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 a genuinely 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

[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