Conference-report: From Concrete Poetry to Digital Poetry
Copenhagen, November 9-10 2006
See the complete program here.
The conference was organised by the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies in cooperation with The Georg Brandes School and The Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies, Literature, and the Arts (KLIK). The papers from the conference will be published in a special-issue of Nypoesi.
Claus Clüver, Indiana University, gave two lectures: first "Post-Colonial Avant-Garde or Modernist Arrière-Garde?" where he focused on the poetic production of the “Noigandres” group during the “heroic phase” of Brazilian Concrete poetry, and secondly "II. The Noigandres Poets, Eugen Gomringer, and Concrete Art." where the work of the poets that gave the “Noigandres” it’s name, were compared to Swiss and Brazilian Concrete painting and sculpture.
Tania Ørum, University of Copenhagen, gave a lecture on Danish Concrete Poetry, and focused on the few important years in the 60’s when concrete poetry in Denmark was pioneered in the little magazine digte for en daler, and later continued it’s life in a modified version in the so-called ‘system poetry’.
Jesper Olsson, Stockholm University, based his lecture "Knead the Language, Manipulate the World: A Look at Swedish Concrete Poetry in the 1960s", on his phd-thesis Alfabetets använding (2005), and focused his paper on text-sound compositions and especially the three poets Öyvind Fahlström, Bengt Emil Johnson and Åke Hodell.
Anna Katharina Schaffner, University of Edinburgh, also based her lecture on her phd-thesis: "From Concrete Poetry to Digital Poetry", and focused on the reconception of poetic space and it’s poetics; how language on the screen differs from language on the paper.
Christian Yde Frostholm, writer and editor at AfsnitP, talked about "Digitalising Swedish Concrete Poetry" based on the Konkretpoesi.se-project, focusing on the aspect of establishing new technologies of reading, providing new concrete readings performed digitally.
Two contemporary writers were invited under the headline "Reinventing Concrete Poetry Today". Jesper Olsson introduced and interviewed the Swedish writer Anna Hallberg, who read from her work and talked about her poetics. Audun Lindholm, University of Bergen, provided a reading and contextualisation of the Norwegian poet Monica Aasprongs latest work, as Aasprong read and gave other examples from, and talked about the (unconscious) concrete poetry-legacy in her work.
The Danish concrete poet Vagn Steen, former editor of digte for en daler, wrapped it all up and completed a good conference by spontaneously performing some of his concrete-visual poems from the 60’ties onwards. There was a good attendance on the conference, and very lively discussions.
Martin Glaz Serup