The achievements of experimental poetry have been many. In the first
place, it managed to lay open the fragility of a restricted concept
of literature, that is, the existence of a single fixed concept of literature
based on semanticity, on the verbal aspect of literature. In reality,
this concept falls under its own weight since, particularly in poetry,
the paralinguistic or a-semantic elements are essential when it comes
to to establishing the meanings. I’m talking about rhetorical devices
and formal structures such as rhyming, metre, rhythm, etc. Thus, Jean
Cohen has been moved to say that “the words that resemble each
other in their sound must resemble each other in their meaning”
while Jakobson has stated that “rhyming necessarily involves a
semantic relationship between the units that are linked by it”,
which means that the connotations also depend on entities that are above
the merely verbal.
In the second place, we have seen an increasing acceptance of an “amplified”
concept of literature, which takes into account Jakobson’s pan-semiotic
elements, the other dimensions, visual, phonic and others, which lie
behind the dominant verbal dimension, and which, in some cases, could,
according to the circumstances, ratify, emphasize or rectify what it
expresses. However, this does not mean a subversive “counter-literature”
that would leave it outside the “canon” but an entity in which
many peculiar concepts of literary art co-exist.
The crucial moment in the history of this process was Christian Morgenstein’s
poem Fiches Nachtgesang (1905) which , for the very first time, proposed
the substitution of words by visual signs that lie outside the verbal
language of poetry: |
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Contrasting or complementary elements of a type of special language
that follow one another and tell of their story, an algorism before
which one need only place two different meanings. This experience was
subsequently revived by the German-based visual poetry of the fifties,
and by Italian visual poetry. In Latin America in the thirties, the
works of Xul Solar, and in the sixties, those of Wlademir Dias Pino,
the semiotic poem and the poem/process were the radical alternatives.
What is new always needs new concepts in order to be defined and seen
as a “knowledge of reality” to the estent that it is extracted
from the “chaos” or the “non-being”. These new concepts,
for these new entities, have to be “created” for what really
exists is the objects,concrete or abstract. What is not known cannot
be named.. They only exist socially when they have a name, that is,
when they acquire a “word format” that represents the objective
correlative discovered. Hence the emphasis on the part of experimental
poetry on scrutinizing the paths of this no-man’s-land limited
by “being” and “not-being”, or, in other words,
“order” and “chaos”, playing philosophy or science
or especially itself, trying to amplify the scenario in which values
will attain their best symbolic expression (in this case, poetic) in
the light of its own time and at the level of the level of technology
achieved by man up to that moment. A clear example of this lies in the
concept of POLYPOETRY or ABSOLUTE POETRY, which gathers all the dimensions
of the language and the means and vehicles available at present and
in the past so as to prefigure the poetry of the future.
The appearance, this century, of Communication studies and semiotics
has been essential to establish these view points. First: the very laws,
processes, structures and functionality of the signs, the expressive
vehicle employed, the considerations on “noise”, etc. Secondly,
the establishment and necessity of experimental activity in languages
so as to examine their expressive possibilities and competency for conceptualizing
the unknown, even though, obviously, not merely in poetry. Thirdly,
as a possible instrument for knowledge, paving the way for science or
philosophy or even supplying arguments for ideology (the pendular movement
of the viewpoint adopted).
What is discovered for oneself will be for others: we cannot separate
the areas of human activity in closed compartments, for they are inter-influential.
What poetry establishes and innovates has the same fate as all new concepts/objects
in any area of human activity: it is assimilated onto the repertoire
of social knowledge of mankind and thus creates irreversible changes
in all its compartments, hence its usefulness as an instrument of knowledge.
Though not of that poetry that is happy to trivially manipulate old
concepts, but the poetry that, even at the risk of not being regarded
as such, delves into the most obscure areas of our existence or our
reality with the means that it has at its disposal. Thus, it can be
consolidated as an instrument of change since what is new, recently
discovered and recently given a name to, warrants a place under the
sun and replaces and buries what is old and obsolete, thus provoking
irreversible changes within the areas of knowledge, demanding new ways
of behaviour and new committments before reality, either as an affirmation
or a change.
