secondary voices—pre¤guring one of the basic principles of Schoenberg’s se-
rial composition, ‘total thematicism’ ”; and (2) “heterophony (or ‘imprecise
union’), a principle in which a melody and an ornamented or varied version
of it are heard simultaneously, or in which identical voices diverge slightly in
rhythm or in interval structure.”^3
These principles, as we shall see, also operate in Johnson’s Songs of the
Earth, where the Mahlerian themes of love and death are treated to the con-
centration and simpli¤cation characteristic of the Chinese lyric. Mahler’s six
songs—“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow,” “The Lonely One in Au-
tumn,” “Youth,” “Of Beauty,” “The Drunkard in Spring,” and “The Farewell”
—become Johnson’s twelve condensed “squarings”: the composer’s delicate
sonorities and exquisite orchestral re¤nements, ¤ltered through the mini-
malism of Li Po and Wang-Wei, provide the impetus for Johnson’s particular
brand of Concrete poetry.
The founders of the Concrete movement—Eugen Gomringer of Switzer-
land and the Noigandres group of Brazil—equated “concrete” largely with the
visual aspect of the poem. “Concrete Poetry,” wrote Gomringer in 1960, “is
the general term which includes a large number of poetic-linguistic experi-
ments, characterized—whether constellation, ideogram, stochastic poetry,
etc.—by conscious study of the material and its structure.” This new poetry,
emphasizing as it does “formal pattern” in “reduced language,” should be “as
easily understood as signs in airports and traf¤c signs.”^4 And Noigandres
similarly focuses on “graphic space as structural agent” rather than “mere
linear-temporistical development.”^5 Central to their concept of the concrete
poem was the Poundian ideogram, and although the ideogram was de¤ned
in Joycean terms as “verbivocovisual,” Noigandres concerned itself with ty-
pography, word and letter placement, and spatial disposition rather than
sound as such.^6 Concrete poetry, after all, was poetry to be seen.
The one early Concretist who quali¤es this emphasis on visual art was the
great Swedish poet-artist Oy vind Fahlström. In discussing various verbal
systems in his “Manifesto for Concrete Poetry” (1953),^7 Fahlström remarks:
“I can construct... for example, a series of 12 vowels in a certain succession
and make tables accordingly, even though a twelve vowel series as such does
not make the same sense as the series of the twelve-tone chromatic scale”
(75). And again:
Above all I think that the rhy thmic aspect contains unimagined
possibilities. Not only in music is rhy thm the most elementary, directly
physically grasping means for effect; which is the joy of recognizing
something known before, the importance of repeating; which has aJohnson’s Verbivocovisuals 195