC in Sound’ … I started sending copies around to various people I had vaguely heard of, people like Dom Sylvester Houédard … . [ellipsis in orig.] I was vaguely aware of them, that they existed, I had never met any of them at that time. John Sharkey was another one. I got one or two addresses – Edwin Morgan was another – and sent a few copies around. Immediately the responses started coming back, not just from this country but from abroad as well, in a couple of months from that November. (Cobbing [1977] 2000, [7])

From this point onwards Cobbing’s work began appearing in journals and magazines associated with concrete poetry. In England these included Tlaloc, Second Amaranth, and Link, while a 1966 issue of the Scottish journal Extra Verse was dedicated to Cobbing’s work, featuring Houédard’s article ‘Bob Cobbing: Troubadour and Poet’ (1966c). By the end of 1965 Cobbing’s poetry had been exhibited at Jasia Reichardt’s Between Poetry and Painting exhibition at the ICA and by July of the following year Cobbing had published his second full collection of concrete poems, Eyearun (1966). Composed across the 18 months since the appearance of Sound Poems, Eyearun is probably his first collection to contain work produced in conscious response to concrete poetry, perhaps explaining the greater visual orientation of that work than in Sound Poems. The poetry and art of Dom Sylvester Houédard seems to have been particularly significant to Cobbing at this point. Cobbing later recalled meeting Houédard at some point between July 1965 and the publication of Eyearun: When I was the manager of Better Books [July 1965 onwards] one day this reverend gentleman with his cassock came in. When he got inside the door, he went down on his knees as if he was going to pray. Instead he opened a suitcase and brought out all sorts of magazines and books that he had collected which he had come to show me. (Cobbing 1995)

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Houédard’s subsequent influence on Eyearun is evident from its title – probably a reference to his ‘Eyear’ lecture (Houédard 1964b) – and from the fact that Cobbing named three of the poems in the collection ‘typestracts’. Houédard also wrote an introduction for Eyearun, dividing up its constituent poems using terms established in his 1966 article on Cobbing, into ‘eye’ poems, ‘ear’ poems, ‘eye/ear’ poems, and ‘eyear’ poems (Houédard 1966c). The appeal of Houédard’s work to Cobbing is perhaps unsurprising, given that Houédard’s typestracts and kinetic poems had dispensed so strikingly with semantic language in favour of a poetics of abstract technical effects.12 However, beyond its tendency towards wordlessness, the visual concrete poetry in Eyearun has little in common with Houédard’s meticulous typewriter compositions. In fact, in appearance and spirit, Cobbing’s work seems more akin to the abstract expressionist painting that he had practised as a visual artist between the mid-1950s and early 1960s. In a press release for Cobbing’s last solo exhibition of painting, held at North Finchley Library in 1963, Jeff Nuttall described Cobbing’s visual aesthetics in terms that apply almost as well to some of the visual poems he would be creating within a few years: Abstract expressionism makes its impact in the mid-fifties and from then on Cobbing progresses to the rather odd, ultra-sensitive wielding of paint which distinguishes his present style. These new pictures are no more (and no less!) than supercharged surfaces in which the geometric restriction imposed by the rectangle of the canvas is reduced to a minimum and one feels that the painting is exploding illimitably from the centre like the universe itself. (Nuttall 1963)

The visual impression Nuttall describes here – that sense that the visual frame might contain a finite segment of an infinite visual form – is very similar to that conveyed by some of Cobbing’s later duplicator prints, for example, by the seepage and coagulation of ink across the page. It is also worth noting the persistent influence of cut-up poetry on Cobbing’s work at this point, though the effects of this seem to have been transferred to the visual plane (an idea clarified below). Something of the cumulative impact of these various influences is summed up in Nuttall’s description of concrete poetry in Bomb Culture, which seems primarily a description of Cobbing’s work: Concrete poetry … is, in fact, a development of the aesthetic potential in the leavings of Dada. Its message, finally, is close to that of Tzara, of Burroughs, of Rothko, of Laing, of John Latham. No Thing (no particular

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bob c obbi ng thing, no defined thing, no isolated thing, all-inclusive totality, total spirit) is Everything. Everything is Nothing. (Nuttall [1968] 1970, 149)

Cobbing’s mid- to late 1960s practice can certainly be compared, as we have seen, to the work of the Zurich Dadaists, of Burroughs and the cut-up poets, and of abstract expressionist painters, while the artist John Latham and the psychiatrist R.D. Laing were personal acquaintances at this time.13 As per Nuttall’s description, the poems in Eyearun redirect the basic idea of arranging language-forms in visually arresting patterns – initially a means of attempting to stabilise semantic sense – according to the broadly anti-rationalist impetus attributed to the movements and figures listed, symbolically disrupting the metaphysical authority of the word by breaking it apart on the page. Nuttall’s analysis of concrete poetry – which, in various senses, could not be more opposed to its initial theorisation – arguably indicates not just the general drift of concrete style towards a neo-dada aesthetics by the late 1960s, but the specific terms of its reception in sixties London. Certainly, the counter-cultural ferment evoked by his passage was especially concentrated within pockets of the English capital by the time Bomb Culture appeared. Moreover, the atmosphere of creative transgression that pervaded Cobbing’s workplace – the paperback department of Better Books – from January 1965 onwards provided a direct backdrop and catalyst for the composition of Eyearun unlike any comparable environmental influence on Morgan’s, Finlay’s, or Houédard’s 1960s work. By July 1965 Cobbing had taken over from Barry Miles as department manager – a position he held until the department’s closure in November 1967 – and, over the next two years, Better Books became a hub of counter-cultural activity, one of the ‘centres of the whole English movement’ (Nuttall [1968] 1970, 201), stocking a comprehensive selection of alternative literature typified by ‘concrete poetry and American Beat Generation mimeo-magazines’ (Miles 2010, 159). Poetry readings were held at the shop, including a performance by the Austrian sound poet Ernst Jandl, which Cobbing often mentioned in interviews as a formative influence on his own practice. The basement, meanwhile, was converted into an exhibition space, hosting installation and performance art. Of particular significance were the various events staged at Better Books during the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), whose influence on Eyearun – published the summer of the symposium – can be sensed from the subtitle of one of the duplicator prints included in the collection: ‘The Death of Language’.

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Eyeverse: Eyearun Eyearun was published as an envelope of loose sheets, the first in the Writers Forum Folder series. As noted, it is partly distinguished from Sound Poems by the emphasis placed on the visual dimensions of language. A more significant distinction, perhaps, is that in these poems we find the basic, sense-conveying units of language – words, syllables, letters – broken apart for the first time in Cobbing’s practice, creating the page-based equivalent of ‘sonic’ rather than ‘phonic’ poetry. The attitude to language implied by this gesture varies from piece to piece, however, in ways that relate to the mystical and materialist connotations of Cobbing’s poetics already discussed. Some of the pieces in Eyearun, including Cobbing’s ‘Duplicatorprint: The Death of Language’ (Cobbing 1966, n.pag.), are almost bereft of any trace of writing or visual reminder of the printed page. In such work, language as such seems to be killed off, perhaps in homage to auto-destructive art. In the place of language we find a grammar of abstract visual effects that might best be called metaphorically poetic, with distinctions in meaning and emphasis implied by contrasts in colour, shape, and texture. Engaging with Cobbing’s visual work at this purely sensory level can be a highly pleasurable experience, but the mode of expression does not seem to emerge through a disruptive, interrogatory encounter with semantic language. Interpreting such work as poetry rather than visual art instead seems to depend on a kind of revelatory encounter with abstract visual motifs as components of an intermedia poetry, and thus, perhaps, on a conception of poetic experience as involving some form of magical or hallucinatory possession. In other poems, however, a more engaging tension is established between visual and semantic expression, suggesting a more contextualised critique of, and movement beyond, the written word. These include the three ‘typestracts’ mentioned above. These pieces seem to have been created by passing stencilled strips and squares of text through a duplicator multiple times, at multiple angles, with a top layer of letters and diacritic marks added using a letter-transfer kit. The overprinting of text means that segments of writing are positioned upside-down from any given reading angle, and also makes large sections of each typestract wholly illegible. This, along with the general impression of damaged or degraded text, might suggest another blanket assault on language, forcing the reader–viewer back onto engagement with simple colour gradients, and the textures created by overprinting, as the only possible means of interpretation. But the columns and squares of text do remain legible in places. Moreover, the titles of the 226

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typestracts are taken from words and phrases positioned at suggestive points on each page – often at the top-left-hand side – suggesting that some kind of linear reading process is still invited. These gestures alone generate a more nuanced interplay between image and language than in the duplicator prints; and when we consider the suggestiveness of Cobbing’s source-texts the treatment of language in the typestracts starts to take on the aspect of sociological critique. Stephen Willey has identified these source-texts as Walter C. Alvarez’s Incurable Physician (1964), an autobiography of an American doctor and popular medical writer, and Denis Warner’s The Last Confucian: Vietnam, South-East Asia, and the West ([1963] 1964), an account of the early stages of the Vietnam War by an Australian war correspondent (Willey 2012, 127). Alvarez’s final chapter, the only one from which Cobbing selects his collage material, consists of a diatribe against Freudian psychoanalysis, describing its ‘almost unintelligible gibberish’ as ‘a manifestation of the present day worship of the unintelligible’ (1964, 248). Warner’s book focuses on the overthrow and assassination of the anti-communist South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem by factions within his own government, an event that destabilised the US-backed state, escalating conflict in the region. Criticising the American Embassy’s lack of concerted response to the coup, Warner presents the various south-east Asian communist insurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s as a collectively orchestrated, ‘skilfully executed plan to destroy Western economic power and influence’ ([1963] 1964, 304). Both texts could be interpreted as harbouring hidden messages or motives: Alvarez is effectively concerned with upholding a biological rather than a sociological account of mental illness; Warner’s text, outwardly motivated by the defence of global capitalism against the USSR and its communist proxies, is predictably silent on the CIA’s tacit support – only latterly revealed – for the coup against Diem, whose anti-Buddhist policies were attracting a level of global condemnation unhelpful to American plans for the region. In overlaying or imbricating lines from the two texts, Cobbing seems to be pursuing the techniques and aims of cut-up as outlined by William Burroughs. As Burroughs noted in interview, that is, cut-up technique was in certain cases intended to function as a kind of textual espionage, a means of uncovering and immobilising secret messages hidden within texts which were somehow able to influence the unwitting reader at a kind of psychosomatic level, ‘certain word combinations produc[ing] certain effects on the human nervous system’ (Burroughs, qtd. in Odier 1970, 12). As Brion Gysin puts it in his title-poem from Minutes to Go (Beiles et al. [1960] 1968, 5): 227

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Figure 2: ‘Typestract: Introduction/Conclusion’

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bob c obbi ng you will soon see just what they really are saying this is the terminal method for finding the truth ….

That Cobbing was using a similar ‘terminal method’ in the typestracts is suggested not just by his choice of source-material but by the fact that aspects of the poems’ appearance seem to visually document the cut-up process. The central columns of text in ‘Typestract: Introduction/ Conclusion’, for example (Cobbing 1966, n.pag.; Figure 2), consist of the aligned left- and right-hand edges of double-spreads from Alvarez’s book, a visual representation of the variant of cut-up technique called ‘fold-in’, whereby ‘a page of text … is folded down the middle and placed on another page, the composite text … then read across’ (Burroughs, qtd. in Mottram 1977, 39). To clarify how Cobbing’s adapted cut-up process presents itself to the reader, it is worth offering a slightly more detailed reading of one of the typestracts. ‘Typestract: Introduction/Conclusion’ consists of five columns of overlaid print whose lines, where legible, seem to alternate between the two source-texts (Cobbing 1966, n.pag; Figure 2). A speculative reading of the first column might proceed as follows: Introduction 57 A essing fears for nobody comes ) No scientist osition became e retained any the generals to cussions. They ……………………. e had a strong lace walls and even Or, further down: e days onward, The underpass Troops attack fter his tremenhis early tene e maintaining

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bor de r blu r s …………………….. ognized by the mother’s birth ers is unclear blish that, find an armoured who were born the officer in ere born easily

Phrases from Warner’s text – ‘underpass’, ‘troops attack’ – bind with references to birth and motherhood from Alvarez’s to generate a series of loosely conflated allusions to military violence and medical pathology; the influence of R.D. Laing, who had argued for the brutality of

Figure 3: ‘Worm’ 230

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conventional psychiatric diagnosis in The Divided Self (1960), seems subtly evident in the resulting cluster of images. The intermingling of lexicons and grammatical constructions thus implies some insidious complicity between the worldviews inscribed in the texts, but also suggests that their hidden messages have been exposed in some way through the process of analogy, and thus stripped of their power. Whatever we make of Burroughs’s rather paranoiac motives for the cut-ups, in this instance Cobbing’s incorporation of visual form into poetic composition does not simply nudge the interpreter towards a synaesthetic reverie. Instead, the poem interrogates specific, historically and sociologically loaded instances of semantic language, literally breaking them apart, and in so doing generating a new poetic grammar of abstract visual forms. In short, the ideological connotations of abstraction in Eyearun are difficult to pin down. What is more obvious is that the work in Eyearun represents a more pronounced degree of abstraction than anything found in Sound Poem. It is significant, in this sense, that Houédard’s introduction to Eyearun presents the typestracts and duplicator prints as ‘eye’ poems, intended for silent contemplation rather than performance (Cobbing 1966, n.pag.). The ‘ear’ poems included in the collection, by contrast, are more obviously legible, in the style of Sound Poems. This suggests that the total breakdown in semantic language that characterised Cobbing’s work by the close of the decade was initially visually enacted. That said, the abstract quality of the visual work in Eyearun also seems to influence Cobbing’s sound-based work from the same period. Besides ‘eye’ and ‘ear’ poems, Houédard’s introduction also lists among the collection’s contents what he calls ‘eyear’ or ‘eye/ear’ poems, visual poems intended for performance, many of which are visual reworkings of earlier, more conventionally ‘linguistic’ pieces. ‘Worm’, for example (Cobbing 1966, n.pag.; Figure 3), is a graphic reinterpretation of Cobbing’s 1954 poem ‘Meditation on Worms’, while ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’ (Cobbing 1966, n.pag.; Figure 4) is a duplicated collage produced from a stencil of ‘A Line from the Observer’. In these pieces, non-semantic visual effects, created by the overprinting and non-linear arrangement of text, seem intended to feed into performance or recording techniques. In 1966 Cobbing collaborated with the composer Annea Lockwood on studio versions of both poems, using overlaid voices, fricative vocal noise, and interspersed sections of tape sound, effects which seem to respond to the increasingly abstracted forms of the new visual pieces (Cobbing and Lockwood [1966] 2009a and b). 231

