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
Ah: sincere apologies for that error, now corrected. I am very sorry for your loss -- your father's work has always given me pleasure, and will, I believe, endure.
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….
According to Mary Ellen Solt, Gomringer 'denied himself the security of following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot and Gottfried Benn, as was the fashion after the war', and instead went back to the earlier free verse experiments of Mallarme (who gave him the idea of printed "constellations") and Arno Holz. So I think the sonnets he was writing until 1950 may still have been quite experimental, in a Symbolist way -- but the concrete poems were clearly a leap out of the nineteenth century. Yet his work often comes back to the Romantic elements of tree, wind, bird etc...
Brilliant, Jeremy! This is marvelous stuff. And it will most certainly feature in a session my upcoming seminar in Introduction to Literary Studies, since you have persuasively argued how to engage readers in the nuance of concrete poetry, regardless of background or prior aptitude. Kudos!
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
Ah: sincere apologies for that error, now corrected. I am very sorry for your loss -- your father's work has always given me pleasure, and will, I believe, endure.
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….
According to Mary Ellen Solt, Gomringer 'denied himself the security of following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot and Gottfried Benn, as was the fashion after the war', and instead went back to the earlier free verse experiments of Mallarme (who gave him the idea of printed "constellations") and Arno Holz. So I think the sonnets he was writing until 1950 may still have been quite experimental, in a Symbolist way -- but the concrete poems were clearly a leap out of the nineteenth century. Yet his work often comes back to the Romantic elements of tree, wind, bird etc...
Brilliant, Jeremy! This is marvelous stuff. And it will most certainly feature in a session my upcoming seminar in Introduction to Literary Studies, since you have persuasively argued how to engage readers in the nuance of concrete poetry, regardless of background or prior aptitude. Kudos!
Thanks, Jessica! Interpretatively speaking, always think it’s best to take concrete poetry at face value (including typeface…)
This is great! I remember Pong; it is lovely to have Gomringer’s poem beside it now.
And thank you for introducing me to the Goethe poem, which will be part of my life now. .
Once learnt, the Goethe is never forgotten! And the story of its composition is also worth knowing https://www.liederabend.cat/en/bloc/entrades/412-the-cabin-song
Thank you! Those images are absolutely part of the poem now as well.