tautogramme
(the same word)
A contrivance by which all the words of a
certain linguistic construction begin with the same letter of the alphabet. For
instance: “carmina clarisonae calvis cantate, Camenae /comperies calvo columen
conferre cerebro / comperies calvos capitis curare catarrhos” (Ucbaldo de
Saint-Amand, “Egloga de Calvis “, IX century). “Triste, transi, tout terny, tout tremblant” (C.
Marot). « oTite, tute, Tate tibi
tanta, tyranne tulisti (Ennius). “veni, vidi, vici” (Caesar).
Picture 161
technopaegnion
This is the title that Decimus Magnus
Ausonius (310-395 a.D.) gave to his poetic experiments, also
called anadiplosis (duplication), or repetition of the same word at the
beginning and at the end of the line: “res hominum fragiles alit, et perimet fors/
fors dubia aeternumque labans quam blanda fovete spes/spes nullo
finita aevo, cui terminus est mors/mors avida, inferna mergit
caligine quam nox /nox obitura vicem, remeaverit aurea cum lux…”
Picture 171
telestic
see acrostic
text-flache
(text-surface)
Evers since 1958 the German writer Franz
Mon has concentrated his interest on what he calls “the poetry of surface”, the
surface of the printed page, where he reads the negative shape created by the
positive one of the letters, a shape which he believs to be an authentic
element of the text. The printed text is generally seen as mere function of the
spoken word and secondary to it. However we forget that the written language
was once of figurative-pictorial nature and that such nature owns semantic
values that go beyond the spoken word. There exists, therefore, the possibility
of articulating the written language in a spatial rather than temporal way, to
enhance communication, for example the aspect of certain chemical formulas
which make use of the surface in a syntactic dimension or the custom of
writing in painting as Paul Klee or Wols did, or even the Porphirius’ versus
contexti at the time of Constantine and then throughout the early Middle Ages.
On the other hand, Mon goes on, the difference between the recited poem and the
written page represents a progression from the flexible medium to the slower
one and this delay may influence the lexical choice and the syntax of the text.
We might mention here the particular written form of epigraphs made up of
abbreviations, monograms, symbols.
The relationship between the poem and its
look is complex because the poem is born from the amorphous which is its
background. The surface is its negation, the blank page, the ‘horror vacui’
against which it struggles to gush out. The poem doesn’t exist without the
vacuum that surrounds it, as Mallarmé was well aware of. A poem which
surrenders to writing, which refrains from the dytirambic current of the spoken
word, which requires silence and expects to be understood as totality, is
semantically mystic and at the same time theoretic. Franz Mon’s “poetry of
surface” may be interpreted as the geography of a spirit which aims at
capturing in the content of the poem that “something else” which exists but is
so vague as to be impossible to be revealed in the “only thus”. Wherever we
perceive the presence of both impulses, the normal evidence of speech and that
somethong else that shines through in the web of signs. The letters of the
alphabet show themselves for what they really are when the “only thus” is
forgotten in vaour if something else that underlies it. No one remembers any
longer that once the letter ‘m’ signified water. In the “poetry of surface”
the text is within the spaces, among the negative areas that break up the
alphabetic forms. Mon admits that for some the scission of the sign-word so as
to arrive at asemantic text may seem like futile acrobatics, but he adds that
what seems useless may turn out to be interesting: the advertising poster may
be crushed into a ball or torn and it begins to sing. Just think of the French
‘affichistes’ Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne and Mimmo Rotella who in 1957 had
exhibited at the Galerie
Colette Allendy of Paris.
The cut up newspaper, Mon goes on, is changed into something that I didn’t know
before, common sense and syntax evaporate, there is born the wish to search
among the pieces of letters a novel recomposition of theirs, an “alien
structure”: a fold becomes punctuation, a cut joins hitherto disconnected signs
hich now possess spatially syntactic values, which can’t be pronounced but can
be read.
Picture 172
tmesis
A metric figure consisting in dividing a
word into two parts, one of which is placed at the end of a line and the second
at the beginning , or sometimes even in the middle, of the next line. For instance: “ne men ti raccomando la mia Fiordi
/ ma dir non potè ligi e qui finìo” (Ariosto)
typoem
(poème mécanique)
The first author to use a keyboard machine
with artistic intentions was H. N. Werkman, a printer and a painter, about 1920. In 1926 we find the works by Pietro Saga and the
exercises of “dactylographic composition” by the Josef Albers’ students at the
Bauhaus in Dessau.
Stefan Themerson, after the Second World
War, in 1946, in London, issued a
series of “semantic divertissements”, which he composed with a typewriter; they
were combined with illustrations by his wife, Franzeska. The use of this medium
for artistic purposes breaks out after. Many concrete poets resorted to it,
particularly Ilse and Pierre Garnier, Jiří Kolár, Henri Chopin. An
exhibition was held in November-December 1973 which was dedicated to the
“typewriter art, half a century of experiments” (New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh), to
Alan Riddle’s care.
Picture 45 - 49
typographisms
Under the title of typographisms we collect
a series of experiences of a more typographic than poetic character. Some of
these have a virtual kinetic value, like Diter Rot’s “bpdq” or with still
greater evidence Tim Ulrich’s ‘e’ (see virtual kinetism) or in the Egyptian
cubic mazes later splendidly revived in the baroque age- Other results, such as
Klaus Peter Dienst “Barbara” or Hansjoerg Mayer’s typogrammes are elegant
typographical exercises.
verbal anamorphosis
This figure appears when the retrograde
reading is accompanied by a transcription that overturns the form of the
letters, that reappear recte, if are read in a mirror.
Pictures 7, 8
verbotettura
A neokogism coined by Arrigo Lora Totino,
meaning architecture of words in the space of the page and is identified with
visual-concrete poetry (q.v.) with the addition of the need to obtain an
exact correspondence between semeiotic-graphic values and the sense of the
poem, which will have to vary when the latter varies. For instance the choice
of types in “chiaroscuro will be different from the one for “equilibrium” of
“light and shadow” or “nocturnal” or “wings”. Word (or verbal) architecture may
develop also in tridimentional space and it will be the “bodies of poetry”
(q.v.); to take advantage of chromatisms as in “Cronofonemi iridescenti”
(1977) and in “Incandescenze, cinque itinerri litoranei” (1978), two
portfolios of screen-printed tables.
The following themes are dealt with in the
verbotettura:
-
transcription into
verbo-visual forms of style practices peculiar to the composing of music.;
- relationships between words
that have the same root but different meanings;
- frequent use of permutation and
saturation of semantic possibilities;
- forms of optical perturbation in
analogy with stylistic features of the optical art;
- trends towards pure abstraction in
symbolic logotypes or neo-mandala;
- optical-verbal transcription of
sounds;
- verbal gags;
- story- telling as a collage of the
daily (see horror vacui).
vers brisés
Lines in which the single words or groups
of words can be read also vertically. Sometimes also the inner columns are
provided with rhyme.
versus intexti
The principles of the versus intexti come
from the acrostic, a second meaning which runs through a written surface in a
non-horizontal direction. This linguistic essence must be put into relief by a
hatching that marks the route of the second meaning. Thus to a linguistic
effect of superimposed meaning a graphic effect of relief, also superimposed,
is added. The writing underneath has the same function as that of the
background in a painting.
For the contrivance to turn out perfect,
the suprasegmental linguistic message must be isometric, that is composed by an
equal number of letters (letters not syllables) which
makes possible the perfect contiguity of
the one supposed to constitute the second meaning, a contiguity necessary to
produce the continuity of the graphic line which is intended to constitute the
design.
The inventor of this difficult contrivance
was Publius Optatianus Porfirius, a high official of the time of Constantine. In the early middle ages there were fruitful
developments in Medieval Latin poetry of mystical inspiration: Rabanus Maurus,
Venantius Fortunatus, Josephus Scotus, Alcuinus etc. For, in the eyes of the
medieval poet, intrinsically mystic, the solution of replacing the description
of the divine event by the ineffability of the geometrically represented divine
Word, a decisive gesture in the soteriological sense, was ideal .
Picture 183 -185
virtual kinetism
In 1913 Blaise Cendrars published “La prose
du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France”, a poem inaugurating a form
of virtual simultaneity, being composed by an original assembly, a technology
he has borrowed from the cinema, of temporally unconnected lyrical situations,
generating in the reader a constant tension of temporal bewilderment. After a
few months from the first edition Cendrars and the paintress Sonia Delaunay
published another edition, where word and painting are united in an
unprecedented object-poem.
Apollinaire, in his “Calligrammes” (1918),
carries out an analogue experiment, with “Poèmes conversation”, where several
dialogue fragments are put side by side to reproduce the multiple facets of
reality (cubist influence) and the free images (futurist influence) in an
accelerated rhythm.
Another form of virtual simultaneity is the
“open composition” or “composition by field” by Pound and Eliot .
