Experimental Poetry

Dans sa révolution poétique, le germe de la poésie performative contemporaine Marinetti aurait emprunté le mot « futurisme » au poète Gabriel Alomar qui en 1904 à Barcelone a donné une conférence sous le titre de FI Futurisme. Couverture de la revue Poesia, fondée et éditée par Marinetti, 1909. La première édition du Manifeste du Futurisme, sans le prologue, publiée dès janvier 1909 par Marinetti. Le prologue sera écrit un mois plus tard, dans un style différent, lors de la publication du manifeste, le 20 février 1909, dans Le Figaro à Paris. GIOVANNI FONTANA Un vaste et significatif pan de la poésie du XX e siècle a montré un grand intérêt pour la complexité des rapports entre l'écriture et les arts, dans la perspective de ce que, dans les années soixante, on a connu comme intermédialité, grâce à l'intuition théorique de Dick Higgins. Dans la poésie, les limites de la page sont violées, et la figure du poète se pose devant la nécessité d'agir dans les espaces acoustique, visuel, scénique, pour affronter les exigences puissantes des projets fondés sur les intersections linguistiques, les contaminations, la perception multisensorielle, les rapports avec les nouvelles technologies, la complexité de la dimension de la performance. En 1913, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, inventeur indiscutable de l'avant-garde futuriste, proposait d'introduire dans le domaine textuel une série articulée d'innovations structurelles. Il préfigurait, en particulier : « Les métaphores condensées.-Les images télégraphiques.-Les sommes de vibrations.-Les noeuds de pensées.-Les éventails tour à tour ouverts et fermés de mouvements.-Les raccourcis des analogies.-Les bilans de couleurs.-Les dimensions, poids, mesure et vitesse, des sensations.-Le plongeon du mot essentiel dans l'eau de la sensibilité sans les cercles concentriques que le mot produit.-Les repos de l'intuition, les mouvements à 2, 3, 4, 5 temps.-Les poteaux analytiques explicatifs qui soutiennent les fils de l'intuition.' » Les nouveaux « mots en liberté » bouleversaient le tableau des certitudes et des usages de la littérature.

The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which puts a positive spin on the association of old age with childhood. a trope that is often deployed to infantilize and disenfranchize older people. By contrast, Hejinian uses it to highlight life's openness and contigency. Taking a cue from the poet, I will mobilize the notion of "the old child" to explore questions like: do we get less creative as we age? Are we born with certain talents and/or do we keep acquiring and developing them later in life? What obstacles get in the way of the expression of our multiple valences as we get older? We will survey the latest research on the epigenetic development of giftedness across the life span, dwell on the lives of exemplary polymaths and late bloomers and discuss how these matters relate to the topics of labor division, meritocracy and leisure.

This essay accounts for various, anomalous and formally generative examples of monotony in cultural production and traces monotony as an unlikely poetic trope in critical discourse. The problem of monotony as a modern phenomenon is expressed most clearly in the fields of music and literary theory because monotony is a form of rhythm. The rhythm of monotony masquerades as a neutral surface to resist subsuming forms of capitalism and nationalism, just as it ironically resonates with superficial forms of twentieth-century communications that exceed the borders of nations. Specifically, this article offers an analysis of monotony in relation to literary texts by Wallace Stevens (“Anatomy of Monotony”) and Inger Christensen (alphabet).

New & revised edition of Trace Peterson’s first book of poems, with an Introduction by Joy Ladin. Published by Chax Press, May 2019.

