Poetic Form: Suprematism as Jakobsonian Poetry
Suprematism is a departure from convention made manifest as a return to form. This may sound like a stroke of irony. You return to form, and you go back to the basics. Principle elements are so often reduced to an origin or a conclusion only in completeness. But the Suprematists, with typical Futurist fervor, asserted that their return to form was more of a transcendence than a regression.
They saw it as a return to faktura, the visual emancipation of essential, rudimentary pieces from their cumulative whole. Indeed, the distilled purity of elementary objects was held up as “supreme,” suprematism itself referring to and reminding us of the "supremacy of pure artistic feeling." But what makes pure, artistic feeling supreme? What has distracted us from this purity of form, and how are we returning to it? These are questions the suprematists answered in their own ways and work. There were many commonalities in the answers, made evident intuitively through the work. Many efforts to communicate the point, through art and speech and manifesto.
I found my answer in the writings of Roman Jakobson. And though his answer was more inferred than obligatory, its basis in theory is underpinned by personal experience, and even collaboration, with the artists of the avant garde. In 1913, a teenage Roman first heard the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky first speak of poet and playwright Velimir Khlebnikov. By the end of the year, he had read and memorized the entirety of both men’s work, and ended up meeting and befriending Khlebnikov by the end of the year. He was even invited to contribute his own Zaum poetry to Zaumnaiga gniga of 1914/1915, which he did so under the pen name Aliagrov. He spent much the the rest of his life ruminating on and directly commenting on this association.
But its Jakobson’s indirect commentary, rather than direct contact, that most interests me. Especially his commentary, stemming from his linguistic forbearers, about Poetry. “All poetry, according to Jakobson, is characterized by ‘a structural and functional dependence upon the material, non-signifying elements of language’ – indeed, ‘poetry is indifferent to the referent of the utterance’ (Bradford, Roman Jakobson, 26-27. )
