Introduction
One kind of visual poetry--or, poetry that utilizes visual elements--is called 'Concrete Poetry.' This type of visual poetry was a cultural movement all its own in the mid-20th century, and here will serve as an excellent entryway into the world of visual poetics.
Concrete poetry as an art form developed in the 1950s and 1960s based on the visual aspects of words. Distinguishing itself from mere ‘shaped’ poetry, in which the meaning of a text is enhanced by the relationship between a sequence of lines and the overall pattern or silhouette that these lines create on a page (as in George Herbert’s ‘Easter-Wings’, 1633, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, 1918), Concrete poetry largely dispenses with conventional line and syntax. It may bring into use not only a wide range of typefaces, but also other elements derived from collage, graphics and computer-generated shapes. It can appropriately be considered a visual art, though it is also a literary one.
The term 'Concrete poetry' as a designation for words in a spatially inventive context was devised in 1955 by Eugen Gomringer and Decio Pignatari, poets and teachers born in South America. Pignatari had been a founding member of a group of poets in 1952, and Gomringer had published a volume of experimental poetry in 1953. From this period onwards, Pignatari, together with his colleagues Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos, viewed a range of styles in avant-garde music and literature as relevant to their work, which was lyrical, exuberant, literally colourful and often socially pointed. Gomringer, in common with other German-speaking poets, preferred the sobriety of Bauhaus typography and looked up to the rigorous example of Swiss Concrete art. His poems involved words and phrases repeated and permuted as in a litany, and one collection took the devotional form of a Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch, 1965).
From 1965, Concrete poetry was being celebrated throughout Europe and America in little magazines, exhibitions and anthologies. Its rise coincided with a revival of interest in modernism and functionalism in architecture, and kinetic art / art based on movement (like Alexander Calder's mobiles). In the 1970s it suffered an eclipse. Nevertheless, several important poets, besides the original group, continued to publish work that identified closely with the movement, notably Robert Lax (1915–2000), an American living in Greece, Pierre Garnier (1928-2014), a pioneer of Concrete poetry in France, and John Cage. The foremost Concrete poet in Britain was Ian Hamilton Finlay, who expanded his range to include poem-prints, cards and booklets published through his Wild Hawthorn Press (founded in 1961). His fame as a garden designer (his garden Little Sparta filled with 'poem-objects' and poetry in sculptural form) can be traced back to the catalytic effect of Concrete poetry. Concrete poetry as a movement continues to manifest itself throughout the world, building on its status as one of the very first truly international literary movements. Whether in concentrated doses of poems in small publications, or through the internet, practitioners of Concrete poetry continue to disseminate their work and expand poetry's visual possibilities.
More introductory notes on visual (and Concrete) poetry
→"Visual poetry at its best foregrounds its materiality, calls attention to the conditions of its production, reminds readers that they are reading a poem, that poems--all poems, not just visual ones--are material objects participating in a poetic tradition" (Joseph Thomas, Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry [2007], p. 98).
→ "The reinvention [of poetry], the making of a poetry for our time, is the only thing that makes poetry matter. And that means, literally, making poetry matter, that is, making poetry that intensifies the matter or materiality of poetry--acoustic, visual, syntactic, semantic. Poetry is very much alive when it finds ways of doing things in a media-saturated environment that only poetry can do, but very much dead when it just retreads the same old same old" (Charles Bernstein, from his essay "Against National Poetry Month as Such")
→ "Visual poems depend for their effect on the special quality of the printed letter and of type spread across a page. It is profoundly literary, for it deals with expressly with the effects of writing (as opposed to [oral] telling)" (Eugene Wildman, Anthology of Concretism [1969])
→"Till recently, poetry, like prose, has been invisible. We can now see a line of poetry as visible as a row of trees. We may see, not through, but with the letters. (The 't' leaves. An 'r' branches. The 'e's have annual rings. Below, the snake believes it is an 's'.) It is a magical world where all is possible. And placed properly on the page an 'I' can not merely resemble but have all the structural capabilities of an I-beam. An 'O' can rise, like the real moon, over the word 'moon'...One could spend a lifetime writing with just the 26 letters of the alphabet" (Ronald Johnson, cited in Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970. Print.)
