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.