Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Poetics after Auschwitz
- Part II Tradition and Transgression
- 7 Between Kahlschlag and New Sensibilities: Notes toward a Poetics of Thought after Gottfried Benn
- 8 “Barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins”: Gottfried Benn's Problems of Poetry and Its Poetology of Existence
- 9 Concrete Poetry
- 10 Heiner Müller: Discontinuity and Transgression
- 11 Let's Begin, Again: History, Intertext, and Rupture in Heiner Müller's Germania Cycle
- 12 Rupture, Tradition, and Achievement in Thomas Kling's Poetics and Poetry
- Part III Comparative Explorations in European Poetics
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
9 - Concrete Poetry
from Part II - Tradition and Transgression
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Poetics after Auschwitz
- Part II Tradition and Transgression
- 7 Between Kahlschlag and New Sensibilities: Notes toward a Poetics of Thought after Gottfried Benn
- 8 “Barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins”: Gottfried Benn's Problems of Poetry and Its Poetology of Existence
- 9 Concrete Poetry
- 10 Heiner Müller: Discontinuity and Transgression
- 11 Let's Begin, Again: History, Intertext, and Rupture in Heiner Müller's Germania Cycle
- 12 Rupture, Tradition, and Achievement in Thomas Kling's Poetics and Poetry
- Part III Comparative Explorations in European Poetics
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
das uneindeutige ist das konkrete.
[concrete is what's ambiguous.]
— Franz MonAs late as 1985, but still before he had won the Nobel prize, Günter Grass, who was growing up while the Nazi ban on so-called entartete Kunst (degenerate art) was in force, publicly declared his contempt for abstract art. Already as early as 1960, when he was freshly famous after the appearance of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) in 1959, Grass had termed the avant-garde poet Franz Mon a “laboratory poet.” That was in a speech on poetry held at a writers' conference held in Berlin. Grass's remark was an allusion to Gottfried Benn, who had spoken favorably in 1954 of a “wordlaboratory.” Grass did not mean to be complimentary when he compared a poem of Franz Mon's with a German children's word game that involved repeating one word, for example Blumenkohl (cauliflower), twenty-five times, until it had lost all meaning.
In spite of Grass's criticisms and, later, those of the proponents of engagierte Literatur (politically committed literature), Concrete Poetry flourished in the sixties in Germany. Some authors, such as Helmut Heißenbüttel and, considerably later, Ernst Jandl, were marketable; so was the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group), and concrete poems were widely broadcast on radio.
However, interest in Concrete Poetry declined after about fifteen years. This was not so much a result of hostile opposition from engagierte Literatur (which is itself now out of fashion) as of the failure of audiences to understand.
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- Information
- German and European Poetics after the HolocaustCrisis and Creativity, pp. 158 - 169Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011