"The second edition of Trace Peterson’s SINCE I MOVED IN (NEW & REVISED) is a welcome re-issue, with a new introduction by Joy Ladin, of a landmark collection of poems by one of the most influential transgender poets writing today. Peterson, enacting her self-chosen name, traces connections and lines of flight between genders, between creative expression and acute observation, between her grounding and training in Tucson’s celebrated poetry scene and her on-going involvement in New York’s. Trace is an imperative, as well as a noun, and a name. It means to write over, as well as a faint remainder. Animated by the space of that double signification, and by the practice of making new life through transcribing an old life into a new register, Trace Peterson’s poetry—in life and in words—gives voice to something raw, inchoate, in-process-of-becoming."—Susan Stryker

"These are the daring adventures of the voice, the voice that wants to be a body, and had no way to be a body in and for itself when this book was written: this book is maybe the first book of poetry in which I saw my own trans experience written and comprehensibly embodied, not allegorically or across a gap of anachronisms but as it is, as it was at the very same time. This is the voice that kept secrets from itself, that knows what it’s like to keep a secret and wonder whether it was never a secret; the voice, too, that knows how troubling it feels to be a voice, to be nothing other than voice, among readers and listeners who claim, in that early-2000s way, to hate voice (because they cannot hear their own). There is a Hartford in her heart, 'no broken glass in it,' though 'the map is not the map,' and alongside it there lurks, or flourishes, an 'inability to be where I am.' This is a voice that sees: that sees 'the boys at / lavender the girls in show,' a voice of experiment, a voice 'wearing your socks.' I recommend it to anyone like me, and also to people who are nothing like me, who want to know how it has been."—Stephanie Burt

"I will forever praise the day in 2010 when I discovered SINCE I MOVED IN at a friend's house and sat down and read it cover to cover. Almost a decade later, my 'skull still humming from a gift received.' The experience of recognition (which is to say the benevolence of awareness) (which is different from the more distant (more dangerous) act of seeing/being seen) that transpired in the initial hours with this book altered the trajectory of my life in simple and extraordinary ways. As Joy Ladin's introduction to the new edition makes clear, SINCE I MOVED IN's 2007 publication was revolutionary and foundational for what would become a beautiful groundswell of trans and nonbinary poetry. 'Even the boundaries were drawn up temporarily,' Trace tells us. And how deeply true this is between so many (so much) of us, on any given day. Thank you, Trace, for this 2nd edition—a kind of textual transition, a gift to trans and nonbinary writers, past, present, and future. Here is 'The Pleasure of Arriving': a poetry of integrity—smart, hilarious, frustrated, and tender."—TC Tolbert

Visual Poetry: Key Historic Figures from Flanders in an International Context

This paper compares historiographic and object-related definitions of visual and concrete poetry. An integrated definition is proposed, situating visual poetry in a semiosphere between fine arts, music and literature where verbal and non-verbal elements form a spatial-semiotic unity. Each element is a bearer and a signifier of meaning on its own, and in combination with the others. The work can only be reproduced via multimedia techniques, while an oral performance will never be its true representation. Finally, the materials, techniques and methods used provide the possibility to date the work and to recognize or identify its maker. This definition is then deconstructed and its separate elements are studied in detail. Methods from literature, art and communication sciences, and experimental/Gestalt psychology are combined in a new toolbox and research methodology, which are then used to analyse five visual poems from different generations from the beginning of the twentieth century till now.

Key words: visual poetry, concrete poetry, semiotics, poesia visiva, vispo, asemic writing, glitch art, poetry, fine arts, music, oral tradition, noise, sound, experimental poetry, avant-garde, Paul van Ostaijen, Paul de Vree, Renaat Ramon, Luc Fierens, Helen White

In vista di un saggio più articolato, questo intervento, in dialogo con altri scritti precedenti, ricostruisce assai sommariamente un frammento della situazione editoriale italiana in poesia, e le disponibilità di testi effettivamente distribuiti in libreria tra la fine degli anni Settanta e la seconda metà dei Novanta. Cerca così di mettere in chiaro come le tre maggiori case editrici italiane abbiano messo in pratica una ben precisa strategia di scelte, centrando quasi interamente la loro attenzione su un preciso tipo di scritture assertive, non sperimentali.
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Pubblicato su slowforward il 21 feb 2022:
https://slowforward.net/2022/02/21/poesia-per-il-pubblico-a-k/
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(CC) 2022 Marco Giovenale

This paper will be part of a volume, edited by Mikhail Pavlovets, to be published by NLO, dedicated to the "Lianozovo" loose grouping of poets and artists in the late 1950s. The article offers a detailed reading of Vsevolod Nekrasov's 1966 poem "Leningrad/pervyi vzgliad," discussing, among other aspects, Nekrasov's play with common cultural stereotypes about Leningrad/Petersburg.