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Figure 4: From ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’

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‘Everything I See I Can Hear’: Vocalising Visuals In 1967 Cobbing published Kurrirrurriri, a collection of mainly phonic poems – in McCaffery’s sense (1997) – which indicates roughly the same stage of creative development as Sound Poems.14 More significantly, he also began during 1966–67 to produce recorded and performed poems without any clear textual basis, in which poetic form becomes increasingly disconnected from semantic language.15 These pieces indicate a level of abstraction within Cobbing’s sound-based practice comparable to the visual abstraction of Eyearun – something like a turn from phonic to sonic poetry – and reflect an increasing level of creative exchange between Cobbing and sound poets such as Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and Ernst Jandl.16 These pieces presage the most striking development in Cobbing’s poetry, which by the late 1960s had radically increased the remit of abstraction in his work, and which would define the dynamics of his practice over the next four decades: his production of visual poems that dispensed with vocalisable language but were intended as scores for vocal performance. Perhaps motivated by a synaesthetic insight professed in a 1973 interview – ‘[e]verything I see I can hear’ (Cobbing [1977] 2000, [14]) – Cobbing increasingly jettisoned speech in performance for vocal (and physical) representation of non-phonetic marks, breaking almost completely from semantic language as Henri Chopin had done with his turn to the ‘micro-particle’. Moreover, because the abstract marks that increasingly constituted Cobbing’s visual poems had no pre-defined sonic equivalents, rendering them in sound and gesture came to generate not just non-semantic but potentially endlessly variable performed versions of single poems. It is perhaps worth re-emphasising at this point the connection between Cobbing’s late 1960s poetics and the dynamics of intermedia art – and, more specifically, of the ‘happening’, the spontaneous, mixed-media performance events that the term ‘intermedia’ had been coined to define. Dick Higgins stated that the concept of the happening developed seamlessly out of experiments across a range of media during the 1950s and 1960s, including his own chance-based theatre scripts, Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson’s experimental musical scores, and Al Hansen’s ‘graphic notation experiments’. The happening thus unfolded in the space of ‘an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs’ (Higgins 234

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1966, [3]). In practical terms, the influence of this idea on Cobbing’s work is suggested by his own experiments with happenings earlier in the decade. In September 1963, a week after the UK’s ‘first happening’ at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival – briefly but infamously featuring a naked model (see Bartie 2013, Chapter 5) – Cobbing and members of Hendon Arts Together staged their own happening, at Hampstead’s New End Gallery, an event climaxing in a mock-surgical operation on a wellington boot.17 Similar events followed over the next few years at libraries across north London and, from 1965 onwards, in the basement of Better Books. In conceptual terms, the idea of an art event whose ‘medium and form’ would be determined by the needs of the performance situation seemed to play into Cobbing’s approach to performance by the late 1960s. He would also have been attracted by the political imperatives of intermedia art as outlined by Higgins: the idea that it could help to usher in ‘a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant’ (Higgins 1966, [1]).18 However, if the unstable generic boundaries of Cobbing’s late 1960s practice were informed by the idea of the ‘intermedium’, the idea of multiplying the poem into several different iterations of the same form seems to owe more to the aesthetics of auto-destructive art. Auto-destruction was a movement to which Cobbing and other concrete poets had various practical connections: in 1966 Cobbing and Houédard were members of the ‘organising committee’ for DIAS, for example, co-organised by Gustav Metzger with another concrete poet, John Sharkey. Metzger, the creative force behind DIAS, had been staging auto-destructive art events since the early 1960s, including his Acid Action Painting on London’s South Bank in 1961, which involved painting with hydrochloric acid onto nylon canvases which dissolved after fifteen seconds. Notwithstanding Metzger’s guiding vision, DIAS was very much a collective affair. Indeed, as Kristen Stiles notes, the term ‘symposium’ is itself ‘a misnomer. Rather, DIAS primarily offered a platform for diverse actions and exhibitions that occurred in dozens of London locations’, though culminating in a three-day conference in early September (2005, 42). Many of these events – most of which involved the destruction or self-destruction of the artwork’s constitutive materials – were staged at Better Books, including Robin Page’s performance piece KROW I – ‘I WORK’ backwards – during which Page dug a hole in the floor of the shop basement, Jean Toche’s Typewriter Destruction event, and An Evening with Ralph Ortiz, during which the six-foot-five Ortiz played a piano with an axe (Stiles 2005; Metzger 1966b).19 235

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In a document circulated to DIAS participants and other interested parties, Metzger offered a critical rubric for such work, stating that the ‘central idea’ of auto-destructive art was: [T]o isolate the element of destruction in new art forms, and to discover any links with destruction in society … . In the context of the possible wipe-out of civilization, the study of aggression in man, and the psychological, biological and economic drives to war, is possibly the most urgent work facing man. (Metzger 1966a)

Cobbing would have appreciated the critique of cold-war politics in Metzger’s statement, and also the way that self-destructing artworks were placed pointedly outside the object-based networks of exchange constituting the capitalist art market. But the clearest practical influence of auto-destructive art on his poetry seems to lie in the idea of generating multiple, transient impressions of a single artwork through processes of incremental decomposition. At a performance given by Cobbing himself at the close of DIAS, 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.20 Similar forms of processual visual work would become increasingly central to Cobbing’s practice over the coming decades, but at this point such experiments seemed to influence his reconceptualisation of the performed poem as a potentially endless series of sonic variations on an initial graphic form. The work that resulted from this reconceptualisation is difficult to evaluate using normal literary-critical terminology: not just because of the obvious difficulty of providing collectively comprehensible analysis of poems that dispense with collectively comprehensible symbolic systems, but also because its point of consolidation coincides with some of Cobbing’s most mystifying statements on his practice. By generating improvised sonic equivalents for abstract visual effects, such statements seem to imply, the concrete poet was either establishing deep trans-sensory relationships between visual and sonic form or somehow magically transposing the raw material of the poem from one medium into another. Though Cobbing’s assertion that he experienced synaesthesia during performance cannot be discounted, it is difficult to know what to make as a critic of, for example, his introduction to Why Shiva Has Ten Arms: why do so many of the poems exist in more than ten versions/ closely examined, shape becomes colour, which becomes vibration,/ which becomes sound, which becomes smell, which becomes taste,/ and then touch, and

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bob c obbi ng then again shape … [ellipsis in orig.] the joyous cosmology … . these visual poems move to sound, dance to light, vibrate to touch/ are innumerably many things at once. (Cobbing 1969d, n.pag.)

Name-checking Alan Watts’s popular 1962 book on oriental philosophy and psychedelic drug experience The Joyous Cosmology, Cobbing expresses an engagingly wide-eyed sense of the possibilities of performance-based intermedia poetry, granting it not just synaesthetic but sentient and even deific qualities. But the statement seems to express a more spiritually loaded than materialist understanding of that poetics, whereby the interpretation of the relevant work as poetry depends on a kind of ecstatic collapse of medium and sensory boundaries, rather than any tangential relationship to language. Again, however, it is possible to apply an alternative reading to such work. The quality of Cobbing’s poetry that might be defined as ‘intermedia’, that is, can in fact be seen to involve the close combination of effects from a range of different media, a technique capable of implying momentary escape from their collective frameworks. The significance of such a reading when applied to Cobbing’s late 1960s poetics is twofold. Firstly, it allows us to interpret that work – and our own engagement with that work – not as the product of some hazily defined spiritual function but as emerging from an interrogatory movement through semantic language. Secondly, and relatedly, it throws a lifeline to critical interpretation, making it possible to quantify in comprehensible terms the relationship between different effects in visual or performed poems, and the interplay between different iterations of the same poem across various formats. Cobbing’s visual and sonic concrete poems can be seen, for example, as combining the effects of written language and visual art and speech and music respectively. On the same basis, the relationship between the poem on the page and the poem in performance can be seen to entail not an esoteric system of equivalences, or the alchemical transformation of image into sound, but various pre-established associations between visual symbols and sonic gestures. Cobbing was reluctant to attach any such fixed associations to the relationship between the visual concrete poem and its auditory (and bodily) interpretation, presumably to avoid imposing pre-emptive control over the process. But in a 1985 video interview he did discuss his performance techniques in terms that might aid our analysis, describing them as ‘just a matter of imagining the equivalence in dance or in sound of the object of the poem that one is interpreting’: 237

bor de r blu r s The marks on the page will have a certain rhythm to them, and that rhythm is the same rhythm that you can get into your dancing movements. Then the strength of the line, or the blackness of the image could make quite a lot of difference, … if you’ve got a very strong line you want a strong movement, if you’ve got a soft hazy line you can make a softer movement … . You can think of a letter as an abstract painting as well as a letter which can be sounded with a conventional letter-sign. So you get an interplay between the two: you can read a poem for the shape of the letter, an s for instance can become a sort of snake-like creature … , or the o can become an egg that grows and bursts … , as well as interpreting it as an o and an s. (Cobbing and Fencott 1985)

This account is spontaneous and informal, of course, and refers largely to an idea of ‘dance’ not covered in this chapter. But we might speculatively infer three methods for recreating visual and linguistic effects in sound. Firstly, Cobbing describes various conventional associative connections between abstract visual qualities and auditory effects: between size, darkness, or thickness of visual form and volume or timbre of sound, for example; and between line curvature and rhythm. Secondly, some auditory effects seem to be intuited from pictorial suggestions, including the pictographic hints of letters: the s as a ‘snake-like creature’ and so on. Thirdly, there remains the possibility of conventional phonetic interpretations of letters, meaning that language in the everyday sense could also remain a part of performance. Of course, any attempt to recreate one of Cobbing’s visual poems in sound along these lines would be a highly subjective process. Outlining the potential dimensions of such a process thus seems more feasible and useful than attempting to detail specific instances of it. However, considering how some of Cobbing’s visual poems might be converted into sound will at least add some contextual ballast to our analysis. Cobbing’s poem-folder Octo (1969b) includes four visual poems, each presented in two alternative versions (reflecting Cobbing’s creation of multiple visual as well as sonic versions of his pieces). The visual effects employed mainly involve the use of chunks of text formed from repeated words or phrases, which seem to be spread spontaneously across the page. This makes the poems wholly non-linear and erases semantic meaning to a large degree, though patches of legible writing do remain. The two duplicator-print versions of ‘Marvo Movie Natter’ – one or both of which might have been the basis for Cobbing’s soundtrack to Jeff Keen’s film of the same name – consist of rough, almost chequered patterns of typewritten text set at the top and bottom of square 238

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sheets (Cobbing 1969b, n.pag.; Figure 5). Between these sections more sparsely distributed groups of letters migrate in concentric or swirling patterns. Parts of the poems are heavily overlaid with text and largely illegible. Scanning the legible areas, we find that, in linguistic terms, the poem is composed from different parts of the title phrase, a repetitive gesture that repels semantic engagement and diverts attention towards visual appearance. The mobile-seeming middle sections, for example, generate optical illusions of ripples in sound or water, though it is also possible to pick out a range of words and letter-sounds from the strings of written characters. Performing this piece based on the ideas outlined in Cobbing’s video interview would depend mainly on finding auditory equivalents for abstract visual effects – line curvature, colour density – and upon the kinds of pictorial hint just outlined: drips and ripples of water, the rippling of sound-waves, etcetera. However, the occasional use of phonemes and even words would also be possible. Cobbing’s soundtrack version of the poem seems to utilise some such range of effects, the overlaid whispered voices of Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall, and Annea Lockwood creating an incessant babbling noise suggesting running water or glossolalia, with individual phonemes periodically puncturing the sound-surface. In short, although the semantic element of the poems in Octo is minimal, it nonetheless indicates an interplay of visual and linguistic expression on the page that would be convertible into an interaction of language and sonic or musical expression in performance. A collection such as Kwatz (Cobbing 1970a), by contrast, introduces a wider range of visual effects in which language seems increasingly submerged. Cobbing’s preface to this collection lists the categories of work included: 1 typewriter poems where the word becomes image & the letters spin 2 fugitive or ghost poems where words recede & ghosts of image focus 3 graphic poems drawing with letters & thrust and tension stir & 4 photo-montage poems where the word is going going gone. (Cobbing 1970a, n.pag.)

