Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct meaning of its own. Concrete poetry relates more to the visual than to the verbal arts although there is a considerable overlap in the kind of product to which it refers. Historically, however, concrete poetry has developed from a long tradition of shaped or patterned poems in which the words are arranged in such a way as to depict their subject.

Development

Though the term ‘concrete poetry’ is modern, the idea of using letter arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem is old. Such shaped poetry was popular in Greek

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...

during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, although only the handful which were collected together in the Greek Anthology now survive. Examples include poems by Simmias of Rhodes in the shape of an egg, wings and a hatchet, as well as

Theocritus Theocritus (; grc-gre, Θεόκριτος, ''Theokritos''; born c. 300 BC, died after 260 BC) was a Greek poet from Sicily and the creator of Ancient Greek pastoral poetry. Life Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from h ...

’ pan-pipes. The post-Classical revival of shaped poetry seems to begin with the '' Gerechtigkeitsspirale'' (spiral of justice), a

relief carving In wood carving relief carving is a type in which figures or patterns are carved in a flat panel of wood; the same term is also used for carving in stone, ivory carving and various other materials. The figures project only slightly from the bac ...

of a poem at the pilgrimage church of St. Valentin, Kiedrich. The text is carved in the form of a spiral on the front of one of the church

pew A pew () is a long bench seat or enclosed box, used for seating members of a congregation or choir in a church, synagogue or sometimes a courtroom. Overview The first backless stone benches began to appear in English churches in the thirt ...

s and created in 1510 by master carpenter Erhart Falckener. But the heyday of the revival of shaped poetry came in the Baroque period when poets, in the words of Jeremy Adler, "did away with the more-or-less arbitrary appearance of the text, turned the incidental fact of writing into an essential facet of composition, and thereby…created a union of poetry with the visual arts". There were already precedents for this in

Micrography Micrography (from Greek, literally small-writing – "Μικρογραφία"), also called microcalligraphy, is a Jewish form of calligrams developed in the 9th century, with parallels in Christianity and Islam,idolatry. The technique is now used by both religious and secular artists and is similar to the use of Arabic texts in

Islamic calligraphy Islamic calligraphy is the artistic practice of handwriting and calligraphy, in the languages which use Arabic alphabet or the alphabets derived from it. It includes Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, and Urdu calligraphy.Chapman, Caroline (2012). ...

Early religious examples of shaped poems in English include " Easter Wings" and " The Altar" in

George Herbert George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devoti ...

's ''The Temple'' (1633) and Robert Herrick's "This crosstree here", which is set in the shape of a cross, from his ''Noble Numbers'' (1647). Secular examples include poems on the subject of drinking in the shape of wine flagons by Rabelais and Charles-François Panard (1750), supplemented by the elaborate goblet of Quirinus Moscherosch (1660), the playful "A Toast" (Zdravljica, 1844) by

France Prešeren France Prešeren () (2 or 3 December 1800 – 8 February 1849) was a 19th-century Romantic Slovene poet whose poems have been translated into many languages.

, with stanzas in the shape of wine-glasses, and

The Mouse's Tale "The Mouse's Tale" is a shaped poem by Lewis Carroll which appears in his 1865 novel ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''. Though no formal title for the poem is given in the text, the chapter title refers to "A Long Tale" and the Mouse introduces ...

, a shaped poem published in 1865 by

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are '' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequ ...

. The approach reappeared at the start of the 20th century, initially in the '' Calligrammes'' (1918) of

Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire) of the Wąż coat of arms. (; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of t ...

, with poems in the shape of a necktie, a fountain and raindrops running down a window, among other examples. In that era also there were typographical experiments by members of avant-garde movements such as Futurism,

Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...

and Surrealism in which lay-out moved from an auxiliary expression of meaning to artistic primacy. Thus the significance of the sound poetry in Marinetti’s

Zang Tumb Tumb ''Zang Tumb Tumb'' (usually referred to as ''Zang Tumb Tuuum'') is a sound poetry, sound poem and Concrete poetry, concrete poem written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurism (art), futurist. It appeared in excerpts in journals between ...