As restated recently in The New Yorker, E. E. Cummings’ style is identifiable from his particular use of punctuation and typography (Muldoon, 2014). Though this is more notably reflected in his experimental poetry, this part of Cummings’ literary production remains mostly untranslated into Spanish. This comes about as a result of the few translations of his poetry into Spanish in general (Canales, 1964; 1973; Paz, 1971; 1974; González de León, 197?; Perednik, 1995; Casas, 1996; Fonseca, 2003; Cueto-Roig, 2006) and, more concretely, of the tendency to exclude the more avant-garde poems in these anthologies. The difficulty that these poems may entail for the translation process, as well as the sometimes negative critical reception of this part of his poetic discourse, may have played an important role in this situation. My overarching aim, thus, is to make E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetry more visible for the Spanish-speaking general reader.
This chapter takes the poem ‘it’s jolly’ (Cummings, 2016: 268) as a sample of Cummings’ more experimental poetry. This will be analysed stylistically, with a strong focus on the notions of foregrounding and deviant structures, and then translated into Spanish. My proposal here links the practice of translation with the analysis itself, heavily relying on the idea that style is essential to literary translation (Boase-Beier, 2006: 112). This work will serve as a test (and model) for the translation of other experimental poems by E. E. Cummings, which I plan to collect together and translate into Spanish in a bilingual anthology for the general public.

Bradley J. Fest’s second volume of poetry, The Shape of Things, continues his project of poetic assemblage. Written in an age of ubiquitous algorithmic surveillance and increasingly catastrophic climate change, these poems both describe the shape of things in the overdeveloped world and endeavor to challenge the widespread feeling that the imagination has been foreclosed in the twenty-first century. An ambivalent hyperarchive, the collection draws influence from a number of seemingly incompatible lyric registers, including the language of contemporary theory. The Shape of Things culminates in an eponymous long poem that asks if a poiesis of “network being” is possible and suggests that there might be some other way to dance to the sounds of our present.

Desde la irrupción de la poesía concreta en los años 1950 brasileños hasta el movimiento arte porno en la década de 1980, el interés sigue siendo hacer una micro-cartografía de transgresiones poéticas y políticas contra formas autoritarias de gobernanza de la vida que prioriza intersecciones entre literatura experimental, poéticas del cuerpo y activismo visual para poner en evidencia el deseo de devenires disidentes, relaciones, complementariedades y enlaces movilizados por el intento de superar incógnitas. Son prácticas que sobresalen por la ocupación de territorios otros en la inauguración de campos de visibilidad, que se atreven a tomar el espacio público cercenado/vigilado y, a la vez, emplean estrategias de trabajo artístico colectivo. Encarnan im•pulsos activistas, pulsiones inconformes o pasiones inevitables que se reflejan en el uso de los lenguajes, los modos de activarlos y la capacidad de invención para interferir en la esfera pública. Son prácticas que prolongan la escritura hacia el cuerpo deviniendo en performance poetry, con la dramatización e improvisación que exige la práctica poética in situ. En el límite, se asumen como dispositivo de actuación cotidiana en la compleja ecuación arte<>vida, marcando así el camino desde la poesía experimental hacia un cuerpo experimental, un cuerpo-poema o cuerpoema (el cuerpo como plataforma de experimentación poética). Así pues vamos a retomar aquí el trabajo de poetas y artistas que produjeron poesía experimental (concreta, visual, táctil, sonora, performática) teniendo, además, el género como eje crítico en esa tarea de indagar los mecanismos y engranajes del lenguaje y en el intento de salir de la disposición binaria construida como lugar de entendimiento y sentido común por la colonialidad.