In reality, the word is ‘going going gone’ in almost all of these poems, notably in the ‘fugitive poem’ reproduced here (Cobbing 1970a, n.pag.; Figure 6). This piece seems to have been created by pressing an almost bare duplicator barrel onto a sheet of paper, creating a blackened frame punctuated by traces of written letters and the visual ‘ghost’ of printed type. Somewhat like Cobbing’s earlier duplicator prints, this creates the impression of a page of writing degraded to the point of erasure. The 239

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Figure 5: ‘Marvo Movie Natter’ (two versions)

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image does, however, feature several faint white lines, perhaps created by pressing ribbons of paper or fabric against the duplicator barrel, against which lines of text can be made out: ‘tchuubaba/ tchuubaba/ tchuwaababa/ tchuwaababa … ’. It would be difficult to describe most of the work in Kwatz as combining language and non-linguistic expression to any significant extent, or, therefore, to outline how a performance based around them might hold the listener in tension between the impressions of speech and sound, or speech and music. In this sense, they fail to reward the critical reading outlined above, seeming to depend, in order to be interpreted as poetry, on an idea of intermedia form that is at best resistant to critical analysis. Putting aside their great interest as works of visual art, and/ or performance scores, they might therefore seem to represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of concrete poetics, whereby the semantic element of the poem, initially reduced in order to be enhanced or clarified by visual and phonetic arrangement, disappears entirely, leaving a purely visual or sound-based medium in its place, but which continues to be presented, through a series of increasingly tenuous metaphors, as poetry. This, in turn, might suggest not so much a peculiar failure on Cobbing’s part as the inadequacies of that whole approach to concrete poetry, which staked a set of ambitious social and cultural ambitions on the style’s ability to ‘break down boundaries’. In various ways, however, this conclusion seems unfair: not least because the development of Cobbing’s work by the late 1960s simply represents a response to pervasive conceptual tension within the concrete programme as a whole, a tension also evident, albeit in more subtle ways, in the classical work assessed in my second chapter. The requirement laid out in the first concrete manifestos – that the concrete poem literally function as text and image simultaneously – was so difficult to fulfil in practice that poets inspired by the idea were generally required to turn to the more extensive, pre-defined possibilities of particular media in order to pursue it. For some poets, this involved a movement back towards language, and thus to more traditionally literary forms of poetic composition. For Cobbing, equally legitimately, the non-linguistic aspects of concrete poetry provided the source of renewal: his poetry essentially evolved into visual art, and, in its performed aspect, a form of music or sound-based art. Rather than constituting a creative failure, moreover, this shift heralded the start of the most prolific phase of his career, one that sustained itself across the following three decades, generating the extraordinary array of graphic and mark-making techniques documented 242

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Figure 6: ‘Fugitive Poem’

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in his three books of collected poetry, Bill Jubobe (1976), Bob Jubile (1990b), and Kob Bok (1999). At the same time, the continued presentation of that work as poetry, though perhaps not logically defensible, remained an important framing device, suggesting a series of engaging analogies and distinctions between different modes of creative expression. Beyond the Word: Conclusion For all its unique influences, that element of Bob Cobbing’s practice assessed across this chapter in certain key respects represents the culmination of a broader process by which concrete poetry became unmoored from its mid-century foundations in constructivism, literary modernism, and semiotic theory. By the close of the 1960s concrete poetry, in England and Scotland as worldwide, had in many instances come to stand for a more spontaneous, expressionistic aesthetic in which the role of semantic language was pointedly reduced and the boundaries between media were overrun. More than anything else, this indicated a renewed, though not necessarily self-aware, engagement with Dada and Futurism as artistic precedents. In many cases, the new approach also fed off the impulses of intermedia art and codified the revolutionary impulses of a counter-culture that had grown exponentially across the West over the same period. Cobbing’s poetry, with its grammars of abstract visual and sonic effect, associated by the late 1960s with a performance paradigm by which single visual poems were subject to ongoing, improvisatory reworking in sound, typified the outcomes of this process. The examples of his work covered in this chapter also suggest that, within Britain, that process correlated with a shift in the geographical base of concrete practice from Scotland to England, and especially high-sixties London. Worldwide, it reflected the increasing orientation of concrete poetics around metropolitan, Western, and, especially, North American reference points. In enacting this process, Cobbing’s practice sometimes generated a precise tension and interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic modes of expression, presenting critiques of ideologically loaded uses of semantic language. In other cases, it abandoned semantic meaning more comprehensively, evolving into a visual and sound-based art practice whose presentation as poetry was a metaphorical, though still significant, gesture. Cobbing’s own critical framing of this aspect of his work is sometimes mystifying – though never dull – but the passage of his work beyond literature and into other art-forms was a response to the same 244

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conceptual complexities that defined the whole idea of concrete poetry from the start. What is undeniable, in any case, is that it was not only through Finlay’s models of Arcadian order at Little Sparta, but also through Cobbing’s wild improvisatory rites in pubs and performance spaces across London and beyond, that the effects of concrete poetry on British literature and art continued to be felt across the remainder of the twentieth century.

Notes 1 Much of this work is gathered together in The Kollekted Kris Kringle Volume IV (Cobbing 1979). 2 See also Sheppard’s fuller account of Cobbing’s work (2005). 3 The term ‘abstract’ is used throughout this chapter to define any expressive gesture whose significatory value is wilfully ambiguous, though connections to specific influences on Cobbing’s work such as abstract expressionist painting are implied. 4 Cobbing’s early poetry was performed and discussed at meetings of Writers’ Circle, a writers group that he co-founded in December 1952, amalgamated in August 1958 with Hendon Poetry Society – also co-founded by Cobbing, in September 1950 – to create Writers Forum (‘They Are the Writers’ Forum Now’ 1958). In interviews, Cobbing referred to Writers Forum – which expanded in the early 1960s to incorporate his publishing activities – as being founded in 1952, suggesting that he took the formation of Writers’ Circle as the point of origin. Cobbing’s monoprints and paintings were displayed throughout the 1950s–1960s at exhibitions organised by the Hendon Experimental Art Group, which he co-founded in 1951, and which was rechristened Group H in December 1957. For a detailed survey of Cobbing’s early artwork see Beckett (2012a). 5 Cobbing also composed his early prints on duplicators – machines for copying written language – suggesting another implicit connection with linguistic expression. His earliest print, from 1942 (Cobbing 1976, 105), was created on a duplicator at Highlands Hospital in Enfield while Cobbing was working there as a conscientious objector. 6 Composition dates for Cobbing’s earliest cut-ups and permutational poems are from a notebook of poems stored with his British Library papers (Cobbing [1960–70?]). All subsequent references to archived material in this chapter, as well as to Hendon Arts Together Bulletins, are to these papers unless otherwise stated. 7 In Cobbing’s poetry notebook the ‘A’ and ‘B’ poems are dated May 31, ‘C’ June 23, and ‘D’ and ‘E’ September 7 and 10 respectively. The remaining poems are all dated ‘Nov 64’ (Cobbing [1960–70?]). Writing about the ICA event to Morgan in July 1964, Houédard mentioned Chopin’s presence but not Heidsieck’s, instead noting that ‘chopin … played the OU (ex cinquieme-saison) disk [featuring] heidsieck-chopin-gysin’ (Houédard 1964c). Either Cobbing was referring to a different performance in the above interview then, or what he recalled as a

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bor de r blu r s performance by Heidsieck was a recording. Cobbing’s recollection of the same event in a 1977 interview suggests the latter explanation: ‘[Chopin] played a Heidsieck tape I was highly fascinated by’ (Cobbing [1977] 2000, [7]). 8 ‘Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism: the rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future’ (Marcuse [1969] 1972, 13). 9 Putting aside Bowra’s obviously Eurocentric thesis, Cobbing’s appropriation of certain Asian and South American language systems in a way that stresses their phonetic patterning over semantic interpretation can certainly be seen as problematically exoticising. This kind of objectification is especially difficult to countenance in the case of the Selk’nam tribe, given their effective extermination by settlers and ranchers across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the collusion of regional governments. It is worth noting, however, that in the case of the two poems mentioned here the sound-patterns Cobbing borrows from Bowra are non-semantic in their original context, so emphasising their quality of unbroachable sense is less questionable than it might otherwise seem. 10 The British Poetry Revival, discussed at length in my conclusion, can be broadly defined as a period of re-engagement with early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernism, and with the terms of its subsequent development worldwide, by British poets of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Following Eric Mottram (1993), it is often associated with the period 1960–75, but Sheppard offers the extended timeframe of 1960–78. The technical characteristics he identifies here are associated both with Revival poets and with those creating ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ during the later period of 1978–2000 (Sheppard 2005, 2). Poets associated with the Revival whom Sheppard discusses at length include Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, and Cobbing. 11 These versions of Sound Poems include a live recital taped at Better Books in January 1965 (Cobbing 1965b), released that September on a Writers Forum LP along with Ernst Jandl’s ‘Sprechgedichte’ (Cobbing and Jandl 1965). Later that year, Cobbing created another version of Sound Poems at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, broadcast as ‘An ABC in Sound’ on the Third Programme on January 7, 1966 (Cobbing [1966] 1968). This version is the most adventurous in its departure from the poem-as-text, using voice overlay, acceleration, and deceleration, and various other forms of studio treatment, to generate impressions of collective incantation and ritual. 12 After discovering concrete poetry, Cobbing also quickly became concerned with exploring its ancient, trans-cultural origins, a critical manoeuvre that suggests Houédard’s influence. As well as producing his vast chronological survey of concrete poetry for Reichardt’s 1965 exhibition catalogue (Houédard 1965a), Houédard wrote an ‘Introduction, Ancestry and Chronology’ for Cobbing and Ernst Jandl’s Sound Poems/Sprechgedichte LP. This essay performs a similar task for sound poetry, referencing historical precursors such as ‘trad folksong refrains: tralala rumtumtum patati-patata &c’ (Houédard 1965c, [11]). The timelines of concrete and sound poetry in Cobbing and Mayer’s Concerning Concrete Poetry ([1978] 2014) seem to be adapted from Houédard’s chronological studies. 13 On connections between Latham and Cobbing’s practices see Willey (2017).

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bob c obbi ng 14 Many of the poems in Kurrirrurriri (Cobbing 1967) borrow from global and ‘primitive’ languages, in this case via Edward Burnett Tylor’s defining work of cultural-evolutionist anthropology Primitive Culture (1871). Cobbing’s title is lifted from one of Tylor’s two chapters on ‘Emotional and Imitative Language’, an onomatopoeic aboriginal term meaning ‘round about, unintelligible’ (1871, 192). 15 See, for example, Cobbing and Lockwood’s tape-poem trio of ‘Khrajrej’, ‘Stip-Step’, and ‘Klowkukulan’ (Cobbing and Lockwood 1967–68), and the performance poem ‘Sound Sequence for Six/Sixty/Six Hundred/or Six Thousand Voices’, the text-version of which appears in Kurrirrurriri (Cobbing 1967, [11–13]) and which Cobbing performed at the New Moon Festival at the Albert Hall in June 1966. 16 During the late 1960s Cobbing produced tape-poems with both Dufrêne and Chopin (Cobbing and Dufrêne [1968] 2009; Cobbing and Chopin [1968] 2009). In 1965 Cobbing would have witnessed Jandl’s performance of his war poem ‘Schützengraben’ at the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation. Captured in Peter Whitehead’s film Wholly Communion, the closing phrases of the poem are swamped in a roar of collaborative audience noise (Whitehead 1965). 17 See the following, uncredited newspaper article, from September 16, 1963: A wellington boot died last week – a white wellington boot that resisted the skill of a surgeon in the ‘operating theatre’ at the New End Art Gallery, Hampstead. Remember the ‘Happening’ at the Edinburgh Festival on Saturday, during which a model stripped? Well, Operation Wellington Boot was also a ‘Happening’ – staged by members of Arts Together … . (‘They Couldn’t Save This Sole’ 1963) 18 One precedent for the happening was the development of aleatoric and graphic musical scores by composers such as John Cage from the 1940s onwards, another feasible influence on, or analogue for, the new text-performance relationship in Cobbing’s late 1960s practice. 19 DIAS-related events were also held in Scotland. On September 1 John Sharkey and Ivor Davies held a press conference on DIAS at the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, followed by Davies’s Explosive Art Demonstration at the Drill Hall (Metzger 1966b). On October 3, Sharkey wrote to Morgan recalling these and other events, including a reading at the Traverse Theatre and a lecture at the Fringe Club (Sharkey 1964–66). 20 For some of the published results see Cobbing (2004). This description is based on Bill Griffiths’s account of the performance – probably Destruction of the DIAS Exhibition, held at Better Books on September 10 (Metzger 1966b) – in his introduction to Cobbing’s Vowels and Consequences (Griffiths 1985).

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?Concrete Poetry and After Conclusion Conclusion In Spring 1971 the international exhibition ?Concrete Poetry, which had debuted at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam the previous autumn, was on its way to Britain, with touring legs due at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in October and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford the following February.1 Bob Cobbing and Hansjörg Mayer, the curators’ contacts in ‘England’ (de Wilde [1970], [15]), had gathered together a wide range of British and Irish work for the Amsterdam show, whose scale and diversity signified both a high-water mark of worldwide responses to concrete poetry and the fact that any clear boundaries once associated with the style had long since been overrun (as that prefixed question mark presumably acknowledged). Writing to Derek Stanford on May 12, Ian Hamilton Finlay described the exhibition as ‘a sorry affair’ whose ‘catalogue re-writes the history of the movement, giving pride of place to the pushers and the manifesto-writers’. ‘A lot of people’, he lamented, ‘seem to have quite forgotten that their first glimpse of concrete poetry was in Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. and not in the publications of Mr. Cobbing or whoever or whoever’ (Finlay 1967–71). Noting Finlay’s refusal to contribute to his 1971 concrete poetry anthology Mindplay, John Sharkey paraphrased Finlay’s assertions that ‘[h]e feels outside and uninvolved in what is happening now’, and that ‘there are enough anthologies already’ (Sharkey 1971, 16). Certainly, the style and movement that had seemed to reward his deep-seated impulses towards moral and emotional order when Finlay first encountered them in 1962 would, less than a decade later, have become somewhat unrecognisable to him. Poets for whom the visual and phonetic stylistics of concrete poetry were a means of securing or 249

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rationally experimenting with the semantic connotations of language had, in most cases, ceased to practise the style with concerted gusto by the early 1970s. Finlay himself was beginning in earnest to convert the grounds around Stonypath Farmhouse into the neo-classical time capsule of Little Sparta – perhaps the single most striking work of art or literature to emerge from the concrete poetry movement – while Morgan’s pluralist imagination had led him into a number of other realms of formal and thematic experiment, with science fiction and sound poetry forming much of the creative nucleus of his 1973 collection From Glasgow to Saturn. For poets such as Houédard and Cobbing, by contrast, for whom concrete poetry was a vessel for multi-media exploration exceeding the boundaries of language, the 1970s were a decade of redoubled activity on concrete themes. A solo exhibition of Houédard’s work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 19712 heralded a period of novel visual-linguistic activity, including his development of the rotating and reversible alphabets deployed in Begin Again: A Book of Reflections and Reversals (1975). Cobbing’s creative trajectory, meanwhile, rocketed across the following twenty years, with his replacement of the duplicator 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 (published 1987). His exploration of computer graphics from Point of Departure (1986) onwards and his involvement in performance groups such Konkrete Canticle, abAna, and Birdyak also served as cues to creative regeneration. Returning to the larger point, then, while Finlay’s angry comments to Stanford certainly reflected a uniquely precise sense of the nature and purpose of concrete poetry, the rumblings and eruptions of disagreement that ensued from projects such as the Stedelijk exhibition do indicate the broader debates played out across the years of concrete poetry’s development worldwide. These extended beyond mere stylistic divergence to encompass differences in attitude towards the social developments – real and projected – for which the years of concrete poetry’s practice were already coming to stand: ‘Concrete Poetry – A Movement of the 60s’, as Finlay had put it (1970). The development of, broadly speaking, a post-constructivist style into a neo-dada one was the surface-level expression of a deeper ideological shift, whereby post-war discourses stressing the evolution of national and international institutions through the development of global language systems gave way to revolutionary assaults on the modes of interaction and expression seen to hold those institutions in place. In an English and Scottish context these disputes took in related questions about the style’s geographical provenance and 250