→ The Getty Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary collections, Nancy Perloff, told Hyperallergic.com that “Concrete poems are material objects constructed of component parts that can include letters, words, phonemes, syllables, and typefaces. By rejecting traditional syntax and utilizing graphic space for both structure and meaning, concrete poets made the sound and shape of words their explicit field of investigation. Concrete poetry made language visible.” (Her statement also forms part of the wording of an exhibition sign at the Getty Museum's exhibition "Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space")
→ More wording / wall text at Getty Museum's exhibition of Concrete Poetry:
"Letters and words--especially nouns and verbs--are the structural building blocks of concrete poetry. They are compositional materials manipulated through repetition, variation, and new typographic arrangements. Concrete poets were creative masters of puns and neologisms, and, above all else, at reducing language to its most essential. Their tendency towards streamlined communication resonates today in our era of tweets and text messages. While wordplay might be humorous, satirical, or poignant, it invariably attempts to attract and engage viewers."
→ In "The Rejection of Closure," an essay (actually a transcribed talk) written in 1985, Lyn Hejinian characterizes a 'closed text' as "one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of the work. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity" (270). She continues, noting that newspaper articles, Dickens' novels, and detective stories are all closed texts--even though we can deconstruct any "single reading." Hejinian argues that an open text, on the other hand, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. (272) Hejinian further notes that the physical layout of a document can encourage openness. Any document, she argues, "in which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance" has open tendencies (273).
→ Lyn Hejinian also observes that "any reading of [open texts] is an improvisation. One progresses through the work not on straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections." Because the reader is unsure which reading strategy he or she should employ, the text therefore invites participation in it.
One kind of visual poetry--or, poetry that utilizes visual elements--is called 'Concrete Poetry.' This type of visual poetry was a cultural movement all its own in the mid-20th century, and here will serve as an excellent entryway into the world of visual poetics.
Concrete poetry as an art form developed in the 1950s and 1960s based on the visual aspects of words. Distinguishing itself from mere ‘shaped’ poetry, in which the meaning of a text is enhanced by the relationship between a sequence of lines and the overall pattern or silhouette that these lines create on a page (as in George Herbert’s ‘Easter-Wings’, 1633, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, 1918), Concrete poetry largely dispenses with conventional line and syntax. It may bring into use not only a wide range of typefaces, but also other elements derived from collage, graphics and computer-generated shapes. It can appropriately be considered a visual art, though it is also a literary one.
The term 'Concrete poetry' as a designation for words in a spatially inventive context was devised in 1955 by Eugen Gomringer and Decio Pignatari, poets and teachers born in South America. Pignatari had been a founding member of a group of poets in 1952, and Gomringer had published a volume of experimental poetry in 1953. From this period onwards, Pignatari, together with his colleagues Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos, viewed a range of styles in avant-garde music and literature as relevant to their work, which was lyrical, exuberant, literally colourful and often socially pointed. Gomringer, in common with other German-speaking poets, preferred the sobriety of Bauhaus typography and looked up to the rigorous example of Swiss Concrete art. His poems involved words and phrases repeated and permuted as in a litany, and one collection took the devotional form of a Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch, 1965).
From 1965, Concrete poetry was being celebrated throughout Europe and America in little magazines, exhibitions and anthologies. Its rise coincided with a revival of interest in modernism and functionalism in architecture, and kinetic art / art based on movement (like Alexander Calder's mobiles). In the 1970s it suffered an eclipse. Nevertheless, several important poets, besides the original group, continued to publish work that identified closely with the movement, notably Robert Lax (1915–2000), an American living in Greece, Pierre Garnier (1928-2014), a pioneer of Concrete poetry in France, and John Cage. The foremost Concrete poet in Britain was Ian Hamilton Finlay, who expanded his range to include poem-prints, cards and booklets published through his Wild Hawthorn Press (founded in 1961). His fame as a garden designer (his garden Little Sparta filled with 'poem-objects' and poetry in sculptural form) can be traced back to the catalytic effect of Concrete poetry. Concrete poetry as a movement continues to manifest itself throughout the world, building on its status as one of the very first truly international literary movements. Whether in concentrated doses of poems in small publications, or through the internet, practitioners of Concrete poetry continue to disseminate their work and expand poetry's visual possibilities.
More introductory notes on visual (and Concrete) poetry
→"Visual poetry at its best foregrounds its materiality, calls attention to the conditions of its production, reminds readers that they are reading a poem, that poems--all poems, not just visual ones--are material objects participating in a poetic tradition" (Joseph Thomas, Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry [2007], p. 98).
→ "The reinvention [of poetry], the making of a poetry for our time, is the only thing that makes poetry matter. And that means, literally, making poetry matter, that is, making poetry that intensifies the matter or materiality of poetry--acoustic, visual, syntactic, semantic. Poetry is very much alive when it finds ways of doing things in a media-saturated environment that only poetry can do, but very much dead when it just retreads the same old same old" (Charles Bernstein, from his essay "Against National Poetry Month as Such")
→ "Visual poems depend for their effect on the special quality of the printed letter and of type spread across a page. It is profoundly literary, for it deals with expressly with the effects of writing (as opposed to [oral] telling)" (Eugene Wildman, Anthology of Concretism [1969])
→"Till recently, poetry, like prose, has been invisible. We can now see a line of poetry as visible as a row of trees. We may see, not through, but with the letters. (The 't' leaves. An 'r' branches. The 'e's have annual rings. Below, the snake believes it is an 's'.) It is a magical world where all is possible. And placed properly on the page an 'I' can not merely resemble but have all the structural capabilities of an I-beam. An 'O' can rise, like the real moon, over the word 'moon'...One could spend a lifetime writing with just the 26 letters of the alphabet" (Ronald Johnson, cited in Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970. Print.)
→ The Getty Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary collections, Nancy Perloff, told Hyperallergic.com that “Concrete poems are material objects constructed of component parts that can include letters, words, phonemes, syllables, and typefaces. By rejecting traditional syntax and utilizing graphic space for both structure and meaning, concrete poets made the sound and shape of words their explicit field of investigation. Concrete poetry made language visible.” (Her statement also forms part of the wording of an exhibition sign at the Getty Museum's exhibition "Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space")
→ More wording / wall text at Getty Museum's exhibition of Concrete Poetry:
"Letters and words--especially nouns and verbs--are the structural building blocks of concrete poetry. They are compositional materials manipulated through repetition, variation, and new typographic arrangements. Concrete poets were creative masters of puns and neologisms, and, above all else, at reducing language to its most essential. Their tendency towards streamlined communication resonates today in our era of tweets and text messages. While wordplay might be humorous, satirical, or poignant, it invariably attempts to attract and engage viewers."
→ In "The Rejection of Closure," an essay (actually a transcribed talk) written in 1985, Lyn Hejinian characterizes a 'closed text' as "one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of the work. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity" (270). She continues, noting that newspaper articles, Dickens' novels, and detective stories are all closed texts--even though we can deconstruct any "single reading." Hejinian argues that an open text, on the other hand, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. (272) Hejinian further notes that the physical layout of a document can encourage openness. Any document, she argues, "in which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance" has open tendencies (273).
→ Lyn Hejinian also observes that "any reading of [open texts] is an improvisation. One progresses through the work not on straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections." Because the reader is unsure which reading strategy he or she should employ, the text therefore invites participation in it.
Resources
The best way to invite participation in visual poetry for your students is to do just that. Have your students write their own visual / concrete poems. They can start with simple shaped poems--they can first draw an outline of an object, and then describe the object using vivid language within the contours of the lines they've drawn. Or, you can pick four or five poets from the list below, and offer them to students as options to emulate. Students can compose their own concrete poem based on the visual style, and tone, of one of the poets on the list.
For example:
→ Emulate Dan Waber by creating a visual poem using a single word
→ Emulate Tyehimba Jess by creating a visual poem with a tie-in to multimedia
→ Emulate d.a levy by creating a visual poem using magazine cut-outs / collage technique
→ Emulate Bob Brown by creating a visual poem that includes common, everyday symbols (like emojis)
The best way to invite participation in visual poetry for your students is to do just that. Have your students write their own visual / concrete poems. They can start with simple shaped poems--they can first draw an outline of an object, and then describe the object using vivid language within the contours of the lines they've drawn. Or, you can pick four or five poets from the list below, and offer them to students as options to emulate. Students can compose their own concrete poem based on the visual style, and tone, of one of the poets on the list.
