[CALIBK12] Share: tidbits on Concrete poetry

[ladewig]

Here are two postings from the Children's Lit listserv on Concrete poetry.
Since I highlight this form of poetry in the library when we read "Love That
Dog" to the 3rd graders, I was intrigued to discover that "concrete" poetry
goes back quite a way. Here is some info I found interesting - perhaps you
may also:

 

"Mary Ellen Solt, an American poet known for helping disseminate the art of
concrete poetry, which marries words and typography to produce works in
which the verbal and the visual are inextricably intertwined, died on June

21 in Santa Clarita, Calif. She was 86 and had lived in Santa Clarita in
recent years.

The cause was a stroke, her family said.

 

With Willis Barnstone, Ms. Solt edited _Concrete Poetry: A World View_
(Indiana University, 1968), considered one of the major anthologies of the
form. At her death, she was emeritus professor of comparative literature at
Indiana University, Bloomington, where she had taught from 1970 to 1991.

 

Concrete poetry, which flourished in the United States in the 1960s, had its
roots in the work of experimental poets in Europe and Brazil a decade
earlier. (Its antecedents go back much farther: among the form's best-known
English examples is the mouse's tale from "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland," by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865. Declaimed by a mouse, the
poem is typeset in the form of a long undulating tail.)

 

A concrete poem exploits the potential of the written word as both a unit of
linguistic meaning and a purely visual symbol. Long before the computer made
it easy to manipulate text, concrete poets were using words much as a
painter uses paint, arranging them to create self-referential forms that
underscored a poem's structure or theme.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/arts/03solt.html?ref=obituaries

 

Michael Joseph

Rutgers University Libraries

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

169 College Avenue

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

 

 

Even (much) further back than Carroll, I think - at least to

George Herbert's "shaped" poems of the 17th century, such as the

much-anthologized "Easter Wings"

(http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Easterwings.html) or "The Altar"

(http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Altar.html). 

 

waller hastings

northern state university

aberdeen, sd 57401

hastingw at northern.edu

 

 

Joanne Ladewig  (A.K.A. "Library Lady")

Library Media Tech

Lawrence Elementary, GGUSD

Garden Grove, California

shatz at verizon.net

 

Comments are my own and may not represent the views of GGUSD

 

 

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