The visual forms that Mallarmé seems to inaugurate have always
existed in literature. They have always existed, based on the visual
dimension of language, not only because the directional quality of ancient
writing now seems to us a conscious and deliberate expressive form,
but also because the use of repetition or redundancy in order to ensure
communication has been concreted in those visual forms that replace
and reinforce the sense of liguistic expression. In other situations,
those forms dominated by the figure poem or carmina figurata were able
to develop their own ways of hermetic or religious expression. It is
really Mallarmé who inaugurated the union of devices that had
hitherto been separate: the visual forms that he imposed on the texts
of “Un coup des...” asigned an extra information that would
have been impossible to convey verbally (or rather, it would have been
possible on the condition of filling pages and more pages with texts
written according to dominant codes, which would have swept poetry aside).
The predominance of written culture made us forget that origin that
Modernism revived through the considerable increase of texts within
the field of information. Mallarmé made use in his book of the
expressive device of the press, wherein the main titles of the articles
are made to stand out in order to emphasize its character and importance;
a device which, in poetry, places emphasis on the role of visuals and
space in the poetry of modern times as well as the integration of the
visual and the verbal in a poem.
There has undoubtedly always existed an experimental attitude in poetry,
even verbal poetry. It would have been hard to achieve any advance in
knowledge or express any new feeling or emotion if we had never delved
into the deep waters of the infinite (oh, Baudelaire). We had necessarily
to make do with previously established forms in order to explain and
conceptualize the new. It was even only possible to describe those sectors
of the unknown that were adjacent to the known, as opposed to the unknown
that was away from what we already knew. Real fiction is indescribable
because we cannot talk about it with the concepts we have nowadays.
It will occasionally also be necessary to wave coloured ribbons to make
people perceive the wind, that is to say, the signs will have to have
a point of reference so that they can be given a designation.
No sphere or dimension of language, whether visual or phonic could remain
outside the range of those texts known as poems, not even that of the
stage or representational art (or performances). Not even the vehicles
themselves since, being the continuum of the area of expression, they
are inseparable from the content level (even the speech “noise”).
Each new channel discovered by technology contributes new artistic possibilities
and paves the way to an entrance in the artistic symbiology of the new
era. Even the humblest form of communication will be unable to escape
being tinged with the attributes of the new formats and vehicles. It
is thus essential to permanently adjust our objectives to the mechanics
of the new media and experiment with the expressive possibilities so
as to give a better portrait of our era and our compulsions.
Clemente Padín.
Nace el 8 octubre, 1939, en Lascano, Uruguay.
Poeta, artista y diseñador gráfico, performancer, videista,
multimedia y networker. Graduado en Letras Hispanas en la Universidad
de la República, Uruguay. Director de las revistas Los Huevos
del Plata (1965-1969), OVUM 10 y OVUM (1969-1975) y Participación
(1984-1986). Autor de 18 libros publicados en Francia, Alemania, Holanda,
Italia, Venezuela, Estados Unidos y Uruguay. Ha participado en 197 exhibiciones
colectivas y más de 1.100 exhibiciones en Arte Correo universalmente
desde 1971.Ha expuesto individualmente en Estados Unidos, Italia, Corea,
Argentina, Uruguay, Alemania, España, Bélgica y Japón.
Entre otras distinciones fue invitado especial en el XVI Bienal de San
Pablo, Brasil, 1981; mención especial en el I Bienal de la Habana,
Cuba, 1984; la Academia de Artes y Letras de la Rep. Federal Alemana
le concedió una beca en 1984, etc. Desde La Poesía Debe
Ser Hecha por Todos, Montevideo (1970), ha realizado docenas de presentaciones
y performances en todo el mundo. Se han publicado sus notas y artículos
en docenas de revistas y publicaciones y fueron traducidas al inglés,
portugués, francés, italiano, húngaro, holandés,
alemán y ruso y ha participado en múltiples eventos en
Internet desde 1992. Ha participado personalmente en encuentros relacionado
con el arte y a la poesía desde la Exposición de Proposiciones
a Realizar, Buenos Aires, 1971 y la XVI Bienal de San Pablo, Brasil,
1981, hasta que el XI Congreso Internacional de Estética, Nottingham,
Inglaterra, 1988; Acciones, Chester Spring, Filadelfia, USA, 1989; el
XXXIX Congreso SALALM, Salt Lake City, Utah, EE.UU., 1994; el V Bienal
Internacional de Poesía Visual/ Experimental, Ciudad México,
México, 1996, Eye Rytmes, Edmonton, Alberta, Canadá, 1997;
Intersignos, San Pablo, Brasil, 1998; el VIII Festival Internacional
de Poesía de Medellín, Colombia, 1998 y el Bienal Internacional
de Poesía de Belo Horizonte, Brasil, 1998, entre muchos otros. |