This paper provides a reading, through a decolonial lens, of the debut work of two recently published South African poets, Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese and Koleka Putuma. In the work of both poets, the reader encounters contemporary South African black womxn subjects, constructed in the matrix of global coloniality. The works articulate issues of identity and belonging, with which many young South Africans are undoubtedly grappling. Both poets identify, interrogate, and resist what might be termed the realms of coloniality—namely coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being—in a process of “unlearning”. A close reading of the themes and aesthetics of these two poets suggests that the site of enunciation for the speaking subjects that emerge is located at the fault lines between two or more very divergent knowledge frameworks.

A monograph on Old Polish visual and conceptual poetry (16th to 18th century). Annotated bibliography of all known visual poems with reproductions. Fist chaoters cover ancient and medieval visual poetry, with more attention given to the renaissance reception and flourishing of the genre in Europe.

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Contributors: Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Kevin Nolan, Donald F. Theall, Bob Perelman, Simon Critchley, D.J. Huppatz, Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Keston Sutherland, Nicole Tomlinson, Julian Savage, Bruce Andrews, Augusto de Campos, Darren Tofts, Gregory L. Ulmer, J. Hillis Miller, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Louis Armand, Steve McCaffery, Allen Fisher.

Percorsi della vocalità nella poesia d'azione Collana
"Archivio della poesia del '900" diretta da Alberto Cappi e Eugenio Miccini
Editoriale Sometti, Mantova, 2004 - ISBN 88-7495-023-3

Giovanni Fontana
POESIA DELLA VOCE E DEL GESTO
Percorsi della vocalità nella poesia d'azione
1. La declamazione dinamica e sinottica. Un ampio e significativo settore della poesia di questo secolo ha orientato i propri interessi verso la complessità della scrittura intercodice, forzando talmente i confini della pagina, che il poeta si è venuto a trovare di fronte alla necessità di dover agire nello spazio acustico e scenico, e, più recentemente, in quello virtuale, per far fronte alle esigenze sempre più pressanti di un progetto poetico alimentato dalle intersezioni linguistiche, dalle contaminazioni, dalla percezione multisensoriale, dalla dimensione articolata della performance. Lanciate da Filippo Tommaso Marinetti nel 1912 con il "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista" e teorizzate in maniera più ampia nel manifesto dell'11 maggio del 1913, le parole in libertà, unitamente all'ortografia libera espressiva, al lirismo multilineo, alla rivoluzione tipografica, all'accordo onomatopeico e ad altre polemiche e spinte innovazioni tecniche, aprono il campo, in maniera determinante, a nuove forme di poesia, dove la dimensione extraverbale concorre alla formazione di atmosfere decisamente spettacolari. La qualità sonora del testo balza in primo piano con prepotenza e si scarica sulla platea attraverso declamazioni cariche di tensioni, dinamiche, ironiche, giocose, talvolta irritanti o addirittura violente. La sonorità è alimentata da procedimenti pre-linguistici di vario tipo, ma principalmente dall'onomatopea, che impegna le parole in libertà marinettiane, la "rumoristica plastica" di Giacomo Balla, la "verbalizzazione astratta" e l'"onomalingua" 1 di Fortunato Depero, la "poesia pentagrammata" 2 di Francesco Cangiullo, ecc. Per Balla l'onomatopea è uno strumento per organizzare parole-suono e parole-rumore, ma anche per inventare nonsenses che propone con grande ironia e spiccate doti di declamatore e strumentista, accompagnandosi talvolta con la chitarra. 1 Il manifesto dell'"Onomalingua" reca la data del 1916. In esso Depero dichiara che l'onomalingua costituisce "la lingua più indovinata per la scena e specialmente per le esagerazioni più esilaranti. Con l'onomalingua si può parlare ed intendersi efficacemente con gli elementi dell'universo, con gli animali e con le macchine. L'onomalingua è il linguaggio poetico di comprensione universale per il quale non sono necessari traduttori". Le liriche onomatopeiche venivano manoscritte su grandi fogli di carta per essere contemporaneamente esposte e declamate. I concetti espressi sinteticamente nel manifesto del '16, riprodotto nel "libromacchina imbullonato" Depero Futurista, Milano 1927, sono estesi e specificati in Chiarezza di stile, pubblicato in "Dismisura" n. 67/74, 1984 (La gola e l'eco), con una nota di L. CARUSO. 2 "… la Poesia pentagrammata, dando la simultaneità grafica della Poesia e della sua Musica naturale, in essa naturalmente contenuta, aggiunge una nuova smisurata estensione di terreno vergine al campo poetico…", F. CANGIULLO, Poesia pentagrammata, Napoli 1923.

