This
is not meant as a complete guide to concrete poetry, but merely a short
introduction.
Basically, concrete poetry is poem
as picture or solid construction. Poets of the past have played with
the idea of making poems in the shape of something. A poem about a
butterfly is set out on the page in the shape of a butterfly.
One of the most interesting
developments of this type of writing was the publication during the
first world war of a book of visual poems by Guillaume Apollinaire
called Calligrammes. Here is one of the poems from that collection:
Perhaps
his
most famous poem from that collection was the poem about rain,
which he wrote in the form of rain falling to the ground:
There
have
been various developments of this style. Concrete poetry became
all the rage during the 1960s. One of the more interesting poets using
the style was Ian Hamilton Finlay, who went on to create his poems as
objects which he placed in his garden in Scotland.
The construction to the right is one of my early concrete poems dating
from 1971. You can see more of my concrete poems in the Gallery.