• Author / Uploaded
• Sophie Polansky

• Categories
• Vanguardia
• Poesía
• Estética
• Atención
• Tecnología

Citation preview

Radical Poetry

SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors

Radical Poetry Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900–2015

Eduardo Ledesma

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2016 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Emily Keneston Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ledesma, Eduardo, 1972– author. Title: Radical poetry : aesthetics, politics, technology, and the Ibero-American avant-gardes, 1900–2015 / Eduardo Ledesma. Description: Albany, New York : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000471 | ISBN 9781438462011 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438462028 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental poetry, Latin American—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Latin America. | Modernism (Literature)—Latin America. Classification: LCC PQ7082.P7 L446 2016 | DDC 861.009/98—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016000471 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: An Overview

1

1. The Historical Avant-Gardes: Futurist Metaphors

19

2. The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes: A Political Turn

53

3. Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise:

81

An Introduction to Digital Poetry

4. Modernisms on the Move: Mechanic, Kinetic, Cinematic

109

5. Letters and Lettrism: Deconstructing the New Vanguards

147

6. Latin American Digital Poetry: Animated Embodiment

171

7. Modernismo: Cannibalistic Appropriation and Advertisement 197 8. Concrete Aesthetics: Abstraction, Mass Media, and Ideology

223

9. Luso-Brazilian E-Poetry and Performance

251

Conclusion: Toward a Radical Aesthetics of the Digital?

281

Notes

289

Works Cited

309

Index

3 31

v

Figures

Figure 1.1:

Josep M. Junoy. “A Portrait of Ynglada”

27

Figure 1.2:

José Juan Tablada. “The Chirimoyo Tree”

41

Figure 1.3:

José Juan Tablada. Fragment from “Li-Po”

49

Figure 2.1:

Clemente Padín. “Signografía I”

62

Figure 2.2:

Clemente Padín. “Inobjetal I”

67

Figure 2.3:

Edgardo Antonio Vigo. “Ninth Signaling”

75

Figure 3.1:

Jordi Pope. “Communication Systems”

87

Figure 3.2:

Jordi Pope. “Atoms”

89

Figure 3.3:

Jordi Pope. “Mathematical Poem”

92

Figure 3.4:

Olga Delgado. “The Woman Who Walks”

99

Figure 3.5:

Olga Delgado. “Island”

102

Figure 4.1:

Francesco Cangiullo. “Smoker”

122

Figure 4.2:

Joan Salvat-Papasseit. “Wedding March”

129

Figure 4.3:

Joan Salvat-Papasseit. “Connubi”

138

Figure 4.4:

Joan Salvat-Papasseit. “Edisson, Charlot”

143

Figure 5.1:

Joan Brossa. “Disassembly”

153

Figure 5.2:

Julio Campal. “Calligram”

161

Figure 5.3

Fernando Millán. “Negative Progression/2”

165

vii

viii

Figures

Figure 6.1:

Ana María Uribe. “A Herd of Centaurs”

177

Figure 6.2:

Ana María Uribe. “Discipline”

179

Figure 6.3:

María Mencía. Cityscapes

185

Figure 6.4:

María Mencía. Cityscapes

186

Figure 7.1:

Cover for magazine Klaxon

212

Figure 7.2:

Guilherme de Almeida. “Coma Lacta”

218

Figure 8.1:

Décio Pignatari. “beba coca cola”

237

Figure 9.1:

Arnaldo Antunes. Live Performance “Nome”

261

Figure 9.2:

Eduardo Kac. “D/eu/s”

270

Figure 9.3:

Eduardo Kac. “Não!”

273

Acknowledgments

This project would have been impossible without the support of many generous individuals and institutions. I wish to express my deep gratitude to my professors at Harvard University, and also at the University of Illinois-Chicago, for guiding me as a young scholar through my transition from structural engineer to literature, film, and new media professor, and for offering advice at various stages of this project. I am grateful to my committee, Brad Epps, Luis Fernández-Cifuentes, Joaquim-Francisco Coelho, and David Rodowick, for their tireless reading and for nurturing this project in its initial stages. I am especially indebted to Brad Epps, my thesis director, for his unfailing and constant support and friendship throughout the years, as well as his invaluable guidance during my dissertation writing. My very warmest thanks to Leda Schiavo, who suggested to me (in my first-ever literature class at the University of Illinois at Chicago) that, yes, one could indeed make a profession of that which one loved, the study of culture, initiating me on this path. To Matthew J. Marr (now at Penn State), for his constant counsel and friendship from my very first days at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Likewise to Rosilie Hernández, Christian Roa, Margarita Saona, Klaus Müller-Bergh, and all my other professors at UIC. At Harvard, many thanks to Mariano Siskind and Sergio Delgado, who counseled me on many academic matters. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues and friends in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who have generously shared their advice and expertise, especially Mariselle Meléndez for her steadfast guidance and mentorship, our department chair, Silvina Montrul, and also my literature colleagues Ericka Beckman, Elena Delgado, Dara Goldman, Glen Goodman, Javier Irigoyen-García, and Joyce Tolliver, as well as Luciano Tosta (now at the University of Kansas), and of course, all the other colleagues at Illinois, too many to mention. My thanks also to our energetic graduate students at Illinois, especially those that endured my graduate seminar on experimental poetry and art in the fall of 2014 and provided intelligent feedback. To many other colleagues ix

x

Acknowledgments

elsewhere, especially those working on experimental poetry and on electronic literature within our field of Hispanism and in other disciplines, with whom I have had the pleasure of exchanging ideas and many of whom have provided feedback at various conferences and on earlier versions or parts of this work, including Ofra Amihay, Laura Borràs Castanyer, Debra Castillo, Hilda Chacón, Osvaldo Cleger, Luis Correa-Díaz, Christine Henseler, Lauren Walsh, Scott Weintraub, and many more. I would also like to thank the excellent anonymous readers for SUNY press, who, with their insightful comments, were instrumental in making Radical Poetry a much better text. Preliminary and partial versions of some sections, extensively revised, have been previously published in: Hispanic Issues Online 9 (2012), Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010). Significantly revised portions of chapters 1 and 3 taken from an essay entitled “From Avant-Garde to the Digital Age: Reconceptualizing Experimental Catalan Poetry,” in The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures (2012) have been published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Some portions of chapters 8 and 9 were originally published in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010) and are reproduced here with the permission of the editors of the journal. I would like to express my gratitude to all the poets and their publishers for generously granting permission to reprint their works. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all copyright holders and I would like to apologize for any errors or omissions. Many institutions provided support for this project. First, I am indebted to the Fulbright Commission, which generously funded a year of research in Spain in 2009–10. Harvard University provided a number of fellowships and grants that funded several research trips to Latin America in the summers of 2008 and 2011. I should also like to thank the University of Illinois Campus Research Board for a supported semester teaching leave (Spring 2015) that was instrumental for completing this book. On a personal note, I would like to thank my dear friends Eugenio DiStefano, Emilio Sauri, Ana Martín Sagredo, Susana Domingo Amestoy, Tara Toscano, Steve Buttes, Anne Bink, Lotte Buiting, Sergi Rivero, Melissa Machit, Ernesto Livón-Grosman, and many, many others, for all your support over the years. A very special note of thanks to Beth Bouloukos at SUNY, who eased the process of turning my rough manuscript into a book, and is the best acquisitions editor one might hope for. And most especially, to my family: my mother Rosario, my sister Carolina, and my amazing niece Ana, thank you for all your love and support. And, still for Jill . . .

Introduction An Overview

®

R

a d i c a l P o e t r y. The title of this work immediately prompts questions: What does radical mean when describing poetry? Is radical a reference to transgressive aesthetic or dissident political practice, or both? How can poetry be radical in our time, and more specifically, how can it be so in Ibero-America? This project began as a kind of experiment in understanding these questions, and “experimental” also defines the project. Indeed, assembling a text that deals with both broad theoretical questions such as these and studies poetry from a vast geographical area requires an anchor point, a coherent center, provided here by the notion of “experimental.” This book weaves together two intimately related research objectives in order to illuminate the centrality of experimental poetry to the Ibero-American avant-gardes: one, an investigation into how the most contemporary digital vanguard is linked with, and owes much of its practice to this lengthy experimental “tradition”; two, a critical reanalysis of the artistic and political concerns of past Ibero-American avant-gardes in order to shed new light on a century of experimental poetry. This endeavor involves moving beyond traditional approaches to poetry. In this way Radical Poetry also bridges several disciplines: literature, art, media studies, history; it also spans multiple linguistic and geographical regions within Ibero-America (comprising Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan-speaking nations, often considered as being in the periphery), and investigates a subject, experimental poetry, that has been thought of as marginal, peripheral, and troublesome to categorize within any specific discipline. In fact, Radical Poetry seeks to celebrate and foreground a genre that has been neglected by critics and readers alike: maligned, misrepresented, and misunderstood, experimental poetry 1

2

Radical Poetry

has often been banished, cast outside the limits of mainstream critical inquiry, a misfit among more respected literary genres such as the novel or the short story, or more canonical types of poetry; in the case of Ibero-American experimental poetry, this marginalization has been acute, since critical attention is often drawn toward European and North American works. This neglect is partly due to the genre’s complexity: we are dealing with a poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, and violently defies categorization. Consequently, the book explores experimental poetry’s close alliances with nonliterary art forms, such as conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media art. Profoundly self-reflexive, experimental poetry questions what the “literary” means, what constitutes “poetry,” and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Naturally, one cannot speak about experimental poetry without also considering the avant-garde, those movements and artists that were driving the most forward-thinking, cutting-edge experiments in poetry. Indeed, despite its apparent marginal status, experimental poetry has been among the most salient artistic strategies deployed by the avant-gardes (along with manifestos, essays, and performances), this being a term, avant-garde, that is not without its cachet within cultural history. The link between the avant-garde and experimental poetry is indissoluble, for if the manifestos expressed the theory and political aims of the avant-garde, experimental poetry and art represented its praxis. Thus, the two terms, experimental and avant-garde, permeate the pages of this book, and yet their essence remains difficult to capture, as elusive, fluid, and dynamic as the movements and works they describe. Not easily reduced to simple definitions, the avant-garde is an artistic mode that is characterized by constant renewal and by its representation and use of the latest technologies of its era (e.g., cinematography, radio, television, computers, Internet). Moreover, the avant-garde manifests itself in every art form and genre: painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, literature; indeed, the avant-garde often seeks to blur these genres, and to achieve, as Peter Bürger argues in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), “the liquidation of art as an activity that is split-off from the praxis of life” (56). Experimental poetry partakes of the same hybridity, raising the question as to whether it can be isolated and studied for its own particularity. The answer is that it should not be isolated, but rather studied in a way that celebrates the very elusiveness that constitutes it, accounting for those overlaps with other artistic forms, visual, verbal, sonorous, and corporeal. As I will show throughout the book, experimental poetry is radical because of its position at the intersection of many art forms. My point, of course, is that despite the apparent marginality, and indeed

Introduction

3

elusiveness, of its subject, Radical Poetry represents a timely approach to contemporary Iberian and Latin American Studies by comparatively examining the experimental writing of avant-garde movements in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan through the breadth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including its very latest instantiation, digital poetry (also known as electronic or e-poetry), a kind of poetry typically created, read, viewed, listened to, and played with on computers and other digital devices.1 It is precisely in an effort to tackle the elusive subject of experimental poetry that it is necessary to examine jointly these different avant-gardes that have been generally approached in isolation. Indeed, it is when we take a broader view that we begin to see a constellation of themes, strategies, and devices that reverberate across continents: word and image interaction, kinetic text, anthropomorphic text, performative and embodied poetry. Mapping out these constellations involves perceiving lines of investigation that have gone unnoticed, finding the common threads that connect such diverse poetic experiments. Other times it involves asking deceptively simple questions, for example, the one that provoked this project: How did the print experiments of the historical avant-gardes transition into contemporary digital poetry? In other words, what is it that links the work of an early-twentieth-century Futurist such as the Catalan Joan Salvat-Papasseit to the work of the twenty-first-century Argentine digital poet Ana María Uribe, despite the vast temporal and geographical distance that separates them? How do their poetic experiments resemble and differ from each other? Is there some type of genealogy at work? Radical Poetry follows these initial questions with a more complex one: What do the changes and continuities in experimental practices tell us about how the Ibero-American avant-gardes relate to technology, to their historical and political context, and to their aesthetic aims? To answer these questions, Radical Poetry retraces and contextualizes the experimental literature, and specifically poetry, in three key periods—the so-called historical avant-garde (1900–1930s), the neo-avant-garde (1950s–1970s), and our own “digital age” (1990–2015)—and draws on the works of artists and poets from the Luso-Hispanic world, comprised of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. As Vicky Unruh notes in her Latin American Vanguards (1995), the avant-garde is “simultaneously international and autochthonous in its orientation” (10). By focusing on countries arguably on the margins of Euro-American cultural production, Radical Poetry shows how the international dimension of the avant-garde—the common ground of experimentalism that defines the vanguard— is punctuated by local phenomena and peripheral discourses—the plurality of regional and national characteristics of each movement.

4

Radical Poetry

In exploring the “experimental,” technology inevitably comes into play. This book also illustrates how technoculture—the intersection of science and technology with politics and the arts—has manifested itself in the experimental arts of Ibero-America, and demonstrates how different technologies (print, cinematography, radio, television, computers, Internet) have been incorporated by poets not just on the level of content but also at the level of form and production, oftentimes, though not always, as part of a radical political project—such was the case, for instance in the 1960s as the Latin American neo-avant-gardes pursued a radical Left politics in conjunction with innovative poetry that aimed to elude censorship under dictatorial regimes; the interaction between aesthetics, politics, and technology will be a prominent topic in this book. Of course, the radicality of the avant-gardes need not reside exclusively, or even primarily, on its connection to the political (narrowly understood as direct action in the political sphere); avant-garde art might very well exist beyond the simple duality of autonomy versus engagement; here I agree with Unruh’s point, which she specifically applies to the Latin American context, that [v]anguardists were profoundly concerned with ideas about art prevailing in their own times and, even when taking ostensibly apolitical stands, seriously examined art’s possible roles within the problematic social and cultural contexts surrounding its production. As they cast a critical eye on the value of their own artistic activities, they often imagined art as an integral part of an activist intellectual life. (7–8) Radical Poetry argues that avant-garde movements emerge at moments of intense technological and cultural change, or technocultural flashpoints, historical conjunctures that are receptive to experimental innovation but also to recycling past artistic strategies to new aesthetic and, at times, political ends. Inherently paradoxical, the etymology of “radical” entails both a departure from tradition and a return to the root, suggesting repetition or circularity—a circularity that, as I shall explain, will be reflected in the book’s structure.2 I am arguing, therefore, for a recurrence of the avant-garde in different historical periods, in both its aesthetic and political dimensions. For that reason, this book offers a very different perspective from accounts—such as Bürger’s—that emphasize the inevitable death of the avant-garde, its passing, that is, as a phenomenon anchored to a very specific time and place, with ephemeral and unrepeatable conditions of possibility; an avant-garde seen as outmoded and elitist.3 Departing from Bürger’s teleological perspective, I propose that avant-garde

Introduction

5

experimentalism is a cyclical phenomenon in literature and the arts that corresponds to an attitude of innovation and to a set of political and aesthetic practices, and is not exclusively bound to any one particular period. Moreover, the specificity of Latin American and other peripheral avant-gardes, as George Yúdice observes in “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery” (1999) provides a different entry point, one that does not position Ibero-American avant-gardisms as belated copies of their Anglo and European counterparts, but rather as an avant-garde that is profoundly autochthonous and displays its own temporality. Challenging the universality of Bürger’s thesis, Yúdice argues, as do I, that “it is possible, by a postmodern turn, to rethink the avant-gardes as not constituting a particular moment in the history of modernity but, rather, a transformative power that is generated whenever the conjectural circumstances allow for it” (74).4 In a sense, this perspective avoids the problem of originality, and as Fernando Rosenberg suggests in The Avant-Grade and Geopolitics in Latin America (2006), it situates Ibero-American vanguards not as cosmopolitan imitators but as artists who were transnationally connected and produced art simultaneously coexistent and also critically decentering in relation to its so-called models. Invariably, this capacity for simultaneity is connected to the technological, as Anthony Geist and José Monleón observe in their introduction to Modernism and its Margins (1999), noting that with the innovations in media and communications after World War I, “the avant-garde movements appeared simultaneously in the margins and the center. No longer can one speak of culture ‘arriving late’ to the far-flung removes of the empire” (xxx). Accordingly, technology will play a fundamental role in the creation and development of experimental poetry, as we shall see. Ibero-America has had several avant-garde moments, and I have chosen to focus on three of the most salient periods. Radical Poetry explores the paradoxical nature of the avant-garde: on the one hand, the avant-garde is defined by its radical newness at key moments. On the other, it is also defined by its continuity in marking that newness. The book shows that the avant-garde is neither conceptually homogeneous nor politically uniform. In this way, Radical Poetry sheds light on the complex intersections between technology and avant-garde poetry in Ibero-America (Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula), regions characterized by political upheavals that are reflected in their arts. A critical question implicit throughout the book is: How are the technologically driven formal experiments of the Ibero-American avant-gardes linked to both aesthetics and politics? Slavoj Žižek cautions against the difficulty of charting the overlap between these two arenas, since, for him, “revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different temporalities—

6

Radical Poetry

although they are linked, they are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet” (xx). My claim, and one of the book’s critical points, is that Ibero-American poetry, on account of its specific geopolitics, became aesthetically radical by progressively disintegrating language, by erasing the distinctions between word and image, and by pursuing the animation of script; it also became politically radical by subverting certain established mainstream practices, such as commercial advertising, often by deploying the same mass media used to promote militarism and commercialism. It further radicalized during periods of military rule by making the body a site for resistance against authoritarianism, as the Chilean artists of CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s. Clearly, politics, aesthetics and the body are inextricably bound in the poetry of Ibero-America. The same aesthetically radical experiments that pushed language toward its destruction became increasingly linked to a politically radical focus on the human body as a “technology” for challenging dictatorial regimes. Artists’ and poets’ technical experiments, for example, began to address the adverse material and political conditions that distinguish the Ibero-American avant-gardes by making visible the parallels between “tortured” syntax and tortured bodies. Thus, the notion of embodiment, of embodied experience reflected through text, image, and sound, also becomes a recurring theme in many of the works I examine, poems in which the body of the text often blends with human and mechanical or digital bodies, through metaphor, anthropomorphism, and other visual and textual devices. Although, as Žižek warns, radical politics and radical aesthetics are not the same thing, as we shall see, for many of these artists, the objective is to map out the complex relationship between the two. In this way, although transgressive aesthetics and radical politics may not necessarily go hand in hand, many of the artists and poets I examine grapple with precisely how to represent, or not represent, the contradictions and consequences of capitalism, totalitarianism, and other ideological constructs. This is especially true with the 1960s neo-avant-gardes, when artists were intensely immersed in the explosive events stemming from the Cuban Revolution, the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, May 68, and the civil rights and student movements. While some poets are clearly more concerned with form, with the boundaries of their material objects, others explore the links between the material and ideological inherent in form, and yet others still examine political concerns more overtly through content. Accordingly, Radical Poetry shifts its attention between those aesthetic and political questions that were most pressing for the experimental poets and movements of each period it examines.

Introduction

7

In short, Radical Poetry analyzes Spanish- and Portuguese-language experimental poetry from the avant-garde movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Futurism, modernismo brasileiro, concretism, and the digital vanguard. By focusing on three key periods—the historical avant-garde (1900–1930s), the neo-avant-garde (1950s–1970s), and our “digital age” (1990– 2015)—I aim to contribute to the study of the avant-gardes from an Ibero-American comparative and transatlantic perspective, making this a broad-based study, both temporally and geographically. Additionally, I suggest that Ibero-American avant-garde experimental poetry is distinctive in two ways: first, because of the region’s uneven technological modernization and, second, because of its particular cycles of revolution and repression, which have been virulent and transformative. In both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, poetic techniques attuned to the latest technologies such as automatic writing, typography, sound and visual poetry, and performance poetry, were deployed to break with poetic tradition and to resist political oppression, as well as to shake local bourgeois sensibilities. Authoritarian regimes throughout the region, intent on modernizing at all costs, often placed technological development over individual rights, environmental considerations, or traditional ways of life. As Rosenberg claims, in Latin America and other peripheries the avant-gardes “are simultaneously agents and resistant subjects of colonial modernization” (27). The Ibero-American avant-garde is therefore marked by a conflict between its embrace of technology and its opposition to the region’s dictatorships. This tension gives rise to types of poetry that often attempt to bridge the gap between the technological and the human. Thus, the productive tension between the regions’ uneven modernity and the avant-garde’s desire to engage (with) the latest technology often endows the poetry of the Ibero-American avant-gardes with a political dimension typically absent in other geographical locations. Beyond these geographical variations, there are still many common threads that we can find throughout these various regions. With Radical Poetry, I show that despite the many different ways in which Ibero-American avant-gardists integrate technology into their experimental poetry—by both writing about it and creating with it—they were motivated by similar desires: to animate text; to endow it with human characteristics; to make it “jump off” the page; and to blur the divisions between words, images, sounds, and actions. This brings us back to the importance of embodiment, affect, and the (often troubling, uncomfortable, and imperfect) fusion of the human and technological in these works. In Radical Poetry I suggest that the dazzling array of stylistic techniques in the experimental poetry of the last century has at times obscured the shared features of these poets’ innovations across all three time periods:

8

Radical Poetry

their recourse to metaphor, their reinscription of the human and the affective into poetry and technology; and their efforts to turn words, machines, and more recently, the digital, into flesh, by making words and objects come alive through motion and making text act and seem human. These notions of poetry as an emerging hybrid that combines the organic and inorganic, the textual, visual, aural, and the human draw on theories of the posthuman and embodiment by Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen, among others. Understanding how the avant-garde made poetry seem more human and more dynamic through the innovation of moving text becomes the focus of several chapters in the book and provides one example of the intricate interplay between the aesthetic and the political across all three historical periods (the 1900–1930s, the 1950–1970s, the 1990s–present), illustrating the comparative approach found throughout the text. Initially, the kinetic impulse in poetry (a desire to make text move) was satisfied through metaphor, by arranging text on the page to suggest its motion. For example, Salvat-Papasseit, a Catalan futurist and committed socialist, associated the disruption of linear syntax with political subversion. Writing during Spain’s turbulent 1920s, a period marked by labor unrest and police repression, and opposed to the Taylorist mechanization of the workforce that treated workers as replaceable parts, Papasseit’s poem “Wedding March” (1921) critiques the repetitive nature of factory work through typography: the word CHARLOT, the Spanish nickname for Charlie Chaplin (a hero of the working class), is typeset in the poem in a way that visually recalls the Tramp’s distinctive quick mechanical steps, also denoting the dehumanizing effect of modern times on human bodies. Thus, through typography and the simulation of motion Papasseit drives home a political point against the dehumanization of labor. Such strategies have found echoes in both the work of the 1960s neo-avant-gardes and in contemporary digital poetry, where text and image are being programmed to move on computer screens, and at times also mobilized to engage sociopolitical concerns. Sociopolitical concerns are clearly manifest in recent digital works, which renewed the experiments of previous eras, not as mere imitative pastiche, but updating them with new technologies and linking them to contemporary issues. Recalling Papasseit’s deployment of embodied letterforms, Ana María Uribe, an Argentine poet of the digital avant-garde, dramatizes such concerns in her online poem “Discipline” (2002), in which a group of capital Hs are organized in military formation as they rhythmically stomp across the screen to an electronic beat, accompanied by the unintelligible commands from an off-screen, authoritarian voice. Connecting it with Argentina’s recent dictatorships, Uribe remarks that the poem is about a group of tyrannized Hs, a letter that in Spanish

Introduction

9

is phonetically mute. The silent letters march in lockstep and activate their “limbs” to simulate both human and mechanized motion, referring to the region’s ongoing militarization. Originating in different periods and locations, and referencing different technologies (the cinema and typography, computers and the Internet), both Papasseit’s and Uribe’s poems share an understanding of poetry as a bodily experience, capable of producing motion and emotion in innovative ways that correspond to their individual epochs and serve to critique different forms of alienation. Both examples display awareness of their own historical significance, and in the case of the latter, a self-awareness of its recuperation of an earlier moment, of reclaiming its avant-gardist legacy. The structure of this book encourages these comparisons, since it returns several times to the three historical periods of interest. Today, we are witnessing an avant-garde that is still emerging and has not yet exhausted itself: the digital avant-garde. With Radical Poetry I attempt to capture the very newness of today’s digital avant-garde before its inevitable reification, by comparing it with those past and by now arguably exhausted, avant-gardes. As we have seen, the idea of exhaustion is also central to the avant-gardes. That is, the avant-garde is also defined by its temporality, more so than other artistic modalities that do not claim to be at the forefront of their time. The avant-garde’s power is, precisely, in its timing; but that goes stale quickly (even as it is also prone to return, under a different guise, as I argue here). The digital avant-garde has tapped into, and produced, contemporary obsessions with newness and obsolescence, making those aspects key to its aesthetic and political outlook. Digital works access temporality, intermediality, and movement in excitingly cutting-edge ways, which nevertheless maintain links to historical artistic and literary traditions. To understand the digital vanguard and its poetry, we must see what it borrows from its predecessors. And, like any vanguard practice, digital poetry is already undergoing a process of institutionalization. Although still early in its development, digital poetry is gradually losing its marginal status (and with it some of its edge) by appearing in university syllabi, doctoral dissertations, scholarly articles, and books such as this one; as such, it is becoming a more visible subject for critical studies, and gaining recognition as a relatively noncommercial form of literature, which is, at least until now, freely available for reading, or viewing on the Web. The organization of this book is somewhat intricate, but it allows for many possible reading options. The task of producing a seamless organizational coherence can be daunting since, given the heterogeneity of this book’s material, topics and themes can and will move in many different directions. My purpose is to ensure that these marginal poets and poems receive proper critical attention

