Beinecke Goes ​“Beyond Words”

It’s a typewriter, but it has been rendered useless for its intended task. It has been occupied by soldiers who patrol its keys and chassis as if it’s a hill they’ve just conquered but barely hold. But it still produces language, or at least characters that could be language. They just don’t come out like they used to. They rise from the typewriter’s body as if they’ve been collecting there, even in the typewriter’s occupied state, and just have to come out. What do they mean? Nothing apparent. But that raises other questions: What did they mean before? And where is this all going?

Jean-Francois Bory’s Fin de mots (End of Words) is a fitting introduction to ​“Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry and the Avant Garde,” an exhibit running through Dec. 15 at the Beinecke Rare Books Library on Yale’s campus that takes a deep dive into the work of a small group of French poets and artists who made nonsense on the surface — or, you might say, made nonsense of the surface. This resulted in a lot of stuff that’s playful, even funny. The exhibit, which covers two floors of the library’s exhibit space, ranges from books, letters, and photographs to sound recordings and pieces of art, covering the work of dozens of poets and artists across several decades. But underneath the playfulness they had a much bigger point to make. Some of it was a visceral reaction to the worst horrors of the 20th century. Some of it feels so startlingly relevant that it’s as if they saw into our present, and tried to prepare us.

At the entrance to the exhibit is a poster made by Julian Blaine in 1967 called ​“Explosion,” part of a series of posters made for the Festival of Fort Boyard — a festival that didn’t actually happen; artists just made posters for it as if it were going to happen (see Gianna Bertini’s example at left). Like many of the psters, Blaine’s ​“Explosion” turns the letters into art. it revels in the shape of them, without worrying much about retaining meaning.

“There is a word. The word is ​‘explosion,’” said Kevin Repp, who curated the exhibit. ​“The word is literally being blasted apart.”

There is a playful intellectual probity at work in such experiments. ​“If you write the word ​‘blue’ in red paint, what exactly is going on?” Repp said. ​“The physical presence of words carries meaning that goes beyond the words themselves.” The experimental poets in the exhibit wanted to investigate that. They wanted to drew attention to words the way that their contemporary visual artists were drawing attention to the canvases they were painting on. A painting of a landscape, after all, isn’t literally a window to another place; it’s pigments on stretched fabric. Experimental poets wanted to show that the same was true of words — they were just shapes that we drew meaning from in ourselves. The poets wanted to highlight that process. They wanted to show how easily those meanings could be dismantled and manipulated. They wanted to reveal the trick, to destroy the illusion.

There was a point to all this that reached way beyond intellectual exercise. An antecedent of Blaine’s, Henri Chopin (b. 1922) was a sound poet who practiced his craft after World War II. His art extended to using microphones to capture the noises his own body made; he considered the body a ​“factory of sound,” Repp said. He swallowed microphones to record the sound of his stomach and inserted them ​“into certain orifices.” He also did performances of his sound poetry, composed of syllables stripped of obvious meaning, and later in late made pieces of art based on the same ideas.

These ideas, however, were born of his experience in World War II. He was a French Jewish resistance fighter who was captured and sent to a forced labor camp in Poland. As the Allies invaded toward the end of the war, he escaped and ended up on a march for his life with fellow prisoners. They were trying to get to Lithuania, where they could be liberated by the Soviets. There, he was surrounded by the languages of fellow inmates — languages he did not understand a word of. That sound, to him, was the sound of survival.

After the war, he conceived of nonsense as a ​“weapon against the sense-making, the twisting of reason, that led to the Holocaust,” Repp said. It was a reaction against totalitarianism, a way to unmask propaganda. Like the Dadaists before them, Chopin and his contemporaries, the Lettrists, were standing ​“against jingoist patriotism,” whether they were making books of letters dancing across the page, or creating their own instruments, or making posters for fictional festivals.

For some the poetry was inextricably connected to radical politics. In the 1960s, poet Alain Arias-Misson staged public poems that consisted of volunteers parading around with letters from a ​“mother word” that would inevitably become jumbled up, creating nonsense and possibly new meanings. In Franco’s Spain, a parade using only punctuation marks threatened to run him afoul of the secret police; funny how adding a question mark to the names of government buildings can throw everything in a new light. Another piece criticized the Vietnam War. (Arias-Misson will stage a similar public poem in New Haven on Sept. 27 at 3 p.m.; with 16 volunteers he will parade the word transculturalism through town. Who knows how it will be recombined, and what meanings it may create?) Others of Arias-Misson’s contemporaries turned their criticism to advertising, and the ways language was used to part people from their cash and get it into other people’s pockets. They wanted people to be savvy observers of the words they saw all around them; as Repp put it, they were ​“trying to mix up the codes of media to get you to think about what you’re looking at.”

In our current era of media supersaturation, these poets’ work seems prescient. The internet has changed the way we read. Words, sound, and images are presented together more often than ever. Memes break words down into funny half-nonsense, while vague, vitriolic tweets from certain heads of state set other public officials and media into frantic action. Social commentators are often asked to make sense of it all. The poets in ​“Beyond Words” suggest a deeper kind of criticism. There’s not necessarily meaning inherent in any of it, they argue. They ask us to peel back the glittering surfaces we’re surrounded by, and to try to look at what’s underneath — who’s making those messages, and why, and what the effect is when half of it seems, well, a little nonsensical.

Bory imagined a time he called ​“the Gutenberg Apocalypse,” Repp said, when language would finally explode. ​“There’s freedom in that,” Repp said, but also power that we don’t yet understand. Who will wield that power, and how?

“Beyond Words” runs at the Beinecke Rare Books Library through Dec. 15. Admission is free. Visit the Beinecke’s website for hours and more information.