Information poetics: communication and combinatorics in concrete poetry

ABSTRACT

While Max Bense advocated information aesthetics primarily in his theoretical works, many Concrete poets applied the principles of information theory and modern communications technologies to their poetry, whether or not they explicitly embraced Bense’s analytical framework. As Eugen Gomringer (the ‘father’ of German-language Concrete poetry) wrote in his manifesto ‘from line to constellation’: ‘our languages are in the process of formal simplification. reduced, terse forms are emerging’. But Concrete poetry was notable not only for its concision, or for the visual and spatial emphases generally said to characterise it; rather, many Concrete poets also employed algorithmic or combinatoric methods or used repetition and variation in ways that mirrored the functions of redundancy and entropy in Claude Shannon’s theory of communication. With Bense’s information aesthetics as background, this essay will explore how the concept of information shaped the practice of these Concrete poets.

KEYWORDS:

• Concrete poetry
• information theory
• entropy
• redundancy
• Max Bense

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bateson’s actual statement is: ‘A “bit” of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference’ (Bateson 1971, 443). In the context of Döhl’s poem, which (aside from its title) contains only two words, those two words might be understood (in an extended sense) as the two values in a sort of binary code in which ‘apfel’ and ‘wurm’ are the only possibilities; thus ‘wurm’ would represent one bit of information.

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Kurt Beals

Kurt Beals is Visiting Associate Professor of German and Humanities Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of Richmond. He was previously Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde (Northwestern University Press, 2020), the translator of books by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, Reiner Stach, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and a co-editor of the volume Hans Richters 'Rhythmus 21'. Schlüsselfilm der Moderne.