10

Radical Poetry

by emphasizing close, detailed readings of single works. This focus on individual poets and poems, however, is periodized and sifted through key theoretical themes. The structure of Radical Poetry is tripartite: the book is divided into three main sections, and each section is further subdivided into three chapters. Each of those three main sections addresses a particular theme: the first section (chapters 1, 2, and 3) centers on word, image, and metaphor (by studyng the interaction between text, images, and sounds in poems that often deploy body-centered metaphors, and analyzing the role of metaphor itself within these works); the second section (chapters 4, 5, and 6) explores kinetic script (by studying animated poems that move within the page, the screen, or some other medium, oftentimes simulating or emulating human motion); and the third and final section (chapters 7, 8, and 9) investigates Brazilian experimental poetry (by paying particular attention to the intermingling between poetry, advertising, and communication technologies in Lusophone poems). Within each main section, the first chapter approaches the overall theme by close-reading examples from the 1920s avant-gardes (chapters 1, 4, and 7); the second chapter focuses on the 1950s to 1970s (chapters 2, 5, and 8); and the third chapter considers the 1990s to the present (chapters 3, 6, and 9). Naturally, connections are established between all sections and chapters, but the tripartite division by “eras” allows the book to be read through a variety of paths; for instance, the scholar interested primarily in digital poetry may opt to read the last chapters of each main section (chapters 3, 6, and 9), which focus specifically on the digital avant-gardes. This structure, while complex, facilitates a diachronic overview, while allowing for a synchronic analysis of paradigmatic poems. The book’s cyclical structure, which revisits each historical period several times (but each time with a different thematic and theoretical focus), is meant to counter teleological progress narratives implied by linear chronology and parallels the argument about the repeated returns of the avant-garde. I am proposing that the avant-garde has potential to transform life habits in each of its reincarnations, that past avant-garde practices can be redeployed, perhaps rearticulated through new technological processes and become critically reinvigorated, even if, eventually, new modes of capitalism assimilate them once again. This conception of the avant-garde does not entail progress, teleology, but instead suggests a spatial vision of moments of intensified artistic experimentation (often “sparked” by new technologies) that lead to a reconceptualization of life practices. The book’s organization responds to that spatial vision: on the one hand, it retains a certain unavoidable linearity imposed by the book format itself. On the other, it hints at recurrence, at an ever looping and reconstituting present or the enduring presence

Introduction

11

of the past in the present. What follows is a more detailed summary of both the content and conceptual framework for each chapter. The first three chapters follow the shifting uses and attitudes toward metaphor by the avant-gardes. Chapter 1, “The Historical Avant-Gardes: Futurist Metaphors,” engages debates about the nature of the visual and the verbal arts, in order to problematize the division between text, image, and sound. As such, the chapter does theoretical heavy lifting focusing on aesthetics, rather than politics. Engaging theorists such as Gotthold E. Lessing, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Peter Bürger, I present my analysis of how the historical avant-gardes—Futurism, Cubism, Dada— attempted to synthesize semiotic systems (script, image, sound) by suturing them through verbal and visual metaphors that rendered script as image and/or sound, just as they endeavored to fuse artistic production and technological innovation by applying their visions of speed, movement, and the mechanical to the form and content of their poetry. Ultimately unsuccessful in achieving synthesis, their efforts demonstrate that there is an unresolvable tension between different semiotic systems and media that even metaphor cannot resolve. I study these issues through close, historically and geographically contextualized analysis of visual poems by the Catalan Josep Maria Junoy and the Mexican José Juan Tablada, two poets who despite their geographical distance display a kindred aesthetic, as well as a troubling Orientalist bent. Although preoccupation with form did not subside, historical events after World War II placed Ibero-America at the center of geopolitical upheavals that demanded from the avant-gardes a more direct (less figurative) engagement with history. Shifting attention toward politics without abandoning aesthetics, chapter 2, “The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes: A Political Turn,” observes that during the turmoil of the 1960s Latin American experimental poetry became politicized in ways unseen in previous periods, engaging formally and thematically with mass media communication technologies such as radio and television, but also circulating through both popular and underground forms such as mail, graffiti, stencil, and mimeographed art. At the same time, the corporeal becomes central to these works: the body as a technology of performance, and simultaneously as a weapon for protest and resistance. In that sense, Ibero-American poetry becomes embodied, so that even a relatively “immaterial” modality such as conceptual art becomes concerned with physical matter, with concrete objects, with human bodies. As the emphasis on politics grew, real life and current events propelled art away from pure aesthetics, from autonomy and from the rhetorical; metaphor was condemned as formally and ideologically regressive. In this context, metaphor became all too easily associated with the lies of the region’s dictatorships, spurring theoretical

12

Radical Poetry

debates about its use. While philosophers and theorists such as Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, and Susan Sontag have warned against the insidious danger of figurative thought as escapist, others, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Ricoeur, or George Lakoff, insist on its transformative potential. Here, I query the work of two poets who were particularly concerned with issues of representation and its intersection with politics, the Uruguayan visual poet and artist Clemente Padín and the Argentine performer-poet Eduardo Antonio Vigo, both of whom suffered during the Southern Cone’s political violence. Padín’s “Nueva Poesía” experimented with minimalist and conceptual poems (letter poems, mail art, nonobjective poetry), subordinating representation to a direct intervention on reality; Vigo deployed his own body to protest against the dictatorship in Argentina. Their poems, performances, and actions displayed the tensions between metaphor and ideology as distortions of an unrepresentable external reality. Chapter 3, “Digital Poetry: Metaphor’s Reprise,” marks a period of renewed concern with the aesthetic and the affective, as new technology is fetishized and sociopolitical issues recede somewhat to the background. With the arrival of digital technologies, especially the personal computer and the Internet, there has been a move toward the convergence of media (as Henry Jenkins points out in Convergence Culture) and an increase in the hybridization of semiotic systems (word, image, sound, gesture) recalling concerns of the historical avant-garde, as poetry becomes more fluid, dynamic, kinetic, and, perforce, laden with metaphor. The precision afforded by the digital has, perhaps paradoxically, intensified poetic experimentalism by enhancing ambiguity, interactivity, nonlinearity, immediacy, and the visual qualities of text, making script more image-like. Establishing a dialog with New Media theorists such as Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin, and Katherine Hayles, as well as digital poetry specialists such as Loss Pequeño Glazier and Christopher Funkhouser, I argue that the intermedial sensibility of experimental poetry has reinvigorated metaphor’s transformative potential. Illustrating New Media’s formal malleability, contemporary digital poets such as the Catalans Jordi Pope and Olga Delgado combine script, image, and sound with motion and interactivity, optimizing the anthropomorphic potential of digital text, which they deploy to elicit the reader’s affective response (the emphasis on the anthropomorphic also signals a renewed interest in the embodiment of text and poetry). Here I examine online works such as “Communication Systems,” by Pope, a digital poem that skirts the boundary between science and poetry, and “The Woman who Walks,” a poem by Delgado in which she draws an interactive subway map with hyperlinks to poems about contemporary human relations. While political concerns become less direct and no longer adopt the revolutionary

Introduction

13

characteristics of the utopian sixties, or the programmatic outlook of the first avant-gardes, these poets nevertheless critique the historical contradictions germane to a technoculture fully immersed in late capitalist modes of production. The next three-chapter unit (chapters 4 to 6) coheres primarily about the issue of the kinetic, specifically the avant-garde’s fascination with moving text and images; closely linked to the question of metaphor through devices such as anthropomorphism and script animation, exploring the “kinetic” becomes a common obsession through all three periods. Chapter 4, “Modernisms on the Move: Mechanic, Kinetic, Cinematic,” opens with the claim that the incorporation of moving text, which ranks among the most spectacular effects of digital poetry, results from the actualization of older print experiments with the capabilities of New Media. Setting script in motion, I argue, realizes the kinetic aspirations of the historical avant-gardes. In this chapter I trace the kinetic impulse in twentieth-century Ibero-American poetry to early attempts by Futurists—such as the Catalan Salvat-Papasseit—to make poems dynamic through typography, images, and sound technologies. In the first part of the chapter, I establish some links between theories of affect and kinetic effects in poetry. In addition, by referencing the work of film theorists such as Mary Ann Doane and Tom Gunning, I examine in particular how poets were impacted, not just by biological and mechanical motion, but also by other significant motion technologies of their day, notably film (moving images), but also radio (moving sound waves), as their work transitioned from “stasis to mobility” (Doane). Through a very close reading of a work titled “Wedding March” (1921), I analyze how Salvat-Papasseit’s poem marries aesthetics and politics via its commitment to the anarchist cause, and its wish to fuse the mechanical and the biological. Once again shifting to the political dimension of experimental poetry, Chapter 5, “Letters and Lettrism: Deconstructing the New Vanguards,” argues that the adverse political conditions in Francoist Spain drove neo-avant-garde poets toward a poetics of silence that reduced aesthetic expression to a minimalist use of letters, blank pages, unreadable and crossed-out text, conjoining form and critique in an ironic commentary against the state’s repressive censorship apparatus. In this period the kinetic and silence go hand in hand, as quiet motion becomes a form of dissent when discourse is policed. Three poets, the Catalan Joan Brossa, the Uruguayan exile Julio Campal, and the Spaniard Fernando Millán, shared an interest in blurring the boundaries separating semiotic codes (text, image, sound) and in redeploying mass media—newspapers, radio and television advertisement— toward instigating social and political change in Spain. Moreover, like their Latin American counterparts, they took poetry to the street: they mimeographed,

14

Radical Poetry

performed, graffitied, and stenciled it on walls.5 Spanish neo-avant-garde poetry became revolutionary by contesting the linguistic and bureaucratic order and by opposing the dominant artistic and political ideology. In their poems, language is mistreated, broken, and dismembered, reduced to phonemes and letters that no longer signify in conventional ways, implying that the disconnect between signifier and signified is analogous to the disjoint between political reality and appearance, between the State’s official jargon and its actual motivations. Chapter 6, “Latin American Digital Poetry: Animated Embodiment,” delves into New Media’s relation to affect by examining the digital animation of text in the work of Argentine poet Ana María Uribe and Venezuelan New Media artist María Mencía. Uribe and Mencía’s postmodern artworks also establish a direct link with previous traditions in a familiar pursuit to destabilize several codes and binarisms: visual and verbal, static and kinetic, human and technological, freedom and constraint, embodiment and disembodiment. Both Uribe and Mencía explore how digital poetry and art engages the reader’s bodily senses and his or her affective response, and therefore reinterpret the “kinetic” in relation to bodily effects. As affect theorists such as Brian Massumi, Mark Hansen, and Patricia Clough have shown, actual “reading” is only one mode activated in what is gradually becoming a total-body experience that engages multiple senses, affective resonances, and modes of knowing: touching, typing, viewing, reading, writing, listening, and engaging through different peripherals. This new attention to the body, as displayed by recent digital poetry, marks a significant departure from past approaches to embodiment—for example, from the sixties when the body referred to very concrete instances of political oppression. Today, Latin American and Spanish digital poetry displays not so much a direct concern toward the overtly political, but rather an interest in our status as humans, and how we might mesh with the pulsating and flickering rhythms of the machine, conceptualizing politics in terms of affect. These poets believe that the digital might lessen that rift between our subjectivity and its being-in-the-world, making the reader “feel” and sense a new type of poetic materiality; or, the digital might precipitate a virtualization of the reader whose physical body might lose its fleshy quality and become gradually indistinguishable from the pixelated objects it contemplates. This poetry obviously represents a turn toward the posthuman. The final three chapters (7 to 9) are centered specifically on Brazilian experimental poetry; this intense focus on a single geographic location responds to the special relevance this country has had in all three periods I examine, and restores the often-neglected Lusophone component to a place of prominence within the narrative of the Ibero-American avant-garde. Finally, these chapters allow me

Introduction

15

to revisit the previous themes (text and image, metaphor, kinetic script, and so on) now intensely focused on one national literature. Chapter 7, “Modernismo: Cannibalistic Appropriation and Advertisement,” returns to pressing questions of aesthetic order, and thus opens by observing that a willingness to appropriate and modify—to culturally cannibalize—imported models, coupled with a desire to embrace emerging technologies, has placed Brazil, time and again, at the forefront of artistic innovation. Brazilian modernists Tarsila do Amaral, Mário de Andrade, and Guilherme de Almeida created Klaxon (1922), the first avant-garde magazine in Brazil, which was notably interartistic as it included poetry, photography, sketches, advertisements, and even film criticism. In this chapter I review visual poems from Klaxon which doubled as product advertisement, studying how they present their elements as spatially juxtaposed, not sequentially arranged, illustrating the oscillation between the sequential, temporal nature of language and the innovative spatial logic and word arrangement on the page. Doubling as product marketing, the poems show that the avant-garde was connected, conjoined, and complicit with advertising and borrowed from commercial publicity strategies for its aesthetic. In fact, much of modernismo was underwritten by a cultural logic that, as Roberto Schwarz and Antônio Cândido have observed, betrayed an inherent unease stemming from the disjunction between pretechnological social conditions and modern aesthetic form. By reading Klaxon’s cover and its poem-advertisements, I show Brazilian modernism as struggling between its complicity with international capitalism and an uncritical fetishization of “the modern,” on the one hand, and its vindication of local and national(ist) traditions, on the other. Returning to the fifties and sixties, Chapter 8, “Concrete Aesthetics: Abstraction, Mass Media, and Ideology,” begins by unearthing the genealogical antecedents of Concrete poetry and painting in European painting, especially in the Dutch Neoplasticists (Mondrian) and the Russian Suprematists (Malevich). The chapter then considers the association between Concrete painting and poetry in post–World War II Brazil and their integration within an industrialized—or rather, industrializing—society steeped in mass-media communications (television, radio, newspapers) and gripped by ideologies of developmentalism. I show, for instance, that the Concrete painters drew heavily on science (gestalt theory) to create perceptual effects, such as the illusion of movement, by the precise configurations of color and geometrical shapes on the white pictorial plane. While also pursuing kinetic illusions, the Concrete poets endeavored to enact a “verbivocovisual” style, encouraging readers to marshal all the senses to experience the poetic “text.” Although the chapter’s primary concern is with its aesthetic development, I also suggest that Concretism brought about a radical shift in

16

Radical Poetry

ways of reading and viewing ultimately linked to sociopolitical changes taking place within Brazilian culture during the Kubitschek years, as the country was swept by both anti-imperialist fervor and a nationalist modernizing craze. I show how poetry plays out these tensions by analyzing poems by the Noigandres group (Décio Pignatari, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos), and comparing them to other international Concretists, such as the Swiss Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer and others. The final stop in this narrative, Chapter 9, “Luso-Brazilian E-Poetry and Performance,” asserts that digital poetry has joined other twenty-first-century paradigms of artistic innovation such as performance, virtual reality, bio art, and installation art, in adapting the visual experiments of previous local and global avant-garde movements to New Media modalities, by incorporating sound, enhanced dynamism, and the simultaneity afforded by the computer. Indeed, despite its newness, Brazilian digital poetry has deliberately cannibalized (to borrow Oswald de Andrade’s term) visual elements from both Concrete art and modernismo. There is a structural affinity between contemporary digital poetry and its experimental ancestors, which explains why many earlier works have been adapted for the computer, making the journey from paper to digital. For example, the isomorphic nature of concrete poems, as well as their inherent capacity to suggest movement, makes them ideal for digitalization. Following Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation,” I examine how digital media (poetry) enters into a symbiotic relationship with older media, appropriating and reelaborating the strategies of representation from print, television, and film. Moreover digital poetry’s capacity for “morphing”—the seamless transformation of shapes afforded by the plastic and filmic nature of the digital—allows the actualization of avant-garde metaphors of movement, endowing the poetic image, formerly confined to the imagination of the reader, with augmented visualization capabilities. The symbiosis between image and script, human and machine, digital and analog become topics for poetic exploration both off and online. The chapter counters accounts that characterize digital art as espousing an uncritical, shallow, and triumphalist vision of techno-progress, one that fails to acknowledge historical conditions and real-life inequalities. Instead, the artists I examine, Brazilians Eduardo Kac and Arnaldo Antunes, are ethically and historically aware poets who dialog with social issues such as poverty, injustice, and the increasing devaluation of human life. The conclusion, “Toward a Radical Aesthetics?” brings the book to a close by reassessing how these poetic projects also represent a radical potential in what we might consider a cyclical (revolutionary) return of the avant-garde in cultural

Introduction

17

work (aesthetically, but oftentimes also politically), whose latest incarnation is the “digital,” but whose future remains open to any and all experiments, whether bio art, holographic poetry, augmented reality, or some unforeseen future techno-artistic development. Digital literature from Ibero-American peripheries counters technocultural concepts of teleological progress by offering works that are geographically decentered and temporally ambiguous, the product of an uneven and troubled postmodernity. Decenteredness in poetry and action may prove to be the radical alternative needed to challenge established ideologies in our time. On a final note, I would like to clarify the rationale behind my selection of works. As I have intimated throughout this introduction, the selection of poets and poems I include in this book was guided by my intent to have a varied sampling of experimental poetry that would at once demonstrate the common pursuits, aesthetic and otherwise, displayed by the international Ibero-American avant-gardes, and to also offer particular glimpses into their regional and local characteristics. Such a wide-ranging selection is perforce incomplete, its limits set by the scope and length of the project, which is intentionally broad. It is also important to clarify that although I contextualize the works I analyze, rather than detailed biographies or lengthy descriptions of movements I focus in depth on a small selection of works by poets from throughout the region. Reading them closely yields rich interpretations that can be calibrated with the sociohistorical events surrounding the genesis of each poem. There are many other works that deal with specific periods, countries, and movements; this book is not a catalog of isms, my aim is, precisely, to offer a macro view that connects the rich history of the Ibero-American avant-garde with our own digital moment. I hope that, despite its limits, Radical Poetry will inspire readers to fill in the blanks, to delve further into the biographies and works of the poets I included, and of those whom I only mention briefly but who also merit more attention in future studies of the avant-garde. As I aim to show, these poets were chosen because they were precursors and innovators internationally and within their own national avant-gardes; thus, the Mexican José Juan Tablada, credited with introducing haiku to the Americas, preceded all other Mexican movements (i.e., the Muralists, the Estridentistas, and the Contemporáneos), anticipating many of their own experiments and concerns. Similarly, the Catalan poets Josep Maria Junoy and Joan Salvat-Papasseit were at the forefront of both Catalan and Spanish avant-gardism, representing the first stirrings of Futurism in the Iberian Peninsula. I also selected those poets in the neo-avant-garde period that stood out singularly for their commitment to art and political resistance: the Uruguayan Clemente Padín, the Argentine Edgardo

18

Radical Poetry

Antonio Vigo, the Spaniard Fernando Millán, the Uruguayan Julio Campal, and the Catalan Joan Brossa, among others. For every period there are many other deserving poets whom I might have included in the list. To the chapters on the historical avant-gardes I might have added the Mexican Manuel Maples Arce, the Peruvian César Vallejo, or the Argentine Oliverio Girondo, or indeed, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, all of them precursors in their own right in deploying a new visual, spatialized poetry and spearheading the inclusion of new technologies thematically and formally in Ibero-American poetry. The same could be said for the many neo-avant-gardists I might have added, such as Octavio Paz whose “signs in rotation” embodied a truly revolutionary poetry, as characterized by the poems “Piedra de Sol” (1957), “Blanco” (1967), or the “Discos Visuales” (1968), or the neo-Concrete poet Ferreira Gullar whose “Poema Sujo” (1976) written while in exile, remains to this day one of the most evocative and seamless fusions of eroticism, politics, and aesthetic self-reflexivity in Brazilian letters. Inevitably, much was also left out from the sections on digital poetry. I leave a more comprehensive work focused exclusively on contemporary digital poetics in Ibero-America as a future project, one in which other notable names will be included, such as the Argentine Belén Gache and her deeply ironic net poetry, the Mexican Eugenio Tiselli and his randomized computer poems, or the sophisticated multimedia poetry of Brazilian André Vallias. Although a specialized text focused exclusively on Ibero-American digital poetry is warranted, I felt it was critical to first establish through this volume a genealogical linkage between those contemporary experiments and the rich Ibero-American tradition that came before, to avoid the misconception that our digital poetry and art is merely derivative from its North American and European counterparts. Besides the intentional emphasis given to Brazil, for reasons already mentioned, several Catalan poets have been included, perhaps proportionately more than would correspond to a small nation, and yet with that gesture I seek to redress their generalized erasure from Ibero-American avant-garde studies, as if the Catalan language precluded their poetry from inclusion despite its many affinities with Mexican, Argentine, or for that matter, Spanish works.

1 The Historical Avant-Gardes Futurist Metaphors

®

Introduction: Text and Image before the Digital

D

espite the varied nature of the avant-gardes I examine in this book—from Futurism to Constructivism, to Lettrism, Concretism and digital poetry— and of their geographical and ideological specificity, they all shared a preoccupation with the ever-shifting status of the visible versus the readable, the complex relationship between text and image. Each movement experimented with intersemiotic relations in the arts and, in turn, with the links established between sign systems and different media platforms: the page, the canvas, or the screen. This gets at the heart of the notion of “experimental,” the idea that, despite their particular stylistic approaches, avant-garde movements are fundamentally vested in exploring boundaries and effects, in expanding the understanding of genre, taking poetry to exhilarating extremes where it begins to disintegrate, becoming something other than itself. Such poetic experiments represent, at least implicitly, a critique of the status quo. Accordingly, the aesthetic and ideological aspects of script-image interaction have received close critical attention in important studies such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology (1986) or Wendy Steiner’s The Colors of Rhetoric (1982), two of the primary texts in the study of intersemiotic relations.1 Mitchell, for instance, delves into the lengthy tradition bent on keeping script and image as separate entities, exploring the interests served by this polemic, and explains that “the relationship between words and images reflects, within the realm of representation, signification and communication, the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meanings” (Iconology 43). 19

20

Radical Poetry

Indeed, much ink has been spilled with regard to the relationship between text (script) and image, one of the fundamental aesthetic problems tackled by twentieth- and twenty-first-century experimental poetry of the avant-gardes. In order to understand why the interaction between text, image, and, to a lesser extent, sound, has been a central issue in experimental poetry for more than a century, I survey, over the next three chapters, a period that spans from the first avant-garde’s visual poetry, through 1960s experimental poetry—Concretism, Lettrism, phonetic and process poetry—and culminating in today’s digital poetry.2 To be able to contextualize the relationship between images and written words requires understanding, at least on a schematic level, how the analogy between the visual arts (painting, photography, film) and the verbal arts (poetry, prose) has changed through time. In this first chapter, I investigate how metaphors, both visual and aural, played a key role in the at times seamless fusion, but also dissonance and tension, between verbal and visual meaning in the experimental poetry of the historical avant-gardes, lasting approximately from 1900 until 1930. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the same issue in later periods. These first three chapters represent, therefore, a coherent, closely knit unit dedicated to tracing (via three interconnected yet distinct temporal nodes) the uses of metaphor as a device deployed by the avant-gardes to exceed the limits of media and genre and increase the porous interactions between text, image, and sound. The inter-artistic analogy (the study of relations between two or more arts) can be traced to a phrase in Horace’s Ars Poetica, his well-known simile ut pictura poesis, which roughly translates: “as is painting, so is poetry.” Horace’s dictum was understood as espousing the belief that painting and poetry are not, in essence, different. The phrase later inspired many Renaissance artists—polymaths such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Brunelleschi—who fervently believed in the proximity of the arts. According to art theorist Rensselaer W. Lee, the belief in inter-artistic kinship between poetry and painting was central to Renaissance thought, and the “sister arts” as they became affectionately known, were understood to differ “in means and manner of expression, but were considered almost identical in fundamental nature, in content, and in purpose” (197). Applying a broad meaning of poiesis as creation, some early modern theorists considered any composition, whether a painting, sculpture, or prose, to be poetry, pushing the analogy to efface any essential difference between the arts. The desire for artistic synthesis led to tendentious differences in how art was viewed, read, and understood. With the Enlightenment, there was a sharp epistemic shift that tore the “sister arts” asunder. In his widely read polemic, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), German philosopher and art critic Gotthold

The Historical Avant-Gardes

21

E. Lessing dealt a blow to the sisterhood of the visual and verbal arts. Focusing on the differences rather than the similarities between poetry and painting, as well as sculpture and architecture, Lessing advocated for the “purity” and separate nature of the arts, which, in his view, needed to be rationally and taxonomically policed by limits and clear-cut categories. Lessing’s zealous understanding of purity meant respecting medium specificity: an artwork in one medium (say, painting) should not be contaminated by the influence of another medium (say, poetry), instituting a strict segregation between words and images. This separation was based on what he saw as an irreconcilable difference, that painting was spatial and poetry was temporal. Of course, this difference hinges on the erroneous idea that spatial art is experienced only after its creation, while the temporal is experienced only as it unfolds in time, as it comes into being; the fallacy in Lessing’s perspective stems from not taking into account poetry that is meant to be seen spatially, or painting, such as action painting, that emphasizes its process and temporality. I would suggest that, although important differences between the arts do exist, so do grounds for a metaphoric treatment of the relationship between script and image. Metaphor is one of the keys to bringing the individual arts closer together. But, what sort of device is metaphor, how can it bring closer together different artistic systems? Metaphor might be defined as a verbal construction or figure of speech that illustrates analogical relations between two different concepts, making those similarities more vivid. Along these lines, in an essay entitled “La metáfora” (“Metaphor”) (published in Cosmópolis, Madrid, 1921), Jorge Luis Borges, who claimed the device was the most significant trope for Ultraismo, defined it as “una identificación voluntaria de dos o más conceptos distintos, con la finalidad de [estimular] emociones [a voluntary identification between two or more different concepts, with the purpose of (stimulating) emotions]” (Textos recobrados 115). This association between the emotional or affective and metaphor, to which we shall return, also taps into the importance of motion and movement, of the kinetic. In the same essay, Borges affirms that metaphor can establish links between the visual, the textual, and the aural, and that it may also succeed in creating images that transmute “las percepciones estáticas en percepciones dinámicas [static perceptions into dynamic ones]” (118). 3 Alternatively, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (1980), define it as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). Metaphor, therefore, is a malleable device that might be used to translate the visual into the scriptural (or vice versa), and to analyze similarities, differences, and other correspondences between script and image.

