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52TRANSITION FROM XX CENTURY CONCRETE POETRY TO XXI CENTURY DIGITAL POETRY
AS A NEW STEP OF GENRE EVOLUTION
Lukianets T.
National University of Ukraine on Physical Education and Sports, Kyiv, Ukraine, Ph.D. in Philology, Assistant Professor, Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Languages
Abstract
This paper examines a poetic literary genre regarding its subsequent transformation from concrete poetry to digital and/or video poetry. Poems of this genre have been studied from in historical perspective to prove that concrete poetry comes from a shaped poetry, arranging letters or/and words into a symbolic form. Later it develops into visual poetry, in which visual component prevails over verbal as in fine arts. The emergence of IT leads to creation of digital poetry as multimodal texts that are presented in electronic format combining visual, auditory and other plates of aesthetic expression on the screen, making it flexible, moveable and vague. Moreover, digital poetry violates the idea of a single author, involving not only software, but also its readers/viewers into creative process.
Given the distinctive features of this poetic genre, we have outlined its three main functions, such as artistic expression, communication and teaching purposes. Thus, it has been proven that new progressive way of creating this poetry has revealed its great functional potential.
Keywords: concrete poetry, visual poetry, digital and/or video poetry, genre evolution.
Introduction
Poetry has always been the most vivid form of literary presentation aiming at aesthetic expression of poet's thoughts and emotions evoking the same in response. With time passing century by century this rhythmic form of literature has been changing significantly moving from conventional forms created with the help of classical stylistic devices of assonance, alliteration and rhythm to new ambiguous non-traditional forms that reject established structure of poem yet preserving full diversity of aesthetic expression.
Phenomenon of visual poetry, often referred to as concrete poetry [10, p. 15] that originated as early as in few centuries BC and has revived again and again through subsequent epochs, is especially of great value for this linguistic research not only due to its prominent content, but also because of its inspirational visual form. The latter has served as a transitional means of implementing XX - XXI century technological innovations in conventions of poetic language. These artistic experiments with new forms and modes of literary presentation have led to the emergence of digital poetry, known as e-poetry [7, p. 35] or web-poetry as well. It seems to be the logical outcome, as genres tend to evolve over time; however, what creates special interest to the above-described change is that multimodal format of its creation has led to an interactive mode of its functioning.
This paper is devoted to the study of poetic transformations that have taken place within the genre as well as defining its functional potential to be used for artistic expression, communication and teaching purposes. The above-mentioned purpose of this article is involves completion of the following tasks: 1) outlining genre specificity of concrete, visual and digital and/or video poetry as successive modifications of contemporary poetry; 2) providing vivid examples of poems with their further lingual and aesthetic analysis; 3) establishing functional value of the studied literary forms.
Poetry Genre Progression
Visual poetry of both XX and XXI century has undergone significant modifications in its form and mode of existence that resulted in the emergence of a new genre - digital poetry.
Concrete poetry is currently used as an umbrella term to refer to poems with unique typographic arrangement of the letters, words or sentences in the chosen shape or pattern [10]. It generates specific meaning via overlapping of its visual and verbal components, creating visual message with hidden words or letters in it. Historically, concrete poetry comes from a shaped poetry in ancient Greek tradition that experienced its post-Classical revival during the Renaissance. However, it was XX century when poets of Germany, Sweden and Brazil simultaneously relaunched this genre using not only typographic mechanisms of text layout on the page, but also applying artistic techniques to put textual and visual modes together. It is necessary to mention influence of artistic avant-garde movements of Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism in making emphasis on structure more than on content.
The popularity of this genre reached its peak in the 50-ies of XX century, when the term "concrete poetry" was coined in Sao Paulo, inspired by Carlos Drum-mond de Andrade. Then in the 60-ies new forms of concrete poetry appeared, interpreting sounds within the poem or exploring possible misinterpretations of visual and verbal elements when being discovered in isolation or clapped with each other [5, p. 37]. Despite syn-chronic blurring of boundaries between verbal and visual modes of perception within this literary form, image still prevails over text, emphasising structural construction of poem over its content. Take for example, Mary Ellen Solt's "FORSYTHIA" (Fig. 1), which depicts the plant of forsythia with the letters of this word forming the swinging branches and overall shape of this flower. The background yellow colour corresponds to the natural tint of the plant thus adding one more visual characteristic to minimal verbal description.
