Concrete Poetry and the DP

"The essential is reduced language."

Mary Ellen Scott

"Concrete Poetry is 'I'-less. . . .Poet: dissolved, issues no orders to reader who has to provide his own mind-gum syntax"

don Sylvester Houedard

Concrete poetry, as described by both Mary Ellen Scott and don Sylvester Houedard, aims for a "semantic economy".

The reduction of a poem, away from emotional conveyance and intellectual intention, to its material element, language, is one that I have always found compelling and interesting. The performativity of a reduced semantic economy: Ian Hamilton Finlay's concrete work is a direct allusion to his later construction of Little Sparta, his garden of embodied poetics. Houedard alludes to the work of Allen Kaprow, famous for his Happenings, installation pieces that broke down the boundaries between audience and art object; later in Kaprow's work, the touching of another's face, intentionally and consciously, became a work of art in this theories of a lived art practice. In both instances, and in concrete poetry itself, I sense a immense focus on a being-with the art object: the concrete poem is not something one consumes, interprets or analyzes; rather, it is something one experiences and dwells with (in the Heideggerian sense). And like Heidegger, concrete poetry, as a spatially located object in the world that one experiences one may possibly come to dwell in the poetic after its building; this is one aspect of concrete poetry, as fully manifested in Finlay's later constructions and Kaprow's immediately embodied works, that I think I can relate to digital poetics: one undergoes the experience of a digital poem, one does not passively receive or interpret. However, in order to come to the level of dwelling that Heidegger speaks for in Building, Dwelling, Thinkings, one must have the capacity, to some degree, to be cognitive of one's mortality and thus fully come toward one's living in the world. I'm not sure if I've seen such digital poetry of such mortal recognition? One might ask, does Finlay arrive at this idea? I think so, Little Sparta is a living and embodied work, where Finlay came to live. Kaprow's later work is an investment in life as life (see his writings collected in "Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life" ). This is where it gets quirky, as I think about, a concrete poem is invested in a reduced economy, a "pure" employment of language as material: how does one convey a consciousness of mortality with such limited means so that one may dwell in the art object?