introductionxxxiiiter’s collages, made from findings in the street, and to his Merz work (a
scrap from the noun Kommerz, or commerce); to Tristan Tzara’s words
cut from a newspaper and jumbled in a hat; to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-
mades and the Surrealists’ collective experiments in creating automatic
poetry—all leading to the aleatory experiments of Lionel Ray and other
contemporary French poets and to the cut-ups of the Americans Brion
Gysin and William Burroughs. The ‘‘combine’’ art of contemporary
American artists, especially that of Robert Rauschenberg, who included
ordinary objects in his work, is closely related to the found poems and
‘‘found objects’’ (les objets trouvés) of the Cubist and Surrealist poets, as
well as to Apollinaire’s poèmes-conversation (conversation poems). What
you find in the street or on the Web—all these constitute, inevitably, a sort
of reticulated combination poem-painting, a spatialized discourse.
Of course, in France the visual and the verbal were never compart-
mentalized. Like Cubism in art, contemporaneous poetry similarly in-
volved the idea of looking at one object from several points of view.
Although Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob would have rejected the label
Cubist as having nothing essential to say about their compositions, it is in
fact a useful reference. Reverdy insisted, in his famous essay on the theory
of ‘‘the Image,’’ that poetry was to be composed of two di√erent elements
from two di√erent realms. The shock of their meeting would give o√ new
creative light, allowing new ways of perceiving. This procedure carried
straight over to Surrealism and its concept of the image as a composition
of farflung elements. Guillaume Apollinaire, the best known of the Cubist
poets, exemplified poetic experimentation in his Alcools (1913), drawing
on the ancient Latin-Christian tradition of ideogrammatic poetry, in
which poems formed pictures—the other side of the concrete poetry so
influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé’s typographical experiment, already
visible in the idéogrammes of Paul Claudel. The emphasis on plastic po-
etry, by way of Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre Reverdy, made way
for visual poetics. The juncture of painting and poetry has yielded such
enthusiastic exhibitions and publications as Poésure et peintrie: ‘‘D’un art,
l’autre’’ (Poeting and Paintry) and Yves Peyré’s Peinture et poésie: Le Di-
alogue par le livre, 1874–2000) (Painting and Poetry: the Dialogue through
the Book.)∞∂
Fascination with the spatial has only increased with time. Witness the
international excitement of Concrete Poetry: the work of the Swiss poet
Eugen Gomringer, who, along with Decio Pignatari, August and Haroldo
de Campos, and Mario de Andrade, founded the Noigandres Group; the
poetry of the Scot Ian Hamilton Finlay and the American Emmet Wil-
liams (and later John Hollander, May Swenson, and many others); and
the work of numerous poets in Japan, Argentina, Spain, Italy, and France.