Concrete Poetry: System Poetry, Language Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, Visual Poetry, Sound Poetry

The concrete poetry movements, such as system poetry, language poetry, conceptual poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry etc., all have in common that the emphasis is on the materiality of language, i.e. the shape and the sound of the signs rather than on the significans of the text. Joseph M. Conte has pointed out that the perception, when reading concrete poetry, is dual, i.e. on the one hand you sense the signs of the text, on the other hand you decode the significans of the text. On the contrary, it seems plausible that concrete poetry, especially in the last half century, is created as a complex interaction between the materiality of writing and existential-political agendas, as in the case with Inger Christensen’s system poetry and Johannes Heldén’s multimedial poetry. The thesis of the chapter is that Nordic concrete poetry is more than a (neo)Dadaist play with typography, orthography, and sound, as it often has its own well-defined poetological, existential and political objectives.
The chapter focuses on three periods in the history of concrete poetry in the Nordic countries. The first period is the avant-garde around World War I, with journals such as the Danish Klingen, the Swedish Flamman, and the Finnish Quosego and Ultra, and poets such as Diktonius, Södergran, Lagerkvist, Uppdal, Bønnelycke, and Momberg. The second period of concrete poetry is the 1960s, with the Danish journals mak and ta', and system and concrete poets such as Vagn Steen, Højholt and Inger Christensen, the Norwegian journal Profil and poets such as Vold and Rykkja, and Swedish poets such as Fahlström, Hodell, and Bengt Emil Johnson. Finally, a golden age of concrete poetry is the turn of the millennium as a result of the impact from the American conceptual writing and the digital literature. Notable is the internordic internet journal, afsnit p, in which poets such as Danish Frostholm and Søndergaard, Norwegian Ormstad and Aasprong, Swedish Heldén, and Finland-Swedish Cia Rinne have published works. The chapter outlines the most important genres within Nordic concrete poetry, which have been spread as currents from the 1920s to the present day, namely graphic poems, sound poems, interactive poems, montage/-readymade poems, and interartial/-medial poems.