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Concrete poetry is the name given a
variety of new formal experiments
undertaken by poets in many countries
since World War II in response to their
perception of the spiritual and
linguistic needs of contemporary man.
They believe that the concrete poem with
its reduced form of language
communicates in a way related to the
scientific formula. This reduced form
has evolved from the very uses of
language in the world of advertising and
mass media that are conventionally
considered to be contributing to the
death of poetry.
Mary Ellen Solt, a leading American
concrete poet, provides in this volume
the first comprehensive survey of the
international movement of this art form.
She traces the evolution of the concrete
poem from the traditional form (the
sonnet) through concrete art and the
theories of Max Bill in the work of
Eugen Gomringer; from innovations made
by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Joyce, Pound,
and cummings; from musicians and artists
such as Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen,
Mondrian, Albers, Calder, Bill, and
Eisenstein; from linguistics, Gestalt
psychology, and cybernetics in the work
of Noigandres Group (Augusto de Campos,
Haroldo de Campos, Decio Pignatari) of
Brazil; from a reaction against
traditional poetry through abstract
painting in the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom,
and from Futurism in the work of Carlo
Belloli.
Included are discussions and defenses
by poets of more recent developments
such as Spatialisme as defined by Pierre
Garnier of France and of new genres such
as type poems, typewriter poems, tape
recorder poems, kinetic poems, and
object poems. The editor has selected
over one hundred thirty concrete poems
and texts, many of them in color, giving
the reader a widely representative
selection of the work being done by
concrete poets throughout the world. A
section of manifestoes and statements on
concrete poetry by Eugen Gomringer, the
Noigandres group, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Max
Bense, Pierre Garnier, Henri Chopin,
Paul de Vree, Ian Hamilton Finlay and
Jonathan Williams makes the volume an
indispensable source book for the
international movement of concrete
poetry.
"Western poems have been, through the
ages, essentially a discourse. Modern
poets, from a symbolism to surrealism
(and, in English, among others and
mainly cummings and Pound) have made a
criticism of poetic discourse within the
discourse, within a poem. Concrete
poetry breaks it: with it the course
stops. This is its great contribution.
Temporal poetry brings the reader from
one place to another, unexpected place;
spatial poetry saves the walk: it
presents us suddenly with the point of
arrival. Or leaves us at the point of
departure."
--Octavio Paz |
