Page 71 - Studio International - September 1968

11. Saving in Swedish suitably shaped

9. Part of Shaped writing generally Apollinaire on the other hand supported shaped
Spratt's series Shaped writing has existed for over two thousand writing in these words written in 1918: 'Calligrammes
of trade marks years under a bewildering variety of names (few of are idealizations of free verse and typographic
for their various which appear in works of reference)7: technopaegina, precision at a time when typography's career is
products carmina figurata, poemata figurata, emblematic verse, ending at the dawn of new reproduction techniques,
shaped poetry, art chirography, calligramme, the cinema and the gramophone'. Little could
figurative concrete poetry. This multiplicity of terms Apollinaire known that beyond his dawn, typo-
suggests that either the process was repeatedly graphy, far from being superseded, would be
forgotten and reinvented or that we like to eat the supercharged into the letters in motion of TV and
same dish under a different name. There have been cinema commercials, 8D printings, flipbooks9 &c.,
many attempts to laugh shaped writing out of Concrete poetry to some extent an abstract shaped
existence, notably Dryden, Ben Jonson, Addison poetry exploits the typographic freedom won by
and Samuel Butler. All these attempts are very witty Joyce with his unpunctuated texts, e.e. cummings
but have been no more successful than centuries of rejecting the capital letter and Mayakovsky's
attempts to kill off the pun. The extraordinary rhetorical use of the stepped margin. This new
hardiness shaped writing shares with the pun is freedom has begun to break the eye's monotonous
perhaps due to both of them being attempts to increase jerky scanning of the inherently meaningless
the informational content of written communication. monotony and regularity of the standard printed page

10. The Liberty
12. An ass shaped by
Bell in shaped
a computer
writing