The Honors Program Distinguished Lecture Series: “What’s Concrete about Concrete Poetry?”
Patrick Greaney, professor of German studies and humanities and director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Critical Theory, gave a talk, “What’s Concrete about Concrete Poetry?” Tuesday evening at CU. Invited by The Honors Program Distinguished Lecture Series, Greaney gave context to concrete poetry’s contribution to literary history.
Concrete poetry is “poetry in which the meaning or effect is conveyed partly or wholly by visual means, using patterns of words or letters and other typographical devices.”
To Greaney, concrete poetry is a universal emphasis on the visual aspects of language. Concreteness draws on art history and also marginal aspects of other histories, making it a wide field to study.
“I like to examine how the explicit desire for the concrete inspires artists and poets to push boundaries,” said Greaney.
One example was from Austrian poet Heimrad Backer, who presented documents from the holocaust in a poetic format. Through this, Backer conveyed a new understanding of this genocide, relating a historical, original document to the present through the concrete experience.
The reconstruction of Nazi language into a documentary art, or concrete poetry, offers a new insight to symbolize the era.
Greaney admitted concrete poetry comes in all languages, so he cannot have access to all of it. However, through its means as a visual poetry, he sees multiple ways of reading a text, as the same words can be read in different ways to produce different meanings. Through concrete poetry, readers must scan up and down, across languages.
“Concrete poetry is a seeing art that extends beyond itself,” said Greaney. “It enables nonlinear reading, extending to literary history.”
The image on the poster for this talk represented gas used to assassinate political enemies under the pinochet in chile. By representing the symbol through concrete poetry, a deeper understanding of a past event is able to surface to the present as a visual art.
Greaney is working on his next book about the desire for concreteness in art poetry and philosophy from the 1950s to present.
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