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The following posts are extractions from Manuel Portola's 2006 article Concrete and Digital Poetics.
- APA: Portela, M. (2006). Concrete and Digital Poetics, LEA, Vol 14 Issue 05 - 06, http://tinyurl.com/pwvqvu5 Accessed on 13 12 2013
- Chicago: Manuel Portola, Concrete and Digital Poetics, LEA, Vol 14 Issue 05 - 06, (2006) http://tinyurl.com/pwvqvu5 Accessed on 13 12 2013
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There is an intrinsic connection between concrete poetics and digital poetics as a theory of poetry for the digital medium. This link is clearly seen in the use of concrete poems as storyboards and scripts for electronic texts, both in composing text for graphic interface static display and for animation.
It is as if the concrete approach to language and form, because of its constructivist and objectivist emphasis, anticipated the kind of reflection on media set in motion by the electronic page. Close attention to the visibility of language and to the materiality of reading, two of the central tenets of concretist texts, also underlie many of the poetic attempts to use the specific properties of electronic textuality in digital forms.
It is as if the concrete approach to language and form, because of its constructivist and objectivist emphasis, anticipated the kind of reflection on media set in motion by the electronic page. Close attention to the visibility of language and to the materiality of reading, two of the central tenets of concretist texts, also underlie many of the poetic attempts to use the specific properties of electronic textuality in digital forms.
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The adoption of computers as a means for literary creation has been fostered by concrete poetics. Because of its internalization of a theory of language as a structural system of signs, the concrete poem laboratory explores the projection of the paradigmatic axis into the syntagmatic axis. This probabilistic game with phonetic and semantic similarities and differences is spatialized on the page, in such a way that it foregrounds the fact that a text is always a set of instructions for reading itself.
Consequently, the combinatorial procedures that have generated the rhetorical and typographic code of the poem become visible on the textual surface.
In retrospect, the poem appears as a script of meaning, even if this meaning is not entirely determinable.
This is the kind of metalinguistic analysis that signals concrete self-reference to the poem’s information code. For concrete aesthetics, the dynamics of a syntactical combination that resulted from phonetic and graphical attractions and lexical cross-breeding is the guiding principle of composition.
Consequently, the combinatorial procedures that have generated the rhetorical and typographic code of the poem become visible on the textual surface.
In retrospect, the poem appears as a script of meaning, even if this meaning is not entirely determinable.
This is the kind of metalinguistic analysis that signals concrete self-reference to the poem’s information code. For concrete aesthetics, the dynamics of a syntactical combination that resulted from phonetic and graphical attractions and lexical cross-breeding is the guiding principle of composition.
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Its conscious and subconscious workings may be observed both below and above the word level: in the first case in the agglutinations, prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and various types of fragmentation of both lexemes, morphemes and even graphemes; in the second case, at the higher level of syntactic units, sentences, and texts. Thus it is a poetics of spoken and written language, as much as it is a poetics of hearing and reading. Its hermeneutics starts at the physiological processing of audiovisual input, which transmutes the poem into a cyborg, that is, a cybernetic simulation of meaning as a specific processing of information.
From this point of view, the concrete poem is a kind of language generator which provides a microcosm both of the linguistic processes of word and sentence creation, and of the more basic and fundamental structuring processes of the phonetic, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic elements that produce language. Language is not a mere repertoire of given elements, classes of elements, and combinations of those classes, but it is above all the possibility of expanding elements, classes, and combinations.
It is not a matter of coincidence that the poem about the poem (always a serious candidate to being the most frequent topic in the history of any type of poetry) has become perhaps the archi-theme of concrete poetry, as if every single poem had to be a ars poetica at the same time.
From this point of view, the concrete poem is a kind of language generator which provides a microcosm both of the linguistic processes of word and sentence creation, and of the more basic and fundamental structuring processes of the phonetic, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic elements that produce language. Language is not a mere repertoire of given elements, classes of elements, and combinations of those classes, but it is above all the possibility of expanding elements, classes, and combinations.
It is not a matter of coincidence that the poem about the poem (always a serious candidate to being the most frequent topic in the history of any type of poetry) has become perhaps the archi-theme of concrete poetry, as if every single poem had to be a ars poetica at the same time.
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The digital medium, especially after the combined development of hypertext and large-scale computer networks, has led to the creation of literary genres that are specifically digital, i.e., genres that adopt the properties of the software and of the means of computational display as structural elements of poetic and narrative forms. Moreover, the digital medium has enabled authors to formalize the intra-textual and inter-textual connections, and it has also permitted the development of certain textual virtualities that are inherent to various typographical genres.