Picture 19
virtual kineticismism , poetry
In visual poetry real or virtual
kineticism is possible. When real, the movement transforms, deforms a text,
whose linguistic elements are subjected to continuous variations, for example
to permutational variations. Such variations may depend on mechanical or
electronic technology, or on other grounds; for example on light variations on
a written surface or a film which continuously casts textual variations.
The case of kinetic virtual poetry is
different; what is read is disposed in such a way as to induce an optical
disturbance in the reader. For example, in “e” by Tim Ulrichs the text seems to
move because of the different orientation of the letters; or in the cube (see),
a contrivance going back to the Egyptians. See also “bright” by E. E. Cummings
(1935).
Picture 17, 17 bis
visual allitteration
A process that cuts the words in the final
part of the lines, a kind of tmesis playing on rhymes drawn from their
mutilated body. Ex.: “Coralment’ò me stesso” (by Monte Andrea, Rhymes, 265).
Picture 5
visual poetry
Introduced by the Florentine group 70, that
had at the same time expressed “technological poetry”. In Eugenio Miccini’s and
Lamberto Pignotti’s visual texts, there takes place a double shifting of the
verbal code towards the visual one and viceversa, thus creating a spatiality
which is an intercode resulting from their contamination. Thus the word
becomes spatial element and the image becomes tale, especially through the use
of collage. The collage first introduced by cubist painters as an element of
‘local colour’, had found its most complete development both figurative and
verbal in dadaist practice, which achieved a style of simultaneous comparison
of several verbal or figurative situations, put together through criteria, unconscious,
intuitive or of social criticism, where the reader is involved in the process
itself of his own thought.
If one compares visual poetry with dadaist
collage, one can see that there are substantial differences between the two. In
the dadaist instance the main character of the text is one of icy scepticism
towards culture and society, not only the middle class one, approached with a
kind of metaphysical irony, bordering on nothingness, like limbs exposed on the
anatomical table: such is the case of Tzara’s poems and Raoul Hausmann’s ,
Anna Hoch’s, Max Ernst’s collages.
In visual poetry, on the contrary, the use
of the standard media (the press, magazines, television) has a function which
is the opposite of the one of advertising type; it is a kind of
counterpublicity, with forms of sign guerrilla. Miccini shows in this
operation a marked sensibility for the interrelationship of signs, carrying on
at the same time a discourse about the world, as for example his acute
reinterpretation of pre-socratic philosophy, through images and words. Lamberto
Pignotti, in a society chock-full of images and saturated with words, reacts by
creating a little void and silence so that horror pleni may take the place of
horror vacui. Thus, among other things, he has begun to cancel details of
Picture in magazines, and these are his “invisible poems” which call to mind
the lost parts of ancient frescoes and the erased passages of ancient
palimpsests.
Picture 186-188
zaum
The Russian word ‘zaum’ is a contraction
of ‘zaumniki jazik’, transmental language, created by three poets Velemir
Chlebnikov, Alexander Krucenych and Iliazd (Ilija Zdanevich). Chlebnikov’s
earliest texts date back to 1909 and his zaum is very different from that of
the other two, who composed an ininterrupted series of ‘smottologies’, that is
fragments of words already existing in the Russian language. The relationship
that is established betzeen these linguistic particles is analogous to that
between prefix and suffix, or root and root, with the creation of a language
made up of neologisms. Also futurist Bruno Corra composed some poems in a
language made of neo-words. Along that path of condensation will also proceed
James Joyce in composing that proteiform magma that is “Finnegan’s Wake”.
Pictures 190-103
zeroglyphics
Published by Adriano Spatola in 1966, they
are on the one hand a renewal of Franz Mon’s “surface-texts”, on the other they
are a reduction to grade zero of the verbal meaning of a written text, through
its minute fragmentation and this corresponds visually to the sound research on
phonemes, that is on the minimal infrasignificant units of the spoken word,
which was inaugurated in 1964 by Arrigo Lora Totino at the Studio di Musica
Elettronica of Turin. And actually in a manuscript later published on “Il
Verri”(Milan) in the issue of December 1991, “Homage
to Spatola”, the author writes that “in most cases my visual texts are also
scores, sometimes in a direct way, sometimes by way of allusion. Mostly the
allusion is to the serial idea of a preordained of sounds, or rather to the
ghost of this idea. If a certain number of variants is established for the eye,
the spectre or mirror of seriality becomes an inevitable consquence.”
Picture 194
zeugma
(yoking)
A grammar figure which consists in
interrelating two elements that would each require a structure of its own. For
instance: “parlare e lacrimar vedraimi insieme”
( Dante) instead of “you will hear me speak
and see me shedding tears”).
English version by
Antonio Agriesti & Eleonora Heger Vita
