'Apollinaire suggested the term
calligramme to describe a poem in which the typographical arrangement is designed to reinforce the theme or sense' (Riccio 1980:63).
Hugo Kernsten and Emil Szittya, launched a prescient attack on the current military conflict per se but on the linguistic structures of the bourgeois institutions-religion, politics, the current cultural industry-that collectively composed a grammar of war" reflected in Apollinaire's
Calligramme and F.
Elles renoncent a rendre l'homophonie de tale et tail (qui fonde le
calligramme dessine par Carroll) et compensent en glissant un cliche de la langue francaise dans la bouche d'Alice: << Encore une histoire sans queue ni tete?
Ironically, a visual approach to the poem (one that "looks without reading" as though the sonnet were a
calligramme) emphasizes the loss of vision.
Calligramme is the name Apollinaire gave to his patterned poetry.
mais on peut obtenir mille-et-un homes differents avec la mime langue, poetiques, litteraires ou non; et l'on peut--malgri ce qui reste toujours, pea ou prou, d'intraduisible--traduire ou transposer dans telle ou telle langue ce qui a ete dit, redige ou compose dans une autre; de meme encore, ne concoit-on ni n'elabore-t-on de semblable maniere un poeme en vers ou en prose (Baudelaire l'a magistralement experimente Apollinaire differemment), un poeme typographique lineaire, un
calligramme, ou un poeme sonore realise au moyen du magnetophone--filt-il dument redige (comme c'est le cas, de fawn revendiquee, avec les "poemes-partitions" de Bernard Heidsieck), ...
Publicly, Apollinaire's critical admiration of Picasso is evidenced not only by his Meditations esthetiques and various reviews, but also by numerous tributes in poetry and prose: the painter is mythologized in 'Les Saltimbanques', Le Bestiaire, La Femme assise, Le Poete assassine, and in the
calligramme published in SIC which bears his name.
The textualizing of sensory experience, lived and remembered fragmentally and sporadically, seems to demand the random texturing of writing that only a conspicuously eruptive use of the
calligramme can produce.
Cesaire, Damas, and Senghor knew of Blaise Cendrars's prose and poems and Apollinaire's
Calligrammes. Why didn't they go further in their experiment with layout?