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‘home’ within Britain – later issues of POTH were published from a rural Scottish farmstead, hundreds of miles, in various senses, from Cobbing’s urban bohemia – and broader issues around the independence and interdependence of English and Scottish creative cultures. More broadly, for all the egalitarian credentials of the variants of concrete poetry more common by the early 1970s, their emergence entailed the redistribution of a late-modernist literary movement initially concentrated, as Marjorie Perloff puts it, within the ‘smaller or marginalized nations of the postwar’ (2010b, 12) – Sweden, Switzerland, Scotland, Austria, Brazil – around the established centres of global cultural and political power. It might be possible, then, to argue that concrete poetry in England and Scotland developed coextensively with the situation internationally in a way that precluded distinct regional characteristics. However, I want in conclusion to pick out a few features that might set the regional and global situations apart, allowing us to talk, even very provisionally, of ‘Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland’ as some kind of distinct aesthetic and cultural phenomenon. In attempting to identify some of those features, we might first establish what they were not, by returning briefly to mid-1950s Germany, and to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where so much of the intellectual bedrock of the concrete poetry movement was laid down. In an article tracing the development of the Hochschule’s design philosophy and teaching methods across its one-and-a-half decades of existence (1953–68), the architecture critic Kenneth Frampton quotes from the introduction to the first issue of the school journal, Ulm: The Hochschule für Gestaltung educates specialists for two different tasks of our technical civilization: the design of industrial products (industrial design and building departments); the design of visual and verbal means of communication (visual communication and information departments) … . The school thus educates designers for the production and consumer goods industries as well as for present-day means of communication: press, films, broadcasting, television, and advertising. (Qtd. in Frampton 1990, 133)

What is notable is not only the equal status seemingly granted to ‘visual and verbal means of communication’ by their presentation as a single ‘task’ – determined by the needs of ‘our technical civilization’ – but also the lack of any implied qualitative distinction between that task and the creation of ‘industrial products’. By this logic, the development of systems of linguistic communication was essentially a branch of functional design, involving various techniques ensuring efficiency and replicability of design 251

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processes. Frampton references Anatol Rapoport’s operational philosophy, Max Bense’s information aesthetics, and Charles Morris’s semiotics as bulwarks of the school’s theoretical approach to this work: ‘Operation and communication, these are the two poles that are to play major roles in the evolution of Hochschule theory.’3 The methodologies favoured at Ulm thus involved the logical definition of design problems and the methodical determination of solutions that, especially in the case of verbal and visual communication, would involve notions of efficient communication adapted from semiotics (with a vestigial emphasis on ‘the intrinsic significance of form’ inherited from Bense [Frampton 1990, 141]). It is hardly surprising that the poetry composed in this environment was, on the one hand, centrally concerned with visual form and, on the other, largely stripped of any implication of arcane or even individual expression, instead placed on a spectrum with the design of ‘functional objects’. It is also reasonable to infer that any such approach to poetic composition was largely alien to the four poets discussed in detail across this text. To a greater extent – accepting the partiality of this survey, and the myriad of competing and contradictory influences assessed over the last four chapters – concrete poetry in England and Scotland stands for a broader phenomenon within British literary culture of the 1950s–1970s, involving a re-engagement with early twentieth-century poetic modernism and the terms of its subsequent evolution worldwide, especially in mid-century North American poetry. The emphasis that Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing placed on the connections between concrete, cut-up, and beat poetry, for example, had no precedent in the poetics of the international movement; and, though Ian Hamilton Finlay might have taken this as evidence of their lack of sensitivity to those poetics, his own concrete poetry was influenced almost as much by his interaction with poets such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker as by his encounter with the Noigandres group. Morgan, to some extent, represents an exception to this rule, with his circumspection regarding the Anglo-American modernist canon and his attempts to establish lines of communication between Scottish, European, Latin American, and Russian poets. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that, via the appropriative work of English and Scottish poets, concrete poetry was partially incorporated into a broader network of British poetic practices whose binding characteristic was a centrifugal relationship to Anglo-American modernist poetry rather than an affinity with the (primarily European) modernist design aesthetics and semiotic theories that had influenced the first concretists. If we accept this assessment, then making sense of why concrete poetry 252

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took root in Scotland and England partly involves unpicking some of the catalysts and characteristics of that wider literary-cultural phenomenon. In his well-known 1974 lecture ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960–75’ – revised and published under that name in 1993 – Eric Mottram presented the turn to modernist techniques among British poets of the 1960s and 1970s as a kind of counter-insurgency against the Movement writers, who had risen to such institutional prominence in the 1950s.4 For Mottram, the Movement stood for a British – especially English – poetic mainstream that had jettisoned the forms and themes of modernism for a banal first-person voice of empirical observation and reactionary social commentary, relayed through forms and meters learned from the Georgian poets. The writers of the Revival, by contrast, ‘used syntheses of forms they had learned from beyond official British parochialism’, including ‘open field poetry, concrete and soundtext poetry, surrealism and dada, conceptual forms, and variants of these’ (Mottram 1993, 32). This narrative captures the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland to some extent – we might remember Morgan’s comments on the ‘lazy minds and small spirit’ of English poets (1965a) – although it is worth noting that the Scottish concrete poets were also responding to their own inhibiting national literary culture, and that Mottram’s reference points are not exclusively Anglo-American. However, Mottram’s essay is too tribal in its affiliation to modernist poets to broach the underlying question of why the work he places in a stylistic dichotomy with the British Poetry Revival seemed parochial by the early 1960s, and why modernist approaches seemed newly viable and vital. This question cannot be answered by invoking vague binaries between ‘experimentalism’ and ‘conservatism’, ‘internationalism’ and ‘nationalism’ (etcetera). It is rather a question of defining the new transnational culture ushered in after the Second World War, which made the Movement and Renaissance poets’ tendency to cling to compositional approaches staked on concepts of national identity seem anachronistic; and also of considering a new set of social and cultural paradigms more particular to Britain that configured local responses to those transnational contexts. As I noted in my second chapter, perhaps the two most significant socio-economic and technological developments that ushered in the new global imaginary of the concrete era were the advent of international economic markets and the nuclear arms race of the post-war period. The emergence of discourses around cybernetics and information theory, meanwhile, seemed to promise modes of universally intelligible linguistic 253

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communication that would transcend and might eventually disintegrate national boundaries, while the shared experiential vistas opened out by space travel and extra-terrestrial photography – as noted at the time by theorists such as McLuhan – allowed an unprecedented sense of the world as a whole by revealing it from a distance.5 At a more prosaic level, the mass rise in TV ownership across the West during the 1950s led to a new homogenisation – or perhaps more specifically Americanisation – of popular culture.6 A more general, fragile spirit of post-war transnational empathy, ultimately frozen out by the intractable hostilities of the Cold War, nonetheless galvanised this new sense of community, as evidenced by the collaborative networks forged by writers, artists, and counter-cultural activists throughout the 1950s–1970s. In a context where it increasingly seemed that – as the curator Stéphane Aquin notes of 1960s art – ‘dreams, plans, and conflicts would no longer be limited to hermetic borders, but would be experienced on a global scale’ (2003, 13), MacDiarmid’s ‘Gaelic Ideal’ and Donald Davie’s musings on ‘England as Poetic Subject’ (1962) might have seemed similarly anachronistic to a whole generation of English and Scottish poets.7 Conversely, the gravitational pull of modernist poetic styles that were international in origin and cosmopolitan in form and theme would surely have been increasingly strong. At the same time, this new international imaginative space coexisted with the geographically specific contexts and concerns brought into focus throughout this text. In The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2003) Andrew Duncan identifies some of these by comparing various alternative ‘chronologies of style’ for late twentieth-century British poetry. The most convincing of these identifies ‘a breakout from an old, restricted style’ in 1959–61, ‘spread through little magazines, and appealing to a new audience created by the expansion of the universities’; ‘as this continued … the new thing received a boost from the revolutionary urges of 1968 and the mass radicalisation of the succeeding years’ (Duncan 2003, 10). Certainly, one vital factor underpinning the British Poetry Revival was the post-war expansion of the UK university sector, especially through the establishment of the so-called plate-glass universities – East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, York, Lancaster, Kent – following the Robbins Report of 1963. Institutions of higher education more generally – including art colleges – were vital centres for the funding, practice, discussion, display, and circulation of modernist poetries, including concrete, throughout this period. To take just a few examples, Nicholas Zurbrugg’s concrete and sound poetry-focused journal Stereo Headphones was edited from the late 1960s onwards at the University of East Anglia campus in Norwich, 254

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where Zurbrugg worked, and where poets such as Chopin and Cobbing were invited to perform.8 The magazine Link, meanwhile, an important early vessel for the dissemination of concrete poetry in England and Scotland, was edited by students at the Gloucestershire College of Art, an institution founded in 1959 from the amalgamation of existing art schools in Stroud and Cheltenham. After Stephen Bann took up a history lectureship at the University of Kent in 1967 his work as a critic, practitioner, and advocate of concrete poetry was supported both directly and indirectly by the university. In 1972, for example, in his new capacity as Chairman of the Senate Exhibitions Committee, Bann proposed the commission for Finlay’s Land/Sea sundial, later installed at a ‘prime site in the middle of the campus’: Finlay’s first public work ‘installed anywhere in the world outside Scotland’ (Bann 2016, 14). An equally significant factor in the advent of modernist literary culture in post-war Britain was the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, and of its various regional offshoots across the next 25 years. Indeed, for all the socially oppositional aspects of the culture Mottram defines, without the financial support of the Council and its subsidiaries many of the exhibitions, presses, and journals listed in Mottram’s article would simply not have survived. Furthermore, Duncan notes that ‘[t]he Arts Council’s engagement with poetry, still trivial in 1964, took off in 1965–66’ (2003, 14). The increasingly regionally focused provision and policies of the Councils also contributed to the geographical diffusion that characterised the culture of the Revival. Between 1956 and 1971 12 regional arts associations affiliated to ACGB were established across England, with an autonomous Scottish Arts Council set up in 1967 (the Arts Council of Wales having been founded along with ACGB in 1946). The first exclusive minister for the arts, Jennie Lee, assumed post as part of Harold Wilson’s new Labour government in 1964, with an explicit brief to distribute funds beyond London. Another relevant sociological shift, one that facilitated the survival of literary and artistic cultures outside systems of elite patronage, was the expansion of the welfare state through the passage of the National Insurance Act (1946) and other legislation. Shifting focus, and as I noted in my second chapter, there are also developments in printing technology to consider, including the advent of offset lithography and DIY letter-transfer kits by the early 1960s, which, for the first time, made the publication and distribution of poetry an activity which almost anyone, almost anywhere, could undertake. As Duncan notes, ‘low-cost technology ended, in the first half of the Sixties, the cultural dominance 255

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of London’ (2003, 14), just as the expansion of higher education was dispersing intellectually adventurous poetry audiences across Britain, and just as Arts Council funding for regional literary culture was taking off. The revolution in DIY and small-press printing thus helped to facilitate the inter-regional dispersal of British Poetry Revival culture, which manifested itself partly in the spread of concrete poetry networks all over Britain, including areas of England and Scotland such as rural Gloucestershire that might previously have lacked the practical and technological means of supporting an autonomous small-press culture. Having established the British Poetry Revival as a frame for the study of concrete poetry in England and Scotland, it is also worth flipping our perspective to consider how current conceptions of the British Poetry Revival might be usefully nuanced by paying closer attention to concrete poetry as one of its exemplary styles. On that note, it is striking how many engaged and detailed discussions of British modernist poetry of the 1950s–1970s overlook or politely skim over concrete poetry, despite its very widespread influence on British writers and artists at the time.9 In some cases, this might indicate a lack of familiarity, perhaps a nervousness about discussing a literary style with so many non-literary affinities. But concrete poetry has also been the subject, as I suggested in my first chapter, of vituperative attacks from British writers on modernist poetry. The overall situation implies that, for many critics, the style simply doesn’t merit close attention. The discussion of specific concrete poets’ work offered across the last four chapters might dispel some of the misconceptions responsible for this view, and might also allow us to rebalance our understanding of the British Poetry Revival itself, perhaps primarily as a sociological phenomenon. Firstly, the practice of concrete poetry in England and Scotland serves as a salutary reminder of the extent to which the British Poetry Revival unfolded outside the major metropolitan and academic–cultural hubs of post-war England. The poet Geraldine Monk, introducing a collection of mainly biographical essays on regional poetic culture during the 1950s–1990s, identifies the geographical lop-sidedness of much discussion of the Revival in the process of explaining her decision to focus ‘on poetry happening away from those two strongholds of poetic power, and sometimes clubbish exclusivity, London and Cambridge’. Monk argues that ‘the poetic insurgence that began in the 1950s/60s was very much a provincial one, emanating from the industrial centres of the North and Midlands such as Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff’ (2012, 7–8). On the evidence of concrete poetry networks, we can add to that 256