Recensione di Gabriele Pulli, Università di Salerno. Italia.

Erminia Passannanti
Poesie dalla terra dei morti

Nella raccolta Poesie dalla Terra dei Morti, Erminia Passannanti pubblica, per la prima volta insieme, poesie e brani in prosa che erano apparsi isolatamente in due riviste online, Erodiade e Transference, da lei stessa ideate e curate. Il titolo della raccolta, oltreché alla mitologia classica, all’'Inferno dantesco a The Waste Land di Thomas Stearn Eliot, a The Tower di W.B. Yeats, attinge alle raccolte di Seamus Heaney (tra cui North e The Spirit Level) che la Passannanti ha tradotto.
Nel tempo che viviamo, che ha conosciuto una pandemia e soffre una guerra in corso, la raccolta offre originali elementi di riflessione – delle vere e proprie sfide interpretative –, con uno stile basato su densi simbolismi e sull’utilizzo di dramatis personae, impegnate ciascuna in un  proprio, drammatico monologo di forte impatto personale e, insieme, collettivo.
Benché il titolo evochi i defunti e l’aldilà, secondo un tropo ricorrente nelle letterature di tutti i tempi, in questa raccolta, per “terra dei morti” si intende invece la dimensione eterea di internet, nella quale opere d’arte possono comparire tempestivamente per poi – per lo stesso motivo – scomparire in un magma indifferenziato, in una sorta di neutro nulla. Ma, diversamente da quanto avviene nelle esistenze reali, per le quali la morte è irrevocabile, nello spazio degli Internet Archives la WayBack Machine consente di ripescare da questa peculiare “landa dei morti” parole che sembravano perdute, anche nella memoria dei loro autori.
Non a caso le poesie e i brani di questa raccolta riprendono il dilemma del tempo, della fragilità della vita, nelle inaspettate disavventure umane, come quelle dell’omerica Odissea. Esse tratteggiano e delimitano il “luogo”, dal quale addentrarsi in questo nulla così specifico e singolare, dunque per riflettere sulle nuove – eppur antiche – emergenze epocali: la perdita delle certezze esistenziali, le esperienze del dolore e del lutto, il senso della caducità di una società globale priva di certezze e bisognosa di recuperare le forme più autentiche di comunicazione interumana.
È un viaggio allegorico in questa singolare “terra dei morti” del nostro tempo, la quale – al pari di quella vera e propria dei defunti – eccede in ampiezza e gravità quella dei vivi. Nel risulta un’efficace metafora della nostra umanità post-pandemica, delle sue traumatiche trasformazioni. Ciò avviene benché i testi della raccolta risalgano a un periodo precedente sia alla guerra russo-ucraina sia all'emergenza pandemica.
Essi – come racconta l’autrice – sono stati ripescati dal web, dove si erano inabissati dopo la soppressione dei due blog (Erodiade e Transference) che li avevano ospitati, sicché il loro tema e il modo della loro composizione si richiamano l’un l’altro in una piena integrazione.



ENGLISH

Review by Gabriele Pulli, University of Salerno, Italy.

In the collection "Poems from the Land of the Dead," Erminia Passannanti publishes, for the first time together, poems and prose pieces that had previously appeared individually in two online journals, Erodiade and Transference, both of which she conceived and curated. The title of the collection, drawing inspiration from classical mythology, Dante's Inferno, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and W.B. Yeats' "The Tower," also taps into the collections of Seamus Heaney, including "North" and "The Spirit Level," which Passannanti translated.

In the era we live in, marked by a pandemic and an ongoing war, this collection provides original elements for reflection—true interpretive challenges—with a style based on dense symbolism and the use of dramatis personae, each engaged in their own dramatic monologue of strong personal and collective impact.