22

Radical Poetry

This explains why metaphor and its use in poetry, painting, and film has been among the principal aesthetic preoccupations of the avant-gardes (for poets such as Vicente Huidobro, Oliverio Girondo, César Vallejo, and, obviously, Borges himself), and, as I will argue throughout this book, has gone hand in hand with their exploration of inter-artistic relations in works where text, image, and sound commingle promiscuously. This commingling of the arts has sparked contentious debates. Following Lessing, post–World War II critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried produced theories of “medium specificity” to enforce the division of the arts. Greenberg famously insisted that “a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium. . . . The arts are to achieve concreteness, ‘purity,’ by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves” (139). For Greenberg, the nature of a medium (writing, painting, film), its physical properties, determines the form each art should strive toward, which in turn depends on the effects the medium can best achieve: thus, painting should be flat and spatial; writing should be linear and temporal. As the twentieth century progressed (especially post-1960), our understanding of “medium” became increasingly complex, encouraging a hybridization of the arts that relativized concepts of genre and artistic purity. Today, calls to separate media and establish clear divisions between the arts have been rendered irrelevant by the increased intermediality brought about by the digital arts. By intermediality, I am referring to the instance in which different media are bound or combined with one another so that they are simultaneously and heterogeneously present, maintaining traces of their separate forms but also displaying new characteristics. An example is the way collage brings together painting, photography, and objects of everyday life; or how new media arts create composites from photography, film, and written text. Of course, media are always already composites of other media and materials, further complicating the definition of “medium.” However, just because the categories of text and image have been destabilized does not mean that an inter-artistic analysis of twentieth and twenty-first-century poetics is unproblematic. Negotiations of medium and genre are further complicated by the following question: How can we establish comparisons between the arts of the historical avant-gardes, considered as “traditionally” analog modes of representation, and our contemporary modes of digital production—digital poetry or art—which are supposedly ontologically different? One possibility is to consider the intriguing notion that “digitality might be embedded in analogicity (and perhaps vice versa in an ongoing recursion-regress?)” (73), as Whitney Davis posits.

The Historical Avant-Gardes

23

As we shall see throughout this book, increasingly indiscernible, and often hybrid, the digital and the analog commingle in contemporary art, resulting in a partial de-differentiation of the terms—a loss of specialization in form or function. Materiality (of print, of objects, of the digital) is a critical concept here, as the physicality of matter, of bodies, is interpenetrated by the virtual, the digital, by data and information. Careful attention to materiality shows that the process of de-differentiation is never fully complete, with persistent traces of the analog in the digital and vice-versa, but Davis insists that, “the representational value of their distinction (if any remains) can only be generated figuratively in analogies to this condition” (84). Davis privileges the figurative over the materiality of both analog and digital, suggesting that the only way to define either category (digital or analog) is through metaphor (analogy). This claim seems overstated and dismissive of physical differences that can be at times blurred but still persist. Despite his inattention to the material, Davis’s claim shows great value on two fronts. First, he foregrounds the importance of metaphor to bridge the gap between seemingly incompatible systems, in this case analog and digital, but by extension (and following Borges), word and image, or literature and painting. Second, his concept of a hybrid recursivity between analog and digital is worth considering. A recursivity that recycles the digital (processed by a computer and coded in binary, discrete units) into the analog (processed by a human and coded in continuous units) and back, is precisely what contemporary artistic practice is all about. Recursivity easily links to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation as a reworking or reusing of old media by new media. “All current media,” they write, “function as remediators, and remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well” (345). The digital has remediated the analog by including formerly analog genres—photographs, paintings, films, literature—within new digital formats. In turn, Bolter and Grusin claim that the analog has mutated to mimic the appearance of the digital, as with television’s use of multiple windows, a strategy adopted from Internet with aesthetic and commercial implications. In the hybrid environment of contemporary media, the supposed ontological differences between analog and digital are increasingly questioned. As we can see, comparing the poetry of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and digital avant-garde entails exploring the boundaries (temporal, spatial, technical, and aesthetic), and overlapping spaces between the arts. How do the avant-gardes combine painting, poetry, and other arts? How do strategies from one art apply to the other? We will also study, in Mitchell’s words, “the social construction of visual experience” (Picture Theory 35), asking,

24

Radical Poetry

How have political and social forces shaped the relations between different arts? The first three chapters of this book analyze poetry from the three periods in question to better understand the critical role played by metaphor in the blurring of the text-image-sound divide: Chapter 1 looks at Josep Maria Junoy (Catalonia) and José Juan Tablada (Mexico), two early-twentieth-century poets who shared an internationalist and intercultural outlook and attempted to fuse script and image through elaborate verbal and visual metaphors. They were a part of the international exchanges, the translations (a term closely related to translatio, to metaphor) and movements between nations, between systems and codes, living in a period of frenetic and simultaneous activity that Marjorie Perloff dubs the “futurist moment.” Junoy’s and Tablada’s poetry, in addition to sharing the futurist obsession for new inventions (automobiles, airplanes, radio) and for international travel, also shared an Orientalist tendency, product of a colonialist perspective, for Tablada, as a wealthy criollo (who traced his ancestry to Spain) and supporter of the Porfiriato, and for Junoy, as a Catalan nationalist; for both, it was an obsession about the “exotic” periphery from their own periphery (Mexico and Catalonia/ Spain, in relation to North America and Europe). Then, recalling an antimetaphoric turn during the militant 1950s to the ’70s, chapter 2 studies the subversive art of two Southern Cone poets, Clemente Padín and Edgardo Vigo. In chapter 3, I examine how contemporary digital poetry by Jordi Pope and Olga Delgado (both Catalan) adopts metaphor once again to expand on the visual and typographic experiments of past avant-gardes through new capabilities afforded by the digital computer. The coherent focus of these three chapters resides in their analysis of the interplay between metaphor (not restricted to the linguistic) with semiotic systems, occurring in specific geopolitical contexts (Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay) that inform poets’ attitudes toward these poetic devices. Josep Maria Junoy’s Visual Poetry and Futurist Haikus

Many prominent Catalan avant-garde poets, inspired by the incessant motion of modern life, began to mobilize poetic language itself, to take it beyond phonetic and textual signification and toward a poetics of visuality, seeking to “paint” with words, letters, and symbols; to live the inter-artistic analogy. Obviously, these inter-artistic projects were not always married to the same ideological positions, proving the link between radical politics and aesthetics as tenuous for the historical avant-gardes. Whereas some poets such as the avowed anarchist Salvat-Papasseit (discussed in chapter 4) were politically progressive, another prominent avant-garde poet, Josep Maria Junoy (1887–1955), was profoundly Catholic, politically

The Historical Avant-Gardes

25

conservative, and a devoted monarchist. Divided by politics and social class, however, these two artists shared a pro–Catalan nationalist sentiment that set them apart from the rest of Spain’s avant-gardes. They also shared a common linguistic project that hinged on promoting the Catalan language and culture, which had suffered under centralist rule and had only begun to flourish again in the nineteenth century.4 Trained as a journalist and artist, Junoy belonged to the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie. His privileged background allowed him, as a young man in 1903–04, to work as an art dealer and bookseller in Paris, where he was influenced by the latest currents: Impressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, Realism, and the first embers of Cubism. Upon his return from Paris, Junoy became an art critic writing about Futurism and Cubism in Catalan periodicals such as La Publicitat. In 1912, Junoy organized an impressive Cubist exhibition at the famed Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, counting on the participation of internationally renowned artists such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, and Juan Gris, among others, many of whom visited or lived in Barcelona. Indeed, between 1914 and 1916, Barcelona became an important locus for the avant-garde because of the influx of artists dislocated by the Great War as well as Latin Americans who wanted to soak up the European art scene. The exchanges that took place in Barcelona between European (Spanish, Catalan, French, Russian) and Latin American artists would result in a mutual influence that left an indelible mark in every aspect of avant-garde production. In Madrid there was an equally dynamic scene during those years, which was formed around the Spaniard Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s weekly gatherings (tertulias) and included several Latin American avant-gardists: the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and his sister Norah Borges, the Mexican Diego Rivera, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, and, shuttling back and forth between Madrid and Barcelona, the Uruguayan painters Joaquín Torres-García and Rafael Barradas, and although, as Aránzazu Ascunce observes, “the Avant-Garde in Barcelona emerged from a very specific political and cultural context that differs significantly from Madrid’s” (69), nevertheless, “there was a significant amount of communication taking place between avant-garde actors representing Barcelona and Madrid” (71).5 This Ibero-American intermingling, a veritable movable literary and artistic feast, would only intensify over the next decades as more Latin American avant-garde artists traveled to Spain (and also to Paris, New York, Berlin, and so on), among them the poets César Vallejo (Peru), Pablo Neruda (Chile), Nicolás Guillén (Cuba), and Octavio Paz (Mexico), or painters such as Wifredo Lam (Cuba). There is a restless, harried quality to many of the works of the first avant-gardes,

26

Radical Poetry

a preoccupation with incessant motion, with kinetic effects (applied to text, as we shall see with Papasseit, also to images, as we shall see with Tablada and others) that is undoubtedly related to both the excitement of the new technologies of motion, but also to their unremitting traveling and criss-crossing of air, land, and oceans. Space was being defied, indeed “conquered” in every sense during this period, simultaneity was becoming possible, and artists wished for everything to become dynamic, animated, kinetic, at times explosive. Politics were also mutable, in flux: cosmopolitanism and internationalism uneasily mixed with nationalism and separatism. These were conflicting feelings that stemmed from a life in motion, from poets and artists who were defined by constant change, by a desire to keep “making it new,” and in whom rootedness and deracination coexisted as a mark of their tumultuous times and peripatetic lives. Needless to say, all this movement became a key element in the content, style, and technological devices employed to create and inspire avant-garde art, increasingly animated, kinetic, cinematic. In 1916, inspired by this cultural effervescence, Junoy published the inaugural issue of Troços (Fragments), a magazine that presented a series of visual poems dedicated to many of those visiting artists, such as Pere Ynglada, Albert Gleizes, Hélène Grunhoff, and Serge Charchounne (Bohn, Aesthetics 85–88; Ynglada 71–80). We can witness this internationalism—which nevertheless retains its Catalan specificity—in one of Junoy’s paradigmatic visual poems, published in Troços (see Figure 1.1). I will expand Willard Bohn’s short but well-informed analysis of the poem in his Aesthetics of Visual Poetry (1986). It is worth paying further attention to its visual and textual metaphors, characteristic of the early avant-gardes’ skillful use of that trope, admired by Borges as the essence of poetry. The poem is dedicated to the now-forgotten painter Pere Ynglada (1881–1958), a close friend of Junoy’s born in Cuba to Catalan parents. A skilled draughtsman, Ynglada was known for his sketches of circus scenes and galloping horses, executed in a loose style that imitated Chinese and Japanese ink brush drawings. Junoy’s poem is a tribute to his friend and a formally innovative work, one that complicates the referential connection between signifier and signified. It represents a link in the passage from traditional verse to ideogrammatic or visual poetry, a watershed moment for the Catalan, and by extension Spanish and European, avant-gardes, preceding Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (written 1913–16, pub. 1918) and Ezra Pound’s use of ideograms in the Cantos (1922). It is also among the first appropriations of advertising for poetic purposes, a strategy that recurs often in the poetry we examine. The poem situates Junoy and Ynglada squarely in the ranks of the refined bourgeoisie they belonged to, far from the leftist poems by Papasseit and other working-class avant-gardists.

Figure 1.1. Josep M. Junoy. “Ynglada” (“A Portrait of Ynglada”). Biblioteca de Catalunya. Barcelona, Spain.

28

Radical Poetry

Looking at the poem, on the right side of the page there is an advertising logo that provides the first clue about Pere Ynglada, the subject of the poem. As Bohn identified in his analysis, it is the logo of a well-known English hat company, James Lock and Co., a manufacturer of luxury hats founded in 1676. Written in Catalan, as with most of Junoy’s poetry a sign of his nationalist identification with Catalonia, the content nevertheless also betrays a great deal of cosmopolitism as the many “international” elements indicate. For instance, the internationalization of Pere’s name to the French form Pierre introduces another referential aspect into the poem by alluding to Ynglada’s long stays in Paris. The poem functions as a referential description of Junoy’s friend by juxtaposing two different elements, one strictly verbal (the script poem), one both verbal and pictorial (the logo). Bohn comments that in Junoy’s poem “decoration is juxtaposed with denotation” (Aesthetics 86), so that some lines of free verse are placed next to the deconstructed logo. Yet, the poetic text is not exclusively verbal, nor is the design entirely pictorial. The poem on the left seems to be arranged to visually counterbalance, compete with, even dislocate the advertising design on the right, which contains various types of script. Both elements remain in a state of visual tension, and in both, the verbal and the iconic elements illuminate, even “illustrate” each other. Also in productive tension is the conflation of the type from the old, hand-operated printing press of the hat logo (prior to 1800) and the newer type (product of a mechanized press), the cohabitation of different eras (as well as geographical areas, and cities: Barcelona, Paris, London) through the juxtaposition of different printing codes. Such printing codes are a fascinating reminder of the domination of the alphabet over other visual codes in the aftermath of the development of the printing press. By including these printing codes, Junoy evokes the long history of typographic media, a tradition that, as an avant-gardist, he intends to both uphold and disrupt. There is much more happening graphically in this poem, as the hinge point where the two halves of the logo intersect echoes the conjunction “i” [and] in the irregular haiku on the left. This conjunction amid disjunction functions as a point of both articulation and disarticulation, as language itself is cut apart, bisected. Indicative of the resilience of the linguistic, a point of contact remains, and the lowest point in the upper semicircle is also the highest point in the lower half. Bearing some resemblance to the Xiantian taijitu, the yin and yang symbol, the play of the split logo sections creates a serpentine “s” shape, echoed by the curlicues inside the logo itself. Undulating lines that seem to ensnare the letters (script) indicate a playful seesawing between the figurative and the verbal. The haiku evokes several idyllic mental images and reads as follows:

The Historical Avant-Gardes

29

Jardí a la francesa Estança de Racan Maduixes en crema d’Isigny i del distant Japó un Herbari Lineal [French garden Stanza by Racan Strawberries in cream from Isigny and from distant Japan a Lineal Herbarium]

Bohn’s analysis describes this haiku as seven conventionally arranged and unrhymed lines of poetry (Aesthetics 86). The poem does in fact read left to right and the words are not arranged strictly for their visual effects as in later poems by Junoy. Nevertheless, the poem’s use of word and image is quite unconventional. Juxtaposing the poetic text with the logo (and the lineal with the circular, or the straight and the curved) creates an elegant but asymmetric visual arrangement providing the poem with a decentered and dislocated sensation of fragmentation, of Cubist simultaneity, while maintaining a taut relationship between image and text. In spite of the almost spectacular (and specular) prominence of its spatial and visual aspects, the poem does not discard meaning or denotative value, as will be the case with later experimental poetry, which will press on toward an erasure of sense, or its separation from both graphic sign and from sound. The poem formally prefigures Junoy’s later haiku production, adumbrated in the reference to “distant Japó,” (distant Japan). Haiku’s influence on Junoy’s poetry coincides with Ynglada’s aesthetic penchant for Sino-Japanese art, which he imitated with the elegant line of his ink drawings. Through poetry, Junoy “paints” a portrait of Ynglada, presenting both “halves” of his friend’s aesthetic inspiration, the European (the English hat, the French cream) and the Japanese. Skillfully evoked by Junoy, the painter is metonymically present through the hat logo as well as metaphorically through his penchant for japonerie. The polysemic verses “del distant Japó / un / Herbari Lineal [from distant Japan / a / Lineal Herbarium],” might be a reference not just to

30

Radical Poetry

Japanese gardens but also to Ynglada’s black ink and brush “Orientalist” sketches, and to Junoy’s own obsession with haiku. Examining the verse distribution we see that the central “i” (which in Catalan means “and”) articulates or provides a hinge for the poem’s many dual structures: the upper and lower sections of the haiku, the “pictoric” and script elements, the Western and the supposedly non-Western. The upper three verses describe Western images of refined luxury (the French Garden, Racan’s seventeenth-century poetry, which refers to an obscure French aristocrat-poet Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan, French strawberries with cream from Isigny—a premium dairy product from Isigny, Normandy), while the verses below deal with topoi of “oriental” refinement (the Japanese art garden, and indirectly, Ynglada’s “Asian”-style art). Why this obsession with the East, we might ask? Was this resurgence of Orientalism an atavistic throwback to nineteenth-century colonialist art as exemplified by French Romanticism or Latin American and Iberian modernismo? I would suggest instead that the literary vanguards’ renewed attentiveness to East Asian art stemmed in part from an obsession with the visual characteristics of letters, whether handwritten or typeset, and, as they saw it, the apparent ease with which representation and signification were synthesized in so-called pictographic systems in China and Japan.6 The avant-gardists, especially the Imagists in England, and notably Ezra Pound, believed that in the Far East, language and the visual arts were in close contact through haiku and calligraphy. Ideograms, they argued, are both scriptural and pictorial. The same can be said for the haiga, a minimalist, restrained calligraphy-style painting associated with, and often accompanying haiku (Zolbrod 44). The Imagists insisted that Chinese script is iconic because its characters are based on pictures that retain a visual, and arguably natural, link to their referents. This obsession with the integration of sign and referent followed at least two paths: one, a pictographic approach, that of the calligrammes, where lines of poetry are shaped as objects. The other, more abstract approach, relied on less direct strategies based on metaphor, closer to Pound’s use of ideograms and best exemplified by Brazilian concrete poetry in the fifties and sixties and anticipated by Junoy. Although Junoy’s poem might also have been influenced by Apollinaire’s earliest calligrammes, dating back to 1913, Bohn points to their differences. “Junoy’s version” he writes, “does not resemble the French prototype. Predominantly abstract, it rejects the figurative bias of the latter, its fascination with objects, and its pictorial structure” (Aesthetics 86). Unlike Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Junoy’s does not rely on spatialized words in order to create a referential pictorial image.7 Rather, the hat logo objectivizes the materiality of print: the nonfigurative letter

The Historical Avant-Gardes

31

types and the varied font styles of the logo call attention to their graphic, decorative function, as material objects worthy of notice for their own sake. The logo also calls attention to script as a signifier that can be visually interpreted by the viewer without the need to read the actual text (on the logo) or process its semantic content: the symbol can be recognized rather than read. The contemporary reader/ viewer would have instantly recognized such a symbol of “wealth and elegance” (Aesthetics 87), signifying the oldest luxury hatter in London, and hence understood it to stand both metaphorically and metonymically for the dandy Ynglada. The reader can choose to interpret the words as words, or as image, or both. A sense of the poem can best be surmised by considering the tension between haiku and advertising logo, which operate at different levels of referentiality. Through the operations of metaphor and metonymy already described, language is disassembled and reassembled from its fragments into an unstable visual “totality,” and visual form is then interpreted through its implicit message. Junoy’s poetry challenges readers to go beyond conventional linear reading methods and shift toward an active engagement with the text that relies on both spatial and temporal apprehension. In his poems, words and images become highly associative, metaphoric, and as such, open to multivalent signification. Syntax becomes fragmented, even at the level of the individual word (note the words and even letters split in two by the severed hat logo). All that visual fragmentation triggers a performative dimension, as the reader must pay close attention to the mise-en-page, becoming a kind-of performer of the poem, traversing it spatially as well as temporally, with his senses. With visual poetry the reading experience itself becomes highly individualized, and its actual process is a hybrid of different modes: it is likely that there are many in-between positions, neither “reading” nor “viewing,” but rather some other fractured or fragmentary procedure. These first experiments of the avant-garde blur the word-image distinction in ways that challenge the ontological nature of both. One might consider a continuum of “textuality” with “texts” at one end showcasing a mostly verbal and nonvisual arrangement of type, while at the opposite end there would be “texts” that reveal their information mostly or even only through visual cues, perhaps even images. It would not be a linear spectrum but rather a series of overlapping territories that would accommodate Junoy’s poem somewhere in between the “either/or” verbal and visual edges. In such an overlapping if highly fractured region between the verbal and the visual, temporary cohesion might be found when connections are established between the fragments either at the level of content or the level of form (expression). An example of this uneasy cohesion at the level of content is the associations between the words of the haiku (its rarefied elite references) and

32

Radical Poetry

the status of the hat logo as also a symbol of elitism. Admittedly, there are other political and ideological implications that also map onto these associations. At the level of form one might cite the use of the “i” to join the two halves of the haiku, and its visual relation to the point of intersection between the logo’s semicircles. These elements allow for semantic interaction between the visual and verbal levels, thereby increasing the force of the associations and the coherence of meaning. Alternatively, the same mechanisms might serve to contradict, separate, fracture, or negate intersemiotic relations, resulting in a shifting terrain that is ruled by metaphoric thinking. While I began the chapter with Junoy, partly because of his “privileged” position as one of the first practitioners of experimental writing in the twentieth century, other contemporary poets in Spain and Latin America were exploring the nexus between the visual and the scriptural—Joan Salvat-Papasseit (whom I examine in chapter 4), Guillermo de Torre, Marius de Zayas, and Vicente Huidobro, just to name a few—and several were also using haiku as a vehicle for these investigations. In Spain, Antonio Machado, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and later Juan Ramón Jiménez, cultivated haiku-inspired short form poetry (Rabasso 204–205). Crossing the Atlantic, to Mexico, we find José Juan Tablada, a poet who combined haiku with other visual devices such as sketches and calligrams to provide the beginnings of a new poetry that, unlike Italian Futurism or Iberian Ultraismo, did not dismiss past traditions. Both Tablada and Junoy reaffirm Bürger’s statement that “the position of individual avant-garde movements vis-à-vis tradition varies considerably” (“Avant-garde” 704). In some cases, such as Italian Futurism, there was outright rejection, others, like the Surrealists, created a countercanon, and others reinscribed new approaches within indigeneous and primitivist “traditions.” Synthesis and Fragmentation in the Poetry of José Juan Tablada (Mexico) The stylistic affinities between Junoy and the Mexican José Juan Tablada (1871– 1945), two poets who had parallel experimental trajectories and shared artistic concerns, suggest a potentially productive juxtaposition of their work that enables understanding some of the multidirectional flows of vanguardist activity across the Atlantic, a crucial task since, as Cecilia Enjuto explains, “avant-garde poetics, and the friendships that emerged, were fundamental to the Transatlantic re-conceptualization of the literary and political relations between Latin America and Spain” (16). Mobility, circulation, international exchange; Tablada’s and Junoy’s poetic innovations stem partially from their travel experiences, from their

The Historical Avant-Gardes

33

translation efforts (from one language to another, from one code to another, from textual to visual), making displacement and mobility key elements of their poetics, as they explored forms such as visual poetry or the haiku. Admittedly, Tablada is perhaps not the most radical experimenter when one thinks of the Latin American avant-gardes; that title might belong to Vicente Huidobro, whose long poem Altazor (1931) progressively disintegrates language and negates the very possibility for a lyrical voice, or to Oliverio Girondo who, despite the violent sexism of his poetry, “tests the boundaries of poetic discourse” (Kuhnheim, Gender 48), or to César Vallejo, whose groundbreaking Trilce (1922) demonstrates a “recognizably avant-garde aesthetic, featuring typographical play, fragmented lines, and the jolting mimesis of disconnected street sounds” (Clayton 55). But Tablada, who traveled extensively to Japan, and who frequented the art scene in New York, is a prime precursor to those (arguably) more “radical” poets, and a critical influence for others who came later, like Octavio Paz or Nicanor Parra. Tablada’s haiku and visual poetry predates efforts at renewal initiated by Mexican avant-garde groups such as the Estridentistas (c. 1921) or the Contemporáneos (c. 1928). He deserves, therefore, greater attention for his role as a detonant and promoter for the avant-gardes, especially in Mexico, but also in Ibero-America at large.8 Tablada explored the possibilities of visual poetry and metaphor through haiku, almost concurrently with Junoy, although the two never actually met. Tablada, a Mexican diplomat who lived in numerous countries (in America and Europe), visited Japan c. 1900 as a reporter for the Mexican periodical Revista Moderna; in that country he learned about Japanese art and Zen Buddhism, which left indelible marks on his work (Ota, “La influencia” 136; Buxó 12). Tablada’s trip took place during the Porfiriato, when the Mexican government wanted to emulate Japan’s technological and industrial modernization (Buxó 12). His interest in Japanese art also linked him to the European avant-gardes, and while in Paris, Tablada discussed haiku with Apollinaire (Hadman 11). Critics credit Tablada with introducing a modified version of Japanese haiku into Latin America, a fact that bonds him to Junoy’s own lifelong interest in Japanese verse (Mata 112; Hadman 14–15; Hokenson 707; Ota, “La influencia” 134). Like other poets at the vanguard, Tablada’s first forays into poetry were part of a transitional second wave of turn-of-the-century Latin American modernismo spanning approximately from 1900 until 1910 (not to be confused with the English term modernism).9 His first anthology, El florilegio (1899), was a work characteristic of the late modernista phase, highly praised for its technical virtuosity by contemporaries such as fellow Mexican poet Manuel Maples Arce (1898–1981).