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list various towns and cities across the South West of England, as well as the major Scottish cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Paying greater attention to the Scottish locations and affinities of Revival culture, in particular, might help to counter a still significant Anglo-centric bias in analysis of these scenes and communities. Secondly, although concrete poetry in England and Scotland was set apart from global developments by its engagement with Anglo-American literary modernism, its practice in Britain should still remind us of the less conspicuous international connections forged by various Revival poets. As already noted, Eric Mottram was careful to cite as influences on the Revival a wide range of European as well as North American literary styles and art practices. Indeed, as the poet Clive Bush has recently stated, although ‘poets of my generation are “accused” of being influenced by [North] American poets’, ‘the critics were and are wrong to say that the American influence was dominant’ (2016, 15). Focusing on Mottram’s own cultural background, Bush notes his ‘powerful connection with continental Europe having taught in Groningen University, where … new European directions in poetry, painting, film and contemporary classical music had been, unlike in Britain, warmly welcomed during the 1950s’ (2016, 15). The interaction of concrete poets such as Finlay, Morgan, and Houédard with writers and artists based not just in Europe but also in Lusophone South America and beyond serves as a similar corrective to accounts of the Revival preoccupied with creative relationships between poets based in south-east England and the USA. It is tempting to draw discussion to a close by attempting to tick off various contemporary literary practices influenced by the pioneers of British and international concrete poetry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find this an almost impossible prospect, given the extraordinarily wide range of artistic media – quite apart from individual literary styles – that concrete poetry has influenced in some way since the 1970s. These include minimalist small-press poetry practices as well as various types of experimental performance and sound art, and a whole range of alternative literatures making use of the new presentational formats of the internet. In any case, one upshot of the broad application of the term ‘concrete poetry’ is that accounts and presentations of contemporary practices influenced by, or presented as, concrete are ironically far more common than concerted engagement with the historical style itself. Rather than repeating what other critics have already said on this subject, then, and without denying its importance, I direct readers towards Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe’s anthology of international 257

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post-1960s concrete poetry The New Concrete (2015), an engaging and diverse selection of poetry, art writing, and performance scores which provides a more effective overview of the current scope of post-concrete creativity than I could hope to muster in a few paragraphs. Suffice to say, the overlapping legacies of concrete poetry in England and Scotland preclude any possibility of the style’s neat historical categorisation. Instead, they attest to the existence of a whole range of creative practices that continue to pursue – in adapted forms, and in response to new social paradigms – the aims of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant-garde and modernist movements that influenced the first concrete poets themselves. These traditions, it seems, like the radical ideologies and political aims that inform them are not going to go away. Perhaps above all else it is the immense adaptiveness of these traditions – the capacity of avant-garde and modernist movements to perpetually renew the terms of their experiment – to which the forwardthinking, backwards-looking era of concrete poetry attests.

Notes 1 The dates given for the exhibition are from Paula Claire, who relays her memories of performing with Cobbing in Amsterdam, and notes that the show also travelled to Belfast (2016, 45–46). 2 Dom Sylvester Houédard: Visual Poetries, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1971. 3 Rapoport’s little-known work Operational Philosophy was, Frampton states, ‘really a methodological update of John Dewey’s pragmatic-instrumentalism. The appeal of Rapoport’s method lay in his attempt to provide a precise system for the evaluation of alternative courses of action’ (Frampton 1990, 139). 4 For clarity of analysis I am going to engage exclusively with Mottram’s account of the British Poetry Revival, in spite of the more detailed and nuanced accounts of that culture since offered by Sheppard (2005), Duncan (2003), Barry (2006), Virtanen (2017), and others. Kennedy and Kennedy, in Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010 (2013), also offer an important history of recent modernist poetries in Britain, though their altered time-frame reflects the dominance of male poets within the Revival paradigm identified by Mottram. On this see Thomas (forthcoming). 5 ‘Since Sputnik’, McLuhan remarked in Culture is Our Business, ‘the world has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble’ (1970; qtd. in Aquin 2003, 13). 6 As Asa Briggs notes, ‘television as a whole offered viewers more of a “window on the world” than radio. There was not one week in 1961 when BBC cameramen were not filming in a foreign country’ (1961–95, vol. 5: 140–41).

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c onclusion 7 It is fair to note that Davie’s essay is actually critical of the thematic fixation on England that his title identifies, associating it with a psychologically cramped quality suitable only for writers such as Larkin able to make their work’s reduced thematic scope seem perversely appropriate, ‘embrac[ing] a deliberate and in a twisted way heroic insularity’ (1962, 121). 8 The Cobbing performance in Norwich memorably described by Jonathan Raban (1971, 89–90) was probably one given at the University of East Anglia with Henri Chopin on November 19, 1969. In anticipation of this event Cobbing published his manifesto ‘Poetry for a New Age’ (1969c) in UEA’s student magazine Mandate, alongside Chopin’s ‘Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians’ ([1967] 1969) and an introduction to both poets’ work by Zurbrugg. 9 Barry’s account of the six ‘writerly characteristics’ of the British Poetry Revival, by the author’s own admission, ‘does not deal at all with sound and visual poetries’ (2006, 143). Duncan’s (2003) chapter on 1960s poetry, focusing on the principle of ‘nil hysteresis and the all-over effect’, is preceded by a generalising dismissal of concrete poetry as a ‘crossword-puzzle like activity’ that ‘jettisoned the lexicon, the organised past experience of the nation’ (53). Andrew Mellors takes ‘the rise of international trends in image- and sound-based poetry’ as evidence against ‘the common misconception that [literary] modernism ended with the onset of World War Two’, but does not return to the subject (2005, 3). Robert Sheppard’s discussion of Cobbing’s concrete poetry (2005) represents an exception to this rule, while recent texts on aspects of British Poetry Revival culture by Hair (2016) and Virtanen (2017) engage more closely with concrete and performance-based poetries respectively.

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Index Index

abAna (performance group) 250 Abrioux, Yves 97, 104 abstract expressionism 1, 50, 224, 245n3 Achleitner, Friedrich 28 Adorno, Theodor 35 advertising 41, 43, 123, 124, 210, 216 Akong Rinpoche 191 Albers, Josef 30, 31, 60n11–12 Homage to the Square 60n11 Albert Hall 17n2, 217, 247n15–16 Alder Secondary Modern School, Finchley 211 Aldhelm, Saint 173 Aleatoric scores 1, 21, 50, 178, 247n18 Allen, Maxwell 108 Allied High Commission 24 Alvarez, Walter C. 227–30 Amiens 87 anarchism 54, 92, 94, 183, 204–05, 206–07 animal poems 73–75, 117, 120, 129–32, 135–36, 138, 143–46 Anthology of Concrete Poetry, An 3–4, 8, 10, 52–53, 104, 156n16 anti-psychiatry 53–54, 230–31 anti-university movement 53–54, 55 Apollinaire, Guillaume 18n7, 33, 51, 63n28, 73, 85, 129 calligrammes see calligrammes Parade of Orpheus, The 73, 129

Aquin, Stéphane 254, 258n5 Arabic calligraphy 188, 201n19 architecture 1, 4, 7, 8, 29–30, 36, 37, 50, 105, 120 of Brasília see Brasília modernist see mid-century modernism Arlington Mill 17n2, 104 Arlington Une (exhibition) 17n2 arrière-garde 27, 37, 38, 49–50, 52, 83, 101, 111–12 art colleges (British) 18n7, 20, 166, 211, 254, 255 Arte Madí group 59n6 Artes Hispanicas/Hispanic Arts 17n4 artists’ books 1, 21, 50 Arts Council of Great Britain 255 Arts Council of Wales 255 Arturo 59n6 Asociación Arte Concreto-Invencíon 59n6 Augenblick 46 Augustine, Saint 161 Austria, Austrian 18n9, 28, 59n1, 87, 225, 251 auto-destructive art 94, 159–60, 183, 190, 201n21, 225, 226, 235–36, 247n19–20 see also Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) avant-folk 78, 113n5

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bor de r blu r s avant-garde 1–2, 6, 24, 82, 98, 101–03, 105, 111–12, 134, 151, 170, 216, 220, 258 and arrière-garde see arrière-garde definition of 17n1 Scottish 5–6, 11–12, 14 see also modernism, Scottish Aylesford Review, The 87, 168, 169, 185, 200n13 Azeredo, Ronaldo 28 Balestrini, Nanni ‘Tape Mark 1’ 132, 156n14, 177–78 Baljeu, Joost 29 Ball, Hugo ‘Karawane’ 217–18 Flight Out of Time 217–18 Bann, Stephen 3, 8–9, 10, 17n3, 20, 23, 28, 29, 49–50, 67, 81, 90, 103, 104, 108, 136, 186, 187, 255 Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology see Concrete Poetry Form see Form Barnfield Secondary School, Barnet 208 Barry, Peter 156n20, 258n4, 259n9 Barthes, Roland 8, 36, 61n16, 62n27 ‘The Death of the Author’ 62n27 Bartie, Angela 113n9, 235 Bartie, Angela, and Eleanor Bell 113n7 Basho, Matsuo 186, 201n16 Bath 166, 167 Bath Academy of Art, Corsham 166 Bauhaus 8, 23, 29, 30 BBC 155n6–7, 246n11, 258n6 BBC Radiophonic Workshop 246n11 Bean, Victoria, and Chris McCabe 4, 257–58 Beat culture 53, 77, 184–85, 191, 200n11 Beat poetry 18n9, 57, 77, 125, 163–64, 165, 168–69, 200n11, 212–13, 214, 225, 252

Beckett, Chris 156n21, 245n4 Beiles, Sinclair 120, 213 Minutes to Go see Minutes to Go Belgium 59n1 Bell, Eleanor 131–32, 155n8 Bell, Eleanor, and Linda Gunn 113n7 Benedictine (order, tradition, institutions) 16, 19, 160, 163, 173 Bense, Max 28, 46, 132, 166, 168, 177–78, 252 Augenblick see Augenblick Rot see Rot Bergonzi, Bernard 155n6 Bessa, Antonio Sergio 22–23, 25, 63–64n30 Better Books bookshop 14, 211, 217, 223, 225, 235, 246n11, 247n20 Between Poetry and Painting (exhibition) 18n7, 20, 92, 104, 114n17, 172, 188, 197, 223, 246n12 Biederman, Charles 29 Bill, Max 23, 30, 31, 59n6, 60n11–12 Birdyak (performance group) 250 Birkhoff, George David 62n23 bissett, bill 56 Björck, Amelie 63–64n30 Black, D.M. 90 Black Mountain poetry 8, 57, 168 Blaine, Julien 51, 56 Blake, George 155n11 Blake, William 123 Bognor Teacher Training College 208 Bohn, Willard 3, 41, 62n26, 63n28 Bonset, I.K. 60n13 book art see artists’ books booklet-poems 15, 67, 78, 98–104, 106 ‘Border Blur’ (term) 17n2 Bory, Jean-François 51, 56 Boulton, Janet 113n11 Bowra, C.M. 220–21, 246n9

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i n de x Braga, Edgard 28 Braque, Georges 63n28 Brasília 25–26 Braziers Park, Oxfordshire 217 Brazil, Brazilian 4, 7, 19–20, 21, 23, 24–26, 28, 37, 41, 52, 56, 58, 59n1, 59n3, 59n6, 61n18, 65, 79, 83–84, 113n12, 115, 117, 120, 125, 128, 153, 159, 176, 212, 223, 251 Brazilian Embassy, Lisbon 20, 79, 121 Bremer, Claus 28 Briggs, Asa 155n7, 258n6 Brighton Festival 104, 136, 186 Bristol 166, 167 British Poetry Revival 16, 222, 246n10, 253–57 Broadsheet 199n3 Brown, Pete 77, 213 brutalism 120 Bryce-Wunder, Sylvia 155n11 Buddhism 73–74, 162, 163, 182, 184, 185, 188–91, 200n10, 200n12, 201n22, 227 Buenos Aires 59n6 Burchfield, Robert 187–88 Bürger, Peter 27 Burns, Robert 74, 76 Burroughs, William 18n9, 50, 77, 120, 213–14, 224–25, 227–29, 231 ‘Cancer Men … These Individuals are Marked Foe …’ 213–14 Minutes to Go see Minutes to Go Bush, Clive 257 Cabaret Voltaire 63n28 Cage, John 35, 201n21, 247n18 California 72 California at San Diego, University of 206 calligrammes 33, 51, 85, 129 Cambridge, University of 8, 17n3, 20, 62n25, 90, 135, 156n16, 186, 256

Cameron, Charles 155n6 Campos, Augusto de 24–26, 40, 41, 65, 79, 81, 121, 125, 129, 138, 166 Luxo/Lixo 138 Poetamenos 25–26 ‘Sem um Numero’ 40, 41 Campos, Haroldo de 22–23, 24–25, 44–45, 46, 61n18, 125, 166 ‘Anthropophagous Reason’ 61n18 Galaxias 22–23 ‘Informational Temperature of the Text, The’ 44–45 Camus, Albert 124 Canada 56, 147 capitalism 5, 24, 26, 39, 41, 50, 54, 59n5, 60n8, 122, 126–27, 184, 190–91, 206, 215–16, 221–22, 227, 236, 246n8 Cardew, Cornelius 50 Cardiff 256 card-poems 15, 67, 92, 94–98, 101, 174, 199n4 Carmelite Order 87 carmen cancellatum 173 carmina figurata 22 Carrà, Carlo 63n28 Carswell, Catherine 76 Catholicism 160, 164, 183, 184–85, 200n11 Celan, Paul 35 Channel Islands 3, 163 Chekhov, Anton 69 Cheltenham 20, 166, 167, 255 Chinese ideograms see ideograms; Fenollosa, Ernest Chogyam Trungpa 191 Chopin, Henri 148, 168, 199n7, 211–12, 217–18, 218–19, 219–20, 223, 234, 245–46n7, 247n16, 254–55, 259n8 ‘Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians’ 259n8 OU see OU

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bor de r blu r s ‘Sol Air’ 217–18, 220 Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art 8 Cisneros, Odile 23 Claire, Paula 13, 18n9, 258n1 Clark, Thomas A. 12, 20, 167 classical concrete poetry 4, 5, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23–50, 51, 58, 65, 94, 97, 103, 117, 130, 135, 143, 146, 153, 154, 159–60, 176, 242 definition of 26–27 Cleft 77, 113n10 Clüver, Claus 59n6 Coaltown of Callange, Fife 106 Cobbing, Bob 2, 3, 4, 5, 9–10, 14, 16, 17n2, 18n7, 18n9, 20, 22, 57, 58, 92, 114n15, 147, 148, 156n21, 173, 178, 203–47, 249, 250, 251, 252, 255, 258n1, 259n8, 259n9 abAna (performance group) see abAna ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’ 147, 231, 232–33 Bill Jubobe 244 Birdyak (performance group) see Birdyak Bob Jubile 244 ‘Burroughs Welcome’ 214 Concerning Concrete Poetry 4, 10, 246n12 ‘Crabtree’ 208, 209 Cygnet Ring 208–11 Destruction of the DIAS Exhibition 247n20 duplicator prints see duplicator prints ‘Duplicatorprint: The Death of Language’ 226 Eyearun 207, 222, 223–33 ‘From Haiku to Happening’ 9–10 ‘Fugitive Poem’ 239–42 Group H see Group H

