Playing with Forms and with Concepts of ‘Form’: Proportion, Symmetry, and Seriality in Modern Visual Poetry

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.