Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry is the name given after the Second World War to poems made to be looked at as much as read: language reduced to a few words, or to letters, and set in space on the page so that the arrangement carries part of the meaning. Mary Ellen Solt, whose anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press, 1968) maps the movement country by country, put the common ground as “concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made”, and the aim as “making an object to be perceived rather than read”.

Two beginnings that met at Ulm

Solt dates the movement from two places that did not yet know of each other. In 1952 three poets in São Paulo, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, formed a group they called Noigandres, after a word in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In Switzerland, Eugen Gomringer published his first book of “constellations” in 1953 and his first manifesto, “from line to constellation”, in 1954, the year he became secretary to Max Bill at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm.

In 1955 Pignatari, a designer, visited Ulm and met Gomringer there. Solt writes that the meeting “can be taken as the beginning of the international movement of concrete poetry”. In December 1956 the Brazilian movement was launched officially at the National Exposition of Concrete Art at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, with poster poems hung beside the paintings, and in March 1958 the group published its “pilot plan for concrete poetry” in the fourth issue of Noigandres.

One word

By 1953 Gomringer could make a poem from a single word, and Solt reports that he found it “wonderful” that he could “say so much with a single word”. That is the wager this press makes too, in a cruder form: one phrase typed into a field is the whole brief. The essay Language as the Only Design Tool follows the idea through.

The difference is who arranges the page. In the classification Solt borrows from the critic Mike Weaver, a constructivist poem “results from an arrangement of materials according to a scheme or system set up by the poet which must be adhered to on its own terms”. The engine that set this cover is a system of that kind with the poet taken out: it does not arrange the letters at all; it turns the title into a number, and the number chooses the shapes. Here it chose a diagonal split in vermilion and federal blue, with a black ring. Nothing on the cover is made of words.

Sources

• Mary Ellen Solt (ed.), Concrete Poetry: A World View, Indiana University Press, 1968, on UbuWeb: the introduction (opens in new tab), and the chapters on Switzerland (opens in new tab) and Brazil (opens in new tab), from which every date and quotation above is taken.