Visual poetry of Ukrainian-Canadian émigré literature

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Visual (concrete) poetry is the original part of the poetic art that can be positioned as the synthesis of literature and fine arts. It took a position as poetry of objectivity. Visual poetry has a long, complicated and contested history. However, for most scholars considered the emerge of contemporary concrete and visual poetry just before the official “International Concrete Poetry Movement” (1955–1970) with the works of Mallarmé and others involved in various Avant Garde movements interested in materialist aesthetics (such as Cubism, Dadaism, Vorticism, and Futurism). Obviously the birth of concrete poetry did not happen ex nihilo, and even the “creators” of the genre acknowledged their “predecessors”: Mallarme, Pound, Joyce, Cummings, and Apollinaire from literature; Mondrian and Max Bill from painting; Eisenstein from cinema; Webern from music 1 . In 1952 three poets in Sao Paulo (Brazil) – Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari – formed a group for which they took the name “Noigandres”. In the first half of 1953 Augusto de Campos wrote the first systematic set of poems which gave body to the new formal concept: a series of poems entitled “Poetamenos” inspired by the “Klangfarbenmelodie” (“Tone-Color Melodies”) of Anton Webern. The poems from “Poetamenos” are intended for both eye and ear. The colors function as directions for reading (male and female voices in “eis os sem senão os corpos”) and to designate word themes. It occurred to Augusto de Campos to use “luminous letters which could automatically switch on and off as in street advertisements” in the presentation of the “Poetamenos” poems, “but there was no money” so he used colors instead 2 . All definitions of concrete poetry can be reduced to the same formula: form = content/content = form. Individual poets tend to say this in less general terms to suit their own solutions of the form-content problem. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself not an interpreter of exterior