Radical Poetry

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

Eduardo Ledesma

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438462028
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens.

1

The Historical Avant-Gardes

Futurist Metaphors

Introduction: Text and Image before the Digital

Despite 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).

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 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. 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.

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, 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),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Overview
• 1. The Historical Avant-Gardes: Futurist Metaphors
• 2. The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes: A Political Turn
• 3. Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise: An Introduction to Digital Poetry
• 4. Modernisms on the Move: Mechanic, Kinetic, Cinematic
• 5. Letters and Lettrism: Deconstructing the New Vanguards
• 6. Latin American Digital Poetry: Animated Embodiment
• 7. Modernismo: Cannibalistic Appropriation and Advertisement
• 8. Concrete Aesthetics: Abstraction, Mass Media, and Ideology
• 9. Luso-Brazilian E-Poetry and Performance
• Conclusion: Toward a Radical Aesthetics of the Digital?
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover