- Gertrude Stein, “An Acquaintance with Description” (1929), in A Stein Reader,
ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 507.
Chapter 9
- Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1971), 71. - Dick Higgins, “Concrete Poetry,” Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex
Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 233. - Solt explains: “In 1952... three poets in Sao Paulo, Brazil—Haroldo de Cam-
pos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari—formed a group for which they took
the name Noigandres from Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In Canto X X, coming upon the
word in the works of Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal troubadour, old Lév y exclaimed:
‘Noigandres, eh, noigandres / Now what the deffil can that mean!’ This puzzling
word suited the purposes of the three Brazilian poets very well; for they were work-
ing to de¤ne a new formal concept” (Concrete Poetry, 12). - Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Basis of Concrete Poetry,” Bucknell Review (fall 1976):
141–51, 143–44. - Ibid., 141. The “Pilot Plan” of Noigandres similarly talks of “space-time struc-
ture instead of mere linear-temporistical development” (Solt, Concrete Poetry, 71). - Solt, Concrete Poetry, 101. For her own translation, see page 102. In her notes,
as recorded by Haroldo himself in a note to the author, Solt gives the following verbal
equivalents. Fala means both “speech” and “speak” (imperative verb); cala is also an
imperative verb, which means “be quiet,” and, by analog y to fala, can be read as “si-
lence.” Cara = “heads” (literally “face”), coroa = “tails” (literally “crown”), para = “to
stop,” and clara = “clear.” The poem dates from 1962. - Solt (102) reads the poem somewhat differently: “When the play stops, silence
may turn to silver, speech may turn to gold (but only if speech is clear).” The refer-
ence to the clarity of language makes this, according to Solt, a reference to the Con-
crete poem itself. - Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” The New Sentence (New York: Roof
Books, 1992), 63–93. In “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and
Practice,” The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 61, Bob Perelman summarizes the
“new sentence” as follows: “A new sentence is more or less ordinary itself, but gains its
effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance.
... Parataxis is crucial: the autonomous meaning of a sentence is heightened, ques-
tioned, and changed by the degree of separation or connection that the reader per-
ceives with regard to the surrounding sentences. This is on the immediate formal
level. From a larger perspective, the new sentence arises out of an attempt to rede¤ne
genres; the tension between parataxis and narrative is basic” (61). - R. P. Draper, “Concrete Poetry,” New Literary History 2, no. 2 (winter 1971):
329–40, 337.
292 Notes to Pages 174–177