12.12.2025 / Vladimir Kopicl
Since almost every review of an artistic field is necessarily marked by the omitted as much as by the selected, here I shall consciously strive to present key phenomena in global as well as in our, i.e. regional, experimental poetic practices of the second half of the 20th century. That is, from the period of the founding of the society of spectacle with its new media instruments, and before the epochal influence of the digital paradigm and its tools on the form of creation, which we consider poetic.
And this is what such report of mine on experimental poetry from 1950 to 1985, intentionally and content-wide inevitably reduced, implies.
The Genesis and Proto-Masters of Concrete Poetry
According to all relevant data, we owe the origin of the term and the international status of the literary and artistic phenomenon that we call concrete poetry primarily to Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer and to the members of the Noigandres Group.
Fahlström
The term itself was first used by the Swedish Falström in his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry of 1953, published only a year after, in 1952, Augusto de Campos, his brother Haroldo and Décio Pignatari founded their concretist group Noigandres in Sao Paulo, and Gomringer published the influential concrete poems silenzio, ping pong, wind and “O”.
Fahlström proposes the abolition of syntax and fixation on content as the unifying factor of poetic text. His permutational and mathematical poems with emphasized sound, optical, signal and sign elements are somewhat reminiscent of the LEF ideal of “free speech”, and later he develops complex forms of collages, radio dramas, installations, musical pieces and documentaries.
Gomringer
In Switzerland, since 1952, Gomringer had been writing minimalist poetry based on materiality, brevity and visual values of language/writing, with an emphasized repetitive use of syllables and consonances. He calls his first concretist poems constellations, whose typographical content also establishes meaning, while the poem tends to become an object. According to him, poetry should overcome and abolish the existing linguistic and natural boundaries, so he uses Spanish, German and other languages in many works, in unison.
Noigandres
Augusto and Haroldo de Campos were initially close to Gomringer’s views, but they soon developed their own specifics and support them in theory. According to them, concretism is a rebellion aiming to free poetry from subjectivism and expressionist momentum, instead of which an emphasized visual element, language fragmentation, quotational and intertextual games enter the scene of a text. Both are known for successful theorizing, editorial and critical work, brilliant translations and large-format literary dedications.
Unlike the literary-oriented brothers, Décio Pignatari was a university lecturer of information theory, which may be seen in his verbal “mobiles”, “anti-advertisements”, “meta-poems” and “cinema-poems”.
As a member of the group, Pignatari co-authored their Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958), Theory of Concrete Poetry (1965) and was director of the influential journal Invensão.
Definitions, styles
The concretism we are talking about is a radical type of innovation in which the author focuses on his/her own medium while carrying out a series of artistic and meta-artistic activities with the common goal of freeing poetry from subjectivism and dictation of content while giving additional space to the visual and material factors of language/writing.
In the catalogue of the exhibition Concrete and Visual Poetry (Konkretna i vizuelna poezija, Gallery 212, Bitef 1969) it is written: “The visual form of experimental poetry is recorded with a pencil, typed on a typewriter, printed with graphics or serigraphs, performed with a letraset, or expressed as plastic form in the shape of a sculpture. According to its external appearance, it approaches the genre of visual arts, painting, graphics or design”. The author of those views is not signed, but another two thinkers, which are presented there are.
Stephen Bann believes that concrete poetry is a material fact that can be viewed, measured, changed and, as a poetic expression, fitted into any context.
Max Bense claims that concrete poetry does not contain an intentional meaning, grammatical rules or certain order of words, but the very structure of a letter “is” poetry, where the letter, or a word, represents an independent visual object-sign.
We find interesting definitions in other sources as well. For instance, Jean-François Bory has a consistently concretist definition, “Concrete poetry can only be defined tautologically: concrete writing is real writing, only writing, writing itself.”
As is the case with definitions, the styles of concrete poetry are not scarce in number, and especially not in the most commonly used forms, materials, performance techniques, media and ways of presentation of the works. Their names speak for themselves and their meanings are, at least in principle, transparent enough that we do not need to clarify them and support them with typologically eloquent examples of works. These are, first of all, letrism, visual poetry, typoesia, aleatoric poetry, machine poetry, elementary poetry, stochastic poetry, verbi-voco-visual… – all the way to later terminological or artistic varieties, from the Italian spatialism to the local, predominantly Belgrade, signalism.
Model works, with commentaries
One of the rare constants of art is its permanent relationship with theories and interpretations. A few dispute that works are the most important things in art, but the most of them agree that changes in theoretical standpoints, evaluation systems, and the tools of analysis, greatly affect both the understanding of the very nature of a work of art and the perception of its primary and secondary properties: from purely material to contextual.
