Concrete Poetry

Works Discussed in This Essay

• "The Altar" by George Herbert
• Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire
• "Easter Wings" by George Herbert
• "Forsythia" by Mary Ellen Solt and John Dearstyne
• "Ho/Horizon/On" by Ian Hamilton Finlay
• "Rever" by Augusto de Campos
• "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree" by George Starbuck
• "Vite" by Henri Chopin

Of all literary forms, poetry is often the most closely associated with visual art, from the close relationship between postwar abstract impressionists and beat writers of the 1950s to the literary stylings of conceptual art in the following decades. Sol LeWitt's large-scale wall drawings, for example, relied on strict instructions and were executed the world over, creating a rhythm and aesthetic not unlike that found in poetry.

In concrete poetry, the words of a poem form some sort of image that relates to the subject at hand. Though poems fitting this description had existed for many years previously, concrete poetry as a movement was founded in the mid-twentieth century by writers who created works that were as much pieces of visual art as they were literary art. Artists Max Bill and Öyvind Fahlström coined the term in the early 1950s in Europe, while a Brazilian group of poets called Noigandres published a manifesto called "Plano-piloto para poesia concreta" ("Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry") in 1958. Penned by Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, the manifesto states,

Renouncing the struggle for 'absolute,' Concrete Poetry remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making. (Campos et al.)

The poets also offer a pedigree of literary figures who contributed to the movement that began in the 1950s. Those named include the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work involved the melding of poetry with other art forms and who would contribute to the growth of schools such as Dadaism and cubism in addition to concrete poetry; Ezra Pound, noted for his incomplete extended poem The Cantos (1925–69); James Joyce, for his novels Ulysses (1918–20, 1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939); Guillaume Apollinaire, for his Calligrammes (1918), which was primarily concerned with visual output rather than literary content; Oswald de Andrade, for his poetic approach of "em comprimidos, minutos de poesia" (in pills, minutes of poetry); and João Cabral de Melo Neto, for his poetry collections O engenheiro (The engineer, 1945) and Psicologia da composição (Psychology of composition, 1947).

Though the concrete poetry movement reached the height of its popularity in the 1960s, a long history of language-image fusion led up to its popularity. Poetry formed into shapes dates back as far as the third century BCE, when it was widely used and read in Greek Alexandria. The master carpenter Erhart Falckener also notably created a much-celebrated work in 1510 with his relief carving of the poem "Gerechtigkeitsspirale" (Spiral of justice) on the front of a pew in St. Valentin church, located in Hesse, Germany. Seventeenth-century poets George Herbert and Robert Herrick both employed the form, using it to create religious imagery with words of faith. However, the modern movement of concrete poetry found its origins in other avant-garde movements such as Dada and futurism, where type was an integral part of the artistic mode. Concrete poetry began as a heavily abstract, avant-garde movement; as its popularity increased, it became more conventional, and the form was adopted by less experimental poets. Some of the artists previously involved in the movement adopted the term poesia visiva (visual poetry) to distinguish the experimental ways in which they paired words and image. The movement eventually evolved to incorporate works that used photography, film, and sound.

In a review of the book The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (2015), edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, for the Creative Review, Rick Poynor wrote of a concrete poetry revival. The book's editors posit that the twenty-first century's word-heavy art and poetry works are a continuation of the twentieth-century movement. Poynor quoted from the book's introduction, written by poet and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, which argues, "While concrete poetry has always been a fast poetry—purposely resistant to close reading—in the information age, it seems intentionally designed for short-attention spans." The assertion of technology's abilities to morph people's attention spans and to shape public and intellectual taste is an interesting one, and lays the groundwork for an aging movement to become something new in a new age. Poynor's biggest criticism of the collection was its unwillingness to distinguish between a piece of art that has been "made graphically out of words" and a poem that is relying on the physical form it has taken. "Given the new context, it's not enough to assume that the original concrete poets have dealt with these matters, leaving nothing more for us to say," he wrote. "If this is to be a new movement with any lasting traction, then the question will need to be investigated thoroughly for twenty-first-century viewers before the reanimated genre can progress much further."

In 2017, Los Angeles's Getty Center presented an exhibit of concrete poetry titled Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space. The exhibit acted as a survey of the most important names to emerge during the height of the movement's popularity. Showing works from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it celebrated the experiments of artists such as Augusto de Campos and Ian Hamilton Finlay and work by other contemporaries, such as Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams.