34

Radical Poetry

Tablada’s best work came during his avant-garde period after 1917, when he began to write haiku and calligrams; according to Carlos Monsiváis, Tablada engaged with “insistencia en el experimento [y] en la renovación formal [insistence in experimentalism and formal renewal]” (28). When Tablada introduced haiku to Latin America in the 1920s these short poems were seen as a radical novelty (Mata 112). Tablada believed that classic haiku would provide an entry point to pursue a course that emphasized images, both verbal and pictorial, while minimizing the strictly verbal (Ota, “La influencia” 133–34). Classic haiku, from which he departed, is an unrhymed yet rigorously structured form that contains three verses of five, seven, and five syllables respectively, and whose content reflects seasonal, cyclical, and natural images; modern haiku have long left such thematic restrictions behind. Haiku typically condense meaning by reducing language to a few intense verbal images, which in turn stimulate mental images. But the verbal and imagistic are shown to be quite fluid in haiku. For example, classic Japanese haiku were individually painted by ink brush, tracing the suggestive, fluid strokes of the artist’s hand on the scroll and conceding to only a single mechanically imprinted element, the poet’s signature stamp, known as a hanko seal. This emphasis on natural and handcrafted methods would not do for the Mexican avant-gardists, who, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, were now in the throes of a technological revolution (Gallo). In contrast with classical haiku, Tablada’s work embraces mechanical reproduction replacing the silent brush with the clatter of the typewriter, perhaps losing the sensuous intimacy of calligraphy but replacing it with other forms of tactility. Although his haiku stayed focused on the natural world, Tablada turned their content to capture the Mexican flora, fauna, and landscape. Tablada’s haiku—which like Junoy’s were the product of a long fascination with the East not exempt of Orientalist shortcomings—first appeared in 1919 in a collection titled Un día (A Day) (1919), followed by Li-Po y otros poemas (Li-Po and Other Poems) (1920) and El jarrón de flores (The Flower Vase) (1922). These works included both classical haiku and haiku-like poems, which Tablada named “synthetic poems,” perhaps as a reference to synthetic Cubism and its heterogeneous synthesis of different materials and subjects superimposed together by collaging images and script from many sources (Ota, “La influencia” 133–35). Familiar with Cubism, he sought to transfer to poetry the multiplicity and simultaneity of that painting style. Tablada’s second anthology (Li-Po) contained the first examples of Mexican ideographic and visual poetry; these poems were not created in a vacuum, but as part of a growing international interest in visual poetry. Li-Po’s publication

The Historical Avant-Gardes

35

was a scant four years after Junoy’s Troços appeared in 1916. Following Bohn’s intuition regarding this matter as outlined in Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde (1997), it is likely that Apollinaire, Junoy, and Tablada form part of a complex weave of mutual influences, direct and indirect: Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918) might have benefited from some of Junoy’s earlier work, and Junoy also had learned from Apollinaire’s poetry published earlier in the magazine Nord-Sud (1912); moreover, both had links to Tablada.10 Furhter complicating this tapestry of mutual influences and international crossings, Tablada was an intimate friend of the Mexican caricaturist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961), with whom he spent time in New York, and was well acquainted with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and other visual artists who had made the trek to Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona; also with poets such as Xavier Villaurrutia, Manuel Maples Arce, and Alfonso Reyes, among others (Ota, Su haiku).11 Undoubtedly, a poetry of the image was in the air, both in Europe and in the Americas, marking a time of profound intermedial experimentalism and a turn toward the graphical/visual nature of language. An example of these mutual influences can be seen in how both Junoy and Tablada were experimenting with different variations of haiku, altering the number of prescribed verses (to four and five, in the case of Junoy) and the number of syllables, in an effort to “Westernize” the form. The exchange of ideas across oceans speaks to the fluidity of the avant-gardes and the complex international strings that connected the different poetic movements to each other. To be sure, Tablada’s work shared many innovative characteristics with the poetry of the European avant-gardists (Salvat-Papasseit, Junoy, Apollinaire): their poems were structurally similar, relying heavily on short verse or free form, verbal economy, an emphasis on temporal and spatial simultaneity, and all engaged with visual and haiku forms. But there were also notable differences in both style and content; Tablada, Maples Arce, and other Mexican poets were caught up in a post-Revolutionary zeitgeist that encouraged a return to the national, and therefore appropriated European models only selectively.12 Their intent was to renew Mexican national culture through artistic and technological modernization, but to remain rooted in a (somewhat idealized and deracialized) pre-Columbian past. In Mexican Modernity (2005), Rubén Gallo argues for the central importance of technological developments such as the typewriter, the photographic camera, and the radio in the artistic representations of the period, stating that studying the effect these technologies had on the arts facilitates the presentation of “a comprehensive account of Mexican post-revolutionary culture in the age of mechanical reproduction” (28). No doubt, incorporating the haiku form was also symptomatic of a Janus-like desire to both innovate and recuperate for Mexican poetry what were perceived as ancient but

36

Radical Poetry

potentially rejuvenating traditions; this was a typical avant-garde move: to seize ideas and styles from the past but recontextualize them in ways that departed from their tradition. Octavio Paz, who also wrote haiku, described Tablada’s poetry as a rupture with tradition whose effects reverberated throughout Latin America, affirming that “su innovación es algo más que una simple importación literaria. Esa forma dio libertad a la imagen [his innovation was more than a simple literary import (from Japan). That form freed the image]” (Generaciones 159). Fascinated by ideogrammatic and visual poetry’s capacity to fuse the poetic with the pictorial, Tablada soon abandoned the more discursive modernista style of his early poems, so laden with rhetorical flourishes, in favor of the spatial qualities of haiku and calligrams: La ideografía tiene, a mi modo de ver, la fuerza de una expresión simultáneamente lírica y gráfica. . . . La parte gráfica sustituye ventajosamente la discursiva o explicativa de la Antigua poesía. . . . Mi preocupación actual es la síntesis . . . porque solo sintetizando creo poder expresar la vida moderna en su dinamismo y en su multiplicidad. [Ideography has, in my opinion, the strength of an expression simultaneously lyrical and graphical. . . . The graphical part advantageously replaces the discursive or explicative component of the Old poetry. . . . My present concern is to synthesize . . . because only synthesizing can I explain modern life in its dynamism and its multiplicity.] (cited in Pacheco 62)

But why was the concept of “synthesis,” the often repeated or repudiated call for a fusion of the arts, so central to Tablada and other avant-gardists? Tablada suggests that to reflect the frenzy and simultaneity of modernity, visual poetry must be stripped from its discursive elements, reduced to its bare essentials, so text and image can coalesce. Synthesizing the fragments of the modern, however, leads to unresolved tension, especially when those fragments, systems, or codes resist, resulting instead in disjointed collages, quilted patchworks. Was modern art, including poetry, to be characterized by fragmentation, by synthesis, by both, or neither? Critical opinions at the time varied as much as artistic practice. T. S. Eliot’s often cited verse from The Wasteland (1922) which captures the disjointed nature of the modern, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” is opposed by what German Bauhaus dramatist Oskar Schlemmer dubbed as “the yearning for synthesis,” following Walter Gropius’s own call for a synthesis of the arts as one of the Bauhaus’s goals (Paret 168). According to art historian Klemens Von Kemperer, the German Expressionists

The Historical Avant-Gardes

37

were also gripped by the obsession to put Humpty Dumpty back together. The Expressionists’ concern with form and the unresolved tension in their works, he argues, stems from their almost religious “sense of mission” to renew culture, to overcome the fragmentation of modern life, to reassemble “the fragments into a new whole” (91). Synthesis, however, was neither easily achieved, nor the (necessary) opposite of fragmentation. In a number of Cubist paintings, when viewed from a distance the fragments form a whole, which is nevertheless difficult to discern as such.13 This “synthesis” is constantly disrupted by the fragments it attempts to pull together, and as one approaches the Cubist work the individual fragments reveal their trace, their origin as something else, a train ticket, a torn cloth, a piece of newspaper. Dislocated and dismembered but juxtaposed and sharing the same canvas, the fragmentation persists, a reminder of the failure of synthesis. The Cubist style was transposed to visual poetry, by Apollinaire in his Calligrammes (1918), but also by Blaise Cendrars in his long poem (illustrated by Sonia Delaunay), La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France) (1913), and by Huidobro in Horizon Carré (Square Horizon) (1916). In Latin America, fragmentation and the search for “origins” (another aspect of the desired synthesis) took on additional levels of complexity, given the continents’ past, their genealogy rooted in the contested mix of their indigenous, African, and European cultural traditions. Unruh theorizes this point, insisting on the mediated nature of these original, organic moments, and the impossibility to know them in an unmediated fashion, or as a synthetic whole: On one level, these [avant-garde] works do enact the search for an “authentic” tradition in the distant past of the continent’s nonWestern cultures. But instead of the definition of America’s “essence” . . . these works embody, as Haroldo de Campos has said of Brazil, a “refusal of the essentialist metaphor of gradual, harmonious natural evolution”. . . . They propose instead a tradition of “random appetites” and “adjacency,” to borrow Said’s terms, or, to employ Bürger’s, of the “simultaneity of the radically disparate.” By appropriating vanguardist motifs as the idiom through which to explore Latin American cultural specificity, these writers create sometimes bizarre “hybrid works,”. . . . Through these unusual works, these writers also laid claim to the vanguards’ dislocations, fragmentations, and nonorganicity as peculiar to and definitive of Latin American lived experience. (169)

Fragmentation and synthesis were, therefore, part of an equation whose variables were both cultural and aesthetic. Tablada also understood the fragmentary

38

Radical Poetry

nature of writing, as he downplayed discursivity and foregrounded the visual aspect of script. Moreover, he aimed toward a paradoxical conception of “pure” poetry in which script combines and freely interplays with images, resulting in an otherwise “impure” intermixing of the arts. His notion of synthesizing or concentrating meaning through an economy of verse, using fewer words that evoke powerful verbal images, is close to both the Japanese tradition of the haiku and to the condensed imagery and precise language displayed by Pound and the English Imagists’ poetry from 1914 to 1917. There might be in this reductionism of the verbal, which reduces words to just another element in poetry, an element increasingly displaced by the visual—including by the word’s own graphical qualities, disposition, etc.—the beginning of a turn toward image that becomes more pronounced with time, and reaches its culmination in today’s digital poetry. It might be a case of the exhaustion of the verbal dimension in literature, a fatigue of everything that is strictly verbal. During this period (roughly 1910–1925) there was a great deal of translation, transcription, and transformation of both Japanese and Chinese poetry for Western readers.14 Roughly a year after Tablada published Li-Po and Other Poems, a former associate of Ezra Pound, the American Imagist poet Amy Lowell, also published a book of translated Chinese poetry titled Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems from the Chinese (1921), where she reworked many of Li-Po’s poems. In the preface, Lowell shares an insight that encapsulates Tablada’s own belief that the visual makeup of painted Chinese characters, otherwise known as kanji, was critical not just because of their semantic significance but because of the suggestive nature of their visual form. Lowell states: Very early in our studies, we realized that the component parts of the Chinese written character counted for more in the composition of poetry than has generally been recognized; that the poet chose one character rather than another which meant practically the same thing, because of the descriptive allusion in the make-up of that particular character; that the poem was enriched precisely through this undercurrent of meaning in the structure of its characters. (viii ) “Kanji,” which is Japanese for “a character from Han China,” were Chinese symbols later adopted and simplified by the Japanese. Each symbol represents a syllable or a single sound, but it might also stand in for a complete word or a group of words. Like calligrams, kanji are sometimes associated through formal resemblance to the objects they represent. The pictographic origin of a kanji can remain residually in its form, even if only schematically. I will examine a poem that relies on the visual aspect of the kanji a bit farther on; for now, I want to underscore the importance of

The Historical Avant-Gardes

39

Eastern poetic forms such as haiku and Chinese script (or for that matter, Japanese script, which is derived from Chinese kanji), which avant-garde movements were simultaneously tackling in different corners of the globe. For Tablada, both the condensing force of haiku’s verbal images, and the apparent “simplicity” and “purity” of Chinese ideographs, embodied the characteristics of what a modern poetry should be, paradoxically turning to the past to produce something new. As we examine Tablada’s poems, both those that use the haiku form or its derivatives and in some cases poems that deploy actual kanji characters, it is useful to reflect on critic Andrea Bachner’s pointed question, “Is a non-Chinese poet’s claim to harness the graphic and expressive power of the sinograph always only a metaphor?” (74). Bachner’s answer is in the affirmative, and while I concur, I would not charge the figurative approach to kanji or sinographs with a wholly negative valence; rather, I suggest a critical point, that the strength of the figurative, the recourse to symbols from another cultural milieu, may have the power to defamiliarize and to effect the type of dislocation of expectations that ultimately facilitates the slippage between the visual and the verbal sought after by the avant-gardes. Tablada’s poem “El chirimoyo,” from Un día . . . Poemas sintéticos (1919), exemplifies his initial efforts to synthesize text and image.15 Un día . . . is divided in four sections, each corresponding to different segments of the day, morning, afternoon, twilight, and night, and containing, respectively, twelve, nine, nine, and seven haikus, most of which deal with plant and animal subjects. Tablada attempts to capture in the book’s pages or “leaves” (hojas in Spanish means both sheets of paper and the leaves of a tree) both the essence of the creatures he describes, and the present-ness of the instant, stating so in the first few lines of the prologue: “Arte, con tu áureo alfiler / las mariposas del instante / quise clavar en el papel [Art, with your golden pin / the butterflies of the instant / I would like to pin on paper].” Every poem in this anthology is accompanied by a circular watercolor sketch (see Figure 1.2), painstakingly painted by Tablada in each of the first edition’s two hundred books, thereby reintroducing the artisanal and the original into the mechanically reproduced, and arguably rescuing the works’ aura. Significantly, the watercolor sketches reference the Japanese haiga, the subtle ink drawings that accompany classical haiku. Much like the elegant yet restrained calligraphy of haiku, haiga use few brush strokes, which nevertheless emphasize the gesture of the hand, sparse color, and schematic suggestion rather than naturalistic representation. There is reciprocity, not redundancy, in this combination of script and image: while haiga trigger associations that complement the haiku, they do not explain the poems (Zolbrod 42–44). Likewise, Tablada’s sketch does not merely illustrate the haiku, instead, both are conceived integrally to establish a semiotic relation between linguistic and

40

Radical Poetry

visual codes and thereby capture the fleeting instant with condensed brevity and expressive force. Tablada meant for both poem and sketch to function in a synthetic union, forming a coherent whole. Although it is a precarious synthesis at best, as the equilibrium might unravel at any moment, in the balance between the juxtaposed but distinct systems there is the promise of an instant of revelation. The precariousness is also present within the text, crystallized by the kireji (a term meaning “hinge” that I will return to), and between the literal and symbolic meanings (Zolbrod 42–44). The issue of balance, or lack of it, is thus closely linked to the capturing of the instant. Tablada’s attempt to freeze the poetic instant functions as a kind of ekphrasis, the rhetorical technique that captures visual images with words. Characterized by the plasticity of a highly expressive written language, ekphrastic description is so vivid that it triggers visual mental images, leading to what Murray Krieger calls “the still movement of poetry.” Note that Krieger theorizes the ekphrastic poetic instant as one that renders possible the synchronous perception of motion and stasis, akin in the visual arts to Dalí’s Surrealist hypnagogic paintings or, more recently, the works of Op-Art (“Appendix” 263–88).16 For Tablada, the intensity of the ekphrastic experience is related to the arresting of time and to the dissolution of distinctions between visual and verbal codes. In fact, all three poetry collections written by Tablada during his avant-garde period sought to dissolve strict divisions between the visual and the textual imposed by Lessing and other Enlightenment theorists, by commingling words, graphic signs, pictographs, and images.17 His choice of the haiku, with its brief and condensed expressiveness, seemed ideal; by arresting the instant through ekphrastic language, Tablada hoped to transcend the limits, and indeed, blur the distinctions between word and image, perhaps even art and life. Does ekphrasis have such magical properties, or are we once again speaking figuratively? Ekphrasis is one of the most debated of rhetorical forms, and carries within it its own failure: the failure of ekphrasis to actually construct or produce a visual image of something that is absent; a failure that has a corollary in the impossibility of any mimetic effort by the arts. There is much tension in the connection between the two fields, visual and verbal, not as easily resolved as Tablada’s synthetic desire would have it. It is this failure that might ultimately reassert the barriers between image and script even as it collapses and interrogates the borderline between them. The simultaneous collapse and separation of the categories renders the moment of awareness that the poem seeks as an ephemeral, tenuous glimpse into “something” whose contours remain blurred, unassailable. The poem in question (“El chirimoyo” [“The chirimoyo tree”]; see Figure 1.2) deploys a visual arrangement suggestively similar to Junoy’s tribute to Ynglada,

Figure 1.2. José Juan Tablada. “El chirimoyo” (“The Chirimoyo Tree”). Consejo General para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico D.F., Mexico).

42

Radical Poetry

with a title and three verses on the left of the page, and a circular sketch on the upper right, both text and image charged with figurative meaning; indeed, the entire poem serves as a metaphor whose terms are “hinged” on the haiku’s colon (:), a visual mark that cleaves the poem in two. Although traditional Japanese haiku are untitled and might be said to function as a Zen koan or riddle, Tablada provides interpretative clues for Western readers by adding a title to the otherwise enigmatic poem. In a sense, the title “El chirimoyo,” which refers to a fruit-bearing tropical tree, functions like “Ynglada” in Junoy’s poem, as a marker that identifies the subject/object of the poem. The title’s obvious referentiality, however, is also deliberately misleading, since the “object” of the poem is something more complex than merely a chirimoyo tree. The text reads: La rama del chirimoyo Se retuerce y habla: Pareja de loros. [A cherimoya tree branch Twists and chitchats: Pair of parrots.]

Tablada, like Junoy, departs from the syllabic structure associated with classical Japanese haiku, but does abide by its thematic tradition, presenting a fleeting, living moment in nature. The poem marks the mysterious and ephemeral instant when the tree’s foliage unexpectedly reveals, or resembles, a pair of parrots, an ambiguous glimpse either real or imagined, which has the shimmering intensity of the ekphrastic. Rejecting external and objective absolutes, classical haiku and haiga typically only offer images of subjective inner vision and of almost imperceptible movement, even when the poems are ostensibly about something concrete. This prompts the question, what, then, is “El chirimoyo” really about? The parrots in Tablada’s poem, which might very well be within the branches, also stand in for something other than themselves. Best known for their vocal mimicry, Tablada chooses instead to foreground the parrots’ ability to blend in through visual mimicry, a phenomenon famously studied by Roger Caillois in relation to surrealist metamorphic images. Caillois theorized that mimicry was the “temptation by space” of an organism seeking dissolution into its environment, desiring to define itself in terms other than its own self, wanting, like the first term of a metaphor, to embrace the alterity of an other, second term. Hence, the parrots in the poem only become distinguishable from the gestalt of the greenery

The Historical Avant-Gardes

43

for the flicker of an instant, after which the spatial confusion of figure and ground returns, blurring, as Caillois said “the frontier between the organism and the milieu” (32). On another level, in “El chirimoyo,” the phenomenon of mimicry serves as a metaphor for the moment of poetic revelation (or reader recognition), when a possible meaning of the poem avails itself to the reader in a flash of insight. The poem is, among other things, about the sudden understanding of a riddle, or a poem. How does the interplay between verbal and visual contribute to this flash of insight? The haiku’s vivid verbal image depicting the metamorphosis from luscious branches to squawking birds makes the sketch appear tautological, superfluous, like mimicry, and perhaps artistic mimeticism itself. Indeed, the beauty of such a moment might at first appear to be trivialized by the depicted image. The sketch, however, fulfills an important semiotic function. The image playfully represents two parrots (in all likelihood, two green parakeets, a species natural to Mexico, Central, and South America) in a yin-yang arrangement, and in vivid, nuanced color, in contrast to the stark black and white in conventional yin-yang signs; moreover, the colors seem to prevent the image from fully representing male/ female, or earth/moon in any distinctive way, as the yin-yang does, hinting perhaps at other types of sexual possibilities beyond the conventional or conventionalized. The sketch perversely shows the “male” and “female” (or some other combination) birds in a mating sexual position that is not generative but rather (potentially) pleasurable. The erotic position is quite anthropomorphic, as one would not expect birds to engage in a presumably human practice. Their yin-yang position suggests something dynamic, as if indeed they were revolving (“retorciéndose”) about each other, symbolizing the interdependence of apparent opposites, masculine and feminine, day and night, and significantly, the “impure” mixing of word and image that the poem gestures toward by spatially juxtaposing both codes, but also teasingly denies by introducing the negative space that separates them. Of course, Tablada’s choice of a parrot, which has the capacity to imitate the human voice, cannot be fortuitous, but is perhaps also present to remind the reader of the importance of “sound,” which is as much a part of poetry as sight. One might imagine the cacophony of the parrots in their imitation of human speech, rendering the chirimoyo as a speaking bush that, albeit incomprehensibly, since it produces noise rather than language, addresses the reader, and completes the verbal and visual dimension with a vocal one. A blank and somewhat disturbing space, which Tablada does not “fill,” separates the poem’s verses from the sketch.18 What does the space contribute to the character of the sketch and the poem? The blankness, which might signify silence

44

Radical Poetry

and stillness, also serves to render both the poem and the sketch more visible, as a moment of quiet reflection can be a counterpoint to the overwhelming cacophony of parroted speech. The stark, empty flatness of the page facilitates, by contrast, the perception of poem and sketch as collage-like fragments, providing a hint of pictorial depth, enhancing the kinetically unstable spatial relation between script, image, and surface that suggest imperceptible motion. Thus, the space that is not represented, or that represents nothing, is a meaningful, if minimal form of expression that both joins and divides haiku and haiga. Furthermore, the sketch in conjunction with the haiku fulfills an important semiotic function by setting up an oscillating duality of reading and viewing, like calligrams, which, according to Foucault, “aspire playfully to efface the oldest opposition of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look, and to read” (21). The haiku’s words unfold in time while the haiga provides a visual shape, and Tablada’s poem becomes a kind of calligram whose terms have been separated by a space, ironically, almost the opposite of the synthetic operation he desired. By questioning what the nature of poetry is, the poem seems to also bring us back to a familiar debate, Lessing’s insistence on separating media based on their temporal or spatial nature. Fenollosa echoes Lessing’s distinction by posing a question about Chinese ideographic poetry that is also relevant for Tablada’s yin-yang sketch, which is an ideograph of sorts: In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye. (6; emphasis in original)

Fenollosa’s characterization of poetry as a time art, like Lessing’s, reductively focuses on poetry as a recited genre, perforce sequential, a format that evokes ritual incantation and oral poetic performance, but also rote repetition, parroting. Yet poetry, when read on the page, as Jakobson observed, clearly retains a visual and spatial aspect that imbues it with a degree of simultaneity (“Language in Relation” 706). Other critics, such as Jiri Veltrusky, postulate that very short poems such as haiku, even when recited, retain an element of spatiality, since “the spatial principles in the structure of a short poem are perceived by the listener, too, though not as strongly as by the reader,” creating an aural gestalt effect in which “space intervenes as a negation of time” (117). While synesthetic speculations about an

The Historical Avant-Gardes

45

“aural” spatiality may be met with reserved skepticism, a poem of short extension easily retained in the mind of the listener might well achieve a degree of mental, if not spatial, simultaneity. In any case, the oftentimes antagonistic relationship between space and time might play a role in the representation of the yin-yang parrots in Tablada’s sketch, by bringing both dimensions into closer contact. Evidently, visual poetry and ekphrasis in the work of Tablada disrupts Enlightenment ideals of aesthetic purity and medium specificity (already compromised given the radical changes in printing technologies during the nineteenth century), problematizing the separation of the spatial and the visual arts.19 Likewise, the haiku fulfills a similar function from within a “purely” script-based locus. If traditional poetry created a sense of space through ekphrastic description, I have suggested that haiku renders spatiality possible, like visual poetry, by facilitating the apprehension of the complete poem spatially and simultaneously in the mind’s eye. For Tablada, this sudden apprehension was the essence of the poetic instant, and its achievement tantamount to a small miracle, a moment of quiet transcendence. I would suggest that this mechanism of quasi-instantaneous apprehension relies on the intensity and evocative power of the images and metaphors activated by the haiku. Clearly, an image’s “intensity” cannot be measured objectively, the poem is only experienced subjectively. In general terms, however, the greater intensity would be produced by the concentration of the greatest significance in the least number of words possible, or through the accumulated force of related images (through semantic layering, a palimpsest of signification). These charged images elicit an emotional response from the reader, and quite possibly, the intensity of an image is also derived from the tensions and contradictions created between its figurative and literal meanings. In haiku the images strike the reader at the instant of decryption or perhaps epiphany. Even the Zen term satori seems appropriate as it brings the analogy of poetic understanding into mystical territory, and paradoxically, beyond the reach of analysis, exceeding the power of the verbal and entering the ineffable. In Tablada’s haiku, this mystical instant of recognition occurs when the poem is received as the movement and chatter of the parrots within the chirimoyo tree. The tree branches are not the birds, and the birds are not the tree, but they share certain characteristics that allow the reader to first mistake one for the other, to carry one term of the metaphor, the vehicle, to the other, the tenor, to use I. A. Richards’s terminology. The tree branch functions as the tenor (the “ground” of the poem), and the parrots are the vehicle (the image or “figure” that embodies the tenor in sudden insight), and their interaction produces meaning, the insightful moment. According to Richards, “The vehicle is not normally a mere embellishment of a

