The Czech experimental poetry of the 1950s and the 1960s

The article deals with a corpus encompassing various poetic experiments. Therefore the joint term for the entire corpus, even though secondary literature shows no consensus as regards a common name. Rather, it is the case of a very diversified poetic movement, sustained by a number of different authors, with a common attribute of intermediality, primarily visual-literary, but also importantly musical and performance art. The focus of attention are the works that retained their status in the field of literature or whose literary segment makes for an imporant segment, while in the analysis of works the literary component is of primary consideration. Standardized definition and typologies are difficult to come by in this analysis due to their variety and peculiar authorial markers. Nor is there a consensus about the name of this divergent corpus given that the terminology is vast, fanciful and scattered, relatively few of the concepts are recurrent. However, the common purpose of these works is a distance from the semantic value of the text and a tendency to objectify language and release its inherent qualities. Semantic structures fall apart, syntactic and cognitive rise up. Despite negating meaning in this poetry and attempting to erase it, it is precisely the devices that promote this that contain an implicit message – criticism of reality. The degree of refutation of traditional poetry varies from one poet to another, as does the choice of the intermedial model and creative devices used. Criticism of the living reality is mostly carried out in a humorous and grotesque way so that negation of the subject in poetry reciprocates the disappearance of the right to one’s self in socialist society while playing with language to the point of meaninglessness becomes a critique of limitation and crisis of language in the contemporary socio-political environment