Concrete/Visual Poetry and Graphic Arts: Directory, Guide, Bibliography, Links, History, Index, How To, Exhibits, and Information; Edited by Michael P. Garofalo

Concrete Poems, Text Graphics, Calligrams, Graffiti, Lettrisme, Calligraphy, Info-graphics, Posters, Shape/Pattern Poems, Ads, TextArt

Interactive and Hypertext Poetry, Ambigrams, Comics, Typographic Arts, Signs, Visual Poetry, Web Text Effects, Digital Graphics

Directory, Guide, Index, Bibliography
Websites, Books, Journals, Pamphlets, Articles, Quotations, History, Exhibits, How To, Artists, Related, and TextArt

February 15, 2020

Anthology of Concretism. Edited by Eugene Wildman. 2nd. edition. Chicago : Swallow Press, Inc., 1969.

Hans Carl Artmann (Ib Hansen) (1921-2000) Austrian-born poet and writer.

John Cage (1912-1992) American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher.

Caligramas, Letras Universales, Spanish Edition. By Guillaume Apollinaire and J. Ignacio Velazquez. Catedra Ediciones, 2007, 283 pages.

Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. By Norman Bryson. Cambridge University Press, 1988, 224 pages.

Calligraphy: A Comprehensive Guide to Beautiful Writing. By Jane Sullivan. Peter Pauper Press, 2016, 120 pages.

Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages. By Thomas Forrest Kelly. W.W. Norton & Co., 2019, 208 pages.

The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy: The Ultimate Compendium of the Art of Fine Writing: History, Craft, and Technique.
Edited by Christopher Calderhead and Holly Cohen. Sterling, 2011, 320 pages.

Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design. By Randy Krum. Wiley, 2013, 368 pages.

Color Index XL: More that 1,100 New Palettes with CMYK and RGB Formulas for Designers and Artists. By Jim Krause.
Watson-Guptill, 2017, 304 pages. VSCL

Color Inspirations: More than 3,000 Innovative Palettes from the Colourlovers.Com Community. By Darius A. Monsef IV. Spiral Bound,
includes CD with Palettes using RGB, CMYK, Hex. HOW Books, 2011, 256 pages.

Interaction of Color. By Josef Albers. Yale University Press, 1963, 2013, 208 pages.

On Color. By David Kastan and Stephen Farthing. Yale University Press, 2018, 272 pages. FVRL

Practical Color Combinations: A Resource Book with Over 2,500 Color Schemes. By Naomi Kuno. Gives CMYK and RGB values. Nippan, 2018, 304 pages.

Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture; (The Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green Blue and Violet).
By Joann Eckstut and Anelle Eckstut. Black Dog and Leventhal, 2013, 240 pages.

Concrete scribblings, concrete jottings, concrete messages, not concrete poetry - Paul Hurt, Designing with Words

Electronic Poetry Center   An outstanding website!   Superb galleries featuring selections from the best concrete-visual poetry artists.
     Excellent information!   A well organized and deep website. Originally organized and published on the web by the Department of Media Study,
     Poetics Program at the State University of New York, Buffalo, New York.   This website is now at the University of Pennsylvania.
     Links Readers should visit this excellent website.

Timothy C. Ely (1949-) American painter, graphic artist, and bookbinder, known for creating single-copy handmade books as art objects.

Imagism A movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.

Isidore Isou (1925-2007) Romanian-born French poet, dramaturge, novelist, film director, and visual artist.

The Order of Things: An Anthology of Scottish Visual, Pattern and Concrete Poetry.  Edited by Ken Cockburn. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001.
     "Concrete Poetry has been called the last great episode in Modernism. It was a worldwide movement, born in Switzerland and Brazil
     in the 1950s, which continued the dynamic experiments of Futurism, Dada and Constructivism in poetry."

Outside the Lines: Poetry at Play. By Brad Burg. Illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon. Putnam Pub Group Juv, 2002. 32 pages. Concrete
poetry for children, grades 4-8. 22 poems in a delightful "rolling, swinging, skipping, bouncing book of poetry at play." Visit the
author's website: Brad Burg - Poems and Songs.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885-1972) An American poet, critic, publisher and a major figure in the early Modernist poetry movement.

