Shakespeare covered the breadth of human emotions and even created his own phrases to capture them. Then T.S. Eliot came along and tackled them again, all the while showing off his erudition, pulling language from ancient texts both revered and forgotten.... [more]

Shakespeare covered the breadth of human emotions and even created his own phrases to capture them. Then T.S. Eliot came along and tackled them again, all the while showing off his erudition, pulling language from ancient texts both revered and forgotten. How was a twentieth-century poet do something unique and truly creative? The Concrete poets answered: you can make pictures with your poems. Concrete poetry is a visual poetry in which each poem defines its own form and is structurally unique (usually abstract), so that it does not allude to any previously existing poem. The style emerged across Europe as many independent artists conceived of it at roughly the same time. In 1955, Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, inspired by Concrete sculptor/painter Max Bill for whom he was a secretary, based his visual verse on early experiments in visual poetry carried out by the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Lewis Carroll, and Ezra Pound. However, an unaffiliated Swedish poet, 'yvind Fahlstr'm, conceived of the poetic form in 1953 and authored the 'Manifesto for Concrete Poetry.' Meanwhile, in Brazil, a similar aesthetic gathered momentum. A group of avant-garde poets published their three-dimensional verbal designs, and one of them, Haroldo de Campos, christened the work 'Poesia Concreta.' The 100th monkey theory seemed to unite these autonomous, far-flung poets. Apparently neither Gomringer nor the Brazilians had ever heard of Fahlstr'm's manifesto. For all these poets, space was definitely the place: the poem's spatial structure connoted more that the words themselves. Gomringer was fond of constructing poems consisting of only one word repeated over and over again, which he called constellations. For Concrete poets, the physical arrangement of words on the page brought meaning and life to the content, as a painter uses form and shape to recreate life. Their preoccupation with the visual aspect of words was matched only by their passion to create a meta-communication, melding typographic patterns, images, and the meanings of the words themselves. [show less]