Kandinsky the Poet

     In 1912 I visited Kandinsky in Munich.  He gave me a very warm
reception.  It was the period when abstract art was beginning to turn
into concrete art; that is to say, the avant-garde painters no longer
stood before an apple, a guitar, a man, or a landscape to convert or
dissolve them into colored circles, triangles, and rectangles; on the
contrary, they created autonomous compositions directly out of their
most intimate joy, their most personal suffering, out of lines, planes,
forms, colors.  Kandinsky was one of the first, certainly the first to
deliberately paint such images and, as a poet, to write corresponding
poems.
     Kandinsky spoke to me with tenderness, richness, vivacity, and
humor.  In his studio, speech and form and color fused and were trans-
muted into fabulous, extraordinary worlds.  Across the bellowing and
tumult of these worlds, by listening attentively, I could hear the 
tintinnabulation of the briliant and gaudy mushroom cities of Russia.
Kandinsky told me that his grandfather had come trotting into Russia
on a small steed studded with bells, from one of those enchanted Asian
mountains made of porcelain.  Kandinsky's grandfather certainly bequeathed
profound secrets.  Anno dada, poems of Kandinsky's, were recited for the
first time in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and the audience received
them with prehistoric howls.  The dadaists were the combative and enthus-
iastic vanguard of concrete poetry.  In 1916 Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara
were writing sound poetry that greatly helped to clarify the meaning of
concrete poetry.  My collection The Cloud Pump consists mainly of con-
crete poetry.
     Resonances, Kandinsky's book of poems, is a great and extraordinary
collection.  It was published in 1913 by Piper in Munich.  In his poems
Kandinsky engaged in the rarest of spiritual investigations.  From "being
in a pure state" he revealed beauties that no one had ever gazed upon before.
     In his poems, series of words, and series of sentences emerge as
never before produced in poetry.  These pieces are imbued with a breath
coming from eternal and unexplored depths.  Shapes arise, powerful as
speaking mountains.  Sulphur- and poppy-stars blossom on the lips of the
sky.  Human shadows dematerialize into roguish mists.  Loads of earth
are shod with boots of ether.  The series of words, the series of sen-
tences remind the reader of the constant flow, the perpetual development
of things, more often than not in a tone of black humor; but the special
feature of concrete poetry is its lack of any sententious or didactic
aim.  A poem of Goethe's teaches the reader poetically that death and
flux are the ineluctable condition of man.  Kandinsky, however, confronts
the reader with an image of words that dies and then develops, a series
of words that dies and then develops, a dream that dies and then develops.
Through Kandinsky's poetry we witness the eternal cycle, the flux and the
disappearance, the transformation of this world.  His poems make absence
and the nullity of perception and reason manifest.

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