具象詩

具象詩：喬治·赫伯特的詩作《復活的翅膀》, 文字排版成張開的翅膀狀

具象詩（Concrete poetry），又名圖案有形詩，是將詩歌的文字排版作調整，令其具備圖象化的呈現方式，以表達詩的意境。

具象詩特別指1950和1960年代的圖案有形詩運動，自由地安排語言的元素，不一定是線性的句子結構，可由空間、圖畫和字形特徵以及字間感受，解讀作品意義。

和圖象詩相較，具象詩仍遵守傳統文字排版的字體及方向性，只是排列較不整齊而已；但圖象詩就已經跳脫傳統文字排版的字體及方向性，甚至使用藝術字體或手寫文字以達成特殊效果。

發展

雖然「具象詩」這個名稱近代才出現，但利用排版安插字母位置來增強詩意的做法已有長遠歷史。追溯到西元前2-3世紀，古希臘帝國在埃及的亞歷山卓(Alexandria)地區早已甚為流行，但只有少數記載於《希臘詩選 (Greek Anthology)》中的文本還流傳下來。相關的範例如: 羅德斯的西米亞斯(Simias of Rhodes)的蛋、翅膀、帆船形詩，以及泰奧克里托斯(Theocritus)以樂器排蕭為樣板的作品。

具象詩的早期復興起源於德國基德里希區，聖瓦倫丁朝聖教堂(St. Valentin, Kiedrich)中的浮雕，正義迴旋(Gerechtigkeitsspiral)。1510年木匠埃爾哈特·福爾克納(Erhart Falckener)於螺旋的形式將內文雕刻於其中一排教堂椅的椅背前方。

但圖像詩真正的全盛時期是在巴洛克時代，引述英國詩人傑洛米·艾德勒(Jeremy Adler)的話:「(詩人們)擺脫了詩體過去差不多被制約的樣式，將詩文書寫從創作偶然性轉變為構思的必須面向......進而產出詩以及視覺藝術的結合體。」在此之前也有希伯來詩人的顯微書法作為先例，將聖經內文以小字排成其所描述對象的樣貌。這讓猶太人在為自然事物打造形象之餘，也避免直接觸犯「打造神像」這條被視為偶像崇拜的戒律。顯微書法現在仍為各藝術家所用，主題不再侷限於宗教，伊斯蘭圖象詩中的阿拉伯詩文也是使用這項技藝。

早期英文宗教具象詩範例包含喬治·赫伯特(George Hubert)1633年在詩集《神廟 (The temple)》中的〈復活節之翼〉、〈祭壇〉兩首，以及羅伯特·赫里克(Robert Herrick)1647年收錄於《聖人們 (Noble Numbers)》中，十字形排列的〈這桿船桅〉。世俗藝術的範例包含弗朗索瓦·拉伯雷(François Rabelais)以紅酒桶書寫飲酒主題。1865年路易斯·卡洛爾在《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》第三章中也寫了以尾巴(tail)與故事(tale)雙關為名的具象詩〈老鼠的故事(The Mouse's Tale)〉一首。

The approach reappeared at the start of the 20th century, initially in the Calligrammes (1918) of Guillaume Apollinaire, with poems in the shape of a necktie, a fountain, and raindrops running down a window, among other examples. In that era also there were typographical experiments by members of avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism in which layout moved from an auxiliary expression of meaning to artistic primacy. Thus the significance of the sound poetry in Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tumb (1912) is expressed through pictorial means. Similarly in Germany, Raoul Hausmann claimed that the typographic style of his "Phonemes" allowed the reader to recognize what sound was intended. In Russia the Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky went so far as to term the typography of his Tango with Cows, published in 1914, "ferro-concrete poems" (zhelezobetonnye poemy), long before the name became current elsewhere.

