| Concrete Poetry |
Article Index for Concrete |
Limousines in Concrete |
Website Links For Concrete |
Information AboutConcrete Poetry |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT CONCRETE POETRY | |
| literary movements | |
| poetic form | |
| latin american literature | |
|
The term was coined in the 1950s , and in 1956 an international exhibition of concrete poetry was shown in São Paulo , inspired by the work of Carlos Drummond De Andrade . Two years later, a Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto was published. One of the earliest Brazilian pioneers, Augusto De Campos , has assembled a Web site of old and new work (see external links below), including the manifesto. Its principal tenet is that using words as part of a specifically visual work allows for the words themselves to become part of the poetry, rather than just unseen vehicles for ideas. The original manifesto says: :Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history - taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.: Although the term is quite modern, the idea of using letter arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem is an old one. This style of poetry originated in Greek Alexandria during the third and second centuries B.C. Some were designed as decoration for religious art-works, including wing-, axe- and altar-shaped poems. Only a handful of examples survive, which are collected together in the Greek Anthology . They include poems by Simias and Theocritus . Early examples of typographically-based poetry include the following poem by George Herbert (1593-1633) (here in a scan of the 1633 edition of Herbert's ''The Temple''), in which the poem is merely a comment on the title, which presents the poem's principal meaning typographically: |
|
|