How Poetry Matters

Abstract

This chapter opens a discussion of how language’s vitality registers in and as material. It assesses the reception of material poetics in late twentieth century North America and compares the examples featured in this book with other investments in poetic materiality. The chapter offers a discussion of the term ‘concrete poetry’ which has lost some of the contextual specificity that historically adhered to it. This history is proved as a way of situating Brazilian concretism and as a way of distinguishing the term’s use from other names for sympathetic forms such as ‘visual poetry’. This chapter makes the case for the term ‘material poetics’ and demonstrates how many of the hybrid linguistic-material practices in the Americas built on early theorisations of language’s matter, which were undertaken with notable depth by the so-called ‘noigandres’ group of Brazilian concrete poets. Literary studies’ adoption of theories of objects and matter are explored along with debates within literary studies that investigate how we read. The introduction takes this book’s featured artists and poets to be its primary theorists and works to test and reframe contemporary thinking on objects by positing the matter of language as its object of study.