46

Radical Poetry

tenor which is otherwise unchanged by it but that vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers that can be ascribed to either [alone]” (55). One might, however, reverse the tenor and vehicle positions in this poem, since the haiku remains ambiguous as to which is which, birds or tree. The central verse (“Se retuerce y habla:”) has variable meaning (as either the parrots or the personified tree branch) depending on whether it is grouped with the first or the third verse, allowing for reversal of the terms of the metaphor. The colon marks this reversibility. The instant of recognition illuminates the difference between the moving figure and the static ground, indicating the contours or limits of the metaphor and suspending the equivalence between the chirimoyo leaves and the camouflaged parrots. But even this is not certain, since it might be the leaves that are moving and the parrots static, or everything could be in motion, and then the distinction is no longer clear, signaling again the evanescence of it all. When did Tablada intend for such a (fleetingly unstable) instant of insight to occur? That instant of recognition is now, that is, the time of the writing, but also, and indeed perhaps more importantly, of the reading, an ever-present instant that demands that the poem be in present tense, and thus, in a sense, the poem escapes time, paradoxically engaging with both the ephemeral and the eternal, seeking simultaneous immanence and transcendence. The sketch is also apprehended and understood in an almost imperceptible instant, by virtue of its recognizable yin-yang shape, its small size, and its delicate quality that seems as fleeting as the precise moment of now-ness the poem crystallizes. In contrast, a larger image might not be apprehended at once, needing to be “scanned,” as Steiner postulates, resulting in an experience closer to sequential reading, “a matter of temporal processing” (Colors 36–37). It is the synthetic tension of Tablada’s haiku, and of the haiku form (as it attempts to capture a single instant), that permits the apparent collapse of the qualities of time and space. For all its collage-like verbal and spatial visuality, Tablada’s haiku, even as it relies on ekphrasis, is not laden with ekphrastic description; rather, it juxtaposes simple, stripped images of the tree branch and the birds, presenting in plain style the moment, the thing-in-itself. Returning to my original point, the haiku in its entirety functions as a metaphor: the concrete, quasi-cinematic image of the rustling tree and the chattering birds connotes a mystical experience, one that remains out of reach. According to Bruce Ross, “Metaphor in haiku includes the presentation of a state of wholeness in which the particular leads to the absolute and first things” (n.p.). The mystery possibly “hinges” on the poem’s dual structures. It is articulated as a two-image poem, the tree and the birds, but also, as a two-code poem, the script and the image, which provides a caesura—a hinge—represented by the colon at the end of the first

The Historical Avant-Gardes

47

verse and duplicated by the space between the haiku and haiga. Above the hinge, a description of the twisting branch. Below it, the depiction of the parrots. The connection between these dual linguistic structures has to be experienced by the reader as the moment of insight or recognition, and corresponds to the physical cutting or connecting element in the haiku—a mark called kireji in Japanese—in this case materialized by the colon, in other poems by a different punctuation mark or by a key word (recall the “i” in Junoy’s poem). The colon is also a graphic trace of the problem of translation, whether from one language or culture to another, or one place to another, it is always fraught with misrecognition. In Japanese, the kireji is a sound, an inflection of tone which sets off the nuanced and multivalent significance of the haiku; it is not translatable, not really reducible to a visible punctuation on the page, but is rather a polysemic cue that makes the reader reevaluate, loop back to, return to what she already read, to glimpse it in new light. The circling-back movement of the reader is where the pivotal nature of the kireji resides. This articulation allows the poem to change direction from one image to the other, establishing an unstable, kinetic relation that is (for an instant) free from causality. Thus, Western modernism’s understanding of time and progress as linear narrative is subverted by the cyclical movement of the haiku, establishing a parallel with non-Western conceptions of time and space (East Asian, but also, pre-Columbian). The opposition between linearity and circularity is also present in the verses of the poem, in contrast with the circular sketch; and yet, such an opposition disappears if one shifts perspectives, or frames of reference, and conceives of both as elements of a sphere; the kind of shift that might be necessary to experience Tablada’s poem as fully and multidimensionally as he might have intended. Far from merely parroting or paraphrasing, Tablada’s efforts to translate haiku’s form and content move beyond mechanical reproduction into the creation of difference, producing a precarious cultural hybridity composed of European modernism, traditional Asian forms, and, arguably, Mexican pictorial traditions that combine images and verbal signs, such as pre-Columbian codices and Casta paintings. The mysteriously ambiguous punctuation mark, perhaps the key to the poem’s reading, serves as either a visible manifestation of temporal and spatial aporia, or of an epiphany, arriving at the precise moment of understanding, at the nexus of a possible synthesis between plant and animal, or text and image, or indeed, poem and reader, a synthesis that remains incomplete, however, as its terms remain in “twisting” tension.20 Tablada’s interest in synthesizing the visual intensity of writing, coupled with his fascination with Asia, led him to experiment with kanji. A remarkable poem

48

Radical Poetry

from his Li-Po anthology weaves together three forms: conventional poetry, visual poetry and a calligraphic kanji symbol (see Figure 1.3). By representing a kanji as the central figure of the poem, Tablada shows his fascination with the power of ideographs to convey meaning through multiple semiotic systems such as their graphic shape, their semantic significance, and their phonetic sound. In a letter, Tablada told his friend José María González de Mendoza that he wished to write poetry like the Japanese poets who, after painting the character that represented a nightingale with ink brushstrokes, could watch it fly away (Fleck 195). He wanted to capture that movement, visible through its trace, in the gesture of the kanji, which also retains a memory of the act of writing. Tablada’s admiration toward calligraphy betrays nostalgia for the passing of the handwritten and the hand-painted, replaced by typescript and printing. A hand-painted kanji permits seeing the irregularities of the brushstroke, indicating the force applied, the speed of its motion. Even though a typographic kanji made by a computer, or typeset, or reproduced by other mechanical methods retains a trace of an “original” gesture predating its stylization and homogenization, sadly, the importance of the individual artist, the calligraphic signature that made each kanji unique, has been replaced by the digitally and mechanically mass-produced. While the trace of the original and the individual, the faded gesture of the calligrapher, might still be seen in the direction of a kanji’s strokes and the disposition of the radicals that conform the symbol, there is no denying that something material has been lost. Tablada renders his poem as a farewell to calligraphy and the calligrapher, so the trace of the human hand remains visible in the print: The poem is part of a longer work that presents different facets of the poet Li-Po’s life (a Tang Dynasty poet also known as Li Bo or Li Bai), starting with his youth and love of wine and ending with the poet’s death by drowning as he attempted to embrace the moon’s reflection in a pond, perhaps a lyrical musing on the elusiveness of representation. Despite its visual immediacy, the anthology retains a narrative component, since it presents, albeit fragmentarily, a story of a life and a portrait of the Chinese poet. Tablada’s ideogram displays a modern sophistication in its structuring of language as image. It is difficult to interpret the symbol itself, although it is a thirteen-character kanji (the strokes are drawn or performed from upper to lower, so the square radical at the bottom left, associated with the meaning for “mouth,” counts as three strokes. Critics attempted to decipher the kanji as being related to the symbol for “voice,” or “poetry,” but this alluring interpretation, according to Atsuko Tanabe, is misleading, illustrating the difficulty of interpreting kanji without being conversant with these symbols, and recalling Bachner’s comment about the West’s metaphoric uses of kanji.

Figure 1.3. José Juan Tablada. Fragment from “Li-Po” Consejo General para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico D.F., Mexico).

50

Radical Poetry

Tanabe, who is Japanese, has analyzed the poem and determined the symbol to be related, although incorrectly drawn, to the Chinese kanji for “longevity,” which etymologically comes from an ideogram that schematically depicts an old man kneeling and praying for long life.21 The script written inside the kanji reads: guiados por su mano pálida es gusano de seda el pincel que formaba en el papel negra crisálida de misterioso jeroglífico de donde surgía como una flor un pensamiento magnífico con alas de oro volador sutil y misteriosa llama en la lámpara del ideograma [guided by his pale hand the brush is the silkworm that traced on the paper black chrysalis of a mysterious hieroglyph from which emerged like a flower a magnificent thought with golden wings a subtle and mysterious flame in the ideogram’s lamp] The vivid visual imagery revisits many of the images from the earlier poems and refers metapoetically to the act of writing itself, for instance in its mention of the hand guiding the brush, of the black ink and its trace on the page, and of the material aspects of creating the kanji, the “mysterious hieroglyph.” The poem addresses the concept that lies behind the material symbol: the magnificent thought (“pensamiento magnífico”) that arises, like a butterfly from its cocoon, from the lines on the page. The poem’s meaning comprises not just its visual form and the significance of the kanji symbol, but also the process of its making, the act of tracing its contours, and the concept that may unite (synthesize) its verbal and visual components. Functioning as an Ars poetica of sorts, the goal of the poem seems to be the

The Historical Avant-Gardes

51

synthesis of an idea, in this case the description of the writing of calligraphic poetry, with a highly concentrated symbol, the kanji. The fact that the symbol is set against a dark page serves to provide a light—and hence legible—background for the verses written in cursive, and possibly to signify the status of the symbol as a light-shedding “lamp,” “la lámpara del ideograma.” It is also the “negra crisálida” (black chrysalis) where the silkworm (the handwritten poem) hides. The inversion of negative and positive, as in a photographic negative, is reminiscent of the Yin and Yang, the male and female, and, in a poem that relates the Western alphabet and Eastern symbols, it signals the overlapping of two worlds, and the amalgam of something avant-garde and “new” such as the calligram, with something quite old, even “ancient,” such as Chinese script and Zen philosophy. The upshot of this typically avant-garde maneuver was not unlike the incorporation of African masks by the Cubists, or the recovery of European folk tales by Chagall and the Nabis, or Sergei Eisenstein’s use of Chinese writing to inspire his theory of montage. My reference to photography, cinematography, and negatives also brings to mind the tension between the mechanically reproduced and the handmade that might be traced through Tablada’s poetry. In his analysis of Tablada’s ideograms, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann argues that the Mexican poet’s attempt to reconcile semiotic systems is ultimately unsuccessful, since the synthetic and simultaneous nature of the poetic experience is divided between a spatial perception of the graphic design (gestalt) and a temporally sequential reading of the text (syntax). In his commentary to Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Michel Foucault had also observed that one cannot see the image and read the words at exactly the same time. If we agree with Meyer-Minnemann, synthesis might take place only after the reading, viewing, and mental processing of verbal and visual script are complete, assembled cognitively in the mind of the reader where the uneasy and tense union of disparate fragments actually takes place. If so, Tablada’s poetry might be understood as a metaphor for cognition itself, in its fragmented apprehension of the rhythms of modern life. Just as fragmented, Tablada’s visual poetry is remembered as pioneering in its combination of such disparate elements as Japanese traditional forms, such as haiku and calligraphy, with the new tendencies and printing technologies of the avant-garde, such as typographical games, parole in libertà, etc. The historical avant-gardes, exemplified here by two paradigmatic cases, Junoy and Tablada, had set the stage for another flourishing of experimental poetry in the post–World War II period, particularly during the 1960s and ’70s, a period that warrants and receives close attention in the following chapter. Technology had evolved by leaps and bounds in the interim: the typing machine and the radio

52

Radical Poetry

had given way to the television with its possibilities for mass media advertising, but also mimeograph machines, silk screening, and other technologies that allowed artists to circumvent state-controlled media as well as commercial media in favor of underground avenues to reproduce their art. This was paramount, since “resistance, defiance, and challenges to the dictatorships in Latin America during the 1960s, 70s and 80s by media owners was the exception and not the rule” (Cañizález 216). On the political front, these Ibero-American artists were nevertheless able to mount resistance to governments increasingly hostile to leftist utopian projects. On the aesthetic front, experimental poetry in the sixties expanded the avant-garde’s inquiries into how script and image interact in the poetic text. This period, in turn, has been superseded by the latest instantiation of the “experimental” ethos in contemporary poetry, stemming from the development of the personal computer, and subsequently, of the World Wide Web, which offers a radical engagement in the interplay of word and image.

2 The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes A Political Turn

®

W

hereas in the previous chapter we saw two paradigmatic poets, one from Latin America and one from Spain, who were profoundly interested in what some may dismissively consider as strictly aesthetic pursuits (but which had obvious connections to social concerns), this chapter captures a sharp turn to the political that began in the aftermath of World War II, and increasingly led toward a reconceptualizing of poetry as event, as a happening, as an art form without objects and without poems but firmly rooted in lived experience, so that, as Camnitzer suggests, “in Latin America art, education, poetry and politics converge and do so for reasons rooted in the Latin American experience” (37). No doubt, the sixties and seventies were violently chaotic decades throughout the globe, but especially so in Ibero-America where intense political conflicts coincided with rapid technological changes and a charged cultural scene. Artists politicized their work, often associating art and militancy. This is not to say that politics had been absent from the historical avant-gardes; one need only consider Italian Futurism’s connections to fascism, or Constructivism’s relations with communism, later assumed by Surrealism as well, and the antiwar nonconformism of Dada, just to name a handful of movements and their ideological leanings. But the intensity of political involvement in Ibero-America was on a larger scale, especially in Latin America. The ravages caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and World War II (1939–45) relocated the artistic vanguards from Europe to America.1 The horrors of these wars, like War World I before them, shattered— at least temporarily—many of the utopian projects of the early avant-gardes. In the 1960s, however, artists began to once again conceptualize art in terms of its transformational and corporeal possibilities, and their focus shifted, generally 53

54

Radical Poetry

speaking, from the finished art object per se toward process art, performances, and happenings aimed at mobilizing art as a tool for political and social action. There was also a shift to emphasize the body’s potential in art making, a turn away from the linguistic and toward the interactive, toward embodiment. While Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism had also staged performances, in the decades following World War II there was an increased attention on the body as both the subject and object of art, giving rise to movements such as Abstract Expressionism (and its extremely physical action painting), Fluxus, and neo-Dada. The greater emphasis on performance, on speaking through and with the body, was tied to an increased political self-awareness brought about by convulsive historical events such as the May 1968 student revolts, the onset of the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution, and the Vietnam War; bolstered by the vigorous countercultural movements that stemmed from these same events, as well as theoretical developments such as poststructuralism and Althusserian Marxism. As Bürger notes, it is as if the rupture caused by fascism, which rendered the avant-garde a failure (since its vision resulted in a world of technologized and dehumanized warfare), “began to change when surrealist slogans started showing up on the walls of Paris in May 1968. At this moment the historical avant-gardes and their utopian projects were also rediscovered” (698). Unfortunately, in Latin America, the ideological projects posed by the Left were forcefully countered by dictatorships, repression, and political violence; this in turn fueled an art of resistance. It was, therefore, in the turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and lasting well into the eighties, that art became further radicalized, striking against established social, political, and aesthetic norms. The focus also shifted from the individual artist toward art collectives, something that had taken place to a lesser extent during the first avant-gardes (with Surrealism and Dada). Artists resisted authoritarian regimes by employing diverse tactics to elude censorship, circumvent the imposed silence, and register dissent. State censorship of printed material forced artists to find creative ways of making and distributing their art. Many resorted to mail art, radio, television and video art, fax art, phonetic and visual poetry, found objects, artists’ books, body art, and happenings. Some notable politically motivated artist collectives active in the seventies and eighties included CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) in Chile, Taller E.P.S. Huayco in Peru, No-Grupo in Mexico, and Taller 4 Rojo in Colombia.2 Much of their artwork has been lost, either because of its ephemeral nature—as with conceptual and performance art—or because authorities destroyed “permanent” works that were critical of the state. Many pieces were of the moment, intended for mass reproduction and immediate distribution (as leaflets, postcards, or underground papers), and their aesthetic value was secondary

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

55

to the conceptual and political messages they encoded. Provocatively, perhaps misguidedly, Camnitzer argues that some guerrilla groups such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay practiced what might be construed as an “aesthetic” in their insurgent operations, blurring further the separation between art and militancy, aiming to “creat[e] a new culture instead of simply providing old perceptions with a new political form” (On Art 14).3 Studying these neo-avant-gardes not just for their own historical and political significance, but also as forerunners of today’s digital practices, provides insights into the origins of tendencies present in contemporary net art and digital poetry. For instance, in the sixties and seventies the arts engaged with media technologies and began to emphasize their “communication” function, and increasingly, communication at a distance through technological means (i.e., mail art, radio art, video art, TV art). It is true that the earlier avant-gardes had also used paper publications, broadsides, and the radio to divulge their programs and manifestos. But with the new politicized atmosphere of the sixties and its countercultural thrust, mass media were approached more critically, as artists were suspicious of the types of media manipulation exemplified by the fascist states in the thirties. Increasingly, there was an interest in a kind of horizontal or networked communication that eschewed the top-down hierarchical model and would, in our time, be materialized by the Web. In the sixties, therefore, the avant-garde’s relation to mass media ranged from collaborative to adversarial as concerns about United States influence, commercialism, and the complicity of the culture industry with the region’s regimes also began to grow. Communication through art, however, was seen as necessary to achieve utopian goals: an educated working class, greater economic equality, and, for some, the creation of socialist states, via democratic processes or through revolution. Art, then, was to lay bare the grim reality of life with the purpose of changing it. Engaging with art and poetry for political ends also had aesthetic consequences. Among these was a wish to restrict or to eliminate metaphor altogether, inasmuch as it was perceived to be a device that distanced the word from the object, as it privileged elegance and beauty to the detriment of what were otherwise understood as the true struggles of life in 1960s Latin America. Antimetaphoric attitudes can be traced back to Plato—who in the Republic charges poets as liars, and poetry and rhetoric as misleading and dangerous—and to later empiricist views that considered the trope as decoratio. Nietzsche also considered metaphor as “falsehood,” lamenting its pervasiveness in language: “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which

56

Radical Poetry

correspond in no way to the original entities” (118). In contrast, José Ortega y Gasset, so insistent in his desire to separate art and life (to maintain art’s autonomy), was enthusiastic about the trope’s escapist function (which he saw as a positive quality), arguing “la metáfora escamotea un objeto enmascarándolo con otro, y no tendría sentido si no viéramos bajo ella un institno que induce al hombre a evitar realidades [metaphor masks one object in terms of another, which makes little sense unless we consider how it is fueled by an instinct that induces man to avoid reality]” (Deshumanización 47); more recently, Susan Sontag has equated the use of metaphor with harmful deceitfulness,4 and David Punter insists that metaphors “establish complex hierarchies of understanding . . . thus, metaphor needs to be seen in terms of operations of power” (87). Building on Althusser’s argument that we are the subjects of ideological control, Punter states, “the principal way through which we are [ideologically] interpellated is metaphor” (42). In today’s postmodern context an antimetaphoric stance seems excessively dogmatic, since metaphor has been reembraced as an inextricable part of poetry (especially so with digital poetry), and, according to Borges, of language itself—also corroborated by Lakoff and other cognitive linguists who insist that metaphor is the very source of language. But in the political climate of the 1960s many artists and critics considered metaphor and other rhetorical tropes as anathema to a contestatory, politically committed poetry. The Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín, for instance, avoided metaphor because of its propensity to “smother reality under a layer of words or signs, signals which are meaningless, or in the majority of cases, at the service of an interest of whoever is using it, in our specific case the capitalist system seeking to preserve itself ” (Art and People n.p.). Evidently, within this unyielding worldview, metaphor was seen as dually suspect: first, it was perceived as formally regressive, and second, it was assumed as being perforce allied with oppressive hegemonic systems; as such, countercultural artists refrained from its usage. This was surely the case in the radically experimental poetry of the period, as practiced by Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Guillermo Deisler (Chile), Wlademir Dias-Pino (Brazil), or Edgardo Vigo and Luis Pazos (Argentina), to name but a few. Whereas the first wave of avant-gardists, as we saw with Junoy and Tablada, made metaphor the pivotal device to disrupt semiotic boundaries (text and image), these neo-avant-gardists wanted to inject poetry with raw, unmediated reality. And yet, despite such vociferous disavowals, metaphor was still widespread in Latin American poetry; in fact, bodily metaphors were often mobilized to describe the ailing “national body” (itself a metaphor, as is the reference to its ailment), or to refer to torture and the disappeared as in work by Raúl Zurita, Diamela

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

57

Eltit, and other members of the Chilean group CADA. Allegories and metaphors became necessary once the military dictatorships in the region began to censor artistic production. There was, however, a general sense by artists that contestation through art was best achieved by presenting things as they were, or as they seemed to be. A somewhat instrumentalist Marxist perspective on art prevailed, positing that artwork should go beyond mimeticism and become a tool to forge reality. The “new art” emphasized message and results, rather than aesthetic value, so that artistic means often became unglamorous and secondary to their political ends. Examples of this gritty art included the widespread use of graffiti, mail art, mimeographed or hand printed leaflets, hastily assembled street performances, and other intermedial practices that appropriated their grainy, rough-around-the-edges and on-the-fly aesthetic from mass media communications. New attitudes toward metaphor entailed, therefore, a stepping away from representation and toward conceptualism. While the new poetry of the sixties reclaimed certain strategies of the historic avant-gardes, such as foregrounding the plasticity and materiality of letters and words as seen earlier in Junoy’s poems, it abandoned the mimetic tendencies that had used typescript to evoke realistic images and objects, as was the case with Apollinaire’s calligrammes. In this sense, the sixties represented a step toward further abstraction. To sum up, this chapter examines how metaphor was all too easily associated by the neo-avant-gardes with the lies of the region’s dictatorships. Despite their bias against the trope, the neo-avant-gardes relied especially on body metaphors to protest the mistreatment of actual bodies in the context of political violence. While, as I mentioned, some theorists (Plato, Nietzsche, Sontag) have warned against the insidious danger of figurative thought, others (Borges, Ricoeur, Lakoff) insist on its potential to transform lived experience. Yet others, such as Derrida, assert that metaphor cannot be avoided in the arts, indeed, in language, since “any statement concerning anything whatsoever that goes on, metaphor included, will have been produced not without metaphor” (“Retrait” 50). The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the work of two poets who were particularly concerned with representation and its intersection with politics, the Uruguayan Clemente Padín and the Argentine Edgardo Antonio Vigo. Padín’s “Nueva Poesía” experimented with minimalist and conceptual poems (“letter” poetry), subordinating representation to a direct intervention on reality; Vigo deployed objects and his own body to protest against encroaching dictatorships in Argentina and elsewhere in the Southern Cone. Their poems, performances, and poetic actions displayed the tensions between metaphor and ideology as distortions of an unrepresentable (ineffable) “external” reality.

58

Radical Poetry Clemente Padín’s “New Poetry”: From Sense to Non-Sense

Clemente Padín, born in Uruguay (1939–), was imprisoned for more than two years on account of the Marxist resonances in his art, which the military dictatorship declared as an assault on “the morale and reputation of the Army” (Kostelanetz 461). Installed by a coup in 1973 with the support of the democratically elected president Juan María Bordaberry (less than three months before Chile’s September 11 coup and the fall of Salvador Allende), Uruguay’s military junta set about eliminating all political opposition. During those difficult years of political repression, Padín created a visual art at the service of the community, an art of action as opposed to an art of merely words or images, an art, in short, inextricably bound to the political (Kuhnheim 114–16). Although it is easy to trace the political in overtly ideological poems such as “Paz-Pan” (1973), a work Padín wrote while in jail that is highly critical of militarism and economic inequality, I will tease out the political in works not typically read through that lens. Padín has been a profoundly intermedial artist, since well before the terms intermedial or multimedia were coined. Since the sixties he has been a poet, a graphic artist, and a performance artist as well; indeed, his work combines all of those practices. Padín edited two influential literary magazines that vigorously promoted what he called the “New Poetry”: Los Huevos del Plata (The Eggs of the Plata) (1965–69) and Ovum 10 (1969–1975).5 While Padín’s term New Poetry did not achieve any currency beyond the Southern Cone, its general characteristics could be appreciated in experimental poetry movements throughout the globe. The single most important characteristic of the New Poetry, as described in Padín’s manifesto/article “La Nueva Poesía,” published in Ovum 10 (1969), was its openness to transformative action, and its deployment of the graphic image, of letters and words, in alternative spaces such as the street; spaces, in short, where the line between activism and art blurs. Poetry as “action writing” shares much with other guerilla art tactics of the Latin American neo-avant-garde, such as leaflets, mail art, posters, graffiti, and stencil art, which allowed the spreading of messages about social and political resistance quickly and directly to the masses. As Jill Kuhnheim notes, “Padín continually uses mass media or strategies that come from advertising against the market or to reach a wider audience” (Beyond 114–15). But by what aesthetic means were messages of resistance communicated? What was, in other words, the most effective way to reach the masses? And how might the “New Poetry” act directly upon reality? Poetry’s move to the streets became possible once poets adopted low-cost, rapid mass reproduction techniques such as mimeographing, stenciling, xerography, and stamping, so as to circumvent printing

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

59

presses and other mainstream methods subject to state control. Their aesthetics reflected urgency, simplicity, and the seriality of works that were no longer unique or seen in institutional spaces; naturally, for performances, the uniqueness and presentness was still very much the point. The first step toward achieving this new, agile art, argued Padín, required a “complete” stripping away of discourse, the elimination of metaphors and other rhetorical and poetic devices, in order to present the object itself and act directly upon reality. He insisted that the emphasis on presentation rather than representation was the chief difference between the neo-avant-gardes and previous vanguards: El futurismo, el dadaísmo, el cubismo, el surrealismo, etc., son corrientes artísticas que se valen de lenguajes de representación—hablar, pintar, recitar, cantar o cualquier otra técnica conocida—son en los hechos actos, pero actos cuya índole determinante es la emisión de representaciones y no la emisión de un lenguaje mediante una acción. [Futurism, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, etc. are artistic movements that use languages of representation—speaking, painting, reciting, singing or any other known technique—that are in their process also actions, but actions whose main characteristic is the production of representations and not the production of a language through an action.] (“El Lenguaje de la Acción” 30)

While selling somewhat short the achievements of the first avant-gardes in nonrepresentation (I am thinking of Dada anti-art, noise performances, and generally outrageous pranks that were focused precisely on action, polemic, and agitation), clearly Padín’s aesthetic position in the sixties paralleled poetry’s gradual shift from representation toward a type of direct action that nevertheless remained connected to the poetic. In other words, for Padín and other neo-avant-gardists it was the “action” and how it changed reality that created the art piece, and not the other way around. The move from object to action was connected to the proliferation, visibility, and public involvement in performative art, which at times became indistinguishable from political protest. In order to stretch the limits of what might constitute the art object, Padín turned to the theories of a well-known Brazilian concrete poet and art critic, Ferreira Gullar. In 1971, borrowing from Gullar’s “Theory of Non-Object” (1959), Padín developed a kind of poetry he called “Poesía Inobjetal” (non-object poetry), or Action Poetry. Action Poetry, as defined by Padín in his text De la representación a la acción (From Representation to Action) (1973), attempts to abandon

60

Radical Poetry

representation to enter into the arena of action. Alas, Padín’s effort to repress the representational—his rejection of illusionism—will come, paradoxically, through several representational means, proving (once again) the resilience of metaphor, mimeticism, and representation in art. In De la representación a la acción, Padín, anticipating Sontag’s critique against metaphor, declares that so-called traditional art provides a substitute for reality that is conducive to escapism and not to the wished-for confrontation with society’s ills. Debates about metaphor were part of the sixties’ general move toward a “literalist” art that could be classified as nonart, a shift toward what Michael Fried calls “objecthood” in his now-famous attack on Minimalism in “Art and Objecthood” (1967). In that essay, Fried argued that the inclusion of the beholder as participant in the experience of recent avant-gardism diluted the centrality of the art object in favor of foregrounding the relationship between viewing subject and object. The failure to maintain distinctions between art object and life, or performance and life, for Fried (as for Greenberg and Ortega y Gasset) meant art’s degeneration and the abandonment of concepts such as quality and value. Such concerns by (mostly) Anglo-American and Western European high modernist critics about the commingling of art and life and the loss of artistic autonomy were closely related to their defense of medium specificity, as discussed in chapter 1. Concerns about the loss of artistic autonomy had less resonance in Latin America, where artists where engaged in life or death ideological struggles. By rejecting artistic autonomy, Padín and other Latin Americans chose instead to involve art with an everyday politics of resistance. According to Padín, with the union of art and life, the art object is eliminated and replaced with the art action. Paradoxically, it would seem that he attempts to subdivide action from ideology. Employing Saussure’s semiotic theory as a starting point, Padín defines a semiotic system in which the sign becomes an “action”: Por una parte, a nivel de significante, la acción opera sobre la realidad y, por la otra, a nivel del significado, opera ideológicamente. [On the one hand, at the level of the signifier, an action works on reality, and on the other hand, at the level of the signified, it operates ideologically.] (De la Representación n.p.)