Because of the movement's reliance on a merging of poetry and form, the definition of concrete poetry has been difficult to confirm in many cases. However, the following major works offer a survey of pieces by poets who are connected to its evolution, whether because of their direct affiliation or because of their influence on the form.

Welsh poet and Anglican priest George Herbert, writing in the seventeenth century, contributed some early English-language examples of a poem's meaning being related to its shape, likely influenced by the ancient Greek works of that type. His poems "Easter Wings" and "The Altar" exhibit his work as a devotional lyricist, as they deal heavily with his Christian beliefs in both subject and form. Herbert took holy orders in his mid-thirties before dying of consumption at the age of thirty-nine.

"Easter Wings" is written in the shape of wings, meant to mimic those of an angel. The poem itself, two stanzas in length, speaks of God's creation of man, sin, and the fall from grace. The second stanza directly addresses the speaker's ill state of health and speaks of a possible flight from it, bringing the focus back to the poem's wing shape. The speaker reveals,

My tender age in sorrow did begin;

And still with sicknesses and shame

Thou didst so punish sin,

That I became

Most thin. (lines 10–15)

before asking for the wings to help him take flight from his suffering. "The Altar," written in the shape of an altar, also speaks of a harsh rigidness in belief. The final lines again bring the poem back to the image the words are creating: "O, let thy blessed sacrifice be mine, / And sanctify this altar to be thine!" (15–16).

French poet Guillaume Apollinaire used calligrams, or poems in which the words form a shape related to the poem's content, in his 1918 collection of poetry about his wartime experience as an infantry officer and artilleryman. He described his work in a letter to André Billy as such: "The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph" (qtd. in "Apollinaire's Calligrammes"). In his work "Il pleut" ("It's Raining"), the words of the poem form long vertical lines meant to mimic the falling of rain. Other poems appear in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, a shouting soldier, and a street scene. Apollinaire's work is particularly striking because of its attention to typeface and design, something missing from the work of those who came before. The bold use of words to create images in a stark but energetic landscape inspired the avant-garde creativity found in the concrete poetry movement.

Brazilian artist and poet Augusto de Campos is one of the founders of concrete poetry. In 1956, he, his brother Haroldo de Campos, and Decio Pignatari declared their movement at an exposition at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo. In the introduction to an interview with Augusto de Campos for the Harvard Library Bulletin in 1992, republished on the website UbuWeb, Roland Greene wrote of the group, "The aims of the concretistas in the 1950s were to reclaim the origins of Brazilian modernism in the decisive events of the twenties, and to reassert its international prospects" (Campos).

Campos's work "Rever" is a striking piece of word art. The poet himself once wrote, "Far from attempting to evade reality or to deceive it, concrete poetry is against self-debilitating introspection and simpleton simplistic realism. It intends to place itself before things, open, in a position of absolute realism" (qtd. in "Word Hoards"). "Rever" consists of a single word, rever, meaning "to see again," printed in bright red on a white background twice, once right side up and once upside down. The words are sliced three times each and fold out from the page, creating a three-dimensional effect for the viewer. The piece not only exists in space but also asks its viewers to contemplate what it means to look a second time. Campos, like Goldsmith, sees the possibilities of concrete poetry in a new digital era. In his interview with Greene, Campos declared, "The virtual movement of the printed word, the typogram, is giving way to the real movement of the computerized word, the videogram, and to the typography of the electronic era. From static to cinematic poetry, which, combined with computerized sound resources, can raise the verbivocovisual structures preconceived by CP [concrete poetry] to their most complete materialization."

Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay had a long, notable career as a writer and artist. His first collection of concrete poetry, Rapel, was published in 1963; his work "Ho/Horizon/On" appeared in the subsequent collection The Blue and the Brown Poems, published in 1968. "Ho/Horizon/On" is an exciting, morphing piece that creates a structure out of the word "horizon." The poem begins with the word alone on its top line. The word then morphs through nine additional lines until it reaches the bottom of the page, finally becoming "hohohohohohohohoho" on the left side and "ononononononononon" on the right ("Word Hoards"). The shape mimics a structure seen on the horizon line, or a sunset, or the way looking to the horizon can warp and change the images one sees.

