How Does Free Verse “Work”? On the Syntax of the Avant Garde

Abstract

The question I wish to pose through my remarks on versification is not limited to the syntax of the avant-garde sentence. It is rooted, rather, in an attempt to reckon with the flat nature of the sheet of paper, and the spatial and dynamic possibilities it implies. The artists of the Polish Avant Garde attempted to refine this, identifying their poems as “constructions”. Rhetoric allows us to hone this possibility, if its premises for the composition of a work (which I prefer to define as an “action”) are mobilised not only as tools for describing the stylistic aspects of a text, but as a system of creative cues that engage the reader. This process is understood as actio – the implementation of the artistic text. In this approach, the poetic text becomes a “notation”, not unlike the sequence of notes documented in music, while its “implementation” consists of the “mimetic” repetition of the author’s creative actions.