"Concrete Poetry is a certain poetry practice formulated in the 50's from Brazil and from Switzerland, with the following basic characteristics: .... b) "verbivocovisual" texts, which means the organization of a poem according to graphic criteria in order to bring out the material aspect of the word, its plasticity and sound - poetry to be seen and to be heard (for eye and ear); c) partial or total elimination of ties with speech, for a direct connection between words and phrases; d) integration between verbal and non-verbal, word and image. Such practices concentrate and expand previous proposals that were part of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century (futurism, dada, simultaneous, etc.) reclaimed in the 50's with a constructivist rigor."
- Regina Vater, Imediata

"Visual forms- lines, colours, proportions, etc., are just as capable of articulation, i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so that relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision."
- Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 1942

"We've already claimed that pattern in a poem is "The artistic arrangement and use of the material (aural and visual) aspects of words into particular repetitive and/or serial forms as a means to structure a poem." The combination of sound and visual elements provides a poem's structure, the resultant sum of all sound and visual form in a poem. The craft of poetry has traditionally concerned itself only with the sounds of the words, but as a written thing, we cannot deny that there is also a certain "paginess" to a poem, and that the patterns developed in that visual field can't be overlooked if we are to concern ourselves with the full potential of the poem's structure.

"Experimental poetry is not easily categorized, but some forms do conform to the aims of Postmodernism, as will be seen most readily in concrete poetry. By being no more than simple letters on the page, the previous cultural standards are decanonized (iconoclasm), the images have no reference beyond themselves (groundlessness), and there is little attempt at harmonious arrangement (formlessness). Even the words are simple and everyday (populism). Concrete poetry is one in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. Yes, but what's the point: what do the arrangements convey? Only what the words do in the little jokes they play on our conceptions or expectations, the way they open up connections or new possibilities in the most ordinary things. There is no further significance: it's a form of minimalism."
- C. John Holcombe, Experimental Poetry, 2019

"The visual and semantic elements constituting the form as well as the content of a poem define its structure so that the poem can be a "reality in itself and not a poem about something or other." Their principles are that concrete language structures do not follow tradional verse forms and are largely visual. As such, the content is strongly related to the question of attitudes towards life in which art is effectively incorporated and hence concrete or visual language is parly reflected and partly unreflected information which often uses sign schemes. Importantly, visual language is reduced language; this is achieved primarily through an acute awareness of graphic space as a structural agent within the composition of the piece. Finally, visual poetry aims at the least common multiple of language. It is simple mind presentation and uses a word arrangement and linguistic means (such as sounds, syllables, words) which are independent of and not representative of objects extrinsic to language."
- Paul Kloppenborg, Concrete to Computer

"A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the development of the internet, they began to appear online as webcomics. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes. Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist/cartoonist. As the name implies, comic strips can be humorous (for example, "gag-a-day" strips such as Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine). Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Terry and the Pirates. Soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s. All are called, generically, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that "sequential art" would be a better genre-neutral name. In the UK and the rest of Europe, comic strips are also serialized in comic book magazines, with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages or more. Comic strips have appeared in American magazines such as Liberty and Boys' Life and also on the front covers of magazines, such as the Flossy Frills series on The American Weekly Sunday newspaper supplement."
- Comic Strip, Wikipedia, 2019

"The essence of a poem is inferred through a simple language pattern without necessarily having to 'read" it."
- John Sharkey, 1971

"A mesostic is a poem or other text arranged so that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. It is similar to an acrostic, but with the vertical phrase intersecting somewhere in the midst of the line, as opposed to the beginning of each line. The practice of using index words to select pieces from a preexisting text was developed by Jackson Mac Low as "diastics". It was used extensively by the experimental composer John Cage (Walsh 2001)."
- Mesostic, Wikipedia

"Like acrostics, mesotics are written in the conventional way horizontally, but at the same time they follow a vertical rule, down the middle not down the edge as in an acrostic, a string spells a word or name, not necessarily connected with what is being written, though it may be. This vertical rule is lettristic and in my practice the letters are capitalized. Between two capitals in a perfect or 100% mesostic neither letter may appear in lower case. .... In the writing of the wing words, the horizontal text, the letters of the vertical string help me out of sentimentality. I have something to do, a puzzle to solve. This way of responding makes me feel in this respect one with the Japanese people, who formerly, I once learned, turned their letter writing into the writing of poems. In taking the next step in my work, the exploration of nonintention, I don't solve the puzzle that the mesostic string presents. Instead I write or find a source text which is then used as an oracle. I ask it what word shall I use for this letter and what one for the next, etc. This frees me from memory, taste, likes, and dislikes, By means of Mesolist, a program by Jim Rosenberg, all words that satisfy the mesostic rule are listed. IC [a program that generates the I Ching numbers, available for downloading on the Net] then chooses which words in the lists are to be used and gives me all the central words, the position of each in the source material identified by page, line, and column. I then add all the wing words from the source text following of course the rule Mesolist does within the limit of forty-five characters to the right and the same to the left. Then I take out the words I don't want. With respect to the source material, I am in a global situation. Words come first from here and then from there. The situation is not linear. It is as though I am in a forest hunting for ideas."
- John Cage

"Once time and space, action and thought, became captured in writing, literature inevitably became involved with material substances: ink, pen, papyrus, stone, paper, etc. Literature remains a communication of the logical and expressive power of language, but to varying degrees it is also a vehicle for the communication of uniquely visual qualities.

