Introducing the Visual Art through Concrete Poetry in the EFL Classroom: A Case Study

Teaching poetry offers the teacher of literature some basic and active ways to engage students in learning English because of poetry’s rich language which represents an opportunity for learners to explore meanings and be able to formulate creative responses. One must be aware of the fact that poetry includes various types which differ in forms, and each one of these may have a particular influence on students? learning literature; that is why one centralized the research area on concrete poetry or what is called visual poetry too. This study aims to teach students not only to read and listen to a poem but to develop the skill of creativity through rewriting and this ability would be provoked by the visual shape of the concrete poem. One is trying to bring fun in the EFL classroom and particularly during the literature lecture where students are probably bored by analyzing every line and stanza. So, all these aims were to be concrete via a test, observation and questionnaire. These scientific tools confirmed one’s hypotheses about how positive is concrete poetry for the group of the third-year English L.M.D. students at the University of Djilali Liabes, Sidi Bel Abbes

Enfolding the Hand, Entrancing the Eye: Erica Baum’s Dog Ear

This essay will situate Erica Baum’s Dog Ear within broader discussions of appropriation, remediation, and queer phenomenology.  In her ongoing series, begun over a decade ago, Baum makes the quotidian act of folding the corner of a book’s page into a sculptural intervention, allowing her to “reauthor” the newly concealed and revealed juxtaposition of text.  These digital photographs, initially displayed in art galleries, were selectively sequenced by Baum to become Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011, reprinted 2016).  Both the accompanying critical writings and subsequent reviews of the book emphasized continuities between Baum’s project and traditions of found and concrete poetry, alongside modernist precursors like Malevich and Albers who informed her visual lexicon.  While acknowledging these legacies, my essay focuses on the evident limitations of attempts to render Baum’s works using standard and modified modes of lineation (offered by Kenneth Goldsmith and Amaranth Borsuk, respectively) which consistently evacuate what is most compelling about them.  Instead, I propose and demonstrate a method of gestalt poetics, one which lets their circuitous, open-ended dimensions register more fully by emphasizing evocative recombination, adjacency, and the interrelation of these remediated pages as they return back to and contort the codex.  Textual figures get produced, as Sara Ahmed has argued “by acts of relegation” and their queerness, in Baum’s work, depends on perpetually destabilizing the bifurcation between reading and looking in order to shift our sense of foreground and background into an extended matrix of partial legibilities. 

‘A sculpture that has never been seen before’: the Advanced Sculpture Course, group crit and Silâns magazine at St Martin’s College of Art1

Focusing on the magazine Silâns, produced by students and tutors Barry Flanagan, Rudy Leenders and Alistair Jackson on the Advanced Sculpture Course at St Martin’s College of Art between 1964 and 1965, this article explores the magazine as a collaborative space for students and tutors alike. Arguing that while the ‘group crit’ or discussion forum at St Martin’s offered students a verbal platform to describe, defend or critique their work (which increasingly relied on concepts and ideas over formal properties), it was the format of the art school magazine that offered a space for discourse and collaboration. By questioning the purpose of art and the role of the artist more generally, Silâns offered a site for critique of a rapidly changing art education system. In doing so, it prefigured later conceptual magazines that encompassed similar territory and preoccupations. I argue that although the content and form of Silâns are now identified in relation to concrete poetry, it is better situated in the context of early text-based conceptual art practice. The emphasis on the magazine as a means to disseminate concrete poetry tacitly avoids any of its political implications, in favour of its formal aspects. In concluding that the importance of Silâns, as an alternative platform for student collaboration and a precursor to later text-based conceptual art practice, has so far been overlooked and confined instead to a footnote in the sculptor Barry Flanagan’s biography, I argue that, more than group crit, this magazine is a manifestation of the verbal impulse in art colleges.

Multiálogo e arco tenso: poemas intermídia de Décio Pignatari

Décio Pignatari (1927-2012) era o mais irreverente do trio de poetas concretos que compunha junto com os irmãos Haroldo e Augusto de Campos. A ousadia de Pignatari está na sátira, mas também no multiálogo das mídias, que ele experimenta por meio de diferentes suportes nos poemas intermídia. O objetivo do trabalho foi trazer a poesia de Décio Pignatari para o campo de análise do suporte de inscrição, sugerindo um diálogo ativo com o contemporâneo digital. Observa-se que existe algum dado tecnomoderno nos poemas intermídia um movimento (1956), hombre hambre hambra (1957) e caviar (1959), que transitam entre os suportes da página e do áudio. Para compor a discussão teórica do conceito de intermídia foram utilizados os textos: Inter textos/ inter artes/ inter media (2006) e Concrete poetry and the new performance arts: intersemiotic, intermedia, intercultural (2000), de Claus Clüver. Já os textos: A poesia concreta como precursora da cibercultura (2006) e Décio Pignatari entre a vida, os signos e a memória (2016), de Lucia Santaella, articularam o diálogo entre os poemas e o contexto digital.

Between the treatise and epiphany, that is, about Leszek Szaruga for the eighth time

The article, written on the occasion of the jubilee of an outstanding polish poet, prose writer, essayist, literary critic and literary scholar, possessing enormous achievements in each of these fields, is an attempt to determine his creative personality. The author wrote about him 8 times reserving individual books and now tries to merge his recognition into the overall portrait of the writer. He states that Szaruga is a linguistic poet and at the same time well-versed in literary tradition, as evidenced by numerous intertextual references, among others to the works of Borges in short stories and Lec in aphoristics. He perfectly accomplishes both classical forms: poetic treatise, lyrical miniature, sonnet as well as experimental: linguistic poems and concrete poetry. Finally, an experimental interpretation of one short poem is presented.