Author
Abstract
Starting from a distinction between different historical and philosophical concepts of ‘form’ as they have been discussed by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, this article argues that visual poetry is constituted and concretely shaped by its implicit, sometimes even explicit, reflection upon ‘form’. In three paragraphs different concepts of ‘form’ are briefly discussed with regard to selected examples of visual poems: (1) form as ‘proportion’; (2) form as the counter-concept of ‘content’; and (3) form in the sense of ‘contour’. The first part focuses on examples of twentieth-century visual poetry playing with the sonnet form and exposes its rigidly proportional visual structure. In addition, the strategy of turning form to serial account is illustrated. There is a long tradition of engaging with the sonnetʼs history and generic features via the very sonnet form, either in order to defend this highly artificial poetic genre (as an example by August Wilhelm Schlegel illustrates), or in order to criticize or parody it. Visual poetry sonnets reduce this poetic genre to its proportions, thus questioning under which preconditions the reader identifies a ‘sonnet’ at all. The second section of the article presents two examples of concrete visual poetry (by Eugen Gomringer and Mathias Goeritz) that play with the notion of ‘content’ by foregrounding this ludic element and the poetic processes that are represented indirectly by the respective poems’ visual structure. The third section is dedicated to the complementary concepts of ‘outline’ and ‘dissolved contours’, focusing on the contrast between traditional instances of the contour poem and more recent examples (Carlfriedrich Claus, Eugen Gomringer) which expose the tension between form and its dissolution.
Suggested Citation
Schmitz-Emans, Monika, 2021.
"Playing with Forms and with Concepts of ‘Form’: Proportion, Symmetry, and Seriality in Modern Visual Poetry,"
European Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 29(2), pages 285-296, April.
Handle:
RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:29:y:2021:i:2:p:285-296_10
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:29:y:2021:i:2:p:285-296_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/erw .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.