Eugen Gomringer died on 21st August 2025 at the age of 100. It seems appropriate that the life of the man known as “the father of concrete poetry” should have achieved the round number of a whole century, with all the simplicity and symbolism of its single line and two circles. Born in Bolivia and educated in Switzerland, Gomringer’s work embodied a modernising spirit of gleaming idealism and comic-strip humour about the world of international signs and logos in which we live. “Our languages,” he wrote, “are on the road to formal simplification” — a fact that the poet must work with. His poem “roads 68”, for example, composed in English, captures the monotonous phenomenon of the petrol station by repeating the names that loom up along the motorway in different combinations, then giving them a final, rhyming twist:
TEXACO and
ESSOESSO and
BPBP and
SHELLthe common
smell
Mary Ellen Solt, the editor of an important early anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), summarises the defining moment of Gomringer’s life as follows:
In 1955 a Brazilian designer, Decio Pignatari, met Eugen Gomringer, a Swiss, who was Max Bill’s secretary at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, Germany. To their mutual delight and surprise, they discovered that they were also poets committed to a new way of making poems, which would free the poet from the line as his basic structural unit. Gomringer, working alone, called his new poems “constellations”; and Pignatari working with two other poets in Sao Paulo — Augusto and Haroldo de Campos — conceived of his poems as “ideograms.” […] The most important single aspect of the concrete poetry movement is that poets in many countries, speaking different languages, unknown to each other, began making similar innovations in structure almost immediately following World War II. […] They agreed to call their experiments “concrete poetry” in 1956 after Pignatari had returned to Sao Paulo. There are several significant areas of agreement in the thinking and practice of these poets. For instance: although both Gomringer and the Brazilians were working to bring poetry into new relationships with the other arts and advanced areas of contemporary thought, they saw their experiments as related to the mainstream of poetry. Gomringer wanted to rescue the poem from literary professionalism, for he saw that it had become accessible for the most part only to poets and critics […] So he gave up writing sonnets as beautifully irrelevant to the present reality.
Gomringer’s first manifesto statement, “From Line to Constellation” (1954, trans. Mike Weaver), explains how his early work was inspired by the “restriction” of language that he observed happening in the streamlined world around him:
Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful use. The aim of the new poetry is to give poetry an organic function in society again, and in doing so to restate the position of poet in society. Bearing in mind, then, the simplification both of language and its written form, it is only possible to speak of an organic function for poetry in terms of the given linguistic situation. So the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts […] It is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture.
One of the best descriptions I have read of how Gomringer’s poems work (or play) comes from Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019):
Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems […] tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem “Ping Pong”. Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.
This nicely describes how concrete poetry verges on an abstract verbal art, concerned with the dynamics of relationship. But I think there is still an important element of semantic or referential content in “Ping Pong”: the visual 2-3-3-2 rhythm of its shape, made of overlapping lines on a diagonal axis, wittily suggests a rally across a table tennis table. Gomringer said of his word-shapes that “the constellation is an invitation”, and here the reading eye is invited to bounce around like a player at the table, or even the “o”-shaped ball itself. In this way, he hoped, the poet could “help” the reader to find the poetry in modern life through a new “kind of play-activity”.
(With its rubber bats and plastic ball, ping pong — the name was trademarked in 1901 — was a modernist sport which would achieve global reach. The International Table Tennis Association was formed in 1926, one year after Eugen Gomringer was born, and twenty years after Gomringer’s poem first appeared, the binary back-and-forth of table tennis, with its simple set-up and rules, would form the basis of a new “kind of play-activity” for humanity: the first commercially successful video game, Pong.)
Gomringer’s international modernism expressed itself visually in his signature use of Helvetica, the classic sans serif of the International Typographic Style which was being developed contemporaneously in 1950s Switzerland. Helvetica’s clean, light, rounded lines make for letters that might be inked on ping pong balls, evoking the world of public information and giving the poems a quality of positive innocence.
This typographical neutrality is integral to the ambivalence of his most famous work:
Many critics have commented on how this concrete poem from 1953 creates a conceptual puzzle comparable to John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) — a musical score which contains no notes, but nevertheless requires the physical presence of a performer. How silent can a man-made silence be?
Gomringer’s fourteen printed words do not collectively or individually convey their meaning as effectively as the one unprinted one implied by the blank in the middle. Should we read them aloud? If so, would it be soothingly (to a child?) or shouted (as a command?) And does the language we are reading make a difference? Gomringer originally composed the piece using the German word “schweigen”:
The more internationally legible (and mellifluous) “silencio” has become famous. But it seems to me a German reader would be likely to hear a historical allusion in “schweigen” to Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II”, the brief and delicate lyric whose fame in Germany is comparable to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” in England:
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
[Over all the hill-tops it’s still, in all the tree-tops you hardly sense a breath. The small birds fall silent in the forest. Wait: soon you too will be still.]
“Schweigen” [be silent] is both the main verb and emotional centre of Goethe’s poem — an experience that Gomringer’s rectangle “imprints […] upon the mind as a picture”.
NOTES
I wrote about the history of concrete poetry in Britain here:
You can read a full PDF of Mary Ellen Solt’s anthology of concrete poetry here:
https://monoskop.org/images/5/5d/Solt_Mary_Ellen_ed_Concrete_Poetry_A_World_View_1970.pdf
And you can find her shorter overview (quoted above) here:
https://monoskop.org/images/5/5c/Solt_Mary_Ellen_1970_Concrete_Poetry.pdf
Various key texts by Gomringer can be found on the invaluable Ubuweb:
https://ubu.punctumbooks.com/historical/gomringer/index.html
Thank you for this insightful article on our father‘s work! Please note: He died on August 21st. Tomorrow his burial will take place in Rehau, Bavaria. Nora-Eugenie Gomringer
Maybe it’s been said, but it’s satisfying how the silence in the poem is most vividly conveyed by the *absence* of the word “schweigen”. (Which is a very common word, not particularly property of Goethe.)
Was Gomringer engaged with modernist poetry at all? “He gave up writing sonnets” suggests maybe not. Makes me think of the small cohort of jazz musicians, like Steve Lacy, who went from playing Dixieland in the ‘50s to avant-garde in the ‘60s….