Printed literature is becoming electronic literature: nonphysical, alpha-numeric symbols mixed with other images that are displayed as light and can be stored, distributed, and enjoyed anywhere at any time.

To even the casual observer it would be clear that no satisfactory definition could embrace all the forms of visual poetry, variously identified as technopaegnia, pattern-poems, concretism, spatialism, and so forth. Yet what hold true for all of visual poetry is that to achieve its full effect, language must be visually perceived.

In the case of visual poems which are primarily visual and only lesserly textual─ the verbally poetic visual piece─ a similar metamorphosis occurs: the verbal aspect becomes transcendent to its visual embodiment, and a kinetic thrust becomes possible in a way that very few visual art works can have."
- Richard Kostelanetz, Visual Literature Criticism, 1979, Introduction

"The 'Pattern Poems' are ancient Greek poems composed in the "bucolic" tradition with verses designed to form a specific shape--such as a pipe, an egg, wings, altar, etc.--and with complimentary theme. The few surviving examples of the genre date mainly from the Hellenistic era (C3rd to 2nd B.C.) and are preserved in a section of the Greek Anthology texts."
- Greek Texts

"A calligram is text arranged in such a way that it forms a thematically related image. It can be a poem, a phrase, a portion of scripture, or a single word; the visual arrangement can rely on certain use of the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting, for instance along non-parallel and curved text lines, or in shaped paragraphs. The image created by the words illustrates the text by expressing visually what it says, or something closely associated; it can also, on purpose, show something contradictory with the text or otherwise misleading. Guillaume Apollinaire was a famous calligram writer and author of a book of poems called Calligrammes."
- Wikipedia

"The term was coined in the 1950s. In 1956 an international exhibition of concrete poetry was shown in S�o Paulo, Brazil, by the group Noigandres (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, D�cio Pignatari and Ronaldo Azeredo) with poets Ferreira Gullar and Wlademir Dias Pino. 2 years later, a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published. An early Brazilian pioneers in the field, Augusto de Campos, has assembled a Web site of old and new work, including the manifesto. Its principal tenet is that using words as part of a specifically visual work allows for the words themselves to become part of the poetry, rather than just unseen vehicles for ideas. The original manifesto says: Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history � taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea."
- Penny's Poetry Page, 2019

"The core idea of this form of poetry can be summarized in this way: the visual form of the poem is an integral and essential part of its interpretation. The form of the poem is the poem. Its content is revealed through its form."
- Thomas Muller

"A cartoon is a type of illustration, possibly animated, typically in a non-realistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved over time, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of images intended for satire, caricature, or humor; or a motion picture that relies on a sequence of illustrations for its animation. Someone who creates cartoons in the first sense is called a cartoonist, and in the second sense they are usually called an animator.

The concept originated in the Middle Ages, and first described a preparatory drawing for a piece of art, such as a painting, fresco, tapestry, or stained glass window. In the 19th century, beginning in Punch magazine in 1843, cartoon came to refer � ironically at first � to humorous illustrations in magazines and newspapers. In the early 20th century, it began to refer to animated films which resembled print cartoons.

A cartoon (from Italian: cartone and Dutch: karton�words describing strong, heavy paper or pasteboard) is a full-size drawing made on sturdy paper as a study or modello for a painting, stained glass, or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes, to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted on damp plaster over a series of days (giornate)."
- Cartoon, Wikipedia, 2019

"Reading has become an active, participant-directed process rather than passive, author-directed ... the rational-visual act of reading has become an experience of sight, sounds, and colours."
- Paul Kloppenborg

"While many readers now associate the term "concrete poetry" with poems whose outlines depict a recognizable shape�John Hollander's collection Types of Shape, for example�the ideas behind concrete poetry are much broader. In essence, works of concrete poetry are as much pieces of visual art made with words as they are poems. Were one to hear a piece of concrete poetry read aloud, a substantial amount of its effect would be lost.

