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.