A further move away from overt meaning occurred where "poems" were simplified to a simple arrangement of the letters of the alphabet. Louis Aragon, for example, exhibited the sequence from A to Z and titled it "Suicide" (1926), while Kurt Schwitters' "ZA (elementary)" has the alphabet in reverse, and the Catalan writer Josep Maria Junoy (1885-1955) placed just the letters Z and A at the top and bottom of the page under the title "Ars Poetica".

戰後圖像詩

During the early 1950s two Brazilian artistic groups producing severely abstract and impersonal work were joined by poets linked to the São Paulo magazine Noigandres who began to treat language in an equally abstract way. Their work was termed "concrete poetry" after they exhibited along with the artists in the National Exhibition of Concrete Art (1956/57). The poets included Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, who were joined in the exhibition by Ferreira Gullar, Ronaldo Azeredo and Wlademir Dias Pino from Rio de Janeiro. In 1958 a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published and an anthology in 1962.

Dom Sylvester Houédard claimed that it was the 1962 publication in The Times Literary Supplement of a letter from the Portuguese E.M. de Melo e Castro that awakened British writers such as himself, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan to the possibilities of Concrete Poetry. However, there were by this time other European writers producing similar work. In 1954 the Swedish poet and visual artist Öyvind Fahlström had published the manifesto Hätila Ragulpr på Fåtskliaben. Similarly in Germany Eugen Gomringer published his manifesto vom vers zur konstellation (from line to constellation), in which he declared that a poem should be "a reality in itself" rather than a statement about reality, and "as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs". The difficulty in defining such a style is admitted by Houédard's statement that "a printed concrete poem is ambiguously both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography".

Another difficulty of definition is caused by the way such works cross artistic boundaries into the areas of music and sculpture, or can alternatively be defined as sound poetry, visual poetry, found poetry and typewriter art. Henri Chopin's work was related to his musical treatment of the word. Kenelm Cox (1927–68) was a kinetic artist "interested in the linear, serial aspects of visual experience but particularly in the process of change," whose revolving machines transcended the static page in being able to express this. Ian Hamilton Finlay's concrete poetry began on the page but then moved increasingly towards three dimensional figuration and afterwards to site-specific art in the creation of his sculpture garden at Little Sparta. The Italian Maurizio Nannucci's Dattilogrammmi experiments (1964/1965) were also transitional, preluding his move into light art.

Bob Cobbing, who was also a sound poet, had been experimenting with typewriter and duplicator since 1942. Of its possibilities in suggesting the physical dimension of the auditory process, he declared that "One can get the measure of a poem with the typewriter's accurate left/right & up & down movements; but superimposition by means of stencil and duplicator enable one to dance to this measure." Houédard's entirely different work was also produced principally on the typewriter but approximates more to painterly and sculptural procedures. So too does that of the American Minimalist artist Carl Andre, beginning from about 1958 and in parallel with his changing artistic procedures. And in Italy Adriano Spatola (1941–88) developed the artistic fragmentation of language using various visual techniques in his Zeroglifico (1965/6).

Edwin Morgan's experiments with concrete poetry covered several other aspects of it, including elements of found poetry 'discovered' by misreading and isolating elements from printed sources. "Most people have probably had the experience of scanning a newspaper page quickly and taking a message from it quite different from the intended one. I began looking deliberately for such hidden messages…preferably with the visual or typographical element part of the point." Another aspect of the search for unintended concordances of meaning emerges in A Humument, the lifework of the visual artist Tom Phillips, who uses painterly and decorative procedures to isolate them on the page.

Despite such blurring of artistic boundaries, concrete poetry can be viewed as taking its place in a predominantly visual tradition stretching over more than two millennia that seeks to draw attention to the word in the space of the page, and to the spaces between words, as an aid to emphasising their significance. In recent years, this approach has led Mario Petrucci to suggest that the "extreme example" of concrete poetry can be seen as nested within the larger concept of Spatial Form. Starting from the observation that poetry can usually be told from prose simply by looking at it, this reading of Spatial Form encompasses the many aspects of subtle visual significance that are held, for instance, by typeface or in the textures of repeated letters, as well as the more overt visual signals generated by the poem's layout.

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