conceptual poetry

In 1956, the Brazilian avant-garde poet Wlademir Dias-Pino published one of his most famous books: A Ave. All copies of this conceptual work were produced in a craft press, and the content and form of the text (a process poem, as Dias-Pino called it) are inextricable from the materiality of the book, composed of superimposed perforated pages of different colors and transparency levels, with printed letters and polygonal lines. Scholars have considered A Ave an analog predecessor of new media poetry, reflecting on the affordances of paper, ink, punch hole, and bookbinding, and their creative use in a book of visual poetry centered on the imagery of birds in flight. Wlademir Dias-Pino also wrote theoretical texts and a manifest that point to the permutational and the procedural nature of poetic language as code. His contributions as an antecedent to Latin-American digital literature still require further investigation, especially because scholars interested in the history of new media poetry in the continent often pay more attention to the Brazilian concrete poets from São Paulo, such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Nonetheless, an important gesture of acknowledging Dias-Pino’s contribution to the field was made by the Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín, who created in 2003 the Flash piece Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino. In this animation, a bird graphically constructed as a calligram is seen in flight, and the animal’s body and wings are made of a combination of words that allude to the metadata of A Ave among apparently random ASCII symbols. Padín’s work is included in the Litelat Anthology, but it can no longer be accessed in its “original” format due to the obsolescence of Flash. Although this might initially seem just a setback, the limited temporality of Flash has more to say: as a technological platform with its own lifecycle, it highlights the historicity of Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino as a piece of electronic literature produced for specific software from a specific age. A Ave, on the other hand, is a piece of analog procedural literature meant to be read without any extraneous device, but also susceptible to the physical deterioration that all material culture is liable to. This poster presents some reflections on convergences and dissonances between Wlademir Dias-Pino’s A Ave and Clemente Padín’s Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino, considering both artists’ aesthetic projects, the poetic codes they used, and the affordances of the materialities in which they inscribed their images of birds in flight. We intend to point out how the work by a prominent predecessor of electronic literature is revisited by an established digital artist of our times in a dialogue that is of much interest to the community of Latin American e-lit and to that of electronic literature as a whole.

This dissertation speaks to a massive dearth of research in African electronic literature (African e-lit), a discipline that boasts a growing number of works but little scholarship. With African literature incorporating digital technology into its creative process, and with electronic literary criticism focusing on areas outside its predominantly western cannon, African e-lit positions itself as an important area of scholarly endeavor. After considering the implications of placing African e-lit as the direction in which both African literature and electronic literature take, this dissertation looks at three different genres of African e-lit in the context of oral literature. There are analyses of examples of concrete poetry, conceptual poetry, and mobile video games, all from Ghana. Ultimately, the aim of this project is to ascertain the ways in which oral tradition influences the nature, form, and shape of African electronic literature.

This article considers the intersection between African oral tradition and electronic literature by exploring the potential of Sankofa to interact with concrete poetry in an electronic space. Sankofa is an example of the Adinkra, a set of symbols that were originally created and used by the Akan in West Africa. These symbols have literary value which this article looks at in ways similar to concrete poetry; examining Sankofa as concrete poetry in an electronic context enables a simultaneous dovetailing with as well as convergence from oral and print based modes of engaging with the text: aspects of oral tradition influence this exploration.

Sankofa unlike most other Adinkra symbols has two variations as well as a strong connection to an oral folktale. Other elements of orality such as performance and narrative combine with these features to allow for an analysis of Sankofa through the lens of concrete poetry, both in terms of its Adinkra variation and its folktale rendition. In reverse, the unique implications of this analysis extend the visual-heavy features of concrete poetry due to the ways in which Sankofa impacts conventional understandings of orality, aurality, and the visual in concrete poetry.

Taking recent writings-of-internet as test cases, Stuart Moulthrop demonstrates the folly of deploying modernist compositional models, even avant-garde theories of citational and conceptual poetry recently popularized by Kenneth Goldsmith and the Flarf poets, to read born-digital writing. Though it may be fun, it's ultimately futile to interpret the contingent output of an "interface in process" as a poem existing in a fixed, terminable state. Perhaps, then, interfacing with databases is becoming integral to not just electronic literature and digital poetics but all forms of literary study and practice? (Source: EBR)