Kneaded Language: Concrete Poetry and New Media in the Swedish 1960s

In the early 1960s, Sweden witnessed the advent of a new type of poetic writing. It was a writing that deviated from the lyrical protocols of the time, a writing that did not seem to pay proper attention to poetry as a conveyor of metaphoric messages or as an instrument for excavating the depths of the human soul. Thus, in the fall of 1961, the artist and poet Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, whose earlier work had gravitated towards Nonsense verse, Dada, and the practice of Marcel Duchamp, published a book called På samma gång (At the Same Time), consisting of words dislodged from a dictionary, distributed symmetrically across the page.¹

Flowing	Doll	Cloth	Position	Manufacture
Difference	Claim	Best	Laid	Saffron
Crutch	Grub	Stamp	Liqueur	Fire
Mackerel	Rubber	Discord	D-minor	Module

Instead of creating semantically significant syntactic structures, Reuterswärd construed linguistic grids. Instead of stitching verbal elements together into a "living" tissue, he engineered a surface of signs, where each word constitutes an atomized and semantically multifunctional unit.

A few months before this book appeared, something similar took place in the new literary magazine Rondo. In its second issue, four texts were printed from a series of poems called "Hyllningarna" (The Celebrations) by the young poet and composer Bengt Emil Johnson.² Johnson had earlier published a few poems situated within an established modernist poetics, while at the same time paying homage to the tradition of nature poetry in Sweden. His new work, however, moved in a somewhat different direction, partly due to his interest in contemporary music, and in particular the music of John Cage. In these poems language was processed beyond the confines of grammar, producing sound play and wild juxtapositions, forcing the reader to acknowledge "the word as such," in line with the credo of Russian futurism.

youi o-ing youing-you yokingyou ing mouthwet youslumquarters into sings:to-into under front :to-in-to-you to-ing-nt-ingathering lovely to:a mouth–to-park-o-ing drives waltz-o-tô

If Reuterswärd confronted language as something to be collected, sampled, and arranged, Johnson tested the possibility of shaping or molding words as if they were some kind of physical matter. What they had in common, however, was the focus on language as material, as something to construct and combine with, without the restraints of linguistic conventions or any notions of a "natural" language. Such deviations might certainly be considered endemic to poetry, but here they were pursued with an insistence and inclination towards artifice unprecedented in Swedish literature.

While some were bewildered by these experiments, others seemed more attuned to their workings. "A kind of concrete poetry," the critic Bengt Höglund suggested in his perceptive review of Reuterswärd in the leading literary journal in Sweden, Bonniers Litterära Magasin (BLM), at the same time reiterating comments issued earlier that year and confirming the arrival of a new genre.³ If the advent of concrete poetry in Sweden was thus announced, it was however an event marked by belatedness. Already in 1954, the poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström had declared the form's potentially prosperous future in his article "Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben" ("Hipy papy bthuthdth thuthda bthuthdy," a phrase culled from A. A. Milne's children's book Winnie the Pooh), where it was presented as a challenge to the self-expressivity and symbolism of a post-romantic modernism. With a voice framed by the generic conventions of the avant-garde manifesto, and with a quote from F. T. Marinetti as supporting epigraph, Fahlström thus claimed, "Today, with laboured symbolic cryptograms, silly romantic effusions or desperate grimaces outside the church gate being propounded as the only healthy options, the concrete alternative must also be presented."⁴

At that point in time, no one listened. But the times were changing. Seven years later, in an essay called "Bris" (Breeze), published in Rondo 3, 1961, Fahlström returned to his manifesto and to his "bord," as he called his concrete poems, using a portmanteau consisting of "bokst...