Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology. Ed. by Nancy Perloff

Abstract

This book might be more accurately called a ‘primer’ or ‘reader’, rather than an anthology, as it should be an essential text on any introductory reading list relating to concrete poetry or the twentieth-century literary avant-garde more generally. Perloff’s introduction is a detailed and analytical account of the genre, tracing its international development from the 1950s to the present day. The selection of poems grew out of a 2017 exhibition curated by the editor – in her words, it singles out some of the leading practitioners of concrete poetry rather than aiming to be a comprehensive scholarly retrospective of the form. However, the selection has considerable range and depth. While readers familiar with the work of Eugen Gomringer, Augusto de Campos or Ian Hamilton Finlay might quibble the inclusion of certain poems over others from their œuvres, the cumulative effect is to provide a satisfying overview of work by poets who self-identify as concrete, as well as those who are influenced by its formal developments. Over 150 pages of the volume are given to the work of concrete poets themselves. In the first three sections the work of three seminal practitioners – de Campos, Finlay and Gerhard Rühm – is showcased through sizeable selections. Subsequent sections are arranged by country of origin: Brazil, Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and France, and the United States and Canada. A final section, ‘Postlude’, includes a small selection of visual poetry which builds upon the typographical manipulations of concrete, including American poet Susan Howe’s collages and the digital poetics of Brazilian André Vallias. In total there are 134 poems by 40 poets, plus further images of poems in the introduction. Throughout, the quality of the reproductions is stunning. Poems are printed in colour, an essential semantic as well as aesthetic component of much concrete poetry. Where the original print format of a poem deviates from the two-dimensional page, as with the folded paper structures of Finlay’s ‘standing poems’, these are presented with detailed photographs, often on a double page. Perloff includes an explanatory note for each poem. These notes offer glosses or translations of non-English texts, provide contextual information, outline influences behind the work, and suggest illuminating readings of poems which some readers might otherwise dismiss after a brief glance. The anthology also includes biographical notes on each poet. There are some enjoyable surprises in the selection, such as John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’, which shares with concrete poetry a commitment to manipulating typography and the page’s white space; Cage might best be described as a fellow traveller, rather than a card-carrying member, of the concrete movement. At times readers familiar with how concrete poetics moved off the page and into three-dimensional contexts may be left wanting more: there is no space, for example, for photographs of Finlay’s poetry garden Little Sparta, in which the physical situation of textual works in relation to each other and the wider garden space is an essential aspect of their meanings. But this is an excellent, visually pleasing selection which has the potential to bring concrete poetry to a new audience both within and outside the academy.