Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Mary Ellen Solt writes:

Had [Gomringer] simply printed the word “wind” in the center of the

page, it would simply have sat there. Arranging it spatially so that we

can read the word in four directions, he is able to introduce an element

of play into the “reading” of the poem that captures the nature of the

wind far more truly than a longer poetic statement of many words. The

letters actually seem to ®oat as if the wind were acting upon them.

(Concrete Poetry, 9)

Such iconicit y, carr ying on the tradit ion of such avant-garde poems as Apol-
linaire’s calligrammes (e.g., “Il pleut”) and characteristic of ¤rst-stage Con-
crete poetry, has since been called into question. Can letters and words ac-
tually represent the signi¤ed, in this case the wind itself? Johnson was surely
aware of this discussion when he produced his two constellations:

poem upon poem

form from form

from form from

form from form

open open open

m i n d

i n

n i

d n I w

w d

i n

i n

w g

Here “poem upon poem” alludes to the Gomringer derivation as well as to
the relation of #6 to the earlier and later lyrics in the sequence. Change a
single phoneme in “form” and you have “from”; “form,” moreover, literally
comes “from” a prior form and is in turn “open” to a new one. Here, more-
over, “wind” is not represented in its supposedly actual movement and effect,

200 Chapter 10