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Hendon Arts Together (HAT) see Hendon Arts Together Hendon Experimental Art Group see Hendon Experimental Art Group Hendon Poetry Society see Hendon Poetry Society Improvisation Is a Dirty Word 208 ‘Khrajrej’, ‘Stip-Step’, and ‘Klowkukulan’ 247n15 Kob Bok 244 Kollekted Kris Kringle Volume IV, The 245n1 Konkrete Canticle (performance group) see Konkrete Canticle Kurrirrurriri 234, 247n14 Kwatz 239–42 ‘Lies like Truth’ 210 ‘Line from the Observer, A’ 210 ‘Marvo Movie Natter’ 238–39, 240–41 ‘Meditation on Worms’ 231 Octo 238–39 ‘Poetry for a New Age’ 259n8 Point of Departure 250 Processual 250 ‘Shape and Size of Poetry, The’ 204–05 Sound Poems 203, 207, 211–22, 222–23, 225, 234, 246n11 Sound Poems/Sprechgedichte 246n12 ‘Sound Sequence for Six/Sixty/ Six Hundred/Or Six Thousand Voices’ 247n15 typestracts 223, 226–31 see also typestracts ‘Typestract: Introduction/ Conclusion’ 228, 229–31 Vowels and Consequences 247n20 Why Shiva Has Ten Arms 236–37 ‘Worm’ 230, 231

i n de x Writers Circle see Writers Circle Writers Forum see Writers Fo rum Cobbing, Bob, and Peter Mayer Concerning Concrete Poetry 4, 10, 246n12 Cobbing, William, and Rosie Cooper 3 Cockburn, Ken 18n6, 112n1 Cocteau, Jean 155n4 coexistentialism 170–71, 172 Cold War 53, 150, 236 Coleman, James William 190–91, 201n22 colonialism 126–27, 134–36, 138–39, 149–50, 153–54, 183–84 communism 5, 24, 31, 53, 124–25, 134, 184, 227 see also Marxism computer coding 1, 27 see also cybernetics; information aesthetics; information theory Computer Language Research Unit, Cambridge 62n25 computer poetry 115, 117, 118, 131–33, 155n4, 156n14–15, 177–78 Computing Laboratory, University of Glasgow 62n25 conceptual art 1, 10, 21, 27, 50 concrete (building material) 25, 120 concrete art 8, 23, 24–25, 28, 30–31, 33, 36, 56, 59n6, 60n12, 153, 197–98 definition of 30 ?Concrete Poetry (exhibition) 249–50 concrete poetry classical see classical concrete poetry definition of 21 dirty see dirty concrete poetry

historical surveys of 22, 63n28, 172–73, 199n6, 246n12 sonic see sonic concrete poetry Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology 8, 28, 104 Concrete Poetry: A World View 8, 17n4, 39 constructivism 2, 4, 8, 23, 24–25, 26, 28–32, 33, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 103, 120, 153, 162, 169–70, 172, 187, 218, 244, 250 definition of 29 Corso, Gregory 168, 213 Minutes to Go see Minutes to Go Costa, Lúcio 25 counter-culture 2, 5, 9, 14, 15, 16, 51, 52, 53–55, 56, 58, 77, 94, 155n12, 156n13, 160, 162–63, 172, 182–87, 190–91, 198, 199n1, 200n12, 205–07, 215–17, 225, 244, 254 definition of 53–55 Cox, Kenelm 12, 18n9, 20, 104, 166, 186, 200–01n15 The Three Graces 104, 186 Crawford, Robert 150 Creeley, Robert 72, 79–80, 82, 83, 213, 252 Crosby, Theo 18n7 Cubism 63n28, 84, 170 cummings, e.e. 37, 63n28, 120 Cutts, Simon 108, 114n16 cut-up poetry 1, 9, 21, 50, 120, 178, 203, 208–10, 213–14, 224, 227–31, 252 Cybernetic Serendipity (exhibition) 50, 156n14 cybernetics 1, 8, 14, 27, 31, 36, 41, 45–46, 47, 50, 132, 154, 185, 253–54 see also information aesthetics; information theory Czechoslovakia, Czech 28, 59n1, 60n8, 153

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bor de r blu r s Dada 4, 9, 14, 27, 29, 31, 50, 51, 56, 63n28, 97–98, 104, 152, 160, 169–70, 172, 190, 207, 217–18, 219, 224–25, 244 see also neo-dada Daily Express, The 119 Dair, Carl 57–58 Dalai Lama 190, 191 Daniel, Arnaut 60n15 Darmstadt 28 Davidson Clinic 113n4 Davie, Donald ‘England as Poetic Subject’ 254, 259n7 Davies, Ivor 247n19 Demarco Gallery 247n19 Derrida, Jacques 62–63n27 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) 201n21, 225, 235–36, 247n19–20 see also auto-destructive art Dewey, John 258n3 dialect 11, 74, 113n5, 116, 117, 145, 147, 148–51 Dias-Pino, Wlademir 59n3 dirty concrete poetry 56 Döhl, Reinhard 28 Dorset 167 Drucker, Johanna 52 Duchateau, Béatrice 126 Dufrêne, François 211, 223, 234, 247n16 Duncan, Andrew 7, 254, 255–56, 258n3, 259n9 Dunstan, Saint 173 duplicators 224, 225, 226–27, 231, 236, 238–39, 239–42, 245n5, 250 East Anglia, University of (UEA) 254–55, 259n8 Eckhart, Meister 160 Edinburgh 8, 20, 58, 67, 71, 76, 77, 90, 105, 113n4, 113n9, 113–14n12,

167, 214, 235, 247n17, 247n19, 257 Edinburgh Festivals 77, 235, 247n17 Edinburgh, University of 7, 77, 148 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference 76, 214 ekphrasis 70 Eliot, T.S. 124–25, 128 Empire Exhibition, Glasgow 1938 126 Enigma code-breaking machine 61n19 Erlhoff, Michael 59n5 existentialism 124, 155n9 Extra Verse 90, 223 Fahlström, Öyvind 56, 63–64n30 ‘Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy: Manifesto for Concrete Poetry’ 63–64n30 Fauvism 85 Fencott, P.C. 238 Fenollosa, Ernest Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, The 35–36, 37–39 see also ideograms Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 213 Ferran, Bronać 62n25, 166 Finch, Peter 12, 18n8 Finland 59n1 Finlay, Alec 3, 11, 18n6, 66–67, 74, 94, 113n4, 113n7, 156n19 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 18n7, 19, 20, 28, 58, 64n31, 65–114, 116, 117, 121, 128, 131, 136, 156n17, 157n25, 159, 166, 168, 225, 245, 249–50, 252, 255, 257 4 Sails 18n7, 97–98, 99, 103 Acrobats 106, 114n14, 114n17 Ajar 106, 114n17 Blue and the Brown Poems, The 64n31, 114n16

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i n de x ‘Blue-Coated Fishermen, The’ 70–71 Boatyard, A 114n15 Boat Names and Numbers series 107 Canal Stripe Series 3 98–101, 114n14 Canal Stripe Series 4 106, 114n17 ‘Catch’ 73 ‘Chief Crop of Orkney, The’ 73 Cloud Board 108–10 Concertina 78, 80, 86, 113n12 Dancers Inherit the Party, The 71–73, 78, 113n5 ‘Eatable Peach, An’ 84, 85 ‘Encounter’ 69 ‘eve’ 89 Fish-Sheet see Fish-Sheet Four Seasons in Sail, The 107–08, 109 Glasgow Beasts, An A Burd 73–75, 78, 83 ‘Homage to Malevich’ 86, 114n13 Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections 3, 11 ‘Island Beasts Wait for the Boat, The’ 73 Land/Sea sundial 255 ‘Letter to Pierre Garnier, 1963’ 92–93 Little Sparta see Little Sparta ‘m’ 86–87 Ocean Stripe 5 101–04 ‘Orkney Interior’ 113n10 Poor.Old.Tired.Horse (POTH) see Poor.Old.Tired.Horse ‘Potato Planters, The’ 69 ‘Practice, The’ 113n10 ‘Problems of an Orkney Housewife’ 73 Rapel: 10 Fauve and Suprematist Poems 65, 78, 83–84, 84–87, 88, 89, 90, 99 ‘roses’ 88, 89 ‘Sea-Bed, The’ 71

Sea-Bed and Other Stories, The 68–71, 104 Standing Poem 2: Apple/Heart 94–95 Standing Poem 3: Hearts Standing Poem 94–97 Starlit Waters 107–08 Telegrams from My Windmill 72, 87–90 To the Painter, Juan Gris 106, 114n14, 114n17 Toy Cow 78, 79 toys 71, 78, 79–81, 113n11 ‘Valentine, A’ 87 Wild Hawthorn Press see Wild Hawthorn Press Wave/Rock 105, 106, 114n16 Finlay, Sue 13, 110, 114n17 First International Exhibition of Concrete, Phonetic, and Kinetic Poetry 20, 90, 135, 156n16, 186 Fisher, Roy 246n10 Fishing News 103 Fish-Sheet 77, 87, 128, 130, 131 Fluxus 9, 21, 27, 50, 135 folk (art, music, culture) 11, 53–54, 70, 74, 77, 78, 113n5, 113n10, 246n12 Form 8, 103 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 7, 13 Frampton, Kenneth 59–60n7, 251–52, 258n3 France, French 18n9, 20, 24, 28, 50, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59n1, 62n23, 62n27, 63n28, 87, 163, 184, 186, 200n15, 203, 211, 212, 218–19, 223 Frankfurt School 59n5, 206 Friedman, Susan Stanford 61n18 Furnival, John 12, 18n7, 18n9, 20, 28, 94, 114n17, 136, 151, 166, 186, 200n14, 200–01n15 Babacus 186, 200n15

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bor de r blu r s Openings (press) see Openings Tower of Babel, The 151 Futura (poster-poem series) 139, 156n17 Futurism 4, 9, 14, 27, 29, 50, 51–52, 56, 63n28, 104, 160, 169, 207, 219, 244 Gaberbocchus Press 18n7 Gabo, Naum 29, 60n9 Kinetic Construction 60n9 ‘Realistic Manifesto, The’ 29 Gadney, Reg 17n3, 20 Gaelic (culture, language) 70, 149, 254 Gagarin, Yuri 151–52 Gan, Alexei 60n10 Gardiner, Michael 12, 124, 125 Garnier, Pierre 20, 28, 59n1, 87, 92, 93, 94 Les Lettres see Les Lettres ‘Position 1 of International for Spatialist Poetries’ 20, 59n1 Germany 4, 7, 21, 23, 24, 31, 46–47, 48, 59n1, 68, 117, 223, 251–52 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 76, 125–26, 155n11 Gibson, Corey 113n10 Ginsberg, Allen 77, 168, 217 Glasgow, Glaswegian 20, 62n25, 73–74, 83, 115, 118, 120, 125–26, 147–48, 155n5–6, 155n11, 167, 257 Glasgow, University of 62n25, 118, 132, 148, 212, 154n1–2, 155n6, 212 glass poems 15, 67, 106, 114n14, 114n16 Gledfield Farmhouse, Ardgay 105, 106 Glendinning, Miles, and Stefan Muthesius 155n5

Gloucestershire 16, 17n2, 20, 104, 163, 166, 255, 256 see also West Country concrete poetry scene Gloucestershire College of Art 20, 166, 255 Gloup 166 Goeritz, Mathias 28 Gombrich, E.H. 8 Gomringer, Eugen 23–24, 25, 27, 28–35, 36, 39, 41, 43–44, 60n12, 60n14, 61n17, 63–64n30, 67, 70, 83–84, 87, 88, 129, 130, 133–35, 136, 166, 168, 204 ‘Du Blau’ 88 ‘Concrete Poetry’ 23, 31 ‘From Line to Constellation’ 24 ‘O’ 44 ‘Ping Pong’ 32–33, 130, 133–35 ‘Silencio’ 34–35, 39, 49 ‘snow’ 43–44 ‘Wind’ 60n14 Goncharova, Natalia 113n3 Görtschacher, Wolfgang 205 Gospel of John 139 Graham, W.S. 112n2 graphic scores see aleatoric scores Greenham, Lily 13, 18n9 Griffiths, Bill 18n9, 247n20 Groningen, University of 257 Group H 245n4 Grünewald, José Lino 28 Grupo de Arte No Figurativo 59n6 Grupo Frente 59n6 Grupo Ruptura 59n6 Guernsey 163 Gullar, Ferreira ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ 56 Gunn, Neil 71, 76 Gysin, Brion 18n9, 50, 168, 213, 227–29, 245n7 Minutes to Go see Minutes to Go

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i n de x haiku 9–10, 128, 186 Hair, Ross 72, 78, 113n3, 113n5, 113n7, 259n9 Hansen, Al 234 happenings 9, 94, 135, 234–35, 247n17–18 Harwood, Lee 246n10 Hausmann, Raoul 18n7, 63n28 Hawkes, Dean 17n3 Hawkins, Spike 213 Hayles, N. Katherine 41–42, 45, 48, 61n19–20, 133 Haynes, Jim 77 Heißenbüttel, Helmut 28, 223 Heidsieck, Bernard 168, 211–12, 217–18, 245–46n7 Henderson, Hamish 11, 144, 156n19 Hendon Arts Together (HAT) 212–13, 235, 245n6 Hendon Experimental Art Group 245n4 Hendon Poetry Society 245n4 Hendry, J.F. 70, 71–72, 84 Higgins, Dick 22, 52–53, 56, 173, 204, 234–35 Highlands Hospital, Enfield 245n5 Hilder, Jamie 2, 4, 13, 22, 26, 27–28, 35, 59n5, 60n7, 60n14, 61n19, 157n24, 162–63 Hinduism 163, 189, 201n22 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombing of 53, 66, 156n14, 215 Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, The 23–24, 26, 31, 43, 46, 47, 48, 52, 58, 59n4, 120, 251–52 Holland, Dutch 59n1, 68, 99, 188, 249 Hollo, Anselm 19, 20, 131, 165 Holmes, David 20 see also Link Holmes, John 144 Honour’ d Shade 76 Horovitz, Mike 77