(1912) is expressed through pictorial means. Similarly in Germany Raoul Hausmann claimed that the typographic style of his 'Phonemes' allowed the reader to recognise what sound was intended. In Russia the Futurist poet

Vasily Kamensky Vasily Vasilyevich Kamensky (russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Каме́нский; – November 11, 1961) was a Russian Futurist poet, playwright, and artist as well as one of the first Russian aviators. Biography Kamensky w ...

went so far as to term the typography of his ''

Tango with Cows ''Tango With Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems'' (Russian; ''Танго С Коровами: Железобетонные Поэмы'') is an artists' book by the Russian Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky, with additional illustrations by the brothers David ...

'', published in 1914, 'ferro-concrete poems' (''zhelezobetonnye poemy''), long before the name became current elsewhere. A further move away from overt meaning occurred where 'poems' were simplified to a simple arrangement of the letters of the alphabet. Louis Aragon, for example, exhibited the sequence from a to z and titled it "Suicide" (1926), while Kurt Schwitters' "ZA (elementary)" has the alphabet in reverse, and the Catalan writer Josep Maria Junoy (1885-1955) placed just the letters Z and A at the top and bottom of the page under the title "Ars Poetica".

Post-war concrete poetry

During the early 1950s two Brazilian artistic groups producing severely abstract and impersonal work were joined by poets linked to the

São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for ' Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the Ga ...

magazine ''Noigandres'' who began to treat language in an equally abstract way. Their work was termed "concrete poetry" after they exhibited along with the artists in the National Exhibition of

Concrete Art Concrete art was an art movement with a strong emphasis on geometrical abstraction. The term was first formulated by Theo van Doesburg and was then used by him in 1930 to define the difference between his vision of art and that of other abstract art ...

(1956/57). The poets included Augusto de Campos,

Haroldo de Campos Haroldo Eurico Browne de Campos (19 August 1929 – 16 August 2003) was a Brazilian poet, critic, professor and translator. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Brazilian literature since 1950. Biography He did his secon ...

and

Décio Pignatari Décio Pignatari (August 20, 1927 – December 2, 2012) was a Brazilian poet, essayist and translator. Early life and education Born in Jundiaí in 1927, Pignatari began conducting experiments with poetic language, incorporating visuals e ...

, who were joined in the exhibition by Ferreira Gullar, Ronaldo Azeredo and Wlademir Dias Pino from

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a ...

. In 1958 a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published and an anthology in 1962. Dom Sylvester Houédard claimed that it was the 1962 publication in ''

The Times Literary Supplement ''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp. History The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication ...

'' of a letter from the Portuguese E.M. de Melo e Castro that awakened British writers such as himself,

Ian Hamilton Finlay Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Life Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent. He was e ...

and Edwin Morgan to the possibilities of Concrete Poetry. However, there were by this time other European writers producing similar work. In 1954 the Swedish poet and visual artist Öyvind Fahlström had published the manifesto ''Hätila Ragulpr på Fåtskliaben''. Similarly in Germany

Eugen Gomringer Eugen Gomringer (born 20 January 1925 in Cachuela Esperanza, Bolivia) is a Bolivian-born German concrete poet. He is head of the Institut für Konstruktive Kunst und Konkrete Poesie (IKKP) in Rehau, Germany. Between 1977 and 1990, he was a profes ...

published his manifesto ''vom vers zur konstellation'' (from line to constellation), in which he declared that a poem should be "a reality in itself" rather than a statement about reality, and "as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs". The difficulty in defining such a style is admitted by Houédard’s statement that "a printed concrete poem is ambiguously both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography". 0256-Stuttgart Finlay-11-02

Another difficulty of definition is caused by the way such works cross artistic boundaries into the areas of music and sculpture, or can alternatively be defined as sound poetry, visual poetry, found poetry and typewriter art. Henri Chopin's work was related to his musical treatment of the word. Kenelm Cox (1927–68) was a kinetic artist "interested in the linear, serial aspects of visual experience but particularly in the process of change," whose revolving machines transcended the static page in being able to express this. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry began on the page but then moved increasingly towards three dimensional figuration and afterwards to

site-specific art Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. Site-specific art is produced both by commercial artists, and independently, and can ...

in the creation of his sculpture garden at Little Sparta. The Italian

Maurizio Nannucci Maurizio Nannucci (born 1939, in Florence, Italy) is an Italian contemporary artist. Lives and works in Florence and South Baden, Germany. Nannucci's work includes: photography, video, neon installations, sound installation, artist's books, and ed ...

's ''Dattilogrammmi'' experiments (1964/1965) were also transitional, preluding his move into

light art Light art or The Art of Light is generally referring to a visual art form in which (physical) light is the main, if not sole medium of creation. Uses of the term differ drastically in incongruence; definitions, if existing, vary in several asp ...

