TEXT AS DESIGN
Introduction
What is a poem?
The intrinsic freedom of poetic creation makes it difficult for literary theory to define and delimit it. When we try, we are often left with the impression that any proposed description excludes some author or poem we know. As we mentioned in the introduction, a poem is anything except that which is not a poem.
If we focus on the written poem—the one that can be inscribed with symbols on a page—and accept the inevitable exceptions, there is one element that distinguishes it from non-poetic texts: its design. A poem is almost always written in verse, includes blank spaces, and has a beginning and an end that are visible at first glance. It is not confined to an established format or a fixed syntactic framework. Every margin, every line break, every space forms part of the creative act. It is from this plasticity that we will examine the design of the poem and its potential.
Background and References
There are many precedents for the graphic representation of poetry throughout history, but for this course we have chosen two turning points that we consider particularly relevant. In many ways, contemporary ideas about art and creation are heirs to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Their break with what had existed before was so intense and transformative that virtually every theory of art that looks to the past still passes through that filter.
For our purposes, we take Guillaume Apollinaire—a Cubist poet of multiple nationalities, though best known as French—as a point of departure. He represents a watershed in the visual conception of poetry. He believed that the act of creation should be grounded in imagination while remaining faithful to life and nature, and he promoted a humanism based on knowledge and aligned with science. In his work, this translated into a harmony between content and form.
In pursuit of that harmony, Apollinaire worked with remarkable freedom. He was a versatile and diverse creator; in some works he employed meter and rhyme, while in others he used free verse or a combination of both. He interrupted words, broke lines in unexpected places, juxtaposed humor and sarcasm with grand statements, mixed the vulgar with the refined, and also explored and popularized the calligram.
The term, derived from the French calligramme, refers to a poetic form in which the poem (a word, phrase, or verse) is arranged to create a figure related to its subject matter, thereby becoming an image. The concept had existed and been practiced for centuries, especially in Arabic poetry, but it is through Apollinaire that it entered the literary and artistic modernity of the West.
Calligramme, Apollinaire, 1918
Greetings, world, of which I am the eloquent tongue,
whose mouth, O Paris, hurls and will always hurl itself
against the Germans.
But the calligram is not the only way to give graphic value to a poem. Simply becoming conscious of space creates a broader communicative alternative. The second example we will mention is concrete poetry, sometimes referred to as the Brazilian or Latin American concretist movement.
The movement began in São Paulo, Brazil, in the mid-twentieth century with the creation of the Noigandres group, composed of Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos. The group rejected the ideas of Apollinaire and the avant-gardes, as well as any conception of art linked to imagination, irrationality, or sensuality. They proposed instead a structured and conceptual vision of poetry, composed with dedication and intelligence, coordinated in both space and time.
Haroldo de Campos, Nascemorre, 1958
One of the group’s greatest contributions was its dissolution of the boundaries between disciplines. They conceived poetry as a concept that transcended literature; they collaborated with visual artists, musicians, and singers. Their aesthetic influence can be seen in diverse fields such as architecture and landscape design. Concrete poetry was subsequently developed by many other contemporary and later creators.
Clemente Padín, Paz = Pan, 1980
Eugen Gomringer, Do You Think, 2005
Conclusions and Learnings
As poets, we carry an aesthetic vision and a means of communicating with the world. Our object of study—the poem—is in constant movement and renewal. Any attempt to define it is necessarily precarious and does not arise solely from theoretical reflection, but rather through the practice of writing and our growing awareness of the elements involved in that process.
Understanding the poem as an image, whether intentionally or not, allows us to approach more closely what readers or spectators perceive when encountering the finished work. Experimenting with this idea deepens our understanding of our own practice and of the tools that shape it. Whether through Apollinaire’s spontaneity or the rationality of the concretists, we can strengthen the poem in its many dimensions and discover new avenues for communication and self-reflection.
It is also interesting to observe that, despite their radical breaks with previous concepts and their search for new forms of expression, the examples cited here share many common features. They brought into prominence aspects of the text that literature had largely overlooked. These values are present in our own works, whether we consciously employ them or leave them to chance. Visual communication becomes especially significant when we seek to transcend linguistic boundaries and the inevitable weight of meaning carried by words.
Augusto de Campos, Luxo, 1965
In Augusto de Campos’s poem Luxo, one observes the word lixo (“trash”) formed through repetitions of the word luxo (“luxury”). Through this simple gesture, the author reveals the interrelationship between two concepts, making use of their graphic and phonetic similarity to achieve a moving and profound effect. Yet if we consider the work as a whole, it also serves as an example of communication through minimal means: a simple footnote translating two words is enough to transform it into a universal poem.
Based on the ideas presented here, we propose that each participant investigate their own work and reflect on which elements of these movements support or complement their personal expressiveness, what part of this inheritance speaks to them, and how it might enable them to understand creation from perspectives they had not previously considered.