Houédard, Dom Sylvester 3, 5, 9, 16, 17n2, 18n7, 19–20, 22, 28, 57, 58, 62n25, 77, 79, 82, 83–84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 104, 132, 136, 159–201, 204, 211–12, 223–24, 225, 231, 235, 245n7, 246n12, 250, 252, 257, 258n2 ‘020467’ 192, 193 ‘070267’ 192 ‘4’ 180, 182 ‘Apophatic Art’ 190, 192 ‘Beat and Afterbeat’ 165, 199n4 Begin Again: A Book of Reflections and Reversals 197, 250 ‘Between Poetry and Painting: Chronology’ 172–73, 199n6 ‘Birhopal Takistract: Eyear Poem for Takis Vassilakis’ 176–78 ‘Bob Cobbing: Troubadour and Poet’ 223 Book of 12 Mudras 186–87, 201n17 Book of Chakras, A 192 ‘Can Yr Typewriter Waggle its Ears’ 167–68 Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons 160–61 ‘Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay’ 17n2, 87, 169–71, 172 Cube typestract 195, 197 ‘East and West – New Perspectives’ 200n13 ‘eaten by a’ 165–66 ‘every image’ 165–66 ‘Eyear’ 211–12, 223 ‘Four Stages of Spiritual Typewriting’ 179–82 Frog Pond Plop 186 ‘God Pie, The’ 164 ‘Heathen Holiness’ 200n13 ‘Introduction, Ancestry and Chronology’ 246n12 Jeux Théologiques 163–64, 173

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bor de r blu r s Kinkon 163, 173–82, 188, 199n4 Like Contemplation 194–97 machine-poems see machine-poems ‘Men-Men and Right Mind-Minding’ 200n13 ‘Om’ 181, 182 Openings (press) see Openings ‘Paradada’ 19–20, 79, 166, 171–72 Rock Sand Tide 199n7 Screen typestract 196, 197 Tantric Poems Perhaps 188, 191–94 ‘Thalamus Sol’ 174–76, 177, 178 ‘Third Bridge, The’ 178 ‘this holy’ 185 ‘To Freshen Our Sense of the Language We Do Have’ 168–69 typestracts 16, 17n2, 159, 163, 173, 187–97, 197–98, 199n4, 201n18–20, 223–24 see also typestracts ‘Visualisation of Idapingala Staircase with Mount Meru Up the Middle’ 193–94 ‘Wider Ecumenism, The’ 185 Yes/No 199n4 Hrabanus Maurus 173 Hughson, Joan 147–48 Hulme, T.E. 37, 93–94 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 37, 93 ‘Tory Philosophy, A’ 93–94 Hunter, Fred 156n16 Ibn ’Arabi 160 ICA Bulletin, The 156n16, 199n4, 199n7 ideograms 19, 35, 36, 37–39 Image 8 Imagism 36, 37, 49, 63n28, 93–94, 113n8 imperialism see colonialism

industrial design 44, 60n10, 251–52 information aesthetics 14, 31, 41, 46–48, 62n22–23, 252 see also cybernetics; information theory information theory 1, 4, 8, 14, 24, 27–28, 31, 37, 41–49, 50, 61–62n20–21, 133, 253–54 see also cybernetics; information aesthetics Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 20, 92, 156n16, 199n4, 211–12, 218–19, 223, 245–46n7 Intelligence Corps (British), The 163, 188, 200n9 intermedia 1, 4, 9, 10, 14, 16, 21, 26, 52–53, 56, 94, 160, 162, 169, 172, 198, 204–06, 207, 226, 234–35, 237, 242, 244 definition of 53 International Poetry Incarnation 217, 247n16 International Times 9 Invenção 128–29 Invenção group 28, 178, 199n6 Isou, Isodore 50 Jabberwock 77 Jameson, Fredric 112 Jandl, Ernst 28, 87, 103, 148, 225, 234, 246n11–12, 247n16 ‘Schützengraben’ 247n16 Sound Poems/Sprechgedichte 246n11–12 Japan, Japanese 28, 59n1, 75, 220 jazz 53–54, 78, 213 Jencks, Charles 26 Jerusalem Bible, The 174, 199–200n8–9 John of the Cross, Saint 164, 168–69 Johnstone, William 76

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i n de x Joyce, James 37, 61n17, 63n28, 123, 148 Kac, Eduardo 59n3 Kafka, Franz 124 Kagel, Mauricio 59n4 Kagyu Samye Ling Buddhist Monastery, Dumfries and Galloway 191 Kandinsky, Wassily 63n28 Keen, Jeff 238–39 Kennedy, Christine, and David Kennedy 258n4 Kenner, Hugh 37 Kent, University of 255 Kerouac, Jack 77, 184, 191, 200n11, 213 Old Angel Midnight 213 Khlebnikov, Velimir 63n28, 125 Declaration of the Word as Such 63n28 Khrushchev, Nikita 60n8 kinetic art 60n9, 173–74, 176, 177 kinetic poetry 135–36, 173–82, 186, 188, 224 Klee, Paul 63n28 Klütsch, Cristoph 46, 62n22–23 Konkrete Canticle (performance group) 250 Konkrete Poesie (pamphlet series) 83–84 Krampen, Martin, and Günther Hörmann 23, 25 Kruchenykh, Aleksei Declaration of the Word as Such 63n28 Kujundzic, Zeljko 70 Labour Party (British) 127, 184, 255 Laika 119, 151–53 Laing, R.D. 224–25, 230–31 landscape poems 15, 67, 105, 108–10, 112 Larionov, Mikhail 113n3

Larkin, Phillip 11–12, 124–25, 127–28, 259n7 Latham, John 224–25, 246n13 Lax, Robert 28, 165 LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts 18n7 Le Corbusier 25, 59–60n7 Lee, Jennie 255 Leonard, Tom 12, 147–48, 156n21, 157n22 ‘Good Style’ 157n22 Les Lettres 59n1 Letraset, letter-transfer kits 57–58, 64n33, 226, 255–56 Lettrism 1, 9, 21, 50, 219 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 62–63n27 Lijn, Liliane 13, 18n9, 174, 186, 200–01n15 Poem Machines see machine-poems Lindinger, Herbert 23, 24, 43, 47, 59n4 Lindsay, Maurice 113n7 Link 20, 199n7, 223, 255 little magazines 9, 57–58, 76, 77, 254 Little Sparta 67, 105, 108, 110, 112, 191, 245, 250 Liverpool 256 Lockwood, Annea 13, 231, 239, 247n15 Lohse, Richard Paul Colour Groups Arranged in Squares 30 London 18n7, 18n9, 20, 57, 58, 64n33, 147, 156n20, 167, 208, 211, 217, 225, 235, 244, 245, 255–56 long sixties, the 53 Lorrain, Claude 110 Louvre, Alf 184 Lowell, Amy 37 LSD 191, 201n22, 237 Lubki (Russian folk chapbooks) 113n3

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bor de r blu r s Lucie-Smith, Edward 11, 156n17 McArthur, Bill 77, 113n10 McCaffery, Steve 35, 56–57, 63n28, 219–20, 221, 234 McCance, William 76 McCarthy, Cavan 151 Tlaloc see Tlaloc McCloy, John J. 24 McCulloch, Margery Palmer 76, 113n6, 113n8 MacDiarmid, Hugh 7, 11, 66, 66–67, 70, 74, 75–77, 113n6–8, 113n10, 125–28, 155n11, 214, 254 ‘Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, A’ 77 ‘Glasgow 1938’ 126 Sangschaw 113n8 Ugly Birds without Wings, The 76 ‘Water Music’ 148 McGinn, Pete 73–74 McGonigal, James 3, 113n7, 139, 154n3, 155n6, 156n19 McGonigal, James, and John Coyle 3, 154n2 McGonigal, James, and Sarah Hepworth 118, 120 McGuffie, Jessie 13, 72, 73, 75, 114n17 see also Sheeler, Jessie machine-poems 18n9, 163, 183, 186–87, 199n6, 200–01n15 McLuhan, Marshall 1, 57, 64n32, 82, 122–24, 135, 136, 154, 155n8, 253–54, 258n5 Gutenberg Galaxy, The 1, 57, 82, 122–24 Macy Cybernetics Conferences 41–42, 45, 48 Magritte, René 110 Malayan Emergency 134–35 Maldonado, Tomás 23, 25, 59n6 Malevich, Kazimir 85

Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 23, 24, 36, 61n16, 63n28, 101, 129 Un Coup de Dés 22, 36–37, 61n16, 129 Mandate 259n8 Marcuse, Herbert 184, 206, 215–17, 221–22, 246n8 Essay on Liberation, An 206, 215, 216–17, 221–22, 246n8 One-Dimensional Man 215, 216 Marinetti, Filippo ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ 63n28 ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ 63n28 Marshall Plan 27, 59n5 Martin, Leslie 8 Marwick, Arthur 53, 54–55, 126, 155n12 Marx, William 27 Marxism 23, 55, 75–76, 125–27, 206–07, 215–17 see also communism Masterman, Margaret 62n25 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 125, 155n10 Mayer, Hansjörg 12, 20, 28, 139, 156n17, 166, 249 Futura (poster-poem series) see Futura Medalla, David 173–74 Mellors, Andrew 259n9 Melo e Castro, E.M. de 19–20, 65, 79, 115, 120–21, 159, 166 Merton, Thomas 184–85, 191, 200n12 Mesquita, Ivo 25 metaphysical poetry 163–64, 199n3 Metzger, Gustav 190, 235–36, 247n19–20 Michihiko, Hachiya 156n14 mid-century modernism 1, 14, 17n1, 23–26, 44, 252–52 definition of 17n1 Midlands 72, 256 Migrant Press 72

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i n de x Miles, Barry 225 Miller, G.A. 44 Miller, Tyrus 25 Milne, Drew 82 Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry 159, 249 Minimalism 27 Minutes to Go 120, 213–14, 227–29 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 62n25 Mitchell, Adrian 213 modernism (architecture and design) see architecture; mid-century modernism modernism (literary) Anglo-American 21, 117, 122, 124–25, 128, 246n10, 252–53, 257 definition of 17n1 global 37 late 112 North American 16, 57, 72, 82–83, 160, 168–69, 184, 190–91, 213–14, 214–15, 252, 257 post-colonial 11, 12, 37 Scottish 5–6, 75–76, 113n6, 117, 122, 125–28, 153–54 see also avant-garde, Scottish South American 24 Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne 67 Moles, Abraham 62n23 Monk, Geraldine 256 Montevideo 59n6 Morgan, Edwin 2, 3, 5, 6, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 18n5, 19, 20, 28, 51, 56, 57, 58, 62n25, 65, 75, 77, 79, 82, 87, 90, 91, 105, 106, 115–57, 166, 174, 187–88, 197, 212, 223, 252, 257 animal poems see animal poems ‘Beatnik in the Kailyard, The’ 127–28, 215 ‘Blues and Peal: Concrete 1969’ 146–47

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‘Canedolia: An Off-Concrete Scotch Fantasia’ 115, 149 Cape of Good Hope, The 118 ‘Chinese Cat’ 128, 129 computer poems see computer poetry ‘Computer’s First Christmas Card, The’ 132–33 ‘Dogs Round a Tree’ 128, 129–30, 131, 136 Emergent Poems 138, 139–143 ‘Eohippus’ 144–45 ‘Epilogue: Seven Decades’ 120 Festive Permutational Poem 136, 137 ‘First Men on Mercury, The’ 149–50 Four Glasgow Poets 148 ‘French Persian Cats Having a Ball’ 135 From Glasgow to Saturn 149–50, 250 Horseman’s Word, The 138, 143–46 ‘Instamatic’ poems 116 ‘Instant Theatre Go Home’ 133–35 ‘Into the Constellation: Some Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Concrete Poetry’ 153 ‘Kelpie’ 145–46 ‘Meeloney’s Reply to McBnuigrr’ 149 ‘Message Clear’ 139–43 ‘Newmarket’ 145 newspoems 118, 120 ‘O Pioneers!’ 119 ‘Orgy’ 136 ‘Original Sin at the Water-Hole’ 128, 130–31 Scrapbooks 118–20 Second Life, The 149 ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake’ 128 ‘Sleight-of-Morals’ 156n18 Sovpoems 124–25

bor de r blu r s ‘Spacepoem 1: From Laika to Gagarin’ 119, 151–53 ‘Spacepoem 2’ 157n23 ‘Spacepoem 3: Off Course’ 151 ‘Starryveldt’ 116, 138–39, 140 Starryveldt 129–31, 133–35, 135–36, 138–39, 140 ‘Summer Haiku’ 128 ‘Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly’ 128, 129 Vision of Cathkin Braes, The 118 Whittrick, The 118 Morgenstern, Christian 63n28 Morris, Charles 252 Moscow Linguistic Circle 60n13 Mottram, Eric 9, 10, 16, 222–23, 246n10, 253, 255, 257, 258n4 Moura, Marcelo 65 Movement, the 11–12, 124–25, 253–54 Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi Society 160 Muir, Edwin 76, 155n11 Muir, Willa 76 Murphy, Hayden 199n3, 199n5, 200n9, 200n14 Broadsheet see Broadsheet Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 249 music 1, 5, 10, 12, 21, 24, 35, 36, 50, 58, 76, 86, 127, 212, 213, 234, 237–39, 242, 257 musique concrète 21, 63n30, 136 Nake, Frieder 46–47, 61n20, 62n23 Nam June Paik 234 Naropa Institute, Colorado 201n23 National Insurance Act (1946) 255 Nazism 23, 35, 46–47, 70 Neat, Timothy 144 Neish, Alex 77, 113n10 neo-classicism 105, 108, 110, 112, 250 neo-dada 2, 15, 16, 65, 92, 94, 101,

