Concrete Poetry Constellations and Avant-Garde Poet Emmett Williams

Blink and you'd miss it: curator Nancy Perloff writes for the Getty Museum blog about avant-garde poet and artist Emmett Williams, whose archives are held at the Getty Research Institute. Perloff is mining "the trove" as she explores ideas for her next exhibition. "How was he connected to fellow concrete poets?" she asks. More of her thoughts:

The significance of Emmett Williams lies very much in his lifelong commitment to combining different disciplines in his work. During his early years in Darmstadt, Germany, where he met the teachers of the annual International Summer Courses for New Music, Williams developed an interest in experimental poetry and music. As he recalled,

“In Darmstadt, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I took a deep plunge into contemporary music… The compositional methods and processes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono had a profound effect on my own efforts to work with words and letters in a new way, as the raw materials of a new kind of poetry that would reflect the experimental tradition of the non-literary arts.”

In 1957 Williams joined Swiss poets Daniel Spoerri and Dieter Roth and German poet Claus Bremer in forming the “Darmstadt circle” of concrete poetry. It was through this group that Williams published his first book, konkretionen (concretions), in 1959. Serving as the third issue of Material, a German avant-garde periodical, konkretionen contains typographic poems (“constellations,” Williams called them) comprised of individual letters, sometimes repeated and arranged to suggest spatial, even three-dimensional, forms.

According to a press release by Spoerri accompanying the first issue in 1958, Material “forms a system of words, letters, or signs that first begin to make sense when the reader contributes…These texts are conceived so as not to burden the reader with the poet’s personal opinion...

Read on at the iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty.