Concepts of ‘Form’

From the very beginnings of philosophical reflection on art and aesthetics, form was regarded as a criterion to judge aesthetic artefacts: from works of architecture and music through to the visual arts, poetry, drama, and narrative literature. There is a complex history of numeric poetry and tectonic literature, i.e. of texts composed according to numeric keys, to geometrical and algebraic patterns, altogether constituting texts which were ‘formed’ in a literal sense. Whenever reflections and theories are concerned with issues of proportion, symmetry, or seriality, they focus on forms resulting from relations between parts.Footnote ¹ The concept of ‘parts’, however, seems to imply the complementary concept of a ‘whole’, but this should not be taken as self-evident.

The notion of ‘form’ has a complex history, which is closely connected with the complementary histories of its various opposite terms. There are different complementary concepts: the concept of ‘content’ (versus form), or ‘matter’, but also of ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’. A significant moment in the history of aesthetic form concepts is represented by the Horatian postulate that the poetical work should be simplex et unum. In the course of the development of Enlightenment aesthetics, the ideal of unity and homogeneity (as it is expressed by the formula simplex et unum) is successively devalued, especially under the influence of Alexander Baumgartenʼs aesthetics. As a consequence, complexity and plurality (Mannigfaltigkeit) are now regarded as dominant aesthetic values; they are not any longer identified or associated with disproportionality, asymmetry, or even deformity. The poet is expected to integrate a variety of phenomena into a structure, and the more the aspect of integration is stressed, the more important appears the issue of proportion. Organological models here often supersede concepts of regularity and order. In Hegelʼs Aesthetics the central concept of beauty is discussed in terms of formal qualities (Gethmann-Siefert Reference Gethmann-Siefert2005). In this historically influential theory of beauty, which is concerned with both natural and artificial phenomena, beauty is defined as the unity and harmony of different parts, which are not only arranged regularly and symmetrically but also connected in an organic manner.

In his instructive History of the Six Concepts of Art, Beauty, Form, Creativity, Mimesis and Aesthetic Experience, the Polish philosopher Wladiyslaw Tatarkiewicz (Reference Tatarkiewicz2003, 318) distinguishes systematically between five conceptualizations of form. The first three are of crucial significance for aesthetic discourse and reflections about works of art (whereas the other two correspond, respectively, to the philosophical theories of entelechy and cognition). According to Tatarkiewicz, the first concept of form refers to the order of parts in relation to a whole. It is concerned with composition, proportion, harmony, rhythm, symmetry, and numerical relations (Tatarkiewicz Reference Tatarkiewicz2003, 318). A second idea of form is shaped by the oppositional concepts of form and content: the expression ‘form’ here refers to the sensual appearance of a piece of art as opposed to its message or subject.Footnote ² The third concept of form relevant with regard to works of art and aesthetic discourse, interprets form in the sense of an outline or contour.Footnote ³

Especially when modern art and art theory turned to abstraction, the issue of form obtained new significance in aesthetic discourse. As art was regarded as an exploration of form, artists’ consciousness of form was even regarded as the dominant criterion for their works’ aesthetic quality. As a result, the aesthetics of abstraction are substantially aesthetics of form, as the theoretical essays of Wassily Kandinsky illustrate exemplarily (Kandinsky Reference Kandinsky2002; Kandinsky Reference Kandinsky2004). In general, the aesthetics of abstraction is to a high degree influenced and shaped by an aesthetics of autonomy, especially by the idea of the autonomous work of art as a self-referential, auto-reflexive construction. In a way, the concept of self-reference is the very centrepiece of the modernist aesthetics of form, according to which form displays itself in the single piece of art – and the single work therefore has to be regarded as a concretization of forms. This concerns also specific concepts of form such as proportion, symmetry, and seriality: self-referential art presents itself as a concrete and ‘material’ reflection on these organization principles – in other words on the tension between them and their counterparts (disproportion, asymmetry, variety).

Visual Poetry and the Question of Form

Visual poetry plays a crucial role in the aesthetic project of exposing forms (and of indirectly staging an abstract aesthetics of form) insofar as it is both ‘mimetic’ and ‘abstract’ in the sense of ‘non-mimetic’ poetry. There are various forms of visual texts already in ancient, medieval, and early modern poetry; and these are often based on abstract patterns, on geometrical figures, or grid structures. On the other hand, visual poetry was also continuously shaped by mimetic or iconic tendencies, as for instance in contour poems in the shape of objects (such as altars, wings, eggs, columns etc.). Under the influence of the modernist aesthetics of abstraction, visual poetry takes up again its double tradition of abstract and mimetic forms. Examples often do not only play with specific traditional forms but also with the difference between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘mimetic’ as such, between abstraction and concretion in art and poetry.

