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Concrete Poetry
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Throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, Concrete Poetry was one of the most lively movements in the arts, involving a fertile interaction between poets, artists and early sound artists. Treating the poem as an object, to be carefully constructed from basic linguistic elements, it paralleled a similar 'turn to language' in philosophy and in the visual arts.
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Concrete Poetry is the use of words and their physical formation to convey meaning. This may be done with color, the shape of the letters, and/or the arrangement of words. Samples below show some of the many variations available. To view various forms of concrete poetrty on the Internet, click on the words in bold lettering in this sentence. You may use the information you find at this link, but you may not publish it in anything other than a school report.
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For National Poetry Month, try Meow Ruff: A Story in Concrete Poetry by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Michelle Berg (Houghton Mifflin, 32 pages, $16, ages 3-8). It's a delight. Snippets of shaped poems tell the simple story of a rainstorm and a cast of backyard creatures.
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Experimental poetry – which concrete poetry is part of – has been accused of being an autistic language and therefore of being incapable of having an impact on the reader’s consciousness. Thus, concrete poetry seems to be useless in terms of political interventions. The counter argument is that focusing on the text’s materiality implies a reflection on the use of language thereby impeling the audience to identify and perhaps even reject all attempts of language instrumentalization. (Einhorn).
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The Scottish poets Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finley are among the leading practitioners of concrete poetry. Finley’s first collection of visual verse, Rapel, appeared in print in 1963. In the same year Dick Higgins in America founded Something Else Press. It published concrete poetry, as well as texts and artworks by Fluxus artists and others.
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Every avant garde form has its lunatic fringes—and lunatics who are on or beyond the fringe, no doubt—and concrete poetry has its full share of these. But within the area to which the term properly applies there is mainly sanity and scope for rational development as well as reasonable pleasure.
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Concrete Poetry