Oyvind Fahlstrm's Bord: Visual devices in poetry

• Published in: Studia Metrica Et Poetica Vol. 3; no. 2; p. 7
• Main Author: Lilja, Eva
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: cognitive schemas; concretism; General Language Studies and Linguistics; gestalts; Jämförande språkvetenskap och lingvistik; Linguistics; Oyvind Fahlstrm; premodality; The Swedish fifties; visual
• ISSN: 2346-6901
• DOI: 10.12697/smp.2016.3.2.01

The poet and artist Oyvind Fahlstrm (1928-1976) was the leader of the Scandinavian avant-garde during the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. He wrote his only collection of poetry Bord [Tables] in 1952-1955, but it was not published until 1966. In this book he applies the aesthetic ideas of his two manifestos -signification is what matters in poetry but signification emanates out of the visual materiality of letters and the sounds of speech. Bord contains advanced visual poetry as well as sound poetry. We may notice that the same tools for description and analysis can be utilized for both these modalities, something that can be explained with the help of gestalt psychology and the image schemas of cognitive poetics. Fahlstrm's poem "Den svara resan" ["The hard journey"] is a three-pages score for speech choir and a beautiful visual poem as well. A harmonious, strict picture contrasts to the turbulent sounds. What you see and what you hear express different moods and supply different significations. The printed picture of elder free verse typically has a straight left margin and a wavering right one. After Fahlstrom, poets more and more tended to pattern the whole page. With time, Fahlstrms ideas met with American language poetry, creating a special quality we recognize in contemporary poetry.