My personal theory is that the primary constant of art is not the work of art, but the artist, since, at least for now, even in the advanced age of the technical reproduction, without the artist there would be no works of art, that is, art. But since we cannot reproduce the artists here, we will have to content ourselves with the informative overview of the works of Jochen Gerz, Edward Lucie-Smith and a dozen other authors – with comments.
Regionaln and Serbian Scene 1968-1978.
Reism (Slovenian: Reizam)
In Slovenia, in 1968, published by OHO Edition, the poetry books The Purpose of the Cape by Tomaž Šalamun and Pegam i Lambergar by Iztok Geister Plamen were published, which the then leading critic Taras Kermauner interpreted as examples of reism. According to him, it is a literary movement in which a word does not have meanings that we would have to decipher, but simply exists and carries its meaning within itself, just like everything under the sun in the world of the shedding of the humanistic vision, the commodification of reality, and values that we considered poetic.
So by Kermauner.
And, Plamen in the OHO anthology PERICAREŽERACIREP (1969) expresses a poetic attitude characteristic of the entire movement: “In the classical art of words, the word is meant as a picture and acts as a word. In the contemporary art of words, the word is meant as a word and acts as a picture.”
Neo-Avant-Garde Textualism and Conceptual Poetry
While the ludistic-concretist movement is flourishing in Slovenia, in Belgrade, under the direction of the prose writer Bora Ćosić, the “magazine for literature and aesthetic examination of reality” ROK starts, which publishes an extensive selection from the poetry of the Novi Sad based neo-avant-garde author Vujica Rešin Tucić, which the Novi Sad Tribina mladih will publish in an expanded volume and with the innovative title Egg in a Steel Shell (Jaje u čeličnoj ljusci) in 1969.
Tucić’s early “textualisms”, especially in his spectacular oral performance, are marked by a penchant for devastating irony and social criticism with special gift for meaningful and non-meaningful puns, paradoxical anecdotes, games with neologisms, elaborate quotations and meta-linguistic reduction in his next book, Dream and Criticism (San i kritika, 1977).
In Novi Sad, at the same time, works in the spirit of poetic experimentation were published by Slavko Bogdanović, Miroslav Mandić and other future members of the CODE (KOD) Group.
The most influential, however, is Slobodan Tišma, who in 1970, with three textual works of the same year, laid the foundations and established the status of the phenomenon later called Novi Sad textualism or conceptual poetry.
The first, From 1 to 10, formally and content-wise corresponds to Wittgenstein’s understanding of language games. The second, textually and visually confronts the (anti)symbology of Malevich’s Square, while the third, As Someone (Kao neko), written in the 83rd poetic statemens with additional Note (Beleška), problematizes the (a)poetic use of the famous word as (kao) for poetry.
An important feature of the Novi Sad textualist practice was the uncompromissed political-artistic engagement, for which Bogdanović and Mandić were sentenced to prison in 1971. Bogdanović was tried because of a poem published in the banned issue of journal Student dedicated to the underground, and Mandić because of the text in support of the film W.R. – Mysteries of the Organism by Dušan Makavejev.
Semantic Concretism
Croatian poet, artist and art historian Josip Stošić self-published his first letristic-concretist book Necklace (Đerdan) in 1951, when he was only sixteen years old. The book was banned, but Stošić was not, so in 1972 he wrote: “Poetic text is the relationship between the record and the page of the text (surface)”.
Art historian is also Zvonko Maković who in 1971, in number 25 of the journal Pitanja (Questions) published a cycle of textualist poems Whole Glance (Cjelovit vid), and from 1975 seminal books Comets, Comets, Facts (Komete, komete, Činjenice), etc.
Less than a decade later, linguistic poetry or semantic concretism appeared on the scene. Their leading literary promoters are Off and Republika (Republic) magazines, the authors and interpreters two Brankos, Maleš and Čegec, and their joint postmodern perspective is long-standing Quorum magazine, which passed away only in 2018.
Experimental Poetry and Post-Object art – Cold and Worm Connections
Everything has its limits, the experimental poetry and lectures about it, and the measure of knowledge with which one does not argue, as well as the doubt about the ultimate knowledge. But what kind of story about an experiment would it be, especially about a poetic one, if we will not experiment at least a little?
Let’s say it this way: can we declare a sheet of paper with a message that an artist delivers to his/his agent, colleague, critic, poetry? Or a photograph that captures the figure of the artist in an exterior?
The works I’m Still Alive On Kawara, of 1970, or performance No. 1 from the serial work Eight Natural Stands by Bob Kinmont, of 1969, can serve as excellent samples for the analysis of the indicated type.
Of course, if there is something to add, let it be added.
Creative Europe Project
Anthologies of Cooperation: Encounters in/through Artist’s Book and Experimental Poetry (AbeX), 2025-2026
Partners
Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna, kultura natura pARTicip (KNP), Oradea, National Museum of Contemporary Arts (MNAC), Bucharest, and Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade