Gomringer, Eugen

Eugen Gomringer is one of the pioneers of concrete poetry. He saw works by visual artists at an exhibition in Basel in 1944, which impressed him so much in their stark reduction to simple forms that he sought ways to transfer these principles to poetry. Since then he has worked intensively on the relationship between words and the visual appearance of type, that is to say, content and form. This can be seen in the poem titled »Silence« published in 1953, which plays with several aspects of the relationship between a word and its appearance. The meaning of the word silence, i.e. not speaking, is reflected in its visual form, at least when viewed as a whole, as an image. If one reads the poem in silence, word for word, one becomes aware of the seemingly banal difference between the pronunciation of the word and its meaning. Concrete poetry is meant to be read aloud to an audience, which in this case represents something of a paradox.