Studies and anthologies dedicated to visual literature often stress the analogies and continuities between ancient, modern, and contemporary subgenres and examples (Adler and Ernst Reference Adler and Ernst1987; Dencker Reference Dencker2011). With regard to its mimetic as well as to its abstract features, visual poetry is evidently related to all three sub-concepts of form as they are considered by Tatarkiewicz. Manifesting themselves most evidently as ‘compositions’ of different parts (of letters and other signs), visual poems programmatically raise the question of how they are ordered and shift the readerʼs focus on their proportion, rhythm, symmetry or asymmetry, often also on their numeric structure. This aspect corresponds to Tatarkiewiczʼs first category of form. However, many subgenres of visual poetry may also be described in terms of ‘form and content’ (i.e. in accordance with Tatarkiewiczʼs second category), interpreting the sensual qualities as the ‘form’ by which a message, meaning, or subject is mediated. This is evidently the case with mimetic or iconic visual poems that refer to their respective subjects or topics by means of their very visual structure. But even abstract, visual text compositions may be interpreted as ‘containing’ a message or ‘representing’ a subject, as for instance spatial and temporal structures and experiences (such as labyrinths) show. The idea of form as a ‘contour’ (Tatarkiewiczʼs third category), finally, is very clearly represented by contour poems, that is, by poems written or printed in a way that appears ‘mimetic’ with regard to the contours of concrete objects, such as wings, columns, eggs, weapons, etc. (Adler and Ernst Reference Adler and Ernst1987; Dencker Reference Dencker2011).

In the course of the twentieth century, visual poetry has unfolded into various new forms and shapes, starting with the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, shaping the concrete poetry movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and later on expanding into the new media (Williams Reference Williams1967; Gomringer Reference Gomringer1972). In its various forms of appearance, visual poetry significantly contributed to processes of reflecting and conceptualizing ‘form’ in the broad spectrum of meanings this term can adopt. Especially with regard to abstraction tendencies, so-called ‘concrete’ poetry often demonstrates that the art of composing words and letters can be regarded as an ‘abstract’ form experiment.Footnote ⁴ Quite often, however, these contributions to the conceptualization of form appear programmatically playful: they emerge as ludic experiments dedicated to the options of using signs and to the creation of forms – ‘form’ here taken to be the opposite of ‘chaos’, of ‘matter’, of ‘contingency’. ‘Form’ is then seen as proportion versus disproportion, symmetry versus asymmetry, and so on. A small selection of examples hereinafter shall illustrate the implicit (and sometimes even explicit) aesthetics of form as it is characteristic of multifaceted and self-referential visual poetry.

Form as Proportion: Playing with the Sonnet Form

When works of literature and poetry are compared to architecture, there is often a special focus on the proportion of their parts, the numeric relations dominating their structure. This is most notably the case with the sonnet as a poetical genre shaped by its relatively constant form and ‘architecture’. The traditional sonnet evidently does not represent a subgenre of visual poetry. However, it is closely linked to aesthetic debates about the significance and value of form, since it has always been regarded as a decidedly formal poem, if not even a lyrical homage to form as such (Greber and Zemanek Reference Greber and Zemanek2012). Precisely because of its rigid form, the sonnet was both praised and criticized. And in the course of the dispute about the sonnet, several poets used the sonnet form in order to reflect about it – either in affirmative or critical ways. As programmatic sonnets, these meta-poems are also shaped by their specific visual dimension. In a famous meta-sonnet, the German poet August Wilhelm Schlegel describes the sonnetʼs structure as regulated by measure, number, and proportion:

Several keywords in this text are evidently related to concepts of form, number, proportion, and symmetry: two rhymes, repeated four times, lines of equal measure, homophony, order, number, proportion (Ebenmaß) of antithetic elements. At the time when Schlegel wrote this poem the sonnet form was discussed controversially. Goetheʼs attitude toward the sonnet was ambiguous; critics such as Johann Heinrich Voss regarded this lyrical form as too rigid and too artificial, as a kind of ‘unnatural’ regulation of poetical language. Schlegelʼs meta-sonnet, on the contrary, is a homage to its own regulated form. It rejects sonnet criticism and compares its own form to a magic formula. It even alludes to the biblical phrase, according to which God himself has ordered all things according to measure, number, and weight (omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti – Wisdom of Solomon, 11, 21). Schlegelʼs sonnet, thus, is characterized by a relation between structure and content that might metaphorically be called ‘symmetrical’.