For example:
→ Emulate Dan Waber by creating a visual poem using a single word
→ Emulate Tyehimba Jess by creating a visual poem with a tie-in to multimedia
→ Emulate d.a levy by creating a visual poem using magazine cut-outs / collage technique
→ Emulate Bob Brown by creating a visual poem that includes common, everyday symbols (like emojis)
Click to see poems and discussion questions regarding these American poets and artists (listed chronologically by birth):
Bob Brown (1886 - 1959)
Kenneth Patchen (1911 - 1972)
May Swenson (1913 - 1989)
Saul Steinberg (1914 - 1999)
Robert Lax (1915 - 2000)
Mary Ellen Solt (1920 - 2007)
Emmett Williams (1925 - 2007)
Maxine Kumin (1925 - 2014)
William Burford (1927 - 2004)
John Hollander (1929 - 2013)
Jonathan Williams (1929 - 2008)
X.J. Kennedy (1929 - )
Robert Hollander (1933 - )
Arnold Adoff (1935 - )
Ronald Johnson (1935- 1998)
Charles Suhor (1935 - )
Courtland Smith (1939 - )
Carlota Cardenas de Dwyer (1940 - )
D.A. Levy (1942 - 1968)
Aram Saroyan (1943 - )
Michael McFee (1954 - )
Tyehimba Jess (1965 - )
Dan Waber (1966 - )
Douglas Kearney (1974 - )
Rob Giampietro (1979 - )
Joni James (1979 - )
For more information on these artists, including more examples of their work,
head to Crystal Bridges Library, or conduct an online search.
Bob Brown (1886 - 1959)
Kenneth Patchen (1911 - 1972)
May Swenson (1913 - 1989)
Saul Steinberg (1914 - 1999)
Robert Lax (1915 - 2000)
Mary Ellen Solt (1920 - 2007)
Emmett Williams (1925 - 2007)
Maxine Kumin (1925 - 2014)
William Burford (1927 - 2004)
John Hollander (1929 - 2013)
Jonathan Williams (1929 - 2008)
X.J. Kennedy (1929 - )
Robert Hollander (1933 - )
Arnold Adoff (1935 - )
Ronald Johnson (1935- 1998)
Charles Suhor (1935 - )
Courtland Smith (1939 - )
Carlota Cardenas de Dwyer (1940 - )
D.A. Levy (1942 - 1968)
Aram Saroyan (1943 - )
Michael McFee (1954 - )
Tyehimba Jess (1965 - )
Dan Waber (1966 - )
Douglas Kearney (1974 - )
Rob Giampietro (1979 - )
Joni James (1979 - )
For more information on these artists, including more examples of their work,
head to Crystal Bridges Library, or conduct an online search.
REFERENCES
Introduction to Concrete Poetry adapted from:
→ https://www.britannica.com/art/concrete-poetry
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry
More introductory notes on Visual Poetry adapted from:
→ "Against National Poetry Month As Such" by Charles Bernstein
→"Getty Acquires Concrete Poetry by Two Modern Pioneers of the Form" by Claire Voon
→ Joseph T. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry. Wayne State University Press, 2007. Print.
→ "Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: The Poetics of Power in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric" by Joseph T. Thomas. The Free Library. 2001 Northern Illinois University. The observations of Lyn Hejinian are quoted in this essay.
→ Woldman, Eugene. Anthology of Concretism. Swallow Press, 1969. Print.
Artwork behind title: Emmett Williams's "alphabet square" (detail)
Introduction to Concrete Poetry adapted from:
→ https://www.britannica.com/art/concrete-poetry
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry
More introductory notes on Visual Poetry adapted from:
→ "Against National Poetry Month As Such" by Charles Bernstein
→"Getty Acquires Concrete Poetry by Two Modern Pioneers of the Form" by Claire Voon
→ Joseph T. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry. Wayne State University Press, 2007. Print.
→ "Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: The Poetics of Power in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric" by Joseph T. Thomas. The Free Library. 2001 Northern Illinois University. The observations of Lyn Hejinian are quoted in this essay.
→ Woldman, Eugene. Anthology of Concretism. Swallow Press, 1969. Print.
Artwork behind title: Emmett Williams's "alphabet square" (detail)
