Discover Concrete Poetry: The Art Form Where Words Become Pictures

[BrightRunner]

Concrete poetry is the form that most directly addresses the tension between language as meaning and language as object. A concrete poem asks to be seen as well as read, using the spatial arrangement of words, letters or characters on the page to create a visual experience that is inseparable from the semantic content. The form reached its peak of critical attention in the 1950s and 1960s when the Noigandres group in Brazil, Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland developed it as an international movement, but its roots reach back to Apollinaire's Calligrammes in 1918 and further still to George Herbert's 17th century shaped poems.

For a visual artist or designer exploring the territory between image and text, concrete poetry is the form that has been working that boundary for over a century and has produced a body of work that rewards study. Gomringer's Silencio, a poem that consists of the word silencio repeated in a grid with a blank space in the centre where the word is absent, is the most economical poetic statement of the last hundred years. Ian Hamilton Finlay's stone installations at his garden Little Sparta in Scotland are the form at its most durably physical. The Brazilian movement's systematic investigations into phonetics, syntax and visual design produced work that remains among the most sophisticated experiments in what language can be asked to do.

Digital tools have given contemporary poets working in this tradition access to typography, animation and interactivity that print could not provide. Interactive concrete poems where the reader's action changes the text, animated poems where the arrangement of words is part of their meaning's unfolding, and generative poems that produce new configurations on each viewing are all legitimate extensions of the concrete tradition into new media.

An Anthology Of Concrete Poetrywww.poetryfoundation.org

[Sinead_47]

Gomringer's Silencio being the most economical poetic statement of the last century is the claim I keep coming back to when I think about what poems are actually trying to do. A word repeated until its absence becomes the subject. That is an entire aesthetic philosophy in one page

[EthanHinds]

The Noigandres group being Brazilian is the detail that most people in the anglophone literary world do not know and should. Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari were doing visual work with language in the 1950s that European and American movements later arrived at independently

[Freya]

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta is on my list of places I want to visit before I die. The idea of a garden where the landscape and the inscriptions on it create a complete philosophical environment is an original artistic vision

[Steady Dylan]

The Herbert 17th century shaped poems being in the lineage is the reminder that none of these ideas are as new as they are sometimes presented. Easter Wings as a poem shaped like wings is concrete poetry. The digital tools are new; the impulse to make language visible is ancient

[NightCrawler81]

Animated concrete poetry using CSS or JavaScript to make the arrangement of words part of their meaning's unfolding is where I find the contemporary work most interesting. When the movement itself is the argument the medium and message are perfectly unified

[Phoebe85]

The tension between concrete poetry being visual art and being poetry is the critical debate the form has never fully resolved and probably never will. When something is in both traditions simultaneously it does not fit the disciplinary expectations of either and gets marginalised by both

[ScarletDaemon]

For anyone who designs with type professionally the concrete poetry tradition is essential background knowledge. The decisions those poets made about spacing, alignment, repetition and absence are the same decisions typographers make and the vocabulary transfers directly