El Tribunal Constitucional

However, what could be suggested from the geometric shape of that kind of poem seems to have been based on its meaning. The boundary between content and form emerged as evidence of that binding force. In addition, readers had almost no role here. Feeling images as they existed in real life, reading poems in the flat space, the vertical of time, according to Eugen Gomringer, was the simple ‘line way’ of making poetry. Thus, Gomringer introduced the process ‘from line to constellation’:

The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster.

The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions.132

It could be said that the constellation model, of which Eugen Gomringer was considered one of the pioneers, was totally different from visual the sixteenth century poems. By observing poetry from a mixture of directions and dimensions, bending the line vision into a 3D vision, merging the boundary between shape and content, grouping all of them into a cluster so that no star was in the centre, the poet presented a maze or matrix that was both mysterious and attractive to readers. It was no longer a case of playing with signs, words and semiotics. It gave readers the opportunity, and invited them, to explore concrete poetry. As Lyotard133 _{pointed out about the virtual reality of realism, in the constellation there} was no need to cite any real objects as prototypes of poetic images or ideas. The poem itself created reality and, whether it was accepted and understood or not, it

132 _{Gomringer, From Line to Constellation, p. 67.} 133 _{Lyotard, ibid.}

still existed as a possibility among unlimited possibilities that could be assigned to it. The opinion of rule and law for making poetry, according to this, was further overstepped. The law was no longer a super-personality factor which was formulated, generalised from reality and universally imposed upon all. The laws and rules themselves were the creative, present personalities of the artist, with ambitions to become unique. Moreover, the laws and rules did not aim to create a simulation of a model that had existed before; they aimed to structure a model that had never existed. After that, games in modern/postmodern poetry started by setting up new conventions, laws and unspoken agreements among poet, text and reader. This explained why contemporary poetry could take profoundly different forms to traditional approaches. Poetry could become meaningless sequences like the compositions of the Dada poets. Poetry could deny the existence of text as in the experience of sound poetry and performance poetry. Poetry could reject all words, syntax and rhetoric as in concrete poetry... The personalisation genre not only made specific categories blur but the boundaries between poetry and other art forms also became ambiguous. In conclusion, it could be said that it was only through playing that poetry could maintain its existence. The function of poetry was to stir up central discourse, to open up potential meaning and potential expression; in other words, it was the function of play.

However, in my view, considering the creation of concrete poetry and other Experimental poetry as taking part in play did not mean that poets chose a purposeless or rebellious attitude. The purpose of concrete poetry was not the minimising of words ‘but the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of communication’.134 _{I think this communication should be divided into two trends.} The first, under the pressure of language, hid itself in using the monologue form. In the second, discontent with the fragmentation of reality and the disintegration of social relationships in modern life was exposed through the proliferation of signs, semiotics and letters that made readers impossibly find the original words and collage them into meaningful language. This could be considered as a way for poets to search for dialogue in this solid community.

In the first trend, for example, Bob Cobbing expressed extreme loneliness in a monologue with an imaginary interlocutor, ‘Sockless in Sandals’:

Sockless in sandals, gibbering his wares

in unintelligible shrieks and hisses, a 'poet' merely disrupts

the solid, sensible business of the night.

the people hear gibberish; Poets: how can nothing be said with all that noise?135

The poet places himself in opposition to the night, places his quiet situation in contrast with the noise of the night: ‘gibberish’ and ‘unintelligible shrieks and hisses’. Sound is used to highlight the no-word condition. The final question is left opening for the participation of readers.

Similar to the attitude of Bob Cobbing, Alan Riddell, in his poem named ‘Help’, communicated with others through the feeling of loss and despair:

someofmybestfriendsare someofmybestfriendsar someofmybestfriendsa someofmybestfriends someofmybestfriend (…) some som so s136

All the lines of ‘Help’ open a question the poetic character seems to ask himself: ‘Could I name some of my best friends?’ but there is no answer. The same structure is repeated over 22 lines. After each non-response, a letter is dropped. Finally, he receives nothing and the poem loses itself in a single silence: ‘s’ – ‘shhhhhhhhhh’. The poem is structured in quite a simple shape: a triangle with the top beneath (with the maximum restriction in terms of making new words); thus, it is strictly a

135 _{Bob Cobbing, Sockless in Sandals: Collected Poems Volume Six (Cardiff: Second Edn., 1985), p. 8.} 136 _{Alan Riddell, Eclipse (London: Calder and Boyar, 1972), p. 22.}

concrete poem that shows the forgotten position of the human being in modern life.

Still on the first trend, in other concrete poems of the mentioned volume, Bob Cobbing used many phonetic aspects. This was reminiscent of his ABC sound poem, which was performed in ensemble at ‘The Other Room’. The attraction was that, in both sound performance and silent reading, his phonetic poems proved their total difference from any dictionary expression or anything found in the introductions of guidance books. Since one of the aims was that concrete poems would be as easy to understand ‘as signs in airports and traffic signs’,137 _{it would} have been easy for this kind of poetry to fall into naturalism and then lose the poetic figures. However, Bob Cobbing, by taking on this challenge, kept his poems far from the temptation of depiction of normal life. For example, he created a poem from a list of Californian fishes138 _{analysed as ‘A – nan an’ nan in a dictionary} format,139 _{he described mushrooms with various names, kinds, shapes and} materials140 _{or used the letters in the word ‘rainbow’ as initial consonants for} creating new compounds141 _{and many other cases. However, they did not become} phonetics lessons or crossword puzzles. The poet showed that this was an exploration rather than unconscious play. In each poem, the concern of the artist to find the right letter and organise the correct word structure was evident, as was the aspiration to create new words and unpredictable transplants that would never be found in a dictionary or in real experiences. The poem ‘Rainbow’ was an integration of innumerable images which seemed to have no relation to the meaning of a rainbow but were born from the actual word R-a-i-n-b-o-w. The poem included the beauty, the ugliness, the logic, the illogic, the unexplainable combination and the curiousness of exploring more about the unlimited associations arising from the specific word Rainbow in a limited form. As such, the poem bloomed like a kaleidoscope of the rainbow itself.

The other trend expressed the desire for two-way-communication by inviting readers to contribute to poems which were incomplete and which lacked the basic

137 _{Gomringer, Concrete Poetry, p. 68.} 138 _{Cobbing, p. 33.}

139 _{Cobbing, p. 24.} 140 _{Cobbing, p. 32.} 141 _{Cobbing, p. 39.}

components to be simple to read. The poet, in this case, explored the possibilities of poetry by cutting words into pieces, mixing the orders of letters, blurring language into a shape or even using non-linguistic components.

For instance, with the poem ‘Spectrum Shift’142 _{and its content made from} repetition of the seven words red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet with an alternate arrangement of typography, Alan Riddell created the visual effect of a spectrum in the shape of a crossed line throughout the poem. In my view, this kind of visual feature influenced Dương Tường, one of the first Vietnamese poets to experiment with concrete poetry, especially picture poetry, when he published his second volume named Musical Instrument. This was a ‘non-word’ volume which used images to indicate an autobiographical chart of human life in communication with the universe. Before Musical Instrument, following the influence of concrete poetry, he disrupted the structure of language, giving verbal expression in a form which was constantly moving, changing and forcing readers to integrate into the poetry, perceived by every possible sense. Like Bob Cobbing, he was concerned about:

The extent to which syllable-structure plays a crucial role in determining the choice between 'ae' and 'e' is dramatically revealed by considering post-vocalic consonants other than 'n' or 'm'. 143