103, 104, 162, 171, 172, 198, 225, 250 see also Dada neo-objectivist poetry 57 Neoprimitivism 113n3 New Departures 77 New End Gallery, Hampstead 235, 247n17 New Left, The 127 New Moon Festival 247n15 New Saltire 113n7 New York 52, 58, 147 Newcastle 256 Ngo Dinh Diem 227 Nichol, bp 56 Nicholson, Colin 116, 138–39, 145–46 Niedecker, Lorine 72, 113n5, 252 My Friend Tree 72 Niemeyer, Oscar 25 Nine 112n2 Noigandres group 20, 22, 23, 24–26, 27, 28, 33, 35–41, 45, 46, 56, 59n3, 59n6, 60–61n15, 61n17, 63–64n30, 83, 84, 87, 113n10, 113n12, 116, 125, 128–29, 132, 138, 166, 168, 178, 223, 252 ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’ 25, 33–34, 36–37, 45, 79, 83, 87, 113n10, 129, 132, ‘Noigandres’ (term) 60–61n15 nonsense poetry 22 North Finchley Library 213, 214, 224 Northernism, Northern sensibility 69–70, 88 Nottingham 167, 256 nuclear (armaments, war, weapons) 27, 53, 66, 82, 94, 215, 253 Nuremberg Rallies 47 Nuttall, Jeff 54, 183–84, 211, 215, 217, 224–25, 239 Bomb Culture 54, 183–84, 215, 217, 224–25 Nye, Robert 111

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i n de x objectivist poetry 8, 57, 163, 168 offset lithography 57–58, 255–56 Olson, Charles 168 Openings (press) 18n7, 94, 166, OPOJAZ Group 60n13 Orkney Islands 72, 73 Ortiz, Ralph 235 Osgood, C.E. 9 OU 199n7, 212, 245–46n7 Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, The 7 Oxford English Dictionary, The 187–88 Oxford, University of 163, 191, 200–01n15 Page, Robin 235 Paperback Bookshop 77, 113n9 Paris 18n9, 50, 58, 62n27, 63n28, 186, 200n15 parole in libertà 63n28 Patchen, Kenneth 213 pattern poetry 22, 203 Patterson, Benjamin 234 Peace News 11–12, 124, 127, 151, 155n6 Peebles, Alistair 72 performance 10, 16, 21, 26, 51, 55–56, 178, 204, 207, 211–12, 213, 218, 219–20, 221, 222, 225, 231, 234–44, 236, 245, 247n15, 247n16, 247n18, 247n20, 250, 257–58, 259n8 Perloff, Marjorie 27, 61n17, 64n31, 81, 111, 251 permutational poems 98–99, 116, 136, 137, 138–39, 140, 146, 173–78, 208, 210–11 Perrone, Charles 22 Pevsner, Antoine ‘Realistic Manifesto, The’ 29 Phillips, Tom 50 phonic poetry 151, 217–18, 219–20, 226, 234 Picasso, Pablo 63n28

Picking, John 73–74, 78 pictographs 38, 46, 87, 178, 199n6 Pignatari, Décio 23, 24–25, 38–41, 64n32 ‘Bebe Coca Cola’ 39–41 ‘LIFE’ 38–39, 49 Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline 114n16 plate-glass universities 254–55 poésie sonore 203, 212, 214, 218 see also sonic concrete poetry; sound poetry; Ultralettrism Poetry Society, The 17n2, 156n20 Poor.Old.Tired.Horse (POTH) 20, 65, 77, 78, 90, 104, 129, 199n7, 251 pop 11, 136 pop art 1, 21, 50 Portugal, Portuguese 19–20, 59n1, 64n32, 121, 159 poster-poems 135, 139, 156n17 post-existentialism 124–25, 127, 153–54 post-modernism 112, 147, 171 post-structuralism 15, 51, 54–55, 116, 117, 154 Pound, Ezra 35–36, 37, 49, 60–61n15, 63n28, 82 Cantos, The 35–36, 60–61n15 Poussin, Nicolas 110 Prinknash Abbey 20, 163, 185, 200n14 Productivism 60n10 Project Sigma 217 psychedelia 136, 201n22, 236–37 Purvis, Alston 201n20 Queneau, Raymond 18n7 Raban, Jonathan 259n8 radio 43, 123, 127, 132, 147, 155n6–7, 218–19, 246n11, 258n6 Rapoport, Anatol 252, 258n3

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bor de r blu r s Raworth, Tom 246n10 Rawson, Phillip 189 Read, Herbert 20 rebus principle 62n26 redcats, the 125, 168 Reichardt, Jasia 18n7, 20, 50, 92, 104, 156n14, 172, 188, 223, 246n12 Riach, Alan 3 Richter, Hans 63n28 Riddell, Alan 12 Rilke, Rainer Maria 88 Rillie, Jack 132 Rimbaud, Arthur 101 Rio de Janeiro, Carioca 25, 59n3, 59–60n6–7 Robbins Report, The 254 Rodchenko, Alexander 60n10 Rot (book series) 46 Rothko, Mark 224 Rousay 72, 73, 89 Rowan, John 210 Royal Army Medical Corps 118 Royal College of Art 211 Rühm, Gerhard 28, 147–48 Ruskin, John 123–24 Russia, Russian 24, 29–30, 52, 60n8, 63n28, 69, 79, 112n1, 113n3, 119, 125–27, 150, 151–53, 168, 184, 227, 252 Salon des Refusés 170, 173 Sant Anselmo Benedictine College, Rome 163 São Paulo 20, 23, 24, 52, 58, 59n6, 120 São Paulo Museum of Modern Art 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul 124, 155n9, 163 Being and Nothingness 124, 155n9 Saunders, Crombie 112n2 Saussure, Ferdinand de 62–63n27 Scholl, Hans and Sophie 23 Scholl, Inge 23

Schaeffer, Pierre 63n30 Schoenberg, Arnold 26 Schwitters, Kurt 18n7, 63n28, 97, 103, 151 science fiction poetry 116, 250 Scobie, Stephen 49–50, 56, 147, 156n20 Scots (language) 11, 18n8, 74, 76, 113n8, 128, 145–46, 150, 155n10 Scotsman, The 114n17 Scott, Alexander 76 Scott, Francis George 76 Scottish Arts Council 255 Scottish Colourists 85 Scottish Nationalism 5–6, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 75–77, 117, 122, 125–26, 128, 154 Scottish Poetry (book series) 7, 148 Scottish Renaissance 11, 74, 75–77, 82, 113n6, 113n7, 117, 125–28, 155n11, 253–54 sculpture-poems 67, 94, 98, 104, 106–08, 135–36, 186–87 Second Aeon 12, 18n8 Second Amaranth 223 Second International Concrete Poetry Exhibition 200n15 Second Vatican Council 183, 184–85, 190 Second World War 2, 12, 13, 23, 25, 35, 39, 82, 118, 126, 170, 190, 208, 215, 253 Seed, John 126–27, 156n13 Selk’nam, the 221, 246n9 semiotic poetry 46, 178, 199n6 semiotics 4, 8, 14, 16, 37, 41–49, 50, 244, 252 serialist music 24, 25–26, 36 Shakespeare, William 23 Shannon, Claude 41–42, 45, 48, 61n19 Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver 42

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i n de x Sharkey, John 12, 20, 90, 132, 136, 156n14, 156n16, 159, 166, 223, 235, 247n19, 249 Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry see Mindplay OPENWORDROBE 156n16 Sharpeville Massacre 138–39 Shayer, Michael 72 Sheeler, Dick 114n17 Sheeler, Jessie 75, 113n11 see also McGuffie, Jessie Sheppard, Robert 206, 222, 245n2, 246n10, 258n4, 259n9 Sidewalk 77, 113n10 Signals Gallery 18n9, 200–01n15 Simpson, Nicola 3, 199n1, 201n16 Simpson, Nicola, and Andrew Hunt 3 sixties, the 1, 2, 53, 105, 111, 117, 154, 183, 204–05, 206–07, 225, 244, 255–56 see also counter-culture Smith, Stewart 77 Smith, Sydney Goodsir 74, 76 Snyder, Gary 77, 191 Society of the Horseman’s Word 144 Solt, Mary Ellen 8, 17n4, 39, 83, 113–14n12 Concrete Poetry: A World View see Concrete Poetry: A World View Something Else Press 52 sonic concrete poetry 146–53, 117 Sound and Syntax (festival) 147–48 sound poetry 1, 18n9, 21, 50, 56, 63n28, 77, 97–98, 103–04, 116, 117, 147–153, 156n20, 203, 211–12, 219–20, 225, 234, 246n12, 250, 254–55 historical surveys of 63n28, 246n12 International Festivals of 156n20 see also poésie sonore; sonic concrete poetry; Ultralettrism

Soviet Union, Soviet see Russia, Russian space travel 15, 27, 115, 119, 147, 150–53, 157n23, 254, Spoerri, Daniel 28 Sputnik (satellites) 119, 127, 151–53, 157n24, 258n5 Stalin, Stalinism 60n8, 126–27, 184 Stanford, Derek 69, 78–79, 81, 98, 104–05, 108–09, 111, 249, 250 Steadman, Philip 8 Form see Form Image see Image Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 249–50 Stein, Gertrude 63n28 Stereo Headphones 146, 254–55 Stiles, Kristen 235 Stonypath Farmhouse see Little Sparta Strindberg, August 69 Stroud 166, 167, 255 structuralism 8–9, 54–55, 62–63n27, 116, 153, 187 Studio International 201n21 Stuttgart 28, 46–47, 48, 132, 166 Sufism 160, 185 Suprematism 85 surrealism 27, 118, 120, 164, 170, 253 Suzuki, D.T. 191 Sweden, Swedish 50, 56, 251, 156n20 Switzerland, Swiss 23, 28, 59n1, 251, 87 symbolism 36, 123 Takis 173–74, 176–78 Tantra (art, mythology, ritual) 163, 188–94 tape-poems, tapes, tape recorders 10, 147, 219–20, 231, 245–46n7, 246n11, 247n15, 247n16 Tate Gallery 107

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bor de r blu r s Taylor, Brandon 60n12 Technischen Hochschule, Stuttgart 46, 48, 62n24, 166 technopaegnia 173 television 57, 123, 127, 155n7, 210, 251, 254, 258n6 Themerson, Franciszka 18n7, 200n10 Themerson, Stefan 12, 18n7, 200n10 Third Reich see Nazism Thomas, Greg 13, 18n7, 258n4 Tibet, Chinese invasion of 191 Tilbury, John 201n21 Times Literary Supplement, The (TLS) 19–20, 65, 79, 90, 121, 157n25, 159, 166, 197, 199n7 ‘Changing Guard, The’ (special issues) 19–20, 90, 91, 199n7 Tlaloc 151, 223 Toche, Jean 235 Tolkein, J.R.R. 199–200n8 Tolstoy, Leo 69 Traverse Theatre 247n19 Trocchi, Alexander 55, 76, 113n7, 214, 217 ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ 55 troubadour poetry 60n15 Turgenev, Ivan 69 Turing, Alan 60n19 Turnbull, Gael 72, 113n4 Tylor, Edward Burnett 247n14 typestracts 16, 17n2, 159, 163, 173, 187–97, 197–98, 199n4, 201n18, 20, 223–24, 226–31 Typographica 18n7, 87 typography 18n7, 52, 166 Tzara, Tristan 224 Ulm (journal) 251 Ulm School of Adult Education 23

Ultraism 63n28 Ultralettrism 211, 219–20 see also poésie sonore; sonic concrete poetry; sound poetry universities 8, 20, 53–54, 55, 77, 90, 118, 122, 148, 206, 254–55, 257 Upton, Lawrence 3 Uruguay 59n6 Van Doesburg, Theo 30, 60n12–13 ‘Basis of Concrete Painting’ 30, 60n12 Vedda, the 221 Verey, Charles 12, 20, 163, 167, 190, 191 Verstraeten, Pieter 27 Victoria and Albert Museum 150, 258n2 Vienna 18n9, 28, 87 Vienna Group 18n9, 28 Vietnam War 156n13, 215, 227 Virtanen, Juha 258n4, 259n9 Vorticism 63n28 Voznesensky, Andrei 125 Vree, Paul de 103 Wales 12, 18n8, 256 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 249 Walker, Marshall 124 Walter, Grey 155n4 Walther-Bense, Elisabeth 46 Warner, Denis 227–30 Warsaw Pact 60n8 Watts, Alan 191, 237 Weaver, Mike 8, 20, 88, 90, 135, 153, 154, 157n25, 187, 197–98 Form see Form Werkman, H.N. 188, 201n20 West Country concrete poetry scene 12, 17n2, 20, 104, 166–67, 186, 199n6, 200n14, 255, 256–57 West Germany see Germany White Rose Movement 23

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i n de x Whitehead Peter Wholly Communion 247n16 Whyte, Hamish 128–29 wider ecumenism, the 185 Wiener, Norbert 41–42, 45, 61n19 Wild Hawthorn Press 72, 73 Wilde, E. de 249 Willett, John 19 Willey, Stephen 227, 246n13 Williams, Emmett 3–4, 8, 10, 28, 52–53, 104, 156n16 Anthology of Concrete Poetry, An see Anthology of Concrete Poetry, An Williams, Jonathan 28, 166 Williams, William Carlos 49, 82–83, 113–14n12, 130 Wilson, Colin 160 Wilson, Harold 127, 156n13, 255 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 57, 64n31, 159–60, 163, 168, 171–72, 174, 178, 199n5 Philosophical Investigations 57, 171–72

Wolff, Christian 50 women in concrete poetry 12–13 Worcester 72 World War Two see Second World War Wright, Edward 12, 18n7 Writers Circle 245n4 Writers Forum 9, 18n9, 147, 173, 191, 203, 212–13, 225, 245n4, 246n11 Xisto, Pedro 28, 65 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 125 Young, La Monte 201n21 Zoroastrianism 175, 200n9 Zukofsky, Louis 168 Zurbrugg, Nicholas 146, 254–55, 259n8 Stereo Headphones see Stereo Headphones Zurich Dada 63n28, 217–18, 224–25 see also Dada

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