Gutai-shi - "concrete poetry"

Whatever the reading, what the viewer is presented with is an example of gutai-shi — "concrete poetry" — which first appeared in the 1950s and '60s. Concrete poetry was an offshoot of the "shaped poetry" of the early 20th century that sought to amplify the meaning of a text by using the layout of the words to add to the meaning, as in "Calligrammes," by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). This offshoot largely dispensed with standard grammar in favor of typography and composition, forcing the reader further into the interaction between the visual and the verbal.

From the 1930s, there were already exponents of avant-garde poetry in Japan, such as Katue Kitasono (1902-1978), who independently had arrived at some of the precepts of what would come to be known as concrete poetry. Wider attention came to the movement when Kitasono assisted the Brazilian composer and poet L.C. Vinholes in staging an exhibition of Brazilian concrete poetry at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1960. In 1964 in Tokyo, Seiichi (1925-77) also became acquainted with Vinholes — and through him the international movement — but Seiichi's initial efforts in the genre predate the Japanese-Brazilian collaboration too.

An exhibition at The National Museum of Art, Osaka, "The Concrete Poetry of Niikuni Seiichi: Between Poetry and Art," follows the story of his work. The artist's first collection of "Poems for Watching" appeared in 1955, which was followed in 1963 with "Zero-on," long considered the best individual collection of concrete poetry by a Japanese poet. Seiichi founded the The Association for the Study of the Arts (ASA) the following year and set himself the task of developing a Japanese version of concrete poetry, the tenets of which were set down in a series of manifestos.

The "Tokyo Manifesto for Spatialism" (1968) was overwrought, shifting from humdrum statements such as, "a word has semantic and aesthetic information" to far out goals such as "to liberate the energy of words from the origin of language to a cosmic philosophy." The ASA Manifesto of 1973 was more measured. Seiichi argued for a supranational poetry and a way of communicating instantaneous understanding. More specifically, this meant that "a poem should have the nature of an ideograph or hieroglyph."

The three Japanese scripts — kanji and the simplified, phonetic hiragana and katakana — lent themselves well to the basic premises of concrete poetry as they are readable from right to left or in reverse, up and down or otherwise scattered over a page as in the chirashigaki calligraphic script popular since the 11th century. The scattered script style can be found in the constellationlike groupings of Seiichi's early work, such as "Onna (Woman)" (1963), which collates various kanji for the words "legs," "fire," "hips," "eyes," "ass" and others.

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