European artists Max Bill and �yving Fahlstr�m originated the term in the early 1950s, and its early methods were described in the Brazilian group Noigandres' manifesto "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry." During this period, concrete poems were intended to be abstract and without allusion to an existing poem or identifiable shape. An interest in ideograms�and the notion that words themselves could be ideograms�accompanied the typographical innovations developed by these artists and by such visual writers as E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound.

"The letters of the alphabet have been the object of speculation since their invention almost 4000 years ago. The symbols represent sounds, yet they exist in their own right, often invested with quasi-magical power. This book examines the many imaginative, often idiosyncratic ways in which the letters of the alphabet have been assigned value in political, spiritual, or religious belief systems over two millennia. The birth of writing was linked to religion and cosmology and was endowed with semi-divine status. Plato saw letter-forms as reflecting ideas, while the Pythagoreans assimilated them to number-theory. The Greeks employed letters for occult and divinatory purposes, while the Romans used them in more practical ways, such as the invention of shorthand. The Middle Ages saw the rise of further theories about letters in Christian philosophy, alchemy and Kabbalah. Theories of their divine origin and mystical significance continued into the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming involved with nationalism and revolutionary political theory. In our own day letters of the alphabet are the subject of scholarly research, and inspiration to graphic artists and a fertile field for mystical speculation. This book explores this realm, and should be of interest to cultural
historians, art historians, and anyone interested in the history of typography."
- Joanna Drucker, Alphabetic Labyrinth, 1995

"That process involves �visualization� for �graphic documentation.� These purely graphic poems avoid both the structure of linguistics (no words) and the aura of author (non-expressive of emotion). Dias-Pino concludes that the �process poem is anti-literature in the sense that true mechanics seeks motion without friction or electricity seeks a perfect isolator.� If that explanation strikes some as stiff and not perfectly clear, then the poems of invented symbols and montages of symbols and images will also 18 Networking Artists & Poets. �Process poetry builds on the advances of Concrete Poetry and moves that tendency toward visual conceptual games, scores, and activities.� Although these poems are not yet scores, they do suggest a secret code system waiting for a reader to interpret or play. The �process� can refer to the process of interpretation; the reader as writer-performer has to try out these strange code systems.

"Discard words for a moment and contemplate facts more directly than images ... the highest philosophical capacity requires a cobination of vision with abstract words."
- Bertran Russell, The Analysis of Mind

"Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols. Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time. Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work."
- Asemic Writing, Wikipedia, 2019

A new exhibition at the Lighthouse Gallery as part of Outside-in / Inside-out Festival, supported by AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellow, Design & the Concrete Poem, explores the centrality of design and typography to the movement. Curator Bronac Ferran has compiled a remarkable survey of the different directions and trajectories on which concrete poets embarked. Brazilian poet and member of the Noigandres group, D�cio Pignatari, declared that �the poet is a language designer�, and Ferran focuses on concrete poets who take that definition of poetry to heart, emphasising the connections between the physical act of writing and typography."
- Colin Herd, Design and the Concrete Poem.

"If you were creating text art in the 1950's, you could be using a typewriter, or letters drawn or painted on paper or canvas, letters cut out of paper for collage, or working in a printer's workshop (stencil, lithography, printing). By the 1990's, we have improving graphic arts software, home computers, decent printers, and people making ASCII art works on computers and sharing on the Internet. (I was online at home on a UNIX system in Pasadena in 1992.) In 2020 we now have inexpensive high end graphic arts programs and sophisticated cameras on cell phones, and Instagram and Facebook and blogs and messaging and emailing on the Internet. The desire to create art is the same as in 1850 or 1950. We now have more tools at our disposal in our home workshops, if you can afford to spend money on this sort of hobby."
- Mike Garofalo, Random Notes on Text Art, Concrete Poetry, Graphic Arts, Etc.

"In 2006 we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of two interconnected events. The first was the trans-Atlantic baptism of a new kind of poetry produced in Brazil by the �Noigandres� group of poets and in Europe, as the Brazilians had recently found out, by Eugen Gomringer and others, and which Gomringer in 1956 agreed to label �poesia concreta / konkrete poesie / concrete poetry,� a label that Augusto de Campos had first proposed for their own production a year before. The second event was the opening of the �I Exposi��o Nacional de Arte Concreta� in the Museu de Arte Moderna of S�o Paulo, where it was shown from the Fourth to the Eighteenth of December 1956 without attracting unusual attention. When it was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in February 1957, it caused excitement and derision and unleashed a critical debate in the newspapers that was to last for months. (We were also, incidentally, celebrating 75 years of the life of Augusto de Campos.)