Given that the sonnet is substantially determined by its form, from the perspective of the modern aesthetics of abstraction, it appears logical to reduce sonnets to their pure form. Twentieth-century avant-garde poetry uses the sonnet form in various ways, covering a broad spectrum between abstraction and parodic imitation. Sometimes the sonnet is presented as an abstract visual form, a pattern of words which – as it seems – abstains from all reference and represents the mere sonnet structure. Ernst Jandlʼs sonnets are such programmatic ‘formal’ sonnets. Based on the idea that one could fill the sonnetʼs lines with abstract expressions related to the sonnetʼs form, they demonstrate that a poetic genre (like the sonnet) that is characterized by its rigid form provides a composition principle allowing one to produce ‘concrete’ poems. In Jandlʼs oeuvre, the idea of writing ostentatiously abstract poem lines without ‘content’ recurs repeatedly. Being variations of a concept, Jandlʼs sonnets not only demonstrate that form as such may be interpreted as a poem, but they also locate the single examples within a series, and that means: in another, open formal pattern.

Jandlʼs ‘Sonett 1’ (Reference Jandl1985b, 40) consists of two four-word sequences (stanzas) and two three-word ‘tercets’, all of them built from words ending in –nett. I quote the first quatrain and the second tercet:

The second quatrain sports the first syllables da (‘danett’), es, ge and ja, and then follow two blocks of three words, again ending in -nett and with the first syllables (in-, ob-. du-; im-, wo- and zu). Here is the final tercet:

These words, besides all rhyming with the German word Sonett (‘sonnet’), also invoke the Austrian German word nett (‘nice’) which in some cases can be used as a discourse marker (‘not’, ‘not really’). Some of the words actually have meaning; thus zu nett corresponds to ‘too nice’; wo nett could be read as ‘where not’, annett as ‘not either’.

Jandlʼs ‘Sonett 2’ refines this process even further by simply using the word ‘sonett’ (the sonnet in German is spelled Sonett!) in small letters as a one-word sonnet line and repeating the word twice four times in separate lines, and then twice three times, thus creating four stanzas and the image of the two quatrains followed by two tercets. In another variation that is even more playful, Jandl deploys the German definite article in its neuter form das (‘it’) as a modifier of the vowels a, e, i, o and u, echoing the sonnetʼs rhyme patterns by having the lines end in u – o – o – u // u – o – o – u // i – e – a // i – e – a and reiterating the sequence of vowels (a e i o u) from different points in the sequence so that the fifth vowel is different from u. The use of the article also echoes the iambic rhythm of the sonnet: dadumm, dadumm, dadumm, dadumm, dadumm. I quote the first quatrain and the final tercet to illustrate:

Twentieth-century visual poetry provides even more eccentric variations of the sonnet form than poems just using formulae instead of conventional lines. As a consequence of its clarity and rigidity, the sonnet form can still be identified when applied to chains of non-verbal signs, as for instance in Mary Ellen Soltʼs ‘moonshot sonnet’ (Williams Reference Williams1967). This poem does not consist of words, but of graphic signs. As the poet herself explains, she uses ‘the scientistʼs symbols for marking off areas on the moonʼs surface’. Thus, the arrangement of signs refers to the moon by symbols that are normally used to ‘describe’ or ‘inscribe’ the moon in a literal sense, namely by writing on photographs of the moon surface. These rather abstract signs are ‘presented five to a line’, and the lines are ‘added up to fourteen’. By adapting the sonnetʼs structure, the concrete poem becomes a ‘visual sonnet’ (Soltʼs own commentary in Williams Reference Williams1967). This visual poem is noticeably ordered according to measure and number – but wordless, mute, rigidly abstract. As an architectonic poem it refers to its own distinctly ‘ordered’ shape. At the same time, it is linked (slightly ironically) to the idea of space as a cosmos for ‘cosmonauts’: the symbols it is composed of instead of words and letters are screen symbols as they are commonly used in the computer sign codes of US American space technology. Accordingly, the poem refers to cosmic space via its own signs. Moreover, the text might also be read in the tradition of poems dedicated to the moon.

