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.