The first event established the international presence of the Brazilians in a movement that was found rather than founded as its members gradually discovered each other, and that culminated (and ended) in the publication of several international anthologies in the late sixties and in a number of exhibitions, including a month-long �expose: concrete poetry� at Indiana University in 1970.(1) The second event had no international repercussions but turned out to be of considerable significance for the Brazilian cultural scene of the day. It established the label �Concrete Art,� and with it �Concrete Poetry,� in the public mind. It was apparently the first exhibition in Brazil where paintings, sculptures, and poster poems were exhibited side by side. It thus gave visitors an opportunity to explore the features that prompted visual artists as well as poets to use the same label for their work � a challenge that has gone largely unheeded, even though many of these works were reunited in memorial exhibitions in 1977,(2) in 1996, (3) in 2002, (4) and in 2006. It was the first � and for a number of years the only � time when artists belonging to two groups, one from S�o Paulo, the other from Rio, all of them engaged in developing a constructivist, abstract-geometric art which they now decided to call �Concrete� (as opposed to �Abstract�[5]), exhibited their work together, ten artists from each camp.(6) The three Noigandres poets from S�o Paulo, D�cio Pignatari and Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, were joined by three �Cariocas�, Wlademir Dias Pino, Ferreira Gullar, and Ronaldo Azeredo. Not long after, the artists and poets from Rio decided to break with the Paulistas for ideological reasons and declared themselves to be �Neoconcretos�, except for Ronaldo Azeredo who had already joined the Noigandres group (and was followed a little later by another Carioca, Jos� Lino Gr�newald). The exhibition was, finally, also the place to reaffirm the claims by all involved to represent the avant-garde in poetry and the visual arts, a claim already announced by the titles which the groups of artists had chosen for themselves at their foundation in 1952: �Ruptura� and �Frente�."
- Claus Cluver, The Noigandres Poets and Concrete Art

"Comics is a medium used to express ideas through images, often combined with text or other visual information. Frequently, comics takes the form of sequences of panels of images. Often textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. The size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing. Cartooning and similar forms of illustration are the most common image-making means in comics; fumetti is a form which uses photographic images. Common forms include comic strips, editorial and gag cartoons, and comic books. Since the late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels, comic albums, and tankōbon have become increasingly common, while online webcomics have proliferated in the 21st century with the advent of the internet.

The history of comics has followed different paths in different cultures. Scholars have posited a pre-history as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings in France. By the mid-20th century, comics flourished, particularly in the United States, western Europe (especially France and Belgium), and Japan. The history of European comics is often traced to Rodolphe T�pffer's cartoon strips of the 1830s, but the medium truly became popular in the 1930s following the success of strips and books such as The Adventures of Tintin. American comics emerged as a mass medium in the early 20th century with the advent of newspaper comic strips; magazine-style comic books followed in the 1930s, in which the superhero genre became prominent after Superman appeared in 1938. Histories of Japanese comics and cartooning (manga) propose origins as early as the 12th century. Modern comic strips emerged in Japan in the early 20th century, and the output of comics magazines and books rapidly expanded in the post-World War II era (1945�) with the popularity of cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, et al.). Comics has had a lowbrow reputation for much of its history, but towards the end of the 20th century began to find greater acceptance with the public and academics.

The term comics is used as a singular noun when it refers to the medium, but becomes plural when referring to particular instances, such as individual strips or comic books. Though the term derives from the humorous (comic) work that predominated in early American newspaper comic strips, it has become standard for non-humorous works too. In English, it is common to refer to the comics of different cultures by the terms used in their original languages, such as manga for Japanese comics, or bandes dessin�es for French-language comics.

There is no consensus amongst theorists and historians on a definition of comics; some emphasize the combination of images and text, some sequentiality or other image relations, and others historical aspects, such as mass reproduction or the use of recurring characters. The increasing cross-pollination of concepts from different comics cultures and eras has only made definition more difficult."
- Comics, Wikipedia, 2019

"Musique concr�te, (French: �concrete music�), experimental technique of musical composition using recorded sounds as raw material. The technique was developed about 1948 by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer and his associates at the Studio d�Essai (�Experimental Studio�) of the French radio system. The fundamental principle of musique concr�te lies in the assemblage of various natural sounds recorded on tape (or, originally, on disks) to produce a montage of sound. During the preparation of such a composition, the sounds selected and recorded may be modified in any way desired�played backward, cut short or extended, subjected to echo-chamber effects, varied in pitch and intensity, and so on. The finished composition thus represents the combination of varied auditory experiences into an artistic unity."
- Encyclopedia Britannica