Nevertheless, Padín’s semiotics of action is a difficult proposition to accept wholesale. While actions can clearly function as signifiers—they might “speak” louder than words, as the popular saying goes—the separation of the action from

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

61

its ideological content is rather difficult to envision. More likely, what he points to is a use of “action” as a form of representation (indeed, a form of theater, happening), which acts on the “real” but is still located within a realm of the performative. Indeed, this communication, or speech-act, uttered in a public space, might be construed as both artistic and political action; a public artistic action is rendered meaningful by those that perform it and those that witness it. There is in Padín’s work, in a sense, a certain element of the theatricality that Fried abhorred in Minimalist art, a return of performance, and an unintended reinstitution of certain boundaries between art and “real” life, which have to do with the presence of the observer. This return of artifice, despite Padín’s efforts against it, is no doubt closely linked to the return of metaphor and the discursive. The presence of this element of performance, in my view, does not render the artist or the artwork any less committed. Ultimately, as Fried argues, theatricality, or, we may call it performance or metaphor, can only be denied through theatrical, performative, or metaphoric means. Yet, there is still a kind of authenticity in the efforts by Padín, Edgardo Vigo, and others to engage with and understand their historical conditions and the real world that inspired their work. It will be useful to frame these discussions in specific works. I would like to examine two experimental poems by Padín, one from the period immediately before his development of nonobject poetry, and one from the period after. Neither is overtly political in the way many of his other works are, but they illuminate his understanding of “poetry” as something extraliterary, as an action or performance. While Padín refers to this work as a poem (see Figure 2.1), some might challenge this label in favor of another; perhaps graphic art, or a visual poem, and possibly a nonobject, to use Gullar’s terminology. Representative of efforts to minimize the content of poetry, the poem explores the limits and overlapping regions between poetry and visual art. For this reason, for some readers it may insistently prompt the question, Is this poetry? To this question, I reply with Jonathan Mayhew’s point that “avant-garde movements in poetry almost by definition, will produce work that will not appear ‘poetic’ to contemporary readers” (21), in fact, even to sophisticated readers and critics. Perhaps a better question might be, at which point does poetry stop being poetry and become something else? And, if the author intends it to be “poetry,” even if a variant of experimental poetry, might the critic question this label, which is, after all, just that, a label? Within the context of the experimental “tradition,” the same question was asked of Dadaist sound poetry, of Futurist parole in libertà, and so on. According to Antonio Monegal, the concept of the poetic, by the start of the twentieth century, shifts from referring strictly to the verbal arts to becoming “un rasgo potencialmente presente en cualquier actividad artística,

Figure 2.1. Clemente Padín. “Signografía I.” Printed with permission from Clemente Padín.

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

63

con independencia del medio [a facet potentially present in any artistic activity, independent of its medium]” (34). The very resistance to labeling or categorization is one of the constitutive characteristics of the different modalities that conform experimental poetics. This particular work could also be referred to as “word” or “letter” art, or as an anti-poem; I will refer to it as a visual poem. Part of the Signografías series, published in Los horizontes abiertos (The Open Horizons) (1969), this poem shows—especially in its concise, minimalist presentation—the aesthetic influence of the Brazilian concrete poets and of the Noigandres group in particular (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari) which I discuss at length in chapter 7. Its title, “Signorafía I,” identifies it as the first of a series of visual poems created with the semi-industrial process of serigraphy (serigrafía), or silkscreen, which was popularized by Andy Warhol in the 1960s but invented as an artisanal process in tenth-century China. Silkscreen is related to stencil art, since both deal with the transfer of ink through a filter. But whereas silkscreen was used in publicity and graphic arts, stencil art enjoyed a more marginalized existence, closer to graffiti and other street art. In this sense, this method of production is itself positioned in between the marginal and the commercial, between the graphic and the pictorial, between “poetry” and “picture.” Padín’s poem (like Tablada’s haiku in chapter 1) might also be understood as investigating relations between figure and background, as well as the instability of semiotic systems, in particular as letters transform into images. The poem resembles variations on the letter “a,” although certainty is impossible given the letter’s deformity, indeed, its illegibility as letter. Alternatively, these might not be letters at all, but rather graphisms, signs that only imitate letterforms without actually referring to any specific standard recognizable letter, as in the work of Spanish poet José Miguel Ullán. “Signografía I” self-consciously plays with its own ambiguous status as either “poem” or “visual art,” or perhaps both, or even neither. If the viewer expects or is presented with the first option (the work is framed as “poetry”), the expectations about conventional poetry may overdetermine his reaction. The eye wants to perceive letter components in an effort to relate linguistically to the work. Thus, the fourth letter in the top row bears some resemblance to the “a,” but at the same time the similarity is thwarted by the left side of the letter, which clearly departs from the familiar shape of a lowercase typescript “a.” The denial of the stereotypical function of the letter as a signifying object, which forms part of a word, is a constant in Padín’s early poems, and it creates a tension between the scriptural and the visual. These letter shapes suggest movement, strange contortions, as they acquire the appearance of exotic, amoeba-like organisms reacting kinetically to some unseen

64

Radical Poetry

stimulus. Using white symbols on a black background also reverses the traditional arrangement of typescript: black on white. Karl Young has interpreted a similar work by Padín in musical terms, stating that en cierto modo, las variaciones de la ‘a’ parecen seguir principios de la improvisación del jazz, o acaso formas minimalistas de música más actual: las modulaciones de las figuras siguen formas musicales básicas como la sucesión invertida de una locución melódica, poniendo la melodía del derecho o del revés y así sucesivamente. [in a certain way, the variations of the “a” seem to follow jazz improvisational principles, or perhaps contemporary minimalist musical forms: the modulations of the shapes follow basic musical forms such as inverted and successive melodies, placing the melody one way and then another, and so on, successively.] (14)

Young’s “musical” interpretation grapples with how the different graphic symbols relate to each other. Arranged in a seemingly orderly grid of five rows (as in the five lines of a musical staff) and four columns, the shapes struggle to break out of the Cartesian rigidity, to break, so to speak, out of the mold. The signs that are closest to each other share some resemblance or affinity, which creates a sense of progression or movement from one to the next. Some even display a degree of complementarity, as if they were reacting to each other, for instance the fourth and fifth signs in the second row, which cross into a common space, in a sort of dance-like arrangement, or even a poetic “enjambment” (see Figure 2.1). The color reversal (white on black) also refers to the alterity of the signografías’ “writing” system that might be considered as a shadow of conventional forms of writing, or as a deliberate challenge to the writing norm. In this sense, it echoes Torres-García’s well-known 1935 drawing of an inverted South American continent, which, according to Rommens, is “representative of the dynamics of inversion of periphery and center” serving as “an emblem for the desire for an independent and genuine Latin American art,” an art inverted, like Padín’s colors, so that now it favors the subaltern (n.p.). Padín’s theories notwithstanding, this early work does not engage frontally with the political, certainly not in any direct or active way, although it does engage with language, or rather, with its absence (presenting “signifiers” without discernible “signifieds”); through its minimalism and its emphasis on the “object” quality of the graphisms, it attempts to disrupt the metaphoric (as we saw unsuccessfully,

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

65

since we can “read” all kinds of images into the Rorschach-like shapes). Nonetheless, the poem is much more than a mere formal exercise; it is a meditation on the arbitrary nature of our roman lettering (and indirectly of our classical heritage), which, arguably different from the ideographs we discussed previously, does not bear any connection to the physical world. Developed in Sumeria in 3300 BC, the first writing system—used to represent spoken language graphically on clay tablets—was radically transformative. After its invention, it became necessary to understand written language to interpret its signs into some form of meaning, whereas before, other types of signals or body gestures might have sufficed to “naturally” convey meaning. Padín’s sign system seems to connect instead to some proto-writing system where the graphemes do not have a preestablished meaning and are devoid of linguistic content, but function to metaphorically suggest possible meaning(s), all of which remain open to subjective interpretation, indeed, to overinterpretation or perhaps even overreading. And although my own analysis might not be completely exempt from overinterpretation, the process of making meaning through interpretation is in itself a return to the centrality of the observer, a return that lessens (to the disapproval of critics such as Fried) the gap between art and life. In that sense, Padín’s language games do become political. The poem’s graphemes or markings can be interpreted as being merely visual patterns or as having some other “hidden” significance. In the first case, we see the work as being an asemic type of writing in which no predetermined meaning can be ascertained; rather, it remains open for the reader to interpret in various ways. Despite the difference with pictographic systems, however, Padín’s signografías share with Japanese, Chinese, or Korean kanji one important aspect: the oscillation between the reading and the looking, which leaves the spectator/reader suspended between the two functions. Since asemic writing did not begin to become prevalent in visual poetry until the late 1970s, “Signografía I” might be considered as one of its earlier examples. Asemic script, however, has also been connected to both Paleolithic sign systems (proto-writing) and to a new postliterate “calligraphic” writing trend that courts the nonsensical in a kind of neo-Dada sensibility. But “hidden” significance can be found, or “read” into the work. In spite of Padín’s intention to strip away any possible figurative meaning, as stated in his Manifesto of Non-objective Art, meaning, as well as metaphor and interpretation, succeed in resisting eradication. Implications can be drawn from even the most abstract, minimalist works, and Padín’s visual poetry is far from complete abstraction. I mentioned that there was in the sixties a hostility coming from Modernist critics (i.e., Fried, Greenberg) toward conceptualism and interpretation, as well as

66

Radical Poetry

toward intermediality and other artistic experiments deemed as too heterodox, as compromising the role of art as an autonomous space free from real-life concerns. Part of the concerted effort directed against interpretation (and against overreading), as outlined in Sontag’s essay by the same title (“Against Interpretation” 1966), was a criticism that overreliance on (perforce reductive) constructed intellectual abstractions will result in the overuse of rigid grids, which are then applied to investigate works of art with the purpose of overlaying predetermined meanings onto them. Sontag makes specific reference to Freudian and Marxist analysis as bearing responsibility for much overinterpretation. Interpretation, thus viewed, is not a truth-seeking enterprise but rather an ideologically driven and historically determined critical strategy or technique. This critique is on a par with similar attacks on the Author, the Critic, and other figures of authority put forth in the sixties by Barthes, Foucault, and others. To be sure, the elimination of content in Padín’s signografías series would seem to impede the discourse of interpretation, since there is no “content” (or, rather, verbal content is minimized) to analyze, leaving only description as a possibility. As Sontag argues, referring to the sixties, “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling . . . interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art” (4). Advocating for description over interpretation, however, Sontag fails to observe that the first always already entails the latter: every description contains an interpretation, just as the most abstract, contentless art will entail meaning and suggest metaphoric constructions. Where the border between interpretation and overinterpretation might be located is never clear; it might just be located at the place where the work of the critic overlaps with the work of the artist, when criticism becomes in fact, creation. What is at stake, then, in metaphor’s resilience, or in the insistence on interpretation? Padín’s effort to reduce content to the visual graphemes and their relation to each other does not preclude metaphor from enduring, via the creative flights of fancy of the viewer. This could, in fact, be considered as one of the potentially revolutionary aspects of this type of poetry: that despite the meticulous exploration of a seemingly abstract grapheme, the metaphoric trope returns, generated by the reader’s own predisposition toward it or by the suggestive condition of the language and its graphic forms. Although perhaps contrary to Padín’s desire to present just the materiality of the graphemes, the insistence and return of the figurative seems a reminder that no abstract grid can ever be fully imposed on the imagination and attests to the ubiquity of metaphor and the power of mental images. Nor do I see a problem or contradiction with this metaphoric presence and Padín’s express need for political commitment to changing

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

67

social reality, a commitment that does not come fully through in this early work (except perhaps implicitly through its radical form: its disruption of the linguistic, the discursive, etc.), but which becomes more evident in later poetry. In fact, an allegorical reading of the work might suggest that neither the strict patterning of grids, and rigid rationalist systems, nor the imposition of authoritarian rules (artistic or otherwise) can ever imprison the work of the imagination. The work then becomes liberational. In a disquieting and problematic poem (see Figure 2.2) Padín attempts to deconstruct the perceived barriers between art and life, which he believes are a stumbling block to developing a political consciousness. For Padín, political awakening occurs when there is a direct, unmediated interaction between the

Figure 2.2. Clemente Padín. “Inobjetal 1.” Printed with permission from Clemente Padín.

68

Radical Poetry

reader/viewer/spectator and the poem (and indirectly, with the poet). From this position as an active participant the spectator becomes, in the best of cases, politically aware. By engaging directly with the spectator, the poet believes, art transitions away from representation and toward “action art.” It is important to start the analysis of the poem by addressing the obvious misogynistic, or at least masculinist, component of the work, which in a sense reflects one of the shortcomings of Latin American Marxism in the sixties, its shocking sexism. Recalling Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’origine du monde (more on this later), Padín’s “Inobjetal 1” “plays” with the void of the vagina and the fear it projects (horror vacuii) in a somewhat stereotypical fashion. As the piece attempts to “represent” the empty nature of art via a somewhat infantile caricature of female genitalia, it becomes apparent that the problematic and insidious aspects of gender discrimination are fully operative; the abstract has been breached, by way of denigrating the particular, the concrete, the female body; indeed, the sketch is in no way “innocent” or arbitrary, but quite possibly outright misogynistic. But what, exactly, is Padín attempting to do in this admittedly grossly sexist work? What is its objective, as it skirts, or straddles, a line that barely separates the supposedly political from the barely pornographic? Or is pornography itself to be read as a form of radical politics, here oriented to shock bourgeois sensibilities? By its own admission, the work aims to eliminate the art object as such in order to encourage the participant/reader/viewer to engage directly with reality, that is, after verifying that engagement with the work of art does not take him/her anywhere. Paradoxically, Padín’s search for the literal and the unmediated notwithstanding, engagement cannot come about without the mediating function of the artwork, or language (and therefore, of some sort of figuration). Even in this poem, which seeks to leave art behind, the artwork is the catalyst that activates the transformative experience that changes something in the external world. In the case of “Inobjetal 1,” one of a series of poem-manifestos that define Inobjetal poetry (Nonobjective) its purpose is to spark the realization of the empty nature of representational art, replacing it with a direct experience, as the “directions” indicate: Stick your finger, or whatever you want, in, and you will feel the emptiness and frustration that awaits you behind the paper. That is how art operates: it offers a substitute of reality so that you might escape it. Art is what you do in direct relation to your surroundings and not in relation to a representational system of that reality.

Once again, we see that to practice what Padín calls “el arte de la realidad” (the art of reality), the artist must eliminate the distance that separates art from

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

69

life, questioning also other established dualisms such as the divide between theory and praxis, or reason and emotion (even as it glaringly reproduces the age-old misconceptions about gender, understood narrowly from a phallocentric perspective as another dual structure, male-female). If followed to its conclusion, the disruption of dual structures would also mean that every reader should become a poet, and every poem an action, and so forth. The equating of art and life poses some serious problems since it collapses all categories somewhat unproductively or, more likely, presumes a collapse that will never materialize. Viewed in this light, it seems as if the debate about art and life threatened to result in a choice between a culturally elitist, complete autonomy of the artwork, versus a totalizing nihilism: either art signified only its own materials and conditions of production, or it signified everything and, therefore, nothing. There had (has) to be a middle ground. This, in a sense, brings us back to metaphor, interpretation, and the irreducible complexity of systems, or to put it another way, the impossibility of a totalizing synthesis. Perhaps some distance is necessary, some tension needs to be kept in order for different systems to coexist. For instance, simply attempting to eliminate the figurative from the work of art does not eradicate the division between literal and figurative (as Padín would like to do), since both persist in the work. Indeed, it is quite possible that the world of poetic figurative language and the world of action are actually related through metaphor, and that the figurative is necessary to achieve the type of political transformation that Padín’s work calls for. According to Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, as laid out in The Rule of Metaphor (1975), to neglect metaphor and the work of the imagination that it entails is to abandon a powerfully transformative and dynamic tool that informs the tension between identity and difference; indeed, metaphor facilitates spaces of negotiation between concepts in opposition, which can be reconciled through the crossing of boundaries (disciplinary, semiotic, generic) and at times lead to the surprise or shock of the new, to imaginative discoveries. Paradoxically, and despite Padín’s failed intent to purge the figurative, the highly sexualized nature of the sketch (originally intended as a provocation to conservative-minded Uruguayans, although it is now an assault on our contemporary sensibility, much more attuned to issues of sexism) also functions metaphorically: the reader is asked to “penetrate” the sketch in order to understand the message about the emptiness of the representational sign, as opposed to the “fullness” of a direct operation on reality. The penetration need not be literal (the finger does not have to puncture the paper to “get” the point) since the reader understands the concept and has no need to carry out the instructions; it is, instead, a figurative penetration by the reader’s intellectual and emotive understanding.

70

Radical Poetry

But the action suggested by the lewd (also raw, in-your-face, confrontational, and, as observed, misogynistic) nature of the sketch is first understood literally, and only then symbolically, and from the tension between the literal and symbolic arises a new understanding and the world-making possibilities of the poetic. It is rather unfortunate that this potentially emancipatory effect is, after all, obscured by the very “shock” Padín has enacted, for the work does not stand up well to contemporary criticism, that is, to a nuanced and gender-attentive analysis; its overt sexism is, quite possibly, its own undoing. As a work, however, it illuminates the debates about metaphor, artistic autonomy, and commitment present in the sixties, and the period’s changing, but still problematic attitudes toward issues of race, gender, and difference. At the same time, and somewhat curiously for a poem that seeks to leave behind referentiality, Padín seems to be evoking (and perhaps deflating through caricature) the aforementioned Courbet painting L’origine du monde, one of the pinnacles of Realism, which hangs at the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) and was owned, at one point, by Jacques Lacan, and quite possibly also served as an inspiration for Marcel Duchamp’s last work, Étant donnés (1966) (Sayer 160–73). Courbet’s painting, which was made for a private collector, is an equally provocative work that questions our understanding of “origin” and “originality.”6 Both Courbet’s and Padín’s works present a body reduced metonymically to its representation of the vagina, centrally located in the focal point of the canvas and therefore “drawing in” the male spectator’s phallic gaze, whereas the woman spectator is seemingly disregarded, although her reaction would be quite different, presenting a challenge to the male perspective (as theorized by feminist film scholars Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Laurentis, and Linda Williams); noticeably absent from the body on display are other important organs and parts, such as the head, the face and eyes, those parts that confer identity, emotion, and personality, and therefore the woman thus presented is depersonalized, objectified, or, to use Ortega’s term, “dehumanized.” There are other “penetrating” observations to be made here, insofar as both Courbet’s brush and Padín’s pencil or finger, whether gently or roughly, seek to break through to a new understanding of origins in relation to art and sexuality, fears of castration and creative impotence, but do so by rendering a brutal violence, indeed a rape, on woman’s body (this sexual violence equally present in Duchamp’s Étant donnés which may very well depict its aftermath). Nameless, cut up, and mutilated, Courbet’s painting serves as a prelude to modernist fragmentation, while Padín’s may be read less figuratively, as a reminder of the fate of countless women whose bodies have been violated. In a bizarre turn of events, a canvas depicting what is suspected (and disputed) to be the “head” of the model—excised by Courbet to protect her identity—was discovered in 2010 by a Parisian collector, but thus far the art world has placed

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

71

little value in the additional finding, preferring to keep its focus on the “original” work. Courbet’s is in fact a painting that—much like Padín’s sketch—also represents the quest for a lost origin, as well as reenacting patriarchal desires for, and fears of, the female body, and both reaffirms the male order and reveals its “lack” and dependence on the woman’s ultimate power of nonmechanical reproducibility, also understood as a form of enslavement, a sort of immanent disempowerment, by Simone de Beauvoir and, in Latin America, by notable feminist poets such as Gabriela Mistral (Chile), Delmira Agustini (Uruguay), Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay), and Alfonsina Storni (Argentina), as well as others.7 In his version, which appears to be hand-drawn (perversely remitting, therefore, to the “digit” or finger), Padín challenges both the concept of origin and the notion that art could ever represent that original moment of creation. Art, according to Padín, would provide instead infinitely repeating images of images; in this case, a copy of a painting of a model in an arranged “pose.” In this sense “Inobjetal 1” displays the fundamental disconnect between male desire and the possibility of representation, thereby revealing art as simulacra of an original (itself nowhere to be found), or as Baudrillard would have it, as the “discrete charm of second-order simulacra” (1). The substitution of reality with art, Padín asserts, is neither possible nor desirable. And yet, the persistence, indeed the proliferation of artistic representation and of rhetorical tropes suggests otherwise. So why continue the task of imitating imitations of imitations? What is the point of representation? If we consider the creative nature of metaphor, as Ricoeur does, then we can consider the mimetic element of representation not as a copy or imitation of a preexisting original “reality,” but rather as a creative interpretation of our human perception. The play between the “real” and its “creative” or metaphorical rendition thus produces a rich field of transformative possibilities. According to Ricoeur in Interpretation Theory, [I]n the case of metaphor, this redescription [of reality] is guided by the interplay between differences and resemblances that gives rise to the tension at the level of the utterance. It is precisely from this tensive apprehension that a new vision of reality springs forth, which ordinary vision resists because it is attached to the ordinary use of words. The eclipse of the objective, manipulable world thus makes way for the revelation of a new dimension of reality and truth. (68; my emphasis)

Metaphor, Ricoeur argues, bears a relationship to reality by bringing concepts that share a resemblance but remain different in tension with each other to create new meaning. Borges says something similar, stating that metaphor can also

72

Radical Poetry

transform our perception of the world, so that through it, objective reality “se contorsiona hasta plasmarse en una nueva realidad [contorts until it becomes a new reality]” (Textos recobrados 119). Through metaphor, new understanding is brought into being; in “Inobjetal 1” it might be an awareness of the limitations of representation to express the domain of reality, and an appreciation of the reader’s active involvement in the work and the world, both at an interpretative level and perhaps at a political level (insofar as an active participant of the art work is also likely to become involved in social action). As such, for Ricoeur, metaphor can bring about a change of worldview, precisely what Padín wants to achieve through the impossible banishment of metaphor and figurative language. Can or should these opposing approaches to the use of metaphor and poetry be reconciled? In the poetic movements of 1960s Latin America there were few claims in favor of the autonomy of the work of art that had been so in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. In a context of dictatorship, repression, and injustice, art and poetry have a stake in real life and its transformation, perhaps an obligation to retain some referentiality, without falling into stark approaches such as Socialist Realism. But a playful back and forth between the referential and the poetic functions, as identified by Jakobson, is needed so that poetry may retain the ambiguity and interpretative indeterminacy that give it its creative force, and, if we agree with Borges and Ricoeur, its transformative capability. Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Corporeal Poetry: Unearthing Memories of Dictatorship

Whereas with Padín we faced issues about mediation and artistic autonomy, the Argentine Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) brings us back, painfully, to the body. Neglected by the art world for many years but featured in a recent exhibition at New York’s MoMA titled “The Unmaker of Objects: Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Marginal Media” (April-June 2014), Vigo was instrumental in defining the political turn in Latin American experimental poetry in the 1960s. Although still fondly remembered in his city of La Plata, home to the Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo where his work is archived, Vigo remains one of the continent’s unsung experimental artists. Vigo’s poetic trajectory is analogous to his close friend Clemente Padín’s (whom he met in 1970) in several respects: in their shared commitment to a politically inflected art (in Padín’s case most salient in his Mail Art projects), and in their efforts to transform passive consumers of art into its active creators. Like Padín, Vigo produced a wide range of experimental art, departing from using the written word as an exclusive form of expression, and adopting mail art, performance, object poetry, and visual

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

73

poetry. Vigo also edited two neo-avant-garde literary magazines in Argentina during the sixties, Diagonal Cero and Hexágono ‘71. The brief manifesto “Poesía para y/o a Realizar” (“Poetry to and/or Realize”) (1970), published in Diagonal Cero, is among Vigo’s most notable contributions to a theory of experimental poetry. In it he establishes the basis for a systematic destabilizing of the function of art, as well as testing the traditional roles of spectator and artist, with the aim of creating alternative networks of artistic exchange outside of the accepted channels of the museum or the art gallery, and fomenting a playful engagement with art: Y hablamos de lo lúdico como puente de contacto en diferenciadas formas de encarar el arte, porque está comprobado que esa es la única vía posible para que la sociedad retome su interés y participación en el fenómeno del arte. Procedimiento válido y accesible que se basa en la solución de una participación activa para llegar a la ACTIVACIÓN MÁS PROFUNDA DEL INDIVIDUO: la REALIZACIÓN por él del poema. [And we speak of the ludic as a bridge between different approaches to art, because it is known that this is the only way that society may recapture its interest and participation in art. A valid and accessible process that assumes an active participation to achieve A PROFOUND INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATION: the REALIZATION by him of the poem.] (Escrituras en Libertad 426)

