Concrete Poetry

I began experimenting with using phrases gathered through word and image association tests, applying their nonsensical logic to concrete poetry. I was unaware of concrete poetry until last week, so I've been studying Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 by Balgiu and de la Torre, which has been informative, so I'll share what I've learned this past week.

Concrete poetry is challenging to define due to its experimental nature. However, it serves as a tool to "liberate letters from words, and words from the conventions that dictate how they should function in ordinary language and traditional literary texts" (12 Balgiu & de la Torre).

Historically, concrete poetry as a medium has spoken to women as a way to free their words and themselves from social constructs, "Women aren't the only ones engaging in this work, yet they provide double the motivation for entering the discourse: in the past, they have been made immaterial (dare I say dematerialized) by the 'abstract sublimity' of their public image, paralleled by their public absence; privately confined to daily, exclusive contact with the material world, women are now using every fiber of their beings to resist a world rendered unreal (dare I say 'derealized') by repetitive mechanisms" (13 Bentivoglio).

Mirella Bentivoglio, an Italian sculptor, poet, performance artist, and curator, became a significant voice in the international concrete poetry movement in the 1960s. She describes the process and function of concrete poetry as "maps of the energetic tensions presiding over the formation of thought before it's crystallized into verbal articulation" (17 Bentivoglio).

In the book Concrete Poetry by Solt, it is mentioned that concrete poetry consists of three types: "Visual (or optic), phonetic (or sound), and kinetic (moving in visual succession)" (Solt 7). Concrete poetry differs from traditional constructivist permutational poems, as "In the expressionist poem, the poet arranges his material according to an intuitive structure" (Solt 7). Redefining the rules of poetry, "the concrete poet is concerned with making an object to be perceived rather than read" (Solt 7).