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Figure 1. Mary Ellen Soifs "FORSYTHIA", 1966
Therefore, concrete poetry gains features of visual poetry, used by Dick Higgins [2] in its broad meaning as the "intermedium" between visual and literary art. Contrary to concrete poetry as the letter-based kind of poetic form, visual poetry turns words into a piece of art, integrating them in visual plate. Visual design is likely to obtain graphic features which are explicit for interpretation, while text should be reinterpreted in relation to dominant graphic form. Visual poetry is created for viewing pleasure rather than reading or listening. It provides a true challenge of interpretation due to necessity of semiotic decoding of colour, shape, objects and words arrangement that can change meaning of the poem.
The effect of incorporating the text into painting is evident in Ruth Bavetta's "The End and the Aim" (Fig. 2), which is in fact a colourful copy of a book page transformed into a picture of star sky. While the entire page is darkened with dark-blue colour of night sky, three lines are left legible. They state the aim of travelling as "looking out into the dark.. .dimly lit with infrequent lamp", thus, evoking diversity of interpretations of both textual and visual components of this poem. However, it is worth mentioning that form and content are united here by the notion of light ("lit", "lamp" on verbal plate and shapes of stars in yellow colour on visual plate), forming matrix of symbols from overlapping signs on the page.
Figure 2. Ruth Bavetta 's "The End and the Aim", 2008
The ambiguity of visual poetry that is seen as neither conventional poetry nor art leads to multiple critics of this subgenre, as far as literary experts call this hybrid poetic form to have "ephemeral nature" and thus, be "self-destructive"[2].
Contrary to the above-mentioned opinion, we believe that visual poetry was and remains an interesting artistic experiment of combining different signs in one literary or rather artistic text aimed at creating new textual meaning and giving opportunity for readers/viewers to have unique experience of poetic interpretation.
What is more, it has served as a linking element in the system of new emerging poetic genres, in particular, digital poetry.
Digital poetry, also known as cyber poetry, electronic or e-poetry for short [3, p. 12] is a relatively new genre of contemporary poetry that has appeared thanks to technological inventions in the sphere of human communication. As soon as digital media have become available for use by everyone and everywhere, visual reality has provided a new plane for artistic expression. The time has come to talk about new vague poetic form,
created as a result of overlaps between art and literature, cinematography, music, poetry, etc. In this respect, the doubts concerning appropriateness of the term "poetry" are evident, though the aesthetic value of digital poems makes it a right name to denote this literary genre as it is.
The main distinctive feature of digital poetry is innovative way of its creation, i.e. a fully digital process of poem formation conducted on an electronic device to express semantic richness of multimodal text [1, p. 10]. Such a poem often turns to be a hypertext in its broad meaning, when links allow the author to avoid fixed order of poem layout, generating multiple set of poetic meanings when the reader/user clicks them in certain order. This transforms visual poetry of XX century into digital one, because the aspect of interaction
between the text and recipient is added [9, p. 60]. The further development of this feature is related to social media emergence, namely Facebook, Twitter, Insta-gram and YouTube platform, which all together let reader not only interact with the poem, but also participate in its creation, influence the artistic work and experience of author via likes, comments or sharing it with others. Here is an example of this phenomenon (Fig. 3), which reveals two other options for creativity. On the one hand, it is rendering or rewriting of classical poetry with the same rhythmic patterns, but completely different sense; on the other hand, it is usage of IT, particularly, programming rather than personal writing skills for generation of a new poem.
Figure 3. Ranjit Bhatnagar et al's "Pentametron", 2016
The poem given above is actually created by a Twitter bot Pentametron, which in its turn is a software product by Ranjit Bhatnagar. It automatically retweets lines with the same rhythm and rhyme to form a couplet that resembles Shakespeare's sonnets. So, it is evident that digital poetry appears to be a completely new genre of artistic expression, striving to reinterpret conventional art via random virtual communication.
A separate sub-genre of digital poetry is video poetry, also known video-visual poetry, moving or media poetry [6, p. 32]. As is evident from its name it is presented in video format with application of various cinematographic techniques of montage and voicing. When implemented in poetic text structure these techniques are likely to create a multi-facet poetic image as a result of juxtaposition of both visual and auditory components.
Thus, the genre of digital poetry as the successor of concrete and visual poetry always requires application of a multiple set of artistic techniques and methods to be created and to exist over time.
Functional Potential of Digital Poetry
Digital poetry is likely to perform several distinctive functions both at the stage of its creation and over its "shelf life", as it is used namely for artistic expression, communication and teaching purposes.
