Concrete Poetry: A World View

Indiana University Press, 1970. — 311 p.Mary Ellen Solt, a leading American concrete poet, provides in this volume the first comprehensive survey of the international movement of this art form. She traces the evolution of the concrete poem from the traditional form (the sonnet) through concrete art and the theories of Max Bill in the work of Eugen Gomringer; from innovations made by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Joyce, Pound, and cummings; from musicians and artists such as Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Mondrian, Albers, Calder, Bill, and Eisenstein; from linguistics, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetics in the work of Noigandres Group (Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Decio Pignatari) of Brazil; from a reaction against traditional poetry through abstract painting in the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom, and from Futurism in the work of Carlo Belloli.