Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

In Poem #4, the decisive bell gives way to the contrasting sound of the
“wood / wind,” and in #5, that motif is developed:

c h o r d

o o o

W O O D

o o o o o

W I N D

o o o

c l o u d

dark-clouded

spring birds

lark-colored

spring clods

loud strings

Here is an example of the heterophony La Grange describes in Mahler. The
letters and phonemes repeat with delicate variations: we see and hear the
opening “chord,” played on the woodwinds and ¤nally transformed (per-
haps under the pressure of “wind”?) into a reprise of the “cloud” of poem
#2. The little coda brings back the “dark” and “cloud” of that earlier lyric,
transforms “dark” into the “lark” of spring, “cloud” into “clods” as well as its
rhyming partner “loud,” and signals the shift from wind instruments to
strings. Strings further echoes “spring,” substituting only one phoneme, even
as “colored” is almost equivalent phonemically to “clouded.” And of course
“wood wind” refers here not only to musical instruments but also to the
“earth” of poem #1 and the “cloud” of #2. Squares within squares and echo
structures throughout provide a delicate exercise in sameness and difference.
The two central poems, #6 and #7, present a slightly different develop-
ment. One of the ¤rst and most famous exhibits of the Concrete movement
was Eugen Gomringer’s “Wind”:^10

w w

d i

n n n

i d i d

w w

Johnson’s Verbivocovisuals 199