M HKA Ensembles

In 1962 Paul De Vree began to create concrete poetry as well as visual poetry. The coexistence of these trends means that it is not easy to place some of the poems in a clearly defined category. Therefore the classification of De Vree’s poetic oeuvre from the Sixties into several movements is mainly based on the deliberate intention of the poem’s composition.

De Vree’s concrete poems focus on language: by condensing the language to its very ‘essence’ he examined the possibilities for the visual and sound aspects, the typographical letter and word imagery and the musicality of the language. The linguistic sign, stripped of any structural meaning, is only perceived as an image, with even less significance than a smear of paint or a musical note. De Vree used these stark linguistic signs to create constellations whose visual or phonetic character is decisive.

In Zimprovisaties (1968) De Vree collected under the heading ‘concrete poems’ those poems in which sound plays a secondary role to the visual position and relationship of words on the page of type. Nevertheless, the visual character of these poems is merely the consequence of the condensed language. The essential difference between De Vree’s concrete and visual poetry is that in his concrete poetry the visual design is simply a consequence, while in his visual poetry it is an objective. The complete exclusion of any significance in the word was just a theoretical argument to illustrate the lack of any object in concrete poetry. In reality De Vree’s poems are given considerable associative power: it is a game of association between the form, spatial arrangement and meaning of the text.

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