Stream of Concrete

Tom asks in his blog post, how is concrete poetry different from comics and I wonder how concrete poetry is different from visual arts. Would a poet working in the concrete be better suited in an English department or an art department? Shouldn't they should have access to screen printing equipment, paint, wood etc ?

Using text as visual material is the obvious connection between digital poetry and concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is meant to be self contained, but it also knows that when it uses words like "heart" and "head" (DeCampos) or typographical symbols, that the material it's using is a flexible and endlessly meaningful one. What is the grammar of pictures of eyeballs stacked upon each other or letters and symbols torn from context and floating on a page? I just read Gertrude Stein's "Poetry and Grammar" again recently and I couldn't help make a connection between her curiosities with disrupting grammar in order to free up the noun, and concrete poetry. Perhaps stripping language of its grammar, by depending heavily on its typographical semantics rather than its denotation and connotation, is another way of freeing language. What are the implications of a language free from meaning? I don't mean socio-political,though there are certainly implications there. What I mean is what is interesting about a language free from meaning? Besides my skepticism as to whether this is even possible I think one answer is an idea dada might have been after: if we free language we can start over building meaning.

One thing that concrete poetry and digital poetry do very well is point out the arbitrariness of language and of meaning making systems in general. That is at least one of the reasons why many of us poets and scholars of literature tend to cringe at the pieces that reduce language to a pyramid of eyeballs. We know that language is more than that, concrete poets and digital poets must also know that so in essence, artists working in the concrete (whether its digital or print) are pushing up against meaning making as an idea and even destroying it. How frustrating for us who spend our lives as artists trying to find and express meaning. What this conflict tells me is that (enter Stein again) our world is what we call it so why aren't we calling it something else? However, like most things, it is much easier to destroy something (especially meaning) than it is to create it. For example, I can create a concrete poem on the concrete poem generator with one click and a drag. Do you know how many freaking hours a five minute video art piece (that I want to mean something) takes me? Hundreds of hours.

But this goes back to my skepticism. Even my one-second concrete poem has meaning. Even the eyeball pyramid is playing with what our idea of language is and with what makes meaningful symbols. The concrete poem I just made consists of a huge letter K, and a little @ sign that evoked plenty of meaning to me. I thought of K, slang for the drug Ketamine, then K-hole (the state of mind), then K - Hole (the coco rosie song), then my friend Derrick who likes/ed Ketamine and Coco Rosie and whose name ends with a K. The associations, the meaningful associations that my mind created were there in that one symbol. This brings me back however to how similar this is to visual art and painting. We see a picture of an oak tree and we get associations like we do with that K, but not like we're reading Dickinson.