Based on the idea of using non-verbal signs in order to compose sonnet structures, several inventive sonnet writers have created playful variations of the traditional genre: sonnets without words, consisting of abstract signs and composed by pictorial elements, sonnets even consisting of the images of things whose structure is analogous to a sonnetʼs structure: for example, a group of forks. Karl Rihaʼs ‘sonett für scharfe beißerchen’ (‘sonnet for sharp little teeth’) and his ‘gourmet sonett’ (Greber and Zemanek Reference Greber and Zemanek2012, 37) provokingly transgress the borders of conventional poetry. The ‘gourmet sonett’ (1988) or ‘gourmet sonnet’ consists of an image showing four forks: two of them with four, two with three prongs (Greber and Zemanek Reference Greber and Zemanek2012, 37). The poems’ effects might be regarded as rather ambiguous: on the one hand they are satiric; but on the other hand they might be also related to the idea that poetry can emerge wherever the observer perceives it. Everything may be a poem or a collection of poems, when even four forks constitute a sonnet. In these and similar examples, the sonnet is rigidly reduced to its proportions according to the formula 4 + 4 + 3 + 3. Sonnets composed of objects play with our perceptions. At the same time, they seem both to confirm and to question the importance of proportion. Of course, examples like this, mimicking the sonnet structure, raise the question under which conditions a poem may be identified as a sonnet at all. Does just a title actually transform a set of forks into a sonnet? Is ‘form’ so powerful? It is especially with regard to such playful variations of the visual poem that form as such appears as a ludic device for experimental poetry – a poetry that in a strict sense is not even ‘written’ anymore. Although these examples appear to be parodies of the traditional sonnet genre, they can be also interpreted as homages to the sonnet since they represent its form so clearly and purely.

Form versus Content? Playing with a Conventional Distinction

Concrete poetry was modelled and created as abstract poetry with regard to its renunciation of conventional objects of reference.Footnote ⁵ Both abstract and concrete poetry are highly self-referential and renounce primary referential meanings of words. Early abstract poetry, such as Dadaist or Russian Futurist poetry, playfully exploited sound patterns and rhythm. Abstract poetry was an important inspiration for later poets producing concrete poetry. Let us look at Eugen Gomringerʼs ‘ping pong’ (1953):

(Williams Reference Williams1967, 75)

Eugen Gomringer, poet, theorist, and an anthologist, was one of the most influential representatives of the German-language concrete poetry movement. His poem ‘ping pong’ (1977) represents concrete poetry in its purest form. Consisting of one-syllable expressions which are not even conventional words, it demonstrates how concrete poetry, according to its consensual definition, emancipates itself from the idea that words represent ‘things’. But is Gomringerʼs poem actually a poem without content, and consequently an abstract poem? One might interpret the poem as a mimetic or iconic representation of the clipping of a ping pong match. The text form presents itself as a kind of ‘contour’ of the match, based on the poemʼs rudimental vocabulary. It is probably not by coincidence that Gomringerʼs playful poem, which questions the distinction between abstract and mimetic poetry, is at the same time a poem about a game. Arguments that might interpret the text as being abstract of mimetic may alternate like the directions of the ball in a ping pong game. Representing a game by visual means, the poem implicitly refers to the game of ‘interpretation’. Games may be played according to different rules. In other words, a kind of ‘ping pong’ effect emerges regarding the question whether this poem has any content.

My second example is Mathias Goeritz: ‘The Golden Message’ (Williams Reference Williams1967). Mathias Goeritzʼs concrete poem ‘The Golden Message’ does not transmit a verbal message in a conventional sense; it does not have any declarative sentences, it does not name or describe any referent like ordinary verbal chains of signs, it does not represent any reality – it consists in a golden plaque on which are inscribed patterns of geometrical forms composed in the material form of letters (for images and comments see Tennent Reference Tennent2008). However, in spite of this tendency towards abstraction, it nevertheless indirectly refers to processes in reality and even to concrete ‘matter’. The poem is based on the Spanish word oro (‘gold’), and its title ‘The Golden Message’, which constitutes a fundamental element of the poem, stresses the wordʼs importance by translating it into English. As this title directs the readers’ attention to a certain material (gold), it is concerned with materiality, and it thus reminds one of the fact that in discourses on concrete poetry language and words have often been characterized as the poemʼs ‘material’. Yet, we do not just see material but also form: a changing form suggesting an association with a goldsmith forming the material he is working on. In an auto-referential way, the poem symbolically represents the ‘forming’ of texts out of words, playing with both (inextricably linked) concepts of form and matter.