"Although the language element of concrete poetry hasn't been evaluated at all adequately, it has probably been evaluated to a greater extent than the design element. There are comments on the general inadequacy of the language of 'concrete poetry,' for example Roberto Simanowski's comment that 'experimental poetry - which concrete poetry is part of - has been accused of being an autistic language...' In his lecture, Concrete Poetry in Digital Media he quotes one of the 'selves' which have very different attitudes to the digital media: 'There are many spectacular effects people program in digital media. If they only would find some meaning to hook on to it! But they can't think of any because they are programmers not poets. They have an idea of how to make an action happen on the screen but no idea of what this action could mean. They flex their technical muscles ... But they have nothing significant to say.' This is a general difficulty, with a vast range of examples, not confined to the {separation} between the technical and the emotional. To give just one example, the {separation} between the skills of growing and cooking. People who have the skills to grow crops of superb quality may not have the skills to cook them in anything but an unimaginative way - or the time and energy needed to grow these crops may not leave enough time and energy to cook them well.

The 'poetry' of 'concrete poetry' isn't usually poetry at all. A more truthful description of the writing would sometimes be 'concrete jottings' or 'concrete scribblings.'

Even so, the design of concrete jottings or scribblings may well be very successful, an artistic achievement. As for myself, more often than not, I'm very impressed by the design element of 'concrete poetry.' It's rare that I find a design which I think is abysmal.

A very good case could be made for considering the design element of 'concrete poetry' as more important than the language element, for the inequality of the elements, although I think that the majority of creators (or 'practitioners') wouldn't agree. Because I place the emphasized element second, my own view is that 'concrete poetry' is generally a words-design form, not a design-words form."
- Paul Hurt, Designing with Words

"Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, and adjusting the space between pairs of letters."
- Wikipedia

The next step is for poets to make these perceptions of the city into poetry, and that occurs in the Concrete Poetry movement of the era after World War II. The Paris concrete poet Julien Blaine demonstrates this with texts like his "Julien Blaine the i-constructor," where he puts a dot on a photograph of the column in Place Vend�me in order to make the letter i out of it. The Concrete poets make ready use of photographs to discover letters and alphabets in unconventional places -- body parts, for example, mirroring the suggestions made by some illuminated alphabets from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and later. Alexander Nesbitt's volume of Decorative Alphabets and Initials is full of illustrations that show medieval illuminated initials where a group of monks could inhabit an 0, and handsome Renaissance initials on which cherubic infants swing and play like modern children on a jungle jim."
- David Seaman, The Poetic Structure of the Avant-Garde

"The word exists and has the right to perpetuate itself.
ISOU IS CALLING ATTENTION TO ITS EXISTENCE.
It is up to the Letterist to develop Letterism.
Letterism is offering a DIFFERENT poetry.
LETTERISM imposes a NEW POETRY.
THE LETTERIC AVALANCHE IS ANNOUNCED."
- Manifesto of Letterist Poetry, Isidore Isou, 1942

"Therefore, and in a certain measure, philosophers are painters; poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets. He who is not a poet and a painter is no philosopher. We say rightly that to understand is to see imaginary forms and figures; and understanding is fancy, at least it is not deprived of fancy. He is no painter who is not is some degree a poet and thinker, and there can be no poet without a certain measure of thought and representation."
- Giordano Bruno, De Imaginum, Signorum et Idearum Compositione, 1591

"Haiku is by its very nature imagistic to begin with; Couple that with an aesthetic of conciseness, brevity and suggestion, haiku have a particular appeal when they take form as concrete poetry. The possibilities are numerous. At this point concrete haiku has been around long enough that it's time to pause in the fun and take stock. As Robert Spiess once said in an interview with Michael Dylan Welch (Modern Haiku 2002), many are not genuine haiku. On the other hand, some are. Richard Gilbert's "Disjunctive Dragonfly" (World Haiku Review December 2003) includes "concrete disjunction", analyzing how orthography, punctuation and placement intensify meaning in examples by Jane Reichhold, Gary Hotham and David Steele. I like how the editors of Under the Basho put it: that the poem should to embrace deeper meaning (in other words, be a haiku) while the visual realization structures the reader's experience through space and the placement of words."
- A Further Note on Concrete Haiku

"In its simplest definition concrete poetry is the creation of verbal artefacts which exploit the possibilities, not only of sound, sense and rhythm�the traditional fields of poetry�but also of space, whether it be the flat, two-dimensional space of letters on the printed page, or the three-dimensional space of words in relief and sculptured ideograms. Taking advantage of the extra impact which can be given to words by visual lay-out is, of course, a common device in journalism and advertising. This is one of the skills of the graphic designer and the newspaper compositor, the literary equivalent of which is to be found in such devices of visual presentation as are used by George Herbert in "Easter- wings," by Lewis Carroll in the mouse's tail poem from Alice in Wonderland, and by Apollinaire in his Calligrammes. All of these have been widely cited as precursors, along with Mallarm�, the Futurists, Joyce, cummings, and others, of the more recent concrete poetry movement."
- R. P. Draper, Concrete Poetry, 1971

"In a shape poem, a poet uses the lines of his text to form the silhouette of an identifiable visual image�generally, an image that represents or comments upon the subject of the poem.

