In love with words, with Malta and with design

Malta - poema viziva

Author: Victor Fenech Publisher: Horizons Year: 2014 Pages: 72pp

Noel Grima In the sixties, among the new forms of literature and poetry, there arose Word Art, where words acquired colour and movement. Some called it poetry in a new clothing.

Then came Digital Poetics, especially in the US, which was built on the new technology.

Then came Concrete Poetry, defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as ‘poetry in which the poet’s intent is conveyed by graphic pattern of letters, words or symbols, rather than by the meaning of words in conventional arrangement.’

Among the poets who are associated with Concrete Poetry one finds Eugen Gomringer, a Bolivian who lived in Switzerland, and the three Brazilian poets in the group known as Noigandres. A more famous name associated with this experimentation was e e cummings, who foreswore capital letters.

The author of this slim book was one of the leaders of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju – including Mario Azzopardi, Albert Marshall, Charles Xuereb, Charles Flores, Salvu Sammut and Doreen Micallef – who provided a much needed burst in the post-Independence years in what was a placid if not dormant literary scene.

But only Kenneth Wain and the author ventured into Concrete Poetry.

The author was studying in London in those years (1966-67) when everything was happening in London – the Beatles, Mary Quant, Carnaby Street, miniskirts, and, in theatre the new wave. It was there that the author met the foremost exponents of Concrete Poetry like Bob Cobbing and Ian Hamilton Friday.

Since then, the author has been experimenting with the Concrete Poetry genre and where at first he was rather restrained by the typewriters we had in those days, (even though one could do wonders with Letraset) but the advent of the computer opened up new possibilities.

This book is the result of decades-long experimentation.

Using word pictures, the author takes us on an excursus along Malta’s history be- all this ginning with the creation of Malta right down to Malta’s accession into the EU. Each step is accompanied by a word picture – some innovative, others less so.