Although the title evokes the deceased and the afterlife, a recurring trope in literature throughout history, in this collection, "land of the dead" instead refers to the ethereal dimension of the internet, where artworks can promptly appear and then, for the same reason, disappear into an undifferentiated mass, into a kind of neutral nothingness. However, unlike in real life, where death is irrevocable, in the realm of Internet Archives, the WayBack Machine allows us to retrieve words that seemed lost, even in the memories of their authors.

Notably, the poems and prose pieces in this collection revisit the dilemma of time and the fragility of life, in unexpected human misadventures, much like those in Homer's "Odyssey." They sketch and delineate the "place" from which one enters this specific and unique void, in order to reflect on the new—yet ancient—epochal challenges: the loss of existential certainties, experiences of pain and mourning, and the sense of the transience of a global society devoid of certainties, in need of recovering the most authentic forms of interpersonal communication.

It is an allegorical journey into this singular "land of the dead" of our time, which, like the actual realm of the deceased, surpasses the living in breadth and gravity. It becomes an effective metaphor for our post-pandemic humanity and its traumatic transformations, even though the texts in the collection date back to a period preceding both the Russo-Ukrainian war and the pandemic emergency.

They, as the author recounts, were retrieved from the web, where they had vanished after the suppression of the two blogs (Erodiade and Transference) that had hosted them, so their theme and mode of composition mutually reference and integrate with one another.

conférence donnée dans le cadre du séminaire doctoral « Création, media, médias » (org. Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Yves Citton,  Isabelle Krzywkowski ), Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3, 6 avril 2016.
Publiée dans le n°10 de la revue GPS, "Poésies expérimentales", dossier coordonné par Jean-Pierre Bobillot, janvier 2017

This PhD by exegesis and creative project examines the poetry of three contemporary New Zealand poets: Alistair Paterson, Alan Loney and Michele Leggott in the context of the relational axes, comprising syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. It addresses the question
of what the relational axes can tell us about poetry which can then be used in practice. After due consideration of the implications of binary oppositions in the discourse and of features such as codes, the discussion considers Jakobson’s insights into the relational axes and ideas that problematise understandings of the sign, such as Riffaterre’s theory of representation and Derrida’s elaboration of the originary nature of writing. The analysis accommodates theoretical evolution from structuralism to poststructuralism, postmodernism and assemblage
theories.

Poetry is richly susceptible to semiotic analysis because of the way it highlights language. I describe examples of the interaction between the axes through techniques such as metonymy and metaphor. Work that features distinctive layout invites a discussion of how the use of
page space may be conceptualised and what effects are gained by it. The idea of space being used to score music was made popular by Charles Olson and has been a justification for experimental typography, but this is just one possible function. I describe various functions
for the use of space in the poetry discussed, and I argue that its use is paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic, since it often subverts the definition of the syntagm (which is singular and linear). I argue that the use of space constitutes an act of substitution for language.

I have encountered few attempts in the literature to systematically articulate the variety of effects which space can yield, and this is important work that I extend here. The appendix attempts a provisional taxonomy of the use of space, via reference to the analysis of poetry in
chapters two, three and four. These instances are charted and grouped together to gain a better understanding of how space contributes to meaning, and to encourage the use of page space in suggestive and embodied ways. At the same time, I acknowledge that it is one
avenue of many by which multiplicity of meaning can be achieved, and reflect on the way Michele Leggott’s poetry, for example, has moved away from spatial experiments yet found other ways to attain multiplicity, often through an articulation of competing codes. My
creative project responds to ideas in both the poetry analysed and the theoretical components, investigating formal structures as syntagmatic confines; the idea of the centre being outside structure; the place of written language (as opposed to speech); social context; selection and
substitution in poems; spatial relations, misdirection and the unity of the whole. It does so in a variety of forms with an emphasis on hybrids.

