“Il Pleut” (It’s Raining) is a poem from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, written in 1918. The calligramme, ever difficult to translate, consists of a text arranged typographically to create an image which is echoed in the semantic meaning of the text. For an interesting essay on Apollinaire and ASCII art, see Tom McCormack’s article on Rhizome: Emoticon, Emoji, Text II: Just ASCII

Natalie Czech, a visual artist based in Berlin who often collaborates with poets, has made a series of works titled Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire. For these works, Czech invited five writers to create a text which had embedded inside of it the vertical rays of Apollinaire’s caligramme.

In an interview for Bomb Magazine with Rachel Valinsky, Czech explains:

“Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire is a photographic work that reflects on the potential of writing and the possibility of changing one’s perception of an existing thing, of the seen and the read, and how each process generates new images in a constant activity of appearing and disappearing. I initially invited five writers who speak different languages (Vanessa Desclaux, Mara Genschel, April Lamm, Ashkan Sepahvand, and Oliver Tepel) to embed and recontextualize Apollinaires’s calligram in a text of their own, placing the component words of his poem in their texts in exactly the same spatial relationship as it is in the original.

For this really tricky task, each author received a specially prepared computer document, enabling her or him to check when and where to match the specific letter of the poem. When the text is written, the calligram loses its visual presence, even though it is still suspended and embedded in the new text. In a next step the texts were printed on the page of a booklet and photographed in front of different color gradient backgrounds. The color was selected by me or the author in relation to the content.”

This collaborative effort has resulted in the creation of experimental texts built upon Apollinaire’s famous experimental caligramme.

Czech’s recreation, or translation of Apollinaire’s famous caligramme highlights one of the tenets of experimental poetry: that you don’t need to invent new language. The idea of the remix is that “newness” need not be the thing that defines a poem or an artwork. Or, rather, new language need not be invented in order to make a piece of poetry (or a photo-work, in Natalie’s case). By burying Apollinaire’s caligramme within these commisioned texts, Natalie Czech shows us how all language is connected.