Letters on the Page and on the Screen: Concrete Poetry and “Movies of Words” Based on the Example of the Poem by Bpnichol

The article discusses two texts by the Canadian poet Barry Phillip Nichol (known under the pseudonym bpNichol): the poem Evening’s Ritual from 1967, printed in the collection of visual poems Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1967), and the poem Letter from 1984, included in the digital work First Screening (1984). The 1967 text belongs to the tradition of concrete poetry, while the 1984 text is closer to the art of cinema and electronic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Importantly, the 1984 text attempts to translate the 1967 text into the digital realm, as the content of the texts is identical. The researcher highlights the difference in the performative realizations of the same statement. The author notes that in the case of the poems Evening’s Ritual and Letter from the collection First Screening, the intended meaning can be identified not so much with the proposition as with the performative effect produced on the recipient. In other words, the meaning is realized primarily in the realm of the pragmatics of artistic communication rather than semantics. By exploring the performative effect, the author suggests finding it in the structure of “scriptural imagination” (J. McGann), the preconception of the experience of writing, and notes the difference in configurations of imagination in both texts. While the printed text of Evening’s Ritual allows the reader to be a co-author of the statement, the digital text of Letter excludes the reader from the process of meaning-making.