Vigo presents his poetry experiments (or “cosas” [“things”] as he refers to them) in playfully shocking ways that destabilize the expectations of the viewer, using verbal and visual play, fragmentation, humor, irony, but still underpinning his work with social and political concerns. By calling the works “cosas,” Vigo has already removed them from the strictly artistic or poetic and turned them into objects, things, and therefore material, concrete; thus, he too attempts to erode the separation between art and daily life. Replacing the solemnity of the work of art (the hushed tones with which we refer to it at the museum) with a playful and irreverent exchange between work and spectator/creator might be considered subversive even in a democracy. Doing so in Argentina in 1970, during General Onganía’s dictatorship, in a conservative political climate in which such an approach to art suggested a lack of respect toward hierarchy, authority, propriety, and order, was much more insurrectionary.8 During the terrible decades of the Dirty Wars (roughly from the mid-sixties to the late eighties, although it varies greatly by country) in Latin America’s Southern Cone,

74

Radical Poetry

the word subversive and the art of subversion carried a much greater risk than merely shocking bourgeois sensibilities. Argentines labeled as “political agitators” by the military authorities were “disappeared” into a vast network of extralegal, secret detention centers where they were tortured and most often, killed and disposed of in various ways.9 While Vigo was not linked to guerrilla activity, his art might easily have been construed as being “subversive” under the strict censorship laws instituted by the military. In some cases, Vigo engages directly with politics; in Hexágono ‘71 Vigo makes references to events such as the massacre of sixteen leftist militants in Trelew in 1971, or the massacre at Ezeiza of peronistas in 1973, and, during the Proceso, Vigo intensified his protests through Mail Art. Evidently, Vigo’s “revolutionary” artwork had a more potent charge in its original context than now, viewed safely in retrospect. Vigo’s artistic tactics to shift the appearance of everyday objects, or to “shake” the perspective of the passive art consumer in order to alter their political conscience represented real-life risks: potential arrest, torture, exile, or even death. His political artwork took a dramatic and personal turn in 1976 when his own son, twenty-year-old Abel Luis “Palomo” Vigo, was kidnapped and “disappeared” by the military and never seen or heard from again (Padín, “Kairan 7” n.p.). Devastated, Vigo designed a stamp with his son’s image, the date of his disappearance, and the words “SET FREE PALOMO” in English, with which he stamped and sent his Mail Art internationally. Tellingly, he also stamped Mail Art with the word “CENSURADO.” In his manifesto, Vigo coins a term to describe his process-oriented poetry, “poesía para armar” (poetry to be assembled), a name charged with hidden meanings. With it Vigo echoes the title and formal characteristics of Julio Cortázar’s 62 Modelo para armar (1968), a novel written in fragments, which the reader reorganizes at will, creating her own text. Vigo’s text plays on the word armar, which in Spanish has an ambiguous duality. It means either “to assemble” or “to arm” (with a weapon), indicating a poetry that the reader assembles following a given set of instructions, and that also “arms” her with the ability to question and think critically, qualities that are construed as dangerous under an authoritarian regime, indeed, in any regime, as “armed” struggle. Next, I analyze an action-poem or poetic performance that treads a dangerously ambiguous line, delicately balanced between playful, ironic criticism and potentially dangerous subversion, as it indicts the bureaucratic mechanisms of totalitarianism; it is also a work that mobilizes metaphor to act directly upon the real. Titled “Señalamiento IX” (“Ninth Signaling”), the number IX “signals” its position within a series of similar works. The following is one the photographs taken during its performance (see Figure 2.3).

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

75

“Señalamiento IX” staged two sequences of related actions, which took place on different occasions, before two eyewitnesses. Here the word eyewitness or “testigo” acquires added significance, since the “testigo” provides an account or “testimonio” during legal proceedings to investigate a crime committed; and of course, testimonio refers to the genre that documents and narrativizes violence in Latin America. Testimonio connotes the direct experience of an event and that which certifies the event’s occurrence. Applied to places such as Argentina, Chile, or for that matter, Spain, the act of burying and disinterring evokes a history of disappeared bodies, mass graves, and concerted efforts to conceal a troublesome past that demands remembering—perhaps a literal re-membering. Vigo’s action-poem unfolded over the span of a year and, taking place five years before his son’s disappearance, seems almost prescient. The first stage was held on December 28, 1971, when Vigo marked a particular spot of the garden behind his studio with an arrow, where he proceeded to dig a hole—or a grave—and into which he buried a piece of cedar. He created several bureaucratic forms, imitating, indeed expropriating, the “legalese” jargon in order to document the event meticulously, and more implicitly, to ridicule official protocols. This process was rigorously observed: forms and copies were filled out and “legalized” by notary after Vigo and the two eyewitnesses signed all the documents. Vigo “exhumed” the cedar

Figure 2.3. Edgardo Antonio Vigo. “Señalamiento IX” (“Ninth Signaling”). Centro Experimental Vigo. La Plata, Argentina.

76

Radical Poetry

block during the second stage of “Señalamiento IX,” on December 28, 1972, at the same hour and exactly one year later. The choice of cedar, a tree related to the cypress, is highly significant. The cedar was venerated by ancient cultures, such as Celtic tribes in Western Europe, as having a special connection to the spirit world. It is a hardwood used in cigar boxes, chests, and caskets, precisely because of its resistance to moths, termites, and other destructive invaders. The funerary overtones provided by the choice of cedar, especially through the exercise of burying and unburying it, bring to mind the “desaparecidos.” Although in 1971–72 there were still few disappearances in Argentina (the repression began in earnest with the Junta’s 1976 takeover), Vigo was aware of the threats to the region’s fledgling leftist democracies, as shown by Bolivia’s descent into dictatorship after Hugo Banzer Suárez’s 1971 coup. The language captured by Vigo in the “official” documentation eerily and presciently anticipates that of documents later used in the orders of detention, torture, and elimination of “subversives,” a cold legalese distanced from the bodies it “processed.” These official documents (discovered in Paraguay in 1992), which have become known as “los archivos del horror” (the archives of horror), chronicled the detention and interrogation of thousands of prisoners not just in Argentina but also in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, all the signatories to the Operación Condor (Condor Plan), the special cooperation agreement between the right-wing dictatorships, under the aegis and technical assistance of the CIA, for the surveillance, arrest, and subsequent extradition, or kidnapping of political dissidents, many of whom were not actually affiliated with left-wing guerilla groups. Vigo’s use of legalese acquires a chilling effect: CERTIFICO por el presente que EDGARDO ANTONIO VIGO ha procedido en la finca sita en la calle 15 no 1187 de esta Ciudad de la Plata, el día 28 de diciembre de 1972 siendo las 19 horas, a DESENTERRAR un trozo de madera de cedro cuyas dimensiones son 7 por 14 por 28 centimetros, cumplimentando el compromiso adquirido cuando se produjo el 28 de diciembre de 1971 a las 19 horas su enterramiento, finalizando así el llamado SEÑALAMIENTO NOVENO ’71–72. [I hereby CERTIFY that EDGARDO ANTONIO VIGO has proceeded, in the property located at 1187, 15th Street in La Plata City, on December 28, 1972 at 7 p.m., to EXHUME a block of cedar wood with the dimensions of 7 x 14 x 28 cms., thus executing the commitment acquired when its burial took place on December 28, 1971 at 7 p.m. and thereby concluding the aforementioned NINTH SIGNALING 1971–72.] (Escrituras en libertad 429, fragment of original text)

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

77

Although “Señalamiento IX” ocurred before the Videla years (1976–1981) when the disappearance of “subversives” became commonplace, and, more poignantly, it predates the disappearance of the artist’s son, the work “points” to, or even foretells, the gradual unraveling of political freedoms in the Southern Cone. The following years saw much burying and unburying, by those trying to hide evidence of their political leanings (books, artwork, leaflets) and by others disposing of an altogether more organic type of evidence. But what relation does “Señalamiento IX” bear to poetry, and to metaphor? Is this type of performance not wholly divorced from the lyrical? Not so. The piece parallels works by the first avant-gardes, such as the Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire that mixed spoken word, sound poetry, and music, or the participatory and unique happenings taking place since the 1950s in the United States. Close to the theatrical, Vigo’s “signaling” emphasizes the importance of place but also of the written and spoken word. It is at a crossroads between word and world, between poetry and performance. The piece attempts to activate the “spectator” into a productive engagement with the poetic work—with itself, the poem therefore functions self-reflexively— in order to reveal some new understanding of the world. This engagement takes place through the metaphoric content of the actions performed by Vigo and seen, or “witnessed” later by the reader. In Vigo’s “text,” understanding the historical context is absolutely necessary to decode certain “buried” metaphors. Obviously, burying and exhuming a piece of wood in a decontextualized performance today might mean something quite different than it did in Argentina in 1971; therefore, the piece is intrinsically connected to the time and place of its making. Critic-curator Fernando Davis offers the following analysis to explain Vigo’s practice of signaling and calling attention to objects, such as the wood block: Body and territory were the two principal dimensions invoked by the avant-garde in response to this state of affairs. The body was interpreted as a dispositif of political action that was capable of fracturing and subverting the precepts of meaning imposed by the repressive apparatus. The practice of “signaling” urban space set out to tactically dismantle its measured order, introducing a poetic drive where the urban economy was naturalizing complex power relations, establishing hierarchies, and drawing boundaries and itineraries. (n.p.)

The exercise might also bring to mind the “ready-mades,” but once again there is a striking difference between Duchamp’s objects and Vigo’s “cosas.” Whereas Duchamp took objects and displaced them from their expected locus (as was the

78

Radical Poetry

case with the urinal, the bicycle wheel, etc.), and reinterpreted them as art by placing them in institutional spaces (museums, galleries), thereby questioning the status of the work of art and problematizing notions of consumerism, Vigo does something quite different: he places commonplace objects in public (or semipublic spaces), documenting and signaling them (“señalar”) but not treating them as “pure” or “autonomous” art objects, rather as triggers for some sort of social dialogue or witnessing. The historical context does not exhaust the text, however, which remains open to interpretation and re-semantization. Evidently, both metaphor and ideology had a part to play in the Latin American arts of the 1960s and ’70s, as they were inextricably interconnected to the real conditions of life. Both metaphor and ideology are, in a sense, distortions of some “external” reality that operate through the work of art. Despite efforts by some artists to eviscerate the metaphorical and to present just the naked object, the metaphorical insistently returns. And the ideological is just as pervasive. It may be tempting to consider both of these distortions, or perhaps reflections, of reality, or of utopian projections, as antagonistic forces. In that case, perhaps, metaphor might be activated to make new meanings possible, while ideology, often, although not always, associated with domination and control, would enforce the maintenance of the status quo. And yet this assessment is far too reductive and it might be better to view both, metaphor and ideology, as mechanisms that mediate our experience of reality, and as such, might be used in positive, negative, and neutral ways; there are, in other words, revolutionary, anti–status quo ideologies, just as there are dangerous metaphors that obscure meaning. The simultaneous drive toward increasing abstraction and “concreteness,” two terms that are apparently contradictory and yet bound together in tension, as well as the rejection of metaphor seen in the 1960s and ’70s, suffers a reversal in the nineties with the arrival of the digital (itself characterized by a back and forth relay between the fingers or digits and the electronic), which once again places value in the paradox of metaphor and in the ambiguity created by its polyvalent interpretations. This recuperation of metaphor is due, at least in part, to the increasing acceptance of relativistic perspectives, the abandoning of grand narratives that insisted in the superiority of truth over metaphor, of realism over fiction, etc. The reemergence of the metaphoric is also connected to a blurring of the line between the sciences and the arts, which have increasingly overlapped into each other’s spheres of activity. Our world today is no longer perceived as a fixed, unchangeable object of knowledge, but as a construct subject to change depending on the conceptual framework, model, or indeed, metaphor used to examine it. As

The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes

79

such, our “literary” texts escape the page and become indefinable and contingent. Digital poetry is the most recent form of experimental poetics and, arguably, the inheritor of the previous avant-gardes’ fascination with both metaphor and the shifting boundaries between word and image. I would like to leave the turbulent sixties and seventies (briefly) behind, and move forward by a quarter-century to explore how another innovative technological shift—the arrival of computing—has transformed experimental poetry, both in relation to the interplay between the visual and the verbal, but also in relation to metaphor. Chapter 3 will be the final one in the first section of the book dedicated to metaphor’s relation to semiotic systems (script, image, sound); it also concludes the first approximation at exploring the many links between the three avant-garde periods in question by analyzing how metaphor has been recuperated as a fundamental trope to visualize and conceptualize the elusive structure of the digital.

3 Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise An Introduction to Digital Poetry

®

I

n a provocative essay dealing with “the uncertain future of the printed word,” Jean Franco convincingly argues that, in Ibero-America, “the new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom print culture has lost its luster and now competes with—and is often superseded by—visual and aural culture” (17). While this elegy for print is perhaps a bit premature, the turn to the visual is widely documented. This drastic cultural shift, according to Kuhnheim, has propitiated an “alliance of poetry and contemporary technology . . . [resulting in] works that reformulate as well as consume images and techniques from imported technologies and the mass media” (Textual 146). And, in fact, the last few decades of the twentieth century have seen a new form of experimental poetry, one that takes advantage of the advances in computing, wireless communication, and the Internet, and which goes under the somewhat generic name of “digital poetry.” Exciting and dynamic, digital poetry has been characterized by its embrace of all types of digital technologies (from the now-obsolete CD-ROM, to tablets, to the latest mobile devices) and by a turn toward further hybridization, amalgamation, and porosity between text, image, and sound. But what, exactly, is digital poetry? It is, among other things, a subgenre of digital or electronic literature, which the Electronic Literature Organization—its “governing” body—defines as, “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (Hayles, “Electronic Literature” n.p.). 81

82

Radical Poetry

Digital poetry could also be categorized as a subgenre of experimental poetry, perhaps as the most recent resurgence of the experimental spirit in poetry. For all its newness, however, the experiments made possible by the digital echo the past. In fact, digital poetry has enhanced the expressive potential and injected new life into the visual, typographic, and phonetic poetry of the avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, by drawing on the added capabilities provided by the computer’s graphical user interface, such as interactivity, high quality graphics, and a greater potential for animation, sound, and so on. Critic and poet Loss Pequeño Glazier, like Franco, observes that digital media, especially online, have shifted poetry toward a greater emphasis on visuality. “The Web,” he writes, “continues to bring to light poetry for the screen predicated upon the use of increasingly faster connections. This means that sound, kinetic and video works will become increasingly abundant” (167). Contemporary calls by technophilic digital poets to animate text and images seem to echo the Futurists and other avant-gardists who sought to fuse art and technology. By integrating older print experiments with new media’s capacity to make text and images move, we are realizing the kinetic fantasies of the historical avant-gardes. Every illusionistic attempt to make words seem to move through typography and parole in libertà, every effort to blend image and script, and the use of phonetic and sound elements in poetic performance, can now be duplicated, enhanced, and subsumed by the digital arts. Although such links to the past seem almost self-evident, comparisons with previous experimental traditions spur a Bloomian “anxiety of influence” for contemporary digital poets, resulting in somewhat exaggerated claims of radical “newness” which at times fail to give proper due to those who came before. In his text Digital Poetics, for example, Glazier derides static script in favor of kinetic poetry, claiming movement as one of the defining characteristics of the digital: “Text in digital media, inasmuch as it sits inertly on a screen, is simply a holdover from print writing and from low threshold technology” (169). While, technically speaking, script is never fully inert when displayed on a screen—it flickers, it shifts, and responds to the mouse’s movements—Glazier is making a distinction between “digital born” works that take advantage of the multimediatic possibilities of the Web, and those which are simply transferred onto the Internet but could also be read on paper. The drive toward a digital parole in libertà is paralleled by a vindication of the image, which rather than being subservient to script, becomes a salient component of the digital textual-visual weave: The visual has as much to do with new media writing as text did to codex [traditional paperbound book] writing. In fact, if we consider the vast role

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

83

the image has played in writing generally (cave paintings, Chinese writing, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, Mayan glyphs) the codex era can be considered an aberrant period when text and image were temporarily isolated from one another. (169)

While Glazier does not give the “codex” or traditional book enough credit for the great deal of intermixing it can accommodate between text and image, his somewhat primitivist point about the reunification of script and image in today’s media is well taken.1 The precision afforded by the digital has, perhaps paradoxically, enhanced experimental poetry by increasing its ambiguity, interactivity, nonlinearity, immediacy, and the visual and formal qualities of text (script), which has become more image-like. Moreover, the “new” intermedial sensibility of experimental poetry has reinvigorated metaphor’s transformative potential. Illustrating New Media’s “enhanced” qualities of formal malleability, contemporary digital poets such as the Catalans Jordi Pope and Olga Delgado combine script, image, and sound with motion and interactivity, optimizing the anthropomorphic potential of digital text, which they deploy to elicit the reader’s affective response. While the “political” recedes somewhat in these works, becoming less direct, they retain an element of critique that attempts to challenge the neoliberal state, even though, paradoxically, the technocultural modes deployed are themselves fully inscribed in Late Capitalism. And yet, digital, or hypermedia poetry, as Kuhnheim sees it, “allows poets to explore new frontiers, to bypass more traditional publishing channels, to reach different audiences. People whose experience of language is shaped by exposure to the mass media and computers, those to whom reading and writing, creating and receiving are not separate activities, may find this system of writing more accessible than conventional poetry” (Textual 166). All of which increases digital poetry’s liberatory potential. The Palpability of Signs: Science and Disability Metaphors in Jordi Pope’s Digital Poetry

Virtually unknown outside of his native Barcelona, the poet Jordi Barba i Pérez (1953–2008), nicknamed “el Popeye,” hence “Pope,” dabbled in many experimental poetic modalities such as phonetic poetry, polypoetry, and in later years—having, sadly, lost his voice and mobility to the degenerative disease that eventually took his life—he turned to cyberpoetry.2 During Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), in Spain, many poets such as José Hierro or Blas de Otero turned to “poesía social”

84

Radical Poetry

(social poetry) a realist, sometimes-epic style that attempted to protest against the regime while avoiding the heavy-handed censors (who, on the other hand, were less preoccupied with poetry than with more popular genres such as the novel or, even more so, film). Others, such as Joan Brossa, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, or, later, Pope himself, turned to the experimental as a way to examine issues of aesthetics, but also engage with politics more obliquely.3 After the transition to democracy, Pope focused on exploring the confluence between poetry and science. With the arrival of computers, and, more recently, the Internet, Pope began cultivating the affinity between digital media and the poetic. Among Pope’s many poems dealing with science topics, “Sistemes de comunicació” (“Communication Systems”) (c. 2005) is a sophisticated work that is composed as a four-poem anthology. It is a highly hybrid work that eludes facile classification but partakes of a plethora of signifying systems or codes: a visual code, a sound code, poetic and literary codes, numerical and mathematical codes, all of them superimposed on the linguistic codes themselves. The “poem” also explores rules of social behavior, and investigates biological codes—such as the “language” or communication system of insects. And, the deepest, or least visible, level of code is the computer code used to program the poem, which remains “hidden” from view but always operative.4 An exception, in so-called code poetry either the actual, functioning code or a simulation of it is displayed in the poem’s content (Pope does not engage with code poetry).5 Working within these multilayered code systems that expand but also constrain poetic possibilities, Pope created a poem that draws from Claude Shannon’s theory of communication (1949), and is further enhanced by Roman Jakobson’s attention to social context in communication.6 Shannon’s model, which Pope borrows and modifies, describes a tripartite system comprised of a transmitter that sends a codified signal, a channel or medium that carries the signal and a receiver that decodes and processes it. In poetic terms, the poet becomes the transmitter, the poem and the digital network constitute the media channels, and the reader/viewer will be the receiver and decoder. Pope’s “Communication Systems” also adopts the concept of the “palpability of signs” from Jakobson, that is a process that makes signifiers visible and present (by making the physical attributes of letters stand out, or by making the poetry call attention to its own poetic devices and tropes) while simultaneously subverting, questioning, and/ or inverting the relation between signifier and signified (by lessening the role of sense, meaning, and interpretation). Let us return to Pope’s poem to see these mechanisms at work. Viewable on a networked digital computer, the anthology’s first screen

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

85

opens with the title, “Communication Systems,” which flies in from screen-left simulating rupturing the flatness of the monitor by unexpectedly “approaching” the viewer and then rapidly receding into its final position, having visually mimicked an insect’s “random” flight path. The author’s name arrives next, as its letters glide in, unrecognizable until they rotate into legibility. Next, a flower appears in the center of the screen and the animated sketch of a butterfly flutters near it as if it were responding to a force of attraction, only to move then to the upper left where it remains, suspended near the title. The concept of biological communication systems is thereby established from the outset as the thematic matrix uniting the individual poems (which can be accessed from the main screen). The interspecies aspect of the communication (between flowers and insects, for instance, or arguably, cybernetic machines and humans) has a parallel in the intersemiotic nature of the “image” of the butterfly fluttering near the title’s “script” (image and script enter into contact, blend briefly, yet remain distinct). The images are more than mere illustrations and provide visual information, acting as a “text” without script. Moreover the image on-screen flows into the script and vice versa, as they share an overlapping, common space, the screen plane. Furthermore, the physical appearance of script and its movement is as important as the message the image communicates—a message which I shall discuss in short—so they are both (script and image) taking on functions of the other, operating as text in the broad sense provided by the etymology of the word (from textus, a woven fabric). Although here we have primarily a physical juxtaposition of script and image, meaning that they overlap and are placed next to each other, in each of the poems Pope presents hybrid forms where the categories script/image are blurred even further. It is the hybridity and boundary transgression between the written or verbal and the imagistic and visual, the suggestive cross-pollination of dynamic script with moving images that spurs my interest in Pope’s poem. The main screen’s flower is subdivided into four segments, each corresponding to a different poem, and to a different “communication system” or code. The color correspondence between flower, insect and text—they share a pinkish hue—also establishes a connection that reaffirms a common code, and the possibility of multimodal communication afforded by the digital (sound, image, touch, and even taste or smell in some not too distant future). The reader must select one among the four “zones” of the flower. Choosing zone “1” reveals a kinetic poem. The image (see Figure 3.1), in constant flux, cannot be easily captured “on paper,” and must be viewed online to be fully appreciated. A translation/transcription of the text might read:

86

Radical Poetry

The atoms of the lantalic family in this system which is not permeable, have some variations of the long bands with a well-defined peculiarity, the exit tube is elongated proportionately to the exit of the wave.

