100. Non-written poems

Early experimental poetry from (communist) Czechoslovakia:

The following set of „Non-Written“ poems includes an introduction to the process of creating this type of poetry:

Non-Written Poems

Nebeský wonders if his early binary poems were ahead of their time. Certainly many circumstances of his life and in the world during the period after the creative upsurge of the 1960s were not conducive to their full development. The invasion of Chechoslovakia in 1968 suppressed some of the artistic flowering of the mid 1960s, but it’s not wise to see declines in creativity solely in political or other simplistic terms.

The world of the present may be more cordial, and Nebeský’s personal circumstances greatly improved. The world, after all, now depends completely on binary mediation, and much of society would collapse without the digital infrastructure that has grown since the 1960s. It is a pleasant irony to put binary poems on the world wide web, which is brought to you by binary systems. The dictatorships of the left and the right in the 1960s and 70s saw art forms such as Nebeský’s as self-indulgent, an affront to the „people“ and a decadent waste of time and energy by aesthetes. At present, binary communication is not only highly practical and engrained in the fabric of daily life for a large portion of the world’s population, the technology seems poised on the edge of bringing about a revolution that could empower many people or could become a tool of oppression. If it does the latter, the best way to resist it would include understanding it and finding it familiar.

Ladislav Nebeský was born in 1937, at Jilemnice, a small town about 100 km north-east of Prague. Begining in 1939, his father was a member of the underground anti-Nazi movement. In 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo; in 1942, he was killed in Berlin. Ladislav Nebeský spent his first 18 years in Jilemnice. In the period 1955 – 1960 , he studied mathematics at Charles University in Prague. In 1962, he began working as a researcher at Charles University. This lead to full-time teaching at that school, where he became an Associate Professor in mathematics. The present academic year will be his last year there. He lives with his wife in Prague. They have one son, David.

The development of his poetry falls into two major periods: 1964 – 1972 and 1995 – … (Beginning in the seventies, he pursued mathematics more intensively). In the first period, he was a member of a free group of Czech authors of experimental poetry; he had many contacts with other poets. In the second period, the contacts with other writers became rather rare. In the earlier period, one of the high points for him and several other Czech poets was inclusion in the exhibition Poesía Concreta International in Mexico City, 1966. Another high point was the Konkrete Poesie exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1970. Some of his early poetry was published in international magazines, and he is particularly pleased with one published in Ovum 10, Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1970.

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