Form, ‘Outline’, Dissolved Contours: Symmetry, Orientation and Disorientation

Outline poems were already created in ancient times, as for instance by the Greek poet Simias of Rhodos; Renaissance and Baroque poets such as Richard Willis continued this tradition. The form of symmetrical outline poems often resembles symmetrical geometrical forms, such as the triangle, the square, the rhombus, the oval, etc. Sometimes this genre also refers to symmetrical objects such as the egg, the altar, a pair of wings, a double-axe and to other things (Adler and Ernst Reference Adler and Ernst1987; Dencker Reference Dencker2011). The outline poem is thus a form that appears in a number of different epochs and in a variety of different functions. It can be iconic (for instance a poem about an altar in the shape of an altar – Tatarkiewiczʼs category 2) or merely a shape without any referential link to the content of the poem (Tatarkiewiczʼs category 3); or in concrete poetry, neither shape nor meaning need to have ‘content’. Reinhard Döhlʼs famous poem called ‘apfel’ (‘apple’) is a text which has the visual form of an apple and is made up of the letters of the German word for apple, apfel.

Comparing new examples of the symmetrical outline poem with older ones of the same genre, there is a great resemblance regarding their contours. However, a closer comparative look at these examples reveals an important difference. While the Greek examples consist of parallel lines, among the early modern visual poems there are poems that can only be read when the reader turns the page in his hand or repositions himself to regard it from different sides. Texts that can only be ‘read’ when they are turned or when the reader ‘turns himself/herself’ appear as twisted, if not contorted, however clear their shape may be. Not coincidentally, ‘mannerism’ very much cherished visual contour poems: they are linked to both orientation and disorientation. In modern concrete poetry, there are countless examples of symmetrical poems. Sometimes they resemble the ancient models, sometimes they are even more complex, as for instance texts with more than one symmetrical axis. At any rate, they exemplify the significance of form in this subgenre of visual poetry.

The experimental writer Carlfriedrich Claus created a completely new and quite specific variant of the ‘symmetric’ poem. A large number of Clausʼs texts were written on semi-transparent paper, and therefore these texts can be regarded from two sides in a very concrete sense: two sides that are related to each other in a perfect symmetry and thus provoke two symmetrical acts of reception. The poem – this should be taken into consideration – here is the whole, the ensemble of both sides. There is, however, no observation point that allows one to survey the complete text. All contours are dissolved, even the contours of ‘the text’ as such, since they appear only successively by turning the page. Can this poem be described as a coherent text at all? The traditional concept of a piece of art as a well-structured totality is questioned at different levels, not least since there is no simultaneously ‘present’ whole. Moreover, there is a kind of zoom-effect deriving from the micro-lines of the writing: in the depths of the visible structures there seem to be other spaces inaccessible to the eye.

Summary: Seriality

As these and other poems illustrate, visual poetry in the twentieth century is, on the one hand, linked to notions of form in more than one sense of the term; on the other hand, it explores a variety of different shapes of texts that open up to permanent change in view of their visual appearance as well as the observerʼs position.

Avant-garde poetryʼs contribution to serial art substantially consists of sequential poems, i.e. poems in the form of repetitions and lists, altogether suggesting the idea of incompleteness, even of potential infinity. Gertrude Steinʼs (Reference Stein and Stein1999) famous line ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ in her poem ‘Sacred Emily’ (1913) exemplarily illustrates the unfathomable spaces of meaning suggested by simple repetition. In concrete visual poetry seriality as a concept significantly influences the exploration of different subgenres and types of poems. Although presented in an ostentatiously regular and ordered manner, Eugen Gomringerʼs poem ‘snow is …’ (1968) (Williams Reference Williams1967), evokes the idea of infinity by using the form of the list: the text might be continued endlessly as there obviously is no semantic rule that determines the listed sentences except for their uniform structure. The text refers to everything and at the same time to nothing (thus being faithful to the formula describing concrete poetry as non-mimetic poetry). Moreover, it presents its own abstract and nude form in an ambiguous way: as the epitome of poetical ‘composition’ and as something contingent and vacant, seemingly endless and without structure, like a vast snowy landscape:

In this article I have traced a number of symmetrical, serial and form-focused poetic strategies that illustrate the creative uses of form in contemporary poetry. Repetition is exploited to yield both symmetries and serial sequences in which the same reappears in constellations of slight variation, to astonishingly potent effect. What is even more astonishing is the almost entire lack of meaning(s) in the materials that are so expertly being manipulated in the examples of concrete poetry that we have discussed.