I just came across an online paper that looks fascinating and covers a subject I’d not yet considered at any great length. It’s about concrete poetry, as you might guess from its title, “Concrete Poetry - A World View“. It was written by somebody named Mary Ellen Solt and was published in 1968 by Indiana University Press. I love wacky sixties writings on art and literature. Not that this is necessarily wacky. But I hope so!

What’s interesting about this subject matter is that it’s not dissimilar from some Flash poetry experiments, such as Poems that GO. In fact, I found a link to this paper on the Poems that GO website. Though interested in this subject, I’ll have to bookmark this paper to return to it later when I’m in a more literary mood and am able to slow down. For the time being, I scanned the introduction to the paper, looking for an entry into this somewhat opaque theoretical realm, and this sentence stood out:

But no matter where the concrete poet stands with respect to semantics, he invariably came to concrete poetry holding the conviction that the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time.

That was just enough to whet my appetite to read more later.

Other Posts Categorized as New Media Theory:

• Citizen Journalism No Longer Just an Interesting Idea - July 7th, 2007
• Henry Jenkins on Two Approaches to Participatory Culture: Prohibitionists and Collaborationists - July 25th, 2006
• What is New Media? - July 24th, 2006
• The People Formerly Known as the Audience - July 24th, 2006
• Transmodiology - July 11th, 2006
• Who Reads Hypermediated Tales? Children. - March 7th, 2006