Bob Cobbing Bob Cobbing (30 July 1920 – 29 September 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival. Early life Cobbing was born in Enfield and grew up within the Plymouth Breth ...

, who was also a sound poet, had been experimenting with typewriter and duplicator since 1942. Of its possibilities in suggesting the physical dimension of the auditory process, he declared that "One can get the measure of a poem with the typewriter’s accurate left/right & up & down movements; but superimposition by means of stencil and duplicator enable one to dance to this measure." Houédard’s entirely different work was also produced principally on the typewriter but approximates more to painterly and sculptural procedures. So too does that of the American

Minimalist In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post– World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Do ...

artist Carl André, beginning from about 1958 and in parallel with his changing artistic procedures. And in Italy Adriano Spatola (1941–88) developed the artistic fragmentation of language using various visual techniques in his ''Zeroglifico'' (1965/6). Edwin Morgan’s experiments with concrete poetry covered several other aspects of it, including elements of found poetry ‘discovered’ by misreading and isolating elements from printed sources. "Most people have probably had the experience of scanning a newspaper page quickly and taking a message from it quite different from the intended one. I began looking deliberately for such hidden messages…preferably with the visual or typographical element part of the point." Another aspect of the search for unintended concordances of meaning emerges in A Humument, the lifework of the visual artist Tom Phillips, who uses painterly and decorative procedures to isolate them on the page. Despite such blurring of artistic boundaries, concrete poetry can be viewed as taking its place in a predominantly visual tradition stretching over more than two millennia that seeks to draw attention to the word in the space of the page, and to the spaces between words, as an aid to emphasising their significance. In recent years, this approach has led Mario Petrucci to suggest that the "extreme example" of concrete poetry can be seen as nested within the larger concept of ''Spatial Form''. Starting from the observation that poetry can usually be told from prose simply by looking at it, this reading of ''Spatial Form'' encompasses the many aspects of subtle visual significance that are held, for instance, by typeface or in the textures of repeated letters, as well as the more overt visual signals generated by the poem’s layout.''Writing In Education'', National Association of Writers in Education, issue 40 (2006), pp.37-40.

Bibliography

* Jeremy Adler ‘'Technopaignia, Carmina Figurata and Bilder-Reime. Seventeenth¬Century Figured Poetry in Historical Context’', Comparative Criticism IV (1982), pp. 107–147. * Jeremy Adler and Ulrich Ernst Text als Figur. Visuelle Poesie von der Antike bis zur Moderne, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and VCH, Acta Humaniora, Weinheim, Third edition, 1990. * Bäckström, Per
“Fahlström stannade i Stockholm. ’HÄTILA RAGULPR PÅ FÅTSKLIABEN’ och diktarkonferensen i Sigtuna 1953”
''Edda'' 2019 no. 1. * Bäckström, Per
“Words as things. Concrete Poetry in Scandinavia”
''Cahiers de la nouvelle Europe'': special issue ''Transfers, Appropriations and Functions of Avant-Garde in Central and Northern Europe, 1909–1989'', Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. * Bob Cobbing (ed), ''GLOUP and WOUP'', Gillingham 1974. * Peter Finch (ed), ''Typewriter Poems'', Cardiff 1972. *

Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an ...

, ''Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature'', State University of New York, 1987. *

Nigel McLoughlin Nigel McLoughlin (born 1968, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland) is a poet, editor and teacher. Education He received his early education at St Michael's College, Enniskillen. He holds a BA(Hons) in English from the University of London and a Diplom ...

(ed), ''The Portable Poetry Workshop'', Palgrave 2017 (Part I:12, Spatial Form); Print , Electronic . *

, ''Exempla, Anthology of concrete and visual poetry'', Florence 1970. * John Sharkey (ed), ''Mindplay, an anthology of British Concrete Poetry'', London 1971. * Dencker, Klaus Peter (Trans.Harry Polkinhorn) 'From Concrete to Visual poetry' Kaldron-online & Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry 2000.

References

External links

Concrete Poetry: A World View
by Mary Ellen Solt o
UbuWeb
which hosts a large amount of concrete poetry (Visual Poetry)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Concrete Poetry Graphic poetry Latin American literature Poetry movements

Development

Post-war concrete poetry

See also

Bibliography

References

Further reading

External links