Spatial Montage Rhythm: Reading Concrete Poetry Through Eisensteinian Montage Theory and Multimodal Spatial Poetics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how the intersection of Eisensteinian montage principles and concrete poetics transforms the act of reading into an embodied, multi-sensorial experience. It argues that concrete poetry does not abandon rhythm but transposes it from the phonological to the spatial register, and proposes the Spatial Montage Rhythm Model (SMRM), which articulates five operative principles by which concrete poems generate spatial-temporal rhythm: the shot (lexical cluster as discrete unit), the cut (blank space as active structuring), the sequence (directional reading as embodied movement), the collision (dialectical juxtaposition), and the rhythm that emerges from their coordination. The model is developed through close multimodal analyses of ten works of contemporary American and Canadian visual poetics — by Carl Andre, John Cage, bpNichol, Mary Ellen Solt, Emmett Williams, Susan Howe, and Cia Rinne — drawn from Nancy Perloff's Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology (2021). The readings demonstrate that concrete poetry does not abolish rhythm; rather, it relocates it. Where traditional verse organizes temporal experience through metrical recurrence, concrete poetry organizes temporal experience through spatial configuration
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".