The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Despite such formal preoccupations
not all concrete poetry rejects communication;
indeed the semantic extremes of
concrete poetry, via its spatial ‘grammar’,
come closer than any other mode of
writing to the elusive meaningful semantic
simultaneity that Barthes lauds as ‘colourless
writing’; writing in which each word
is ‘an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box
from which fly all the potentialities of language’.
The elusiveness of ‘writing degree
zero’ may be explained by the fact that
traditional syntax, and the logical form of
linear writing, simply does not permit a
statement of the several simultaneously
existing semantic realities making up the
‘potentialities’ of the word.
The eye may perceive two objects, the
mind may conceive two concepts, but
such pluralistic observations transcend
the possibilities and patterns of linear language
which must choose to record first
one observation and then the other; a distortion
which turns simultaneity into the
sequential. Attempting to simultaneously
evoke all the potentialities of language,
rejecting the internal ordering of sequential
linear language, yet, still working
within its confines, the Surrealists abandoned
logical order for the ‘super-real’
semantic impressionism of ‘automatic
writing’, while Joyce, Helms, Eliot and
Burroughs remixed fragments of words
and phrases in order to exchange old
semantic potentialities for those of their
new hybrid creations. Mallarmé achieved
a relatively non-sequential and non-linear
simultaneity of pluralistic semantic potentialities
in his poem ‘Un Coup de Dés’
whose pages, though precisely sequentially
ordered, proffered scattered spatially
punctuated words permitting permutation
in a number of non-sequential readings.
Concrete Poetry finally attained a
truly poly-semantic ‘Pandora’s box’ of
potentialities of meaning, synthesizing
Context 33
the typographical discoveries of the DADA
and Futurist poetries, and adopting the
single page as ‘working area’, transcending
the sequential, and creating simultaneity,
by rejecting linear order and
spatially punctuating the liberated word,
henceforth an object to be read freely in
all directions, and as such a semantic
object capable of presenting both vertical
and horizontal linguistic potentialities.
Whilst the scale of Concrete Poetry (one
page) marks this genre with the limitations
of minimal rather than of epic
literature, it is significantly symptomatic
of a mode of writing permitting the
presentation of unprecedented semantic
simultaneity. Concrete Poetry has offered
important pointers to a visual writing
transcending the limitations of sequential
language.
See Stephen Bann (ed.), Concrete
Poetry: An International Anthology
(1967); Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete
Poetry: A World View (1968); Emmett
Williams (ed.), An Anthology of Concrete
Poetry (1967); K. D. Jackson, Eric Vos
and J. Drucker (eds), Experimental –
Visual-Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry
Since the 1960s (1996).
NCPZ
Consonance See TEXTURE.
Context A central notion of modern
philosophical linguistics, and by extension,
of modern literary criticism too.
Contextual theories of meaning assert
that concepts precede percepts; that association
can only take place between universals,
not discrete impressions; and that
all discourse is over-determined, having a
multiplicity of meaning. In literary criticism
the effect of these doctrines has been
to extend the use of the word ‘meaning’ to
cover all aspects of interpretation and
to promote the false dictum ‘The meaning
of a word is its use in the language’.