'I would think of the representation of some object in silhouette�a silhouette which wouldn�t have any holes in it�and then draw the outlines, fill in the outlines with typewriter type � and then contemplate the resulting image for anywhere from an hour to several months. The number of characters per line of typing would then give me a metrical form for the lines of verse, not syllabic but graphematic (as a linguist might put it). These numbers, plus the number of indents from flush left, determined the form of each line of the poem.'"
- Michael J. Vaughn, Concrete Poetry, 2008

"The most highly relational feelings are the visual, and these are of all the feelings the most easily reproduced in thought."
- Hebert Spencer, Psychology

"Some of the difficulty in staking a permanent place for concrete poetry in the cultural lexicon may have come from defining what it is. �Concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as its structural agent, as the cosmos in which it moves,� wrote one of its finest and most tireless British exponents, Dom Sylvester Hou�dard, in 1963. �A printed concrete poem is ambiguously both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography � not just a poem in this layout, but a poem that is its own type arrangement.� But a concrete poem does not have to be linguistic, or even typographic at all; it can be made out of anything from a collection of right-angles to a pyramid of eyes, mouths and car headlights clipped from magazines. Lying somewhere �Between Poetry and Painting� � as an influential 1965 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art was titled � it can, like painting, be either figurative or abstract. Put simply, it could be defined as a tendency for a �text� of any kind to illustrate itself within that text. Put even more simply, as Hou�dard expressed it in the same article: �concrete poems just ARE�.

Concrete poetry was initially disseminated by practitioners such as Hou�dard and Ian Hamilton Finlay by mail, and the volume of international correspondence of such figures is prodigious. The next stage was the publication of small-circulation magazines, totalling as many as 50, which were distributed internationally either on a commercial basis through specialist avant-garde art bookshops or on an exchanges basis among practitioners. Some of these magazines, for instance Cavan Macarthy�s Tlaloc, were originated by typewriter and produced by a duplicator (known as mimeographs in the US). The typewriter always played an important role in concrete poetry, some of its practitioners (such as Hou�dard) being highly skilled and innovative. Two anthologies of typewriter works were published, edited by Alan Riddell and Peer Finch, and an American concrete poetry magazine Typewriter was devoted solely to this form. At the other extreme was Rhinozeros, edited by the Dienst brothers in West Berlin and devoted to concrete poetry in calligraphy or handlettering.

Concrete poetry was distributed via small press magazines and exhibitions because the established literary presses of most demoncratic countries rarely paid it any attention except occasionally to vilefy it. This explains the lack of entries under the heading �concrete poetry� in most reference books and why there is practically nothing on the subject to be found in bookshops, although over 20 anthologies of concrete poetry have been published in different countries. In Britain these were a long-running, intermittent and acrimonious dialogue between the proponents of concrete poetry and the traditionalists of the Poetry Society, which from time to time erupted into the national press. Concrete poetry�s development as an international phenomenon was better aided by the innumerable exhibitions including �Poesie Concreta� at the 1969 Venice Biennale, the �Exposicion de Poesia novissima� which opened in Buenos Aires in 1969 and subsequently toured South America, and �Concrete Poetry� at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1970, which toured Europe. Art magazines have shown more interest in concrete poetry than literary ones, and Scottish artist and concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay has continued to exhibit in establishment art galleries and has received accolades in mainstream colour supplements. But Finlay is the exception."
- Concrete Poems Just Are, Peter Mayer

"Concrete Poetry, a movement developed in the 1950s that reached its peak in the 1960s, emphasized the visual aspects of words and examined the relationship between visual form and literary content. Art critic William Feaver described it as a "blend of words used for their literal meanings and words used for their face value or visual appearance." It traces its origins to the traditions of visual poetry, found in the experimental works of Stephane Mallarm�, Lewis Carroll, and Ezra Pound. Adopted by members of the literary avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, Concrete Poetry became the first truly international poetry movement."
- Concrete Poetry, Online Archive of California

