Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology

This selective, personal, yet wide-ranging anthology of concrete poetry sheds new light on this highly visual and typographic poetic art form. Curator Nancy Perloff's choices exemplify poets whom she believes are especially distinctive and significant, and who represent the real strengths of the concrete poetry movement. She includes works by the little-known Wiener Gruppe and the Japanese concretists--groups that, together with the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos and the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, have engaged with the most subtle possibilities of language itself--while also incorporating some key examples from Eugene Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, and others. The anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original language, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that have formerly been dismissed as simple or even trivial texts. Taken as a whole, this significant new collection of poems and analysis redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.