Finlay would eventually take his melding of poetry and visual art even farther with his garden, titled "Little Sparta," which James Campbell described for the Guardian as "one of the wonders of 20th-century art." In this space, Finlay planted words and images among the greenery, across gardening tools, and even in granite and marble. When he died in 2006, he had rarely left the confines of his estate for nearly thirty years. In 2012, the Tate Britain exhibited a collection of his work that included his concrete poems.

As concrete poetry's popularity grew, so did its contributors and methods. American artist and poet Mary Ellen Solt and British designer and printer John Dearstyne collaborated to produce the book Flowers in Concrete (1966). Solt, a teacher and critical theorist who also edited an overview of the concrete poetry movement called Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), created work that mirrored the natural world, from flora to landscapes. In her and Dearstyne's work "Forsythia," the plant's name is created one letter at a time. The letters create the pot for the plant, with the word "forsythia" boldly printed at the base. Each of those letters is used to create an acrostic that blooms up into wisps of the plant ("Word Hoards"). The effect of the poem is one of delicacy—Dearstyne's design is striking against a yellow background, while the font lends an air of structured chaos to the thin stems—and simplicity, like that found by many in nature.

One hallmark of concrete poetry is its willingness to include many types of art in its expression, alongside print and visual work. Henri Chopin, an avant-garde poet and musician, notably embraced the many forms of artistic expression available to him. An editor of the journal OU, which featured the works of surrealist, Dada, and fluxus movement artists and of such writers as William S. Burroughs, Chopin in his own work created an exciting tension between word meaning and form. Avant-garde art expert Michel Giroud wrote of Chopin's work, "Henri Chopin opens new ways by going beyond the separation between music and language, and he discovers the infinite chant, the fantastic yard of the mouth and the corporal noises with the aid of new electronic machines: a new conscience of space thanks to astro-physicians and biologists" (qtd. in "Henri Chopin"). Though his work "Vite" (Fast), from Le dernier roman du monde: Histoire d'un chef occidental ou oriental (The last novel in the world: Story of a Western or Oriental leader, 1970), is still based in the printed word, his use of aggressive repetition resulting in an ecstatic chant seemingly leaps from the page to the viewers' ears. Chopin, in this work, incorporates repetition through using the word "vite" throughout, over a hundred times, creating something that resembles a speaker blast. The word "vivons" appears beneath this invented structure, saying simply, "live."

Poet George Starbuck was a member of the neo-formalist school, and his work as a poet and teacher spanned nearly half a century. "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree," first published in 1978, combines the action of the holiday season with a common symbol of the season, so that the two factors rely on each other. The language of the poem is ecstatic and fragmented:

O

fury-

bedecked!

O glitter-torn!

Let the wild wind erect

bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect

frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn

all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! (1–8)

The rhythm and tone mimic the chaos of a holiday gathering, while drawing in traditional images of the season like glitter, icicles, and junipers.

Dynamic minds such as these poets', which were able to see the connections between all forms of artistic expression and turn them into something able to reach beyond the page, are what have made concrete poetry both an exciting experiment and a lasting movement.

Bibliography

"Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918)." The Public Domain Review, publicdomainreview.org/collections/apollinaires-calligrammes-1918/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Campbell, James. "Ian Hamilton Finlay: The Concrete Poet as Avant Gardener." The Guardian, 16 Nov. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/16/ian-hamilton-finlay-concrete-poetry. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Campos, Augusto de. "From Dante to the Post-Concrete: An Interview with Augusto de Campos." Interview by Roland Greene. UbuWeb: Papers, www.ubu.com/papers/greene02.html. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Campos, Augusto de, et al. "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)." UbuWeb: Papers, www.ubu.com/papers/noigandres01.html. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

"Henri Chopin (1922–2008)." UbuWeb Sound, www.ubu.com/sound/chopin.html. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Herbert, George. "The Altar." A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, edited by Felix E. Schelling, Ginn, 1899, p. 32. Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, . Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Herbert, George. "Easter Wings." A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, edited by Felix E. Schelling, Ginn, 1899, pp. 32–33. Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, . Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Poynor, Rick. Review of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe. The Creative Review, 1 Sept. 2015, www.creativereview.co.uk/words-in-pictures. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

Starbuck, George. The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades. Edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese, U of Alabama P, 2003.

"Word Hoards: Masterpieces of Concrete Poetry—in Pictures." The Guardian, 7 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/apr/07/masterpieces-concrete-poetry-pictures-getty-center-ian-hamilton-finlay-augusto-campos. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.