"The publishing industry has remained virtually unchanged since 1455 when Guttenberg first printed the Bible. Not only the publishing industry, but also the act of reading, unchanged for several centuries, is now being altered. In the case of computer CD-ROMs, reading has become an active, participant-directed process rather than passive, author-directed: turning pages in a book has been transformed into hypertext links. The rational-visual act of reading has become an experience of sight, sounds, and colours. As would seem obvious, writing techniques are also being profoundly altered. The poet of the future will have to be a more complete and unspecialized artist who will need to blend his writing skills with oral and artistic abilities and even more so with technological-computer knowledge. This, together with computer software that allows active participatory reading and even the introduction of modifications made by the reader in the work of art, will perhaps help to rehumanize literature and achieve the Surrealist, Cubists and Dada poets and writers's unfulfilled dream of merging art and life."
- Paul Kloppenborg, Concrete to Computer

"Haroldo de Campos and Agusto de Campos are best known as the prime movers in the creation of Brazilian concrete poetry in the 1950s. Together with the poets D�cio Pignatari and Ferreira Gullar, the Campos brothers launched the first exposition of concrete poetry in 1956 and published the avant-garde art and poetry magazines Noigandres and Inven��o. Concrete poetry attempts to move away from a purely verbal concept of verse toward what its proponents call �verbivocovisual expression,� incorporating geometric and graphic elements into the poetic act or process. Their experiments have included the use of ideograms as a substitute for verbal forms, the concept of a poem as a �layout� of black on white (or vice versa), and the attempt to create poems as objects to be seen and handled as well as heard or read."
- Concrete Poetry in Brazil

"To start with: The page, like the windowed computer screen, can encourage a looking through or a looking at approach � Looking through: as a transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style), or a looking at (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled material reality)."
- Bruce Andrews

"The origins of concrete poetry are roughly contemporary with those of musique concr�te, an experimental technique of musical composition. Max Bill and Eugen Gomringer were among the early practitioners of concrete poetry. The Vienna Group of Hans Carl Artmann, Gerhard R�hm, and Konrad Bayer also promoted concrete poetry, as did Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayr�cker. The movement drew inspiration from Dada, Surrealism, and other nonrational 20th-century movements. Concrete poetry has an extreme visual bias and in this way is usually distinguished from pattern poetry. It attempts to move away from a purely verbal concept of verse toward what its proponents call �verbivocovisual expression,� incorporating geometric and graphic elements into the poetic act or process. It often cannot be read aloud to any effect, and its essence lies in its appearance on the page, not in the words or typographic units that form it. At the turn of the 20th century, concrete poetry continued to be produced in many countries. Notable contemporary concrete poets include the brothers Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos. Many contemporary examples of animated concrete poetry can be found on the Internet."
- Concrete Poetry, Britannica Encyclopedia, 2019

Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry    The outstanding Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry is housed at the
     University of Iowa Librariers Special Collections. This is a very large collection of over 75,00 items that is well indexed and offers full bibliographic/descriptive
     citations.  A variety of search techniques can be used to access the collection. Thumbnails and larger images of works in the collection are
     provided to the reader/viewer. News from University of Iowa     Beyond Words     Website

"Founded by Ruth and Marvin Sackner [Photo] in 1979 in Miami Beach, Florida, the Sackner Archive is the largest collection of concrete and visual poetry in the world. The archive includes over 75,000 annotated books, periodicals, typewritings, drawings, letters, print portfolios, ephemera, and rare and out of print artist�s books and manuscripts representing twentieth century art movements such as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme, and Ultra-Lettrisme.

Ruth Sackner passed away in October 2015, and the family reached the decision that the archive needs to be placed in a world-class educational institution. Due to structural damage their building sustained during Hurricane Irma, the entire collection was moved in October 2017 to temporary housing in Long Island City.

We are pleased to announce that the Sackner Archive has moved to the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections! The Sackner family chose the University of Iowa Libraries as the new home for the archive due to the Libraries� reputation as a center for the study of Dadaism, with its substantial holdings in the International Dada Archive. In addition, the Libraries� world-class conservation program, the UI�s nationally recognized Center for the Book and the Writers� Workshop, collections in the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, and location in Iowa City (a UNESCO City of Literature) were also factors influencing their decision. The Sackners� first encounter with Iowa was to loan work for the 1983 exhibition Lettrisme: Into the Present and those Lettriste works have finally returned to Iowa!"

Karl Young Home Page Visual poetry, mail art, book art, bibliography, criticism and essays.