Translator’s note: In “One of the Postcards was Lying,” Johan Mijail constructs a new sexual identity in opposition to heteronormativity by re-writing and reimagining the poem and spoken word piece « Yo soy la Marilyn Monroe de Santo Domingo » [“I am the Marilyn Monroe of Santo Domingo”] published in Postales [Postcards], the award-winning book by Dominican poet Frank Báez.

From an edited collection that brings together an internationally known and interdisciplinary group of scholars (including François Laruelle himself) who use non-philosophy to cross the boundaries between philosophy and performance, this chapter focuses on quantum complementarity in the work of Georges Bataille wherein it is seen to wield a heuristic power that causal description or teleological writing cannot provide. It is the playful mediation between narrative induction and performative philosophy that helps readers of Bataille to negotiate the world’s inherent discontinuity, offering quantum “bundles” as a way of breaking through the sequential determinism of phenomena.

Aesthetically speaking, the visual representation of quantum bundles playfully unleashes paroxysms of emotional, psychic, and spiritual development. As such, Max Born’s definition of quantum mechanics is transmuted into a kind of quantum mechan(t)ics, evoking a linguistic tomfoolery that functions both heuristically and metaphorically as an acausal entryway, an opening to a critical playfulness ultimately curating the readerly co-quantization with what is being observed.

es un talentoso artista argentino que practica distintas disciplinas (dibujo, pintura, poesía visual, intervenciones, etc.). Como sucede habitualmente, su dedicación a la pintura ha tenido más repercusión que sus propuestas de poesía visual. Quizás esto se deba al carácter fronterizo de este registro, lo cual lo convierte en una disciplina inclasificable.

Poetry written in mathematics. On the „impossible poetry” project by Tymoteusz Karpowicz

ABSTRACT

Tymoteusz Karpowicz is thought to be one of the most imprtant and the most independent poets of the second half of the 20th century. His “unread” volumes of poetry (Odwrócone światło, Rozwiązywanie przestrzeni, Słoje zadrzewne) arouse admiration, but also some embarrassment among critics. In the writings of Tymoteusz Karpowicz the quasi-scientific discourse interlaces with the artistic language.
The purpose of the study is to present this less-known problem and to answer the question about aims and functions of this poetical strategy. The quasi-genres of Karpowicz’s poetry will be discussed during the presentation, i.e.: parallaxes, originals, logical calques, poems-angles and their trigonometric functions.
The above mentioned matters will be lightened up by the context of Karpowicz’s fascination of personas like Albert Einstein or Stefan Banach. This interest influenced on philosophy of writing by Karpowicz, for whom one of the most important philosophers was Martin Heidegger.
The poetry of Tymoteusz Karpowicza will be embedded in the context of modernism, that is a movement which conceives poetry as a cognition tool and in the light of avant-guarde fascination of the development of technology and science. The other aspect will be the friendship of Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Andrzej Falkiewicz. The latter was a critic of literature and theatre, but also a specialist in the fields of mathematics, physics or economy. The evidence of this fascinating dialogue is the correspondence gathered in the book entitled Dwie rozmowy.

ABSTRAKT

Tymoteusz Karpowicz to jeden z najważniejszych i zarazem najbardziej „osobnych” polskich poetów drugiej połowy XX wieku. Prawdziwy podziw, ale i zakłopotanie krytyków budzą wciąż nieopracowane w sposób całościowy tomy poetyckie Odwrócone światło, Rozwiązywanie przestrzeni oraz Słoje zadrzewne. W twórczości autora Słojów zadrzewnych dyskurs quasi-naukowy przeplata się z językiem poetyckim. Artykuł ma na celu przedstawienie tego mniej znanego badaczom zagadnienia oraz odpowiedź na pytanie o cele i skutki owej strategii poetyckiej. Omówione zostały quasi-gatunki poetyckie, będące autorskimi pomysłami Karpowicza: paralaksy, oryginały, kalki logiczne oraz wiersze-kąty i ich funkcje trygonometryczne. Specyficzne światło na powyższe zagadnienia rzuca kontekst fascynacji Karpowicza takimi postaciami jak Albert Einstein czy Stefan Banach. Miało to wpływ na filozofię tworzenia Karpowicza, dla którego jednym z ważniejszych myślicieli był Martin Heidegger. Poezja Tymoteusza Karpowicza została osadzona w kontekście modernizmu, czyli prądu ujmującego poezję jako narzędzie pogłębionej refleksji nad poznaniem oraz w świetle awangardowej fascynacji rozwojem techniki i nauki. Kolejnym aspektem jest przyjaźń Karpowicza z Andrzejem Falkiewiczem. Był on krytykiem literackim i teatralnym doskonale znającym takie dziedziny, jak matematyka, fizyka czy ekonomia. Świadectwem tego fascynującego dialogu jest korespondencja zgromadzona w tomie Dwie rozmowy.

