The untitled poem by Eugen Gomringer that we can only call \u201csilencio\u201d is a classic, perhaps the classic, concrete poem. According to Marjorie Perloff\u2019s Unoriginal Genius,<\/i> the \u201csilencio\u201d version of the poem dates from 1953. In my 1968 edition of The Book of Hours and Constellations<\/i> I find the German manifestation of this poem (with the word \u201cschweigen\u201d) and the English poem (with the word \u201csilence\u201d), on the same page at the very beginning of the book \u2014 but no \u201csilencio.\u201d The place where I do find \u201csilencio\u201d is An Anthology of Concrete Poetry<\/i> from 1967, edited by Emmett Williams. My copy is the re-issue by Primary Information.<\/p>\n
Williams mentions tendencies and tries not to too strongly characterize any particular poets in the anthologies when he writes, in the introduction:<\/p>\n
The visual element of their poetry [the concrete poets\u2019 poetry] tended to be structural, a consequence of the poem, a \u201cpicture\u201d of the lines of force of the work itself, and not merely textural. It was poetry beyond paraphrase … the word,<\/i> not words, words, words<\/i> or expressionistic squiggles …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are several essential points here about the project of concrete poetry and how it differs from, for instance, the shapes of \u201cEaster Wings\u201d and the other poems in George Herbert\u2019s The Altar,<\/i> as well as the way Lewis Carroll presented the image of a mouse\u2019s tail in words that tell the mouse\u2019s tale in Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland.<\/i> However brilliant these two writers were, in these cases they were using language to make pictures; the concrete poets, beginning with Gomringer, worked to create structures.<\/i> Their poems are not just verse (lineated language), but made from lines of force. In many cases, as with the unnamed poem I must call \u201csilencio,\u201d an entire concrete poem can be understood to cohere as a word.<\/p>\n
There are other interpretations of Gomringer\u2019s poem that situate it in history, but I will give a simple one that situates it within the project of concrete poetry \u2014 followed by another that places it in a different and much longer-lived poetic tradition.<\/p>\n
The lines of force of this poem are, most obviously, those that allow for the gap in the middle where the ground (the absence of text, the absence of \u201csilencio\u201d) becomes figure. As ink declares silence, or, if we read the text aloud, as our voice declares silence, attentive readers can\u2019t help but notice a truer silence in the middle of the page.<\/p>\n
At the next stage, there is silence between each \u201csilencio,\u201d horizontally and vertically. We overlook this gap, which is seen even when text is not presented on a grid. It too will be represented if we read the poem aloud, however, between each spoken word.<\/p>\n
We can go further, although ear and eye would not agree about the silences. There are spaces, and thus silences of a visual sort, between each of the letters in \u201csilencio,\u201d too.<\/p>\n
Fascinating, isn\u2019t it, that John Cage\u2019s 4\u201933\u201d<\/i> was composed and presented in 1952, preceding this poem? This poem, too, seems to structurally show, through its lines of force, that silence can take center stage.<\/p>\n
In any case, without offering more than a brief appreciation, I mean to make it clear that this is a quintessential concrete poem. One can read it out loud, but that does not provide the listener with the effect of apprehending the structure of the poem on the page. The poem is not a picture of anything. It is a structure. And it is not squiggles or simply a bunch of words, even if the single lexeme \u201csilencio\u201d is repeated fourteen times. It is fitting to apprehend and read the whole poem as a word,<\/i> not a bunch of words.<\/p>\n
Accepting this, I would like to offer an interpretation of this poem that may seem perverse, but which I believe shows this poem\u2019s radical versatility: It can be seen in the light of a poetic tradition that long predates concrete poetry. This poem is not only a concrete poem, but also a sonnet. Specifically, I\u2019ll argue that although the repeated word is a Spanish word, it fits into the English-language tradition of the sonnet. Because concrete poetry is a transnational phenomenon and Gomringer writes in English as well as German and Spanish, this disjunction may be less unusual that it otherwise would be.<\/p>\n
Consider that the poem consists of fourteen occurrences of \u201csilencio,\u201d which despite their unusual arrangement on the page can be read aloud as fourteen lines. It would be hard not<\/i> to read them this way.<\/p>\n
Because each word is the same, the poem follows the rhyme scheme of a sonnet \u2014 any rhyme scheme, including the Petrarchan or Shakespearean in English, including those typical in Spanish.<\/p>\n
If some reader finds it impossible for the same line to be repeated fourteen times in a sonnet, I refer this reader to the 2002 \u201cSonnet\u201d by Terrance Hayes, which consists of fourteen repetitions of the line \u201cWe sliced the watermelon into smiles.\u201d<\/p>\n
But is it metrical? The word \u201csilencio\u201d pronounced by itself has two metrical feet ( x \/ | x \/ ) and is in perfectly regular iambic dimeter. This is also the meter of Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s last poem, \u201cSonnet,\u201d which begins:<\/p>\n
\nCaught \u2014 the bubble
\nin the spirit level,
\na creature divided;
\nand the compass needle<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThere\u2019s much more variation in Bishop\u2019s poem, but the metrical regularity of Gomringer\u2019s poem shouldn\u2019t preclude it from being in this particular form. While I don\u2019t have an example of a sonnet with repeated lines (like the one by Hayes) from before 1953, there are earlier sonnets in dimeter, or one, at least: a piece of light verse by Arthur Guiterman, published in The New Yorker<\/i> on July 7, 1939.<\/p>\n
Sonnets can be about anything, although the form does have a heritage. Reading the poem as a sonnet allows us to make a connection to the sonnet tradition if we wish. We can, for instance, ask whether this sonnet has anything to do with love, whether in the most traditional sense of love for a woman or, in John Donne and Herbert\u2019s senses, religious love. Could the silence of this sonnet be that of being understood, and of not needing to say anything aloud?<\/p>\n
Seeing this Gomringer poem as a sonnet also allows us to put it into conversation with other one-word texts (those that have several tokens<\/i> but repeat a single type<\/i>) that can also be viewed as sonnets, because they have fourteen tokens.<\/p>\n