It is obvious that experimental nature of this genre presupposes usage of various multimedia, applying programming, animation, etc. Therefore, dealing with
technical language of programming is prior to formation of the ready poem as a piece of art. Authors' work at computer aims at shaping or configuring letters, words, images and sounds in such a way that will allow to reflect their artistic vision of the world. Digital and electronic environment of digital poetry provides poets with a wide range of multimedia tools to either make a completely new poem or reinterpret the existing one. The latter is another opportunity for revealing their creative potential when prototypical components of a particular literary form and constitutive rules of certain genres are combined in a new way or according to a new pattern.
When such a compilation is done automatically by software as in Ranjit Bhatnagar et al's "Pentametron" (see Fig. 3), random Internet users can be involved in poem creation. They unintentionally do part of creative work as the piece of their text later merges with other abstracts to make up a new verse. Their contribution may not be noticeable at all, although it can be probably traced if necessary. Anyway it reveals their aesthetic values, beliefs and interests; moreover, it influences both content and rhyme of the poem, turning Internet users into co-authors. Regardless of participation in initial creative process readers/viewers of digital poetry may also be involved in further poem transformation, interpretation, analysis or discussion via posting or reposting it in social media, adding comments and likes, forwarding it through other computer tools.
Thus, the genre of digital poetry is unique regarding its authors, as far as it intertwines IT and human creativity and forms the chain of co-authors, including software, poet(s), Internet users and/or readers [4]. While human beings present their thoughts and reveal emotions, IT makes it possible to mixture random pieces into one solid piece of art.
The interactive capabilities of digital poetry increase to such an extent that it becomes the reason for outlining its communicative function. Collaborative or more often collective work on its creation leads to emergence of personal interest to the authors, which in its turn results in organizing international e-poetry festivals (e.g., in Paris, 2007) and conferences (e.g., on Rhode Island, the USA, Norway, 2010). Meetings of artists, involved in various kinds of art, are primarily aimed at making personal contribution to the self-organization of digital poetry as a new genre, but what seems to be more important is emergence of new artistic community. Face to face communication and virtual interaction among members of this community allow creating hybrid poetry, when initially literary text is accompanied with music or video, turning it into a collaborative or team project. This is so-called cyberculture art [2, p. 41], representatives of which explore new dimensions of their creativity together.
The phenomenon of intermedia interaction that is the basement of digital poetry appearance ad existence finds other forms of its practical application. In particular, it is widely used in Western European educational system for teaching purposes. Literature classes aim at evoking emotional response among students to the poems they analyse and study. However, personal engagement in these literary forms has been found to be obtained easier if the emphasis is done on the technical aspect of the poem first. Outlining not only classical stylistic devices of assonance, alliteration and rhythm that form the verse, but also defining key principles of automatic software compilation in similar or derivative poems enhances students' interest in both conventional and contemporary literary genres. The above-analysed "Pentametron"'s resemblance to Shakespeare's poems can positively affect children's desire to further study Middle-English poetry (see Fig. 3). What is more, comprehension of digital poetry during Creative Writing classes gives students a great opportunity to develop their writing, drawing or other artistic skills, as well as IT literacy of users and developers [8, p. 23]. Remarkably, it often happens so that advanced computer skills lead to improving their creative skills that is the aims of this discipline.
All three functions that digital poetry performs are interconnected in such a way that artistic expression becomes possible due to interpersonal Internet or face to face communication and vice versa, making it a useful teaching tool in high school setting.
Conclusion
Evolution of poetic literary genre that has undergone numerous artistic changes throughout centuries eventually resulted in emergence of concrete poetry. It is a revolutionary literary form that emphasises not only content of aesthetic expression, but also its shape that possesses additional meaning and artistic value. Technological advancement of previous and current centuries, spread of IT has contributed to further development of poetry, turning it first into visual and then digital and/or video poetry. These new sub-genres are characterised by multimodal format of their creation and existence, when verbal, auditory and visual components are interlaced in electronic or digital environment. It makes digital poetry a multifaceted piece of art that embodies best practices of literature, fine arts, music, cinematography and programming.
Due to its non-rigid, often very changeable and transformative shape, digital poetry is likely to create plenty of interpretations involving in its comprehension many readers/viewers simultaneously. The manner of its creation and analysis encourages its target audience to communication, resulting in formation of a particular artistic community. Moreover, it obtains many more functions, apart from its aesthetic and communicative value it serves as a teaching method, thus can be applied for educational purposes.
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