Since the poem, written in a jargon-filled style, purportedly deals with the micromolecular chemistry of insect communication, that is, the way insects communicate using pheromones and other secretions, the reader (unless she is a trained entomologist or biochemist) will make sense of it only with great difficulty, getting vague glimpses of its possible significance. From its lexicon we see that it alludes to interspecies communication, frequency waves, obscure biological structures, elongated tubes, or sinuous antennae and raging pheromones released as so many codes to be deciphered, just as the reader needs to decipher the poem’s cryptic code. Poring through reference books, or conducting an online search, the patient reader may decode some of the highly specialized jargon. For example, lantalic acid is an alternative name for allantoic acid, an organic compound that is a toxic byproduct of uric acid. The connection of urine to communication is even more obscure. As P. J. Gullan and Peter Cranston explain in The Insects: An Outline of Entomology, lantalic (or allantoic) acids are by-products of feeding and metabolism [that] need not be excreted as waste . . . [but] may form the biochemical base for synthesis of chemicals used in communication including warning and defense. White-pigmented uric acid derivatives color the epidermis of some insects and provide the white in the wing scales of certain butterflies. (84)

We therefore surmise that, in the insect world, waste can be recycled for communicative purposes, and as an added benefit, for decorative reasons—as well as for camouflage, protection, and oftentimes aggression. Such is the case with the pigmentation of butterfly wings that helps them to blend with their surroundings, protecting them from predators. The same entomological text has a lengthy discussion about communication between insects of the same species or even between different species, as well as communication-like exchanges between,

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

87

Figure 3.1. Jordi Pope. “Sistemes de comunicació” (“Communication Systems”). Screen capture.

for instance, flowers and insects. These interspecies communications depend on “semiochemicals,” that is, chemicals that facilitate communicative exchanges between sender and receiver (lantalic acid is one such chemical), and that function as the “channel” in Shannon’s communication theory. The poem, however, does not easily or clearly yield the information I have mentioned above; rather, it sets up an enigmatic scientific language that points at the communicative, excretory, and reproductive functions of biological life-processes, and demands the reader’s involved deciphering, even while it resists coming into clear focus. Pope’s deliberate complexity and thematic options raise more questions than they provide answers to: Why the accumulation—or montage—of unexplained and abstracted scientific terms and images? What does all the biological information and discourse have to do with poetry, and with the digital? Or more to the point, what is the connection between scientific codes, which function to communicate (computer code, DNA, pheromones, Morse code, and so on) and cyberpoetry, or even to poetry at large? We can begin to answer these questions once we frame Pope’s work as seeking to provide links and insights into the relation between biology, poetry, and existence. Indeed, Pope’s poem suggests an affinity with Jakobson’s account of the poetic, which goes well beyond an understanding of how traditional verse form and content operate. Jakobson, echoing Russian formalist doctrines about poetry as a roughening of form that calls attention unto itself (by defamiliarizing, and

88

Radical Poetry

thus awakening, readers), argued that the poetic function of language disrupts the communicative act, and might also interfere with cognitive processes. As such, poetry is inherently disruptive and digressive—an undesirable element from the standpoint of communication, according to Jakobson—in its effort to introduce the aesthetic into the practical.7 In a similar vein, Pope’s poem is highly disruptive of even the poetic function itself, as it relies on the prosaic rather than the lyrical to present its content. Indeed, Pope’s poem appears to be an anti-poem—in the sense of Chilean poet and mathematician-physicist Nicanor Parra’s (1914–) concept of a concise poetry written in flat, nonpoetic language that avoids overblown rhetoric, as seen in his Poemas y anti-poemas (1954)— a gesture that was seen, in Parra’s case, to bring the genre closer to the working class, although perhaps that particular distinction or division (between poetic and nonpoetic language) is no longer possible or even relevant in contemporary poetry.8 Granted, it is also possible for scientific language to be pompous and overblown, overly rhetorical, although, arguably, not when it is reduced to its mathematical components. Nor do I claim that Pope’s poetry is in any way geared toward, or read by, the working class. There is, however, an effort to redefine the poetic by changing the terms of its language and content in a way that transgresses fields, both poetry and science. At any rate, Pope is linking to a tradition that hails not just to Parra (who was influenced by the Surrealists), but also to other Chilean poets, such as Raúl Zurita who also freely employed mathematical symbols and scientific language in his groundbreaking text Purgatorio (1979), a poetic anthology conceived as a veiled protest against Pinochet’s regime. Pope’s poems also bring to mind a contemporary of Zurita’s in the Escena de Avanzada (Chilean neo-avant-gardes), Juan Luis Martínez, whose unclassifiable experimental text La nueva novela (The New Novel) (1977) is a work which, as Gwen Kirkpatrick sees it, belongs to the Dada and Surrealist collage tradition, through its use of mathematics and pseudo-mathematics, newspaper fragments, poetry, photographs, perforations, and transparent pages, all arrayed with the intent to “explorar los limites de un universo utópico en su busqueda de un lenguaje original [explore the limits of a utopian universe in a search for an original language]” (225).9 Pope’s, as it were, anti-poem adapts the form of a scientific exposition, but in the treatment of its presentation the poetic function is enhanced through the power of the images insinuated by the science, which is presented not as objective certainty, but rather as enigma. By reintroducing the poetic into a decontextualized scientific textual fragment, Pope underscores the notion that science and poetry are not opposites, but rather intersecting or overlapping fields. At first glance the poem’s

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

89

language seems essentially nonmetaphoric, but rather “scientific,” discursive, linear, metonymic; but the language is also exotic, rare, and specialized, displaying characteristics that partake of the poetic. In fact, the metaphoric is introduced into the poem through the presence of visual images as well as the evocation of mental images that interact with the written text. Poeticity also infiltrates this poem, arguably written in prose, or in a prose-like and prosaic style, through the analogies presented graphically and through the movement of its digital typography. In that sense, it is the physical presence, the volume of words and images, that confers the poetic onto the text.10 In the first “verse,” if we might designate the topmost line of script by such a conventional name, the to and fro screen movement of the word atoms models the behavior of atomic particles, albeit in a simplified, conceptual way: by behaving “like” an atom, the word atoms becomes a visual metaphor for atoms and their constant movement. Thus, a mimetic relationship is, paradoxically, reinstated as an important component of Pope’s digital poem, a device he returns to in other instances. Through this isomorphic metaphorization, the poetic function becomes dominant, and in effect imposes the figurative to the entire text, even as it propels the transformation of “atom” from signifier into signified, or at least, into an iconic, visual representation of the signified, depicted as a spherical atom-like shape:

Figure 3.2. Jordi Pope. “Atoms.” Detail from “Communication Systems.” Screen capture.

Several other words likewise function as active visual and/or aural components that “catalyze” a poetic reaction from the seemingly inert prose materials. The word permeable, for instance (as can be seen in Figure 3.1), acts as a porous membrane through which some liquid particles flow. The word llargues (long or elongated) displays a moving letter “ll” which rotates into and out of the plane of the screen simulating a molecular structure undergoing Brownian motion. Similarly, the word tub (tube) is formed with a capital letter T that is shaped as a hollow cylinder or tube, and the word ona (wave), when moused-over, displays outwardly moving concentric circles or frequency waves, while emitting a sonar-like sound. By “materializing” letters and words through a depiction of the physical characteristics of the objects they signify (or the functions those objects perform,

90

Radical Poetry

such as the to-and-fro movement of atomic particles) the signifier mimics the signified, and transposes the “literary” from the exclusively textual toward a text/ image hybrid. Taking a cue from a long tradition of visual poetry and from avant-gardist inventions such as the Futurist analogia disegnata (“designed analogy,” a case where words use their typography to display physical characteristics, as in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb [1914] poem), Pope’s poem represents an intersection between both biological and semiotic systems, enacting a kind of interspecies communication between written signs and images. At the level of the poem’s content, Pope is also showing that the ways insects communicate are also suggestively poetic. In addition, his visual and aural tropes point to the notion of “insect communication as poetry” as being itself a metaphor, indeed a conceptual metaphor where the domain “poetry” is understood in the terms of “communication,” more specifically, “insect communication.” It maps simultaneously onto another system of conceptual metaphors that might be termed “text as image” or “script as body.” Indeed, despite their open-ended and evocative nature, which aims to mobilize our affective response, metaphors also can cognitively communicate a message, can, in fact, “literally” tell us something, even as they retain a degree of indeterminacy. In this sense, Pope brings figurative and literal language into close contact in his “scientific” poem, showing them to be unstable and temporary categories. As linguists Lakoff and Johnson argue in Metaphors We Live By, the notion of conceptual or cognitive metaphor posits that metaphor or analogy functions as thought and not just as language. As such, the dividing line between scientific thought and poetry wears rather thin, since, according to Lakoff, “Abstract thought is largely, though not entirely, metaphorical” (272). For instance, many analogies are “body-centered” or “embodied,” and indeed, Lakoff’s cognitive science research indicates that figurative language is experiential and often (though not always) centered on the body, on relations of spatiality, movement, gesture, orientation, and directionality. According to just one aspect of his complex theory of metaphor, Lakoff insists that the functioning of the body informs our conceptual systems. This point has a direct impact on poetry, since it means that the poetic (a mix of cognition and affect) is also entangled with the body, with embodiment: we “feel” poetry, as Borges said, not just as a concept, but also as an embodied form of knowledge.11 Furthermore, Lakoff’s theory presents science as founded on model-oriented thinking, and consequentially, logic itself is subservient to metaphor. Science, as Borges also believed, works through metaphors. Perhaps more radically, Lakoff dismisses any claims to mind-body dualism by insisting that cognition is always embodied, and that therefore metaphor also has physical (embodied) properties.

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

91

This explains why so many metaphors use body-centered language (“being in over one’s head,” “feeling down,” “warming up to someone,” “having a heart-wrenching experience,” and so on). Lakoff was arguably the first to apply modern science (cognitive linguistics) in an attempt to rescue metaphor (and poetry) from marginality, restoring it as the basis for scientific thought itself, and thus inverting the traditional hierarchy, which placed logic and literal thinking as superior to figurative and analogical thought. Lakoff’s claim that metaphor, fundamental to poetry, is the mother of scientific invention, suggests that poetry deserves to be restored to a place of prominence among the disciplines, on a par with the sciences; Pope’s refashioning of a scientific text as poetry seems to do just that, by establishing a dialog between the poetry of science and the science of poetry. In Pope’s poem the overarching “science as poetry” metaphor is reflected, not in the relatively “dry” language of science—although an argument could be made for the “poetic” nature of scientific syntax—but in the visual images that evoke embodied, internal image structures. Although Pope “stripped” the poem from verbal images, it is laden with visual analogies and aural actualities that also reconnect it with a sense of the poetic. Whereas the traditional poetic image can be construed as having two distinct components, a verbal and a conceptual one (the word itself and the “image” the reader “sees” conceptually), the visual analogies presented by Pope serve to bridge those two domains, the visual and the conceptual. The reader sees the visual analogy provided by Pope and links it to other images she has conceptualized in her mind’s eye. The conceptual domain in turn refers back to the physical world and to its verbal, visual, and aural representation. For example, the image of the atom serves as a metaphorical reminder of the physical nature and behavior of atoms, enhancing the poetic function in the text as described by Jakobson: Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry. (“Closing Statement” 356) Although Jakobson does not go as far as Lakoff in declaring the poetic function as the origin of language itself, he does reserve for it a clearly important (although apparently not essential or “dominant”) role in any discursive practice, including, implicitly, in the scientific.

92

Radical Poetry

Figure 3.3. Jordi Pope. “Mathematical Poem.” Screen capture.

Among the other four flower sections in Pope’s digital anthology (each linking to a different communication system/poem), if the reader clicks on number 3, she will be confronted by a mathematically inspired image (see Figure 3.3). Poems about mathematics have existed since at least the time of the Sumerians, when the temple hymn to the moon god Nanna was written (“The Herds of Nanna,” 1800 BC), a poem that traces the origins of both numbers and writing, mathematics and literature, to the need to account for the wealth in cattle and grain in the fertile Mesopotamia (Glaz 36). A contemporary of Apollinaire, the lesser-known French avant-gardist Nicolas Beauduin (originator of Paroxysme, a movement similar to Futurism but without the latter’s penchant for violence and destruction) had also used mathematical symbols in his poem “L’homme cosmogonique” (1922). In the Ibero-American context we have many additional examples, demonstrating a spirit of admiration toward mathematics, as captured, for instance, by Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a los números” from his Odas elementales (1954) when the poet says: “¡Qué sed de saber cuánto! ¡Qué hambre de saber cuántas estrellas tiene el cielo! [What thirst to know how much! What hunger to know how many stars are in the sky!]” (173). While Pope’s “poem” makes overt reference to the language of mathematics by representing a cubed root function, it does not immediately reveal its potential meaning(s), and, indeed, it might lead us to think that its sense is really a non-sense.12 In the mathematical universe of square roots there is a specific taxonomy that defines the “√” symbol as the “radical,” while the number to the left is the index, which indicates what “power” root we are dealing with; to the right of the radical is the “radicand,” the number the function operates on. We can

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

93

see that the formula’s index is 3, denoting a cubed root, and the radicand is b + a, but since neither b nor a are provided with a numerical value, the expression is unsolvable. Furthermore, we do not even know if this is an actual equation to be solved (there is no equal sign present anywhere) or just a jumble of symbols and notations assembled to create a sense of the mathematical through a more or less arbitrary visual composition. The work presents itself in a disconcerting, defamiliarizing way: the reader/ viewer is unsure what sort of exegetical operation to perform, but intuits that she is facing a “problem” that demands decoding. Mathematics are present in multiple ways: as the “language” of the poem, perhaps as the “subject” of the poem, but also metaphorically as an “object” of inquiry that the reader can deploy to solve the problem (and perhaps get at some “sense” or solution). The poem seems to be constructed around the metaphor that presents mathematics as a special “language,” a language that science deploys to explore and test abstract concepts. The exploratory potential of mathematical language is illustrated and “literalized” in the poem by the way the reader can use the mouse-over function to explore, test, and investigate the screen space, comprised of active and inactive regions. By moving the mouse, the reader haptically controls a spiral shape that shifts colors and rotates hypnotically, providing a graphical representation or image of an inward journey of discovery, strangely reminiscent of psychedelic patterns, or, to recall our historical avant-garde examples, Futurist and Vorticist images. It is also, arguably, a crude or schematic representation of the labyrinth, bringing to mind Borges’s calling into question of origins, originality, and the limits of representation, his understanding of the universe as a labyrinthine “unreadable” library, and his parody of scientific efforts in stories such as “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Rigor in Science”) (1946), a tale in which cartographers, in their zeal for exactitude, create a useless 1:1 map of a territory. Pope’s poem may also be a critique of the self-referential aspect of mathematics, the way logical systems such as mathematics or language itself tend to “loop” (or spiral) back to themselves, to refer to their own initial postulates, which are assumed to be “given.” This circularity and its ultimate denial of an origin reveals such systems as useful, but ultimately irrational, self-perpetuating, undecidable. At the same time, we might recall that numbers were profusely used as potentially empty signifiers by different avant-garde movements searching for ways to avoid referentiality. Through the visual device of the spiral, Pope’s poem sets up the hypothesis that mathematics might not be a stable, fixed, and universal form of describing reality. The spiraling shape, by suggesting mutability and endless motion, echoes nondeterministic and probabilistic concepts such as

94

Radical Poetry

fractals, nonlinearity, infinity, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, and other manifestations of uncertainty in contemporary mathematics and physics. Using a pseudo-equation further parodies mathematics’ claim to absolute truth, presenting it instead as a highly formalized but enigmatic, mysterious language, which, under its logical veneer, is uncertain and metaphoric, like poetry. The reader is unsure what properties the displayed mathematical object might have, or what exactly—in a traditional mathematical sense—if anything, it is describing or defining. At the same time, however, the visual presence of the spiral reminds the reader that the symbols constitute a notation system that has a possible referent in the form of a graph or graphic image, which might in turn stand in symbolically for something else: in the case of the spiral, a Jungian might see the cosmic and infinite nature of the universe, but it might also stand for something concrete such as the geometry of a seashell, or the propagation of liquid or sound waves. Controlled by the reader, the spiraling shape collides, emitting a bell-like sound, with the static formula; the latter releases a shower of 0s and 1s, signifying the digital binary code that lies—figuratively speaking— just beneath the poem’s surface. The main metaphor presented in the poem, “math as communication” (or perhaps miscommunication), does create a tension caused by surface differences between tenor and vehicle, between math and verbal-visual language. However, some of these differences are smoothed over by the visual and aural play, which stresses their common function as systems of communication and partially sutures the discontinuities. While the repeating single tone sound or “mantra,” heard as the spiral intersects the formula, sets up a Zen-like atmosphere of reflection, or perhaps indicates a metronome’s count (or a monochord’s relationship to math), the silent formula inspires a parallel visual and imaginary prosody.13 It is a kind of secret rhyme, which might be rendered audible as the reader reads or chants the formula to herself, although not necessarily in English, “the cubed root of b plus a divided by negative one,” perhaps reflecting on the mathematics inherent in traditional poetry, filled with structures of repetition, meter, rhyme, syllabic counts, and stanza control. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, enumerates two central impulses in poetry, melos and opsis, which define, respectively, the music of poetry—its sound—and its poetic images—metaphors (244). Jordi Pope’s digital math poem displays both melos and opsis, as it uses mathematical symbols, neither entirely linguistic nor entirely pictorial, in a powerfully intersemiotic structure which leaves a challenging semantic nucleus for the reader to decode and which, once again, reveals the intersecting spaces of script, image, and sound. The metaphors of math as communication, which

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

95

describes the world and conveys abstract thought and shapes, and math as poetry, overlap in Pope’s text where the graphic space and movement overturn any notion of traditional poetic syntax. There are two more poems within Pope’s Communication Systems, and although I will not examine either in depth, I will mention a few relevant details about one of them. It is a curious poem in which Pope establishes a series of names and corresponding symbols, arranged as a table under the title “Nomenclature and Symbols of the System.” Each of the names pertains to a specific wheelchair brand, a poignant correspondence that supports the notion of disability as a communication system, presenting a code which someone similarly disabled, or familiar with wheelchairs, might immediately recognize, but which might require considerable effort for most readers. As a poet suffering from disability, Pope fights back against the “disabling” conception of disease through a veiled metonymic representation of the same disability—the wheelchair acting as an extension of the disabled body—which is sapping his mobility and his voice, but not his power of expression.14 The wheelchair allows for movement, transportation, and thus for translation (as in translational movement and metaphor, meaning transfer), a critical term for poetics, and is also an object often codified by a symbol ( ) that “stands” (pun intended) for disability at large. It is also a hybrid form, both in its pictorial content—a man and a chair united as one—and in its iconic quality, which places it between language and image. Pope appropriates the wheelchair symbol as a kind of metaphor or model for an exercise in translation; in the first screen of the poem he presents a table which also functions as “symbol key,” which displays side by side the names and pictorial symbols for different wheelchair brands, thus translating the verbal and the visual into each other. The poem, as mentioned, is not easily accessible to the “abled” reader, and in this respect it impairs her, renders her “disabled” from an interpretative perspective. While confusion, as well as frustration and rejection, is not a rare effect in reading complex experimental texts, here it is marshaled to challenge the exegetic task of the able bodied, inverting traditional hierarchies. Paradoxically, the wheelchair user will likely recognize at least some of the chair brands (with names such as GUIDO, SHORTES, MEYRA, CRUISER, KÜSCHALL, and STORM) and possibly see in their schematic symbols some visual analogy of the characteristics of each particular model, such as its movement, its propensity to overturn, and so on, or she might otherwise determine that the symbols are purely arbitrary. A reader “embodied” with the necessary knowledge might decipher the code’s enigma, or, possibly, a “tenacious” reader might also painstakingly ferret out its meaning. The communication channel in this system is partially closed, as the

96

Radical Poetry

transmitter and the receptor rely, to a large extent, on a reader who has corporeal knowledge. Access is thus effectively denied, or at least made difficult, to those that lack the experience of disability, whether directly or indirectly acquired. My aim here is not to trivialize or romanticize disability by rendering it as an advantage or a special type of “knowledge,” but to show how Pope activates it to temporarily reverse its status as the opposite of “ability,” indeed to challenge “the presumed stasis of disability” (May and Ferri 2). Although the poem speaks to a very specific type of disability, that of people in wheelchairs, its rendering of how disability is socially constructed by texts and indeed, by discourse can be extended to other types of disabilities. Language and images have been shown to reveal such structural biases of exclusion, as we refer to the “wheelchair-bound,” “AIDS victims,” and, worse yet, the “mentally retarded,” “cripple,” “abnormal,” and so on, as opposed to “wheelchair user,” “person living with AIDS,” etc. Returning to Pope’s poem, the movement of symbols across the screen, which emerge directly from the chair brand names, and slide or roll toward their eventual locations (as they emit vibration-like futuristic sounds), render these visual metaphors expressive and could facilitate the mapping of concepts such as speed and mobility onto what are essentially abstract forms (squares, lines, circles). Through association with other icons—such as the handicapped, or better said, disability symbol—the attentive “abled” reader might render (although always only partially) meaningful the system that is being communicated, one that could transport and carry—in keeping with the meaning of metaphor—the reader (abled) to a new, more empathetic, domain of understanding the disabled. By undergoing the experience of a text that “disables” the reader, she might—provided she eventually decodes or acquires the knowledge of the wheelchair brand names— experience how the world is constructed to render one as “disabled,” simply because of a bodily difference. The image of the sliding chair symbols functions as a multiple metaphor (etymologically from metapherein, from meta- “over, across” + pherein- “to carry, bear”): as the wheelchair carries the person, so does the metaphor (ideally) carry the understanding of the reader to a greater sensibility regarding disability issues. Hence, the poem is politically inflected by a perspective that advocates for disability issues poetically. In fact, the poem requires the reader to become figuratively “disabled” and to struggle with a task, which is “natural” to the disabled (but only because the poem is constructed thus, and obviously, only to those familiar with wheelchair brands), thereby, once again, subverting traditional roles. Although Pope was confined to his home, the digital medium allowed him to remain an active experimental poet until his death; the poem examined here was

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

97

among his last works. Ultimately, through the autobiographical references, Pope inscribes himself into the poem, which might be read as a bittersweet reflection on his own disability and impending death, saving part of himself for a virtual “afterlife.” Perhaps fittingly, after the dynamic effects subside, the screen becomes still, silent, peacefully tranquil. Although she did not, to my knowledge, know Pope, the next poet I examine shares much with his work, both in regard to uniting poetry and science and in strengthening the possibilities of textual, visual, and aural metaphors in digital poetry. Metaphors and Metamorphoses in Olga Delgado’s Digital Love Poems

The transposition or translation of science and mathematics into the world of poetry, as well as the influence from mathematical modes of thinking and the use of technological models and analogies, appears to be a recurring element in digital poetry. It is therefore not surprising that Olga Delgado, another contemporary digital poet from Barcelona, holds a PhD in Biology and leads a double life as a research scientist and experimental poet and painter. Delgado traces her work to a long tradition of experimental poetry, at once imagistic and minimalist, which originated with William Blake’s illuminated poems (product of the newly developed printmaking technology called relief etching), moved through Stéphane Mallarmé’s typographic poem Un coup de dés (1897), and continued with the French group Oulipo’s mathematical poetry, the Catalan Joan Brossa’s object poetry, and the Spaniard Felipe Boso’s visual poems. Delgado’s “La Dona Que Camina” (“The Woman Who Walks”) (2002), relies on the diagram as a metaphor for love’s journey, a device that at first seems somewhat cliché, but works well here on account of the poem’s skillful integration of content and technical virtuosity. “La Dona” uses subway mapping symbols in order to relate schematic cartography to poetry, and hence the technical to the figurative, rendering the “diagram” as simultaneously readable and viewable. The interactive subway diagram provided by Delgado, which is also an index, visually cites the iconic maps of Barcelona’s metro lines, a map whose style is common to most modern urban transportation systems. Clicking on any subway station takes the reader/viewer to the individual poems or subway “stops.” All the poems are highly kinetic and hybrid works in which images and script transform and flow into each other in a dazzling array of shape shifting. The subway line is thematically arranged around the concept of “love,” specifically the metaphor “love as journey,” and each stop offers a different perspective on the subject, resulting in an affective map the reader can traverse

98

Radical Poetry

in multiple ways. Although the subway line has a start and a finish, there is no immediately discernible logic to the progression of the poems, and one can begin by clicking on any “stop.” Beyond depicting the postmodern love journey as fragmented and episodic, as rife with “stops” and “starts,” the lack of emphasis on a “final destination” seems to stress the notion of process, creating an appropriate sense of whimsicality, perhaps promiscuity, adequate to the elusive subject “love,” even in its ostensibly more “permanent” manifestations (i.e., marriage). If the trajectory involves some transfer of meaning or knowledge, it is because “love” as an experience has as many possible outcomes and endpoints as those suggested by the multiple subway line stations, which are also each a distinct poem. As a rather original method of “indexing” the individual poems, the multiple access points avoid the inflexibility and hierarchization of the traditional index in print poetry, creating unexpected connections between individual poems and diminishing the primacy of front-to-back reading. As the reader chooses, perhaps arbitrarily, her itinerary, she creates one type of love narrative or another, permitting a circular return to the poem’s diagram to give love another try. The work does not provide a single model of love, but rather a visual map, containing text and iconic images, which metaphorically associates the recognizable and concrete activity of subway travel to the affective and more accident-prone vicissitudes of the love journey. The first screen displayed to the reader (see Figure 3.4) shows the schematic subway diagram and a mock LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) sign that reads “Paraules amb atributs” (Words with attributes), meaning words with physical characteristics, again recalling Futurism’s belief in the tangible “materiality” of the word set free. Also reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) and its multiple reading options, the reader/viewer of “La Dona” can choose between the direct “express” journey, an estimated eight minute sequential itinerary through all the poems, or individual trajectories to any one poem following her own inclination, an approach that is, as previously mentioned, closer to the poem’s notion of love. While Delgado makes available the “express” option, which mimics the subway’s linear and sequential motion, it is the nonlinear approach that is arguably best suited to the online medium, “marrying,” so to speak, the idea of the journey with that of the hyperlink, with the ability to defy the spatiotemporal stasis of print with a more flexible type of reading. Here, I am inclined to digress in order to compare Delgado’s poem with one of its Imagist predecessors. While it is uncertain whether Delgado is alluding to the Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) by Ezra Pound (whom she cites as an influence), it certainly shares its emphasis on visuality. Pound’s poem reads: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough” (Axelrod 663). A model of precise language inspired by Japanese haiku, Pound’s poem points

Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise

99

to a tension generated by the distance between the two terms of the analogy, the faces (“these faces”) in the crowd and the petals on a bough, triggering an intensely “visual” reader experience. Yet while Pound “figures” a mental image, Delgado adds a more explicitly ocular visuality to her work. Like Pound, Delgado has chosen disparate terms for her metaphor, subway and love, with the hope of enhancing the poem’s visuality, further materializing or literalizing Pound’s verbal metaphoric style by mixing images with script. Clicking on the first stop, titled “Metamorfosi” (Metamorphosis), the reader sees the word metamorfosi flying into the plane of the screen, and then observes how the word amor separates from it (met amor fosi). Amor then transforms into an initially red heart, which then pulsates with different colors and is finally converted into a petrified grey-green shape, which is pierced by thorns and eventually disappears. Thus, through a complex visual metaphor Delgado bridges temporalities, relating classical mythology (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with the subway diagram, a symbol of modern travel—and also of a journey that, suddenly, derails.15 The metamorphosis from word to image is almost seamless, as the letters from “amor” merge together—like Jordi Pope’s word atoms—into the iconic heart-shaped symbol. The letters “materialize,” becoming objects that signify isomorphically, that is, they mimic the properties and behavior of the item they describe. They do so first by turning red, the color of blood, passion, and the heart, and then by adopting the shape of the organ that metaphorically and iconically symbolizes for

Figure 3.4. Olga Delgado. “La dona que camina” (“The Woman Who Walks”). Screen capture.

100

Radical Poetry

the concept of love: the heart. Delgado’s poem is perhaps a reference to Apollinaire’s early Cubist calligram (“Coeur, Couronne, Miroir,” 1918) in which a heart-shaped poem reads “Mon coeur pareil à une flamme renversée [my heart resembles an inverted flame].” Like the letters, the heart in Delgado’s poem also undergoes a process of “embodiment,” starting from the commonplace two-dimensional icon commercially exploited in pop culture ever since Milton Glaser and Bobby Zarem created the famed “I love NY” rebus (1977), and gradually transforms into a seemingly three-dimensional heart shape, which is anatomically incorrect but nonetheless appears considerably more realistic than its schematic counterpart. What Glaser’s rebus and the morphing kinetics of Delgado’s poem share (also the emoticons that are now ubiquitous shortcuts in digital communication, such as “