Sunday, May 2, 2010

Concrete poetry, Burroughs, Charles Henry Ford

Poetry is a literary art using language to convey a meaning or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. There are different types of poetry such as poetic drama, hymn, lyrics, prose poetry, digital poetry, etc.

I havent hear much about digital poetry therefore i decided to research more about digital poetry. Digital peotry is poem conveyed in different forms of media, eg. dvd, kinetic texts, the internet, blogs, experimental video poetry, etc.

Digital poetry includes visual poetry(sometimes referred as concrete poetry) which uses symobols, images and texts. However visual poetry havent got a concrete definition to it. Visual poetry has been around even before printing were made accesible. Visual poetry can also be achieved by the way a poet arranges his texts to evoke a certain meaning. Visual poetry (or concrete poetry) uses word placement, and visualization to depict the shape or central movement of the subject.

There are three types of concrete poetry; Visual, Phonetic and Kinetic. Theres also a new type of poetry which involves multimedia or interaction, but it was not elaborated. Infact, concrete poetry itself hasnt got a definite meaning, it was said to be more of a form of expression and communication and mostly depend on the artists themselves.

Here are some examples of the concrete poetry:


source: infinityskitchen.com



image source: infinityskitchen.com


As i continue to search for more examples, i came across William S. Burroughs. He was said to a writer, poet, novelist and a painter. I am keen to know more about Burroughs and his works because i had intended to use collage\paper montage for my excution part because of my odd attraction towards papery stuffs. Therefore my research will divert to Burrough's works.

Burroughs have come up with different literacy styles.

1. Early work
2. Cut Up Period
3. Experiment & Subversion
4. The Red Night Trilogy

I am most attracted to Burrough's cut up technique. Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random.

Here are examples of Burrough's work:






sources: realitystudio.org


I really like Burrough's method of cut up, because it is basically just cut up text arrangeed at random to create a new text. I couldnt find more on his cut up works because he applied this technique to film as well and he is more of a novelist than a poet.

I didnt get much on visual poetry through my research on Burroughs. Back to where I started, I wanted to use collage as a means of execution and this leads me to my next research on collage poetry.

Charles Henry Ford created poster poem that are basically words pieced together from magazine cut outs.








Sources: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ford/collage.htm

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