Vincent Broqua, Dirk Weissmann (dir.), Sound / Writing : traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens, Homophonic translation – traducson – Oberflächenübersetzung, Paris, éditions des archives contemporaines, 2019, 356 p., ISBN : 9782813002686.

Ouvrage disponible intégralement en Open Acces sur le site de l'éditeur :
http://www.archivescontemporaines.com/books/9782813002686

Présentation :
Depuis une bonne cinquantaine d’années, la traduction homophonique — aussi connue sous le nom de traducson ou de traduction de surface (de l’allemand Oberflächenübersetzung) — a fait son entrée dans le champ littéraire international, où elle est pratiquée par un nombre croissant d’écrivains, aux États-Unis, en Allemagne, en France et au-delà. À la suite de quelques pionniers tels que Louis Zukofsky, Ernst Jandl ou les membres du groupe Oulipo, ce genre littéraire hétérodoxe, entre traduction et création, s’est largement diffusé sur le plan international, notamment en poésie. Dans la mesure où elle entend transposer dans une autre langue les sonorités d’un texte sans se préoccuper, en premier lieu, de son contenu sémantique, la traduction homophonique peut faire l’effet d’une provocation, d’un canular. Or, en jouant le son contre le sens, le populaire contre le savant, le profane contre le sacré, cette pratique apparaît également comme un vecteur privilégié pour interroger, subvertir, déconstruire nos idées sur la langue, la traduction et la littérature.

Homophonic translation — also known as ‘sound translation’ or ‘surface translation’ (from the German: Oberflächenübersetzung) — made its entry into the international literary field a good fifty years ago at least, and is today practiced by a growing number of writers in the United States, Germany, France, and many other countries. Following such pioneers as Louis Zukofsky, Ernst Jandl, and the members of the Oulipo, this heterodox literary genre, falling somewhere between translation and creation, has spread widely across the international map, particularly in the realm of poetry. Consisting in the transposition of the sound qualities of a source text into another language without initially addressing that text’s meaning, homophonic translation may act as a challenge, or a provocation, or even a hoax. However, by playing sound against meaning, lowbrow against highbrow, the profane against the sacred, this technique also appears as a privileged vehicle to question, subvert, deconstruct our ideas on language, translation, and literature.

For some time scholars have examined unconventional linguistic patterns in E. E. Cummings’ poetic style. Of all the aspects under consideration, it is grammar, lexis and morphology that have been most widely researched, while only a small number of studies have looked at graphology or, least of all, punctuation. This article is a contribution to the latter research field, and is aimed at developing a systematic approach to the use of punctuation marks in E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetry. I deal with two fundamental research questions: What foregrounding patterns are present in E. E. Cummings’ unorthodox use of punctuation marks, and what effects derive from his singular use of marks? Using 157 experimental poems as a corpus, I identify any instances of unconventional punctuation and classify the different devices that break with convention, determining the meaning implications (if any) that derive from these particular uses. An in-depth analysis of these poems reveals that there are three basic unconventional devices in Cummings’ use of punctuation marks (substitution, omission and insertion) and that these help Cummings to achieve a variety of purposes: emphasize certain elements within the poem, shift the tempo of the lines, create chaotic scenes, produce iconic effects, schematize any unit within the poem, omit letters and words, signal heteroglossia, indicate imperative voice, articulate the poem into different layers, create plays on words, and reproduce features of spoken language.