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Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology
Now in paperback, a significant new collection of concrete poetry that redefines what this unique literary movement means today.
Concrete A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works. Nancy Perloff, the curator of an important Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, includes examples from the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe—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 key poems by Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, and others and including contemporary contributions by Cia Rinne and Susan Howe.
Perloff’s anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that some have dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts. This substantial new collection redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.
Concrete A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works. Nancy Perloff, the curator of an important Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, includes examples from the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe—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 key poems by Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, and others and including contemporary contributions by Cia Rinne and Susan Howe.
Perloff’s anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that some have dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts. This substantial new collection redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.
- GenresPoetry
224 pages, Hardcover
Published January 13, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 9, 2022
The editor includes only 4 women. The definition of concrete is restricted to that used by the concrete movement in the 70s. There's no room for growth or change. Has a kind of Make Concrete Great Again vibe. Purports to be an antho for the people but I can't see it. Design isn't great, not giving full space to concrete poems to make way for commentary by the editor. The "post lude" section, a poor attempt to engage with contemporary concrete, missing the great work of many. This is an unnecessary anthology.
June 20, 2024
OK first let me talk a bunch about the edition & intro & editorial practice:
This edition is super valuable for the intro alone, which is a nice and readable historical tour through the main theoretical drivers of concrete. It directly asks and indirectly answers the critical question "what is 'concrete poetry' and how is it different from 'visual' or 'sound poetry'?", which is the reason I picked this book up in the first place, so bottom-line I'm happy.
Editorial practice (by which I mean descriptions and glossing) is good but might not be your cup of tea: Perloff (as David Briers points out in his review of this book) is a gallery curator by trade, and so the descriptions sometimes feel a little gallery-esque in how much they insist on the work's depth, or how they appeal to themes or ideas that often seem way out of the [pieces'? poems'?] league[s], or how much they instruct you in what emotions you should be feeling. Anyway I like it a lot more than the Schizophrenia of Williams' descriptions, almost all extracted from the author's prose which is usually as avant-garde as his/her poetry. Glossing is a big deal of course--most of these poems aren't in English--and is kind of inconsistent: Perloff claims in the intro to be following the de Campos tradition of only glossing two or three words for a whole poem and letting the sound of the words do the heavy lifting, but she only does this rarely (not even for de Campos's works the majority of the time). Now minor points: 1. descriptions sometimes describe details of translations which are not reproduced, which is kinda annoying 2. Half the urls in the notes are dead and unarchived 3. Perloff is majorly addicted to the word 'verbivocovisual' (for which I wrote the Wiktionary page).
I can't really comment on the choice of poems themselves, except to say that despite how much lip service she pays to the "under-appreciated" Japanese concretists, she only reproduces like five of them (obviously Niikuni's are the best in the entire collection). The geographical organization is nice--I guess it's better than the soup that is Williams's. Cool that she reprints a lot of Rühm tho.
Beautiful as an edition. Color added much more than I expected it to. Small, easy to carry, well-printed and all in all quite a nice book. (One complaint: I don't love the font choice in the intro).
Above all it's an anthology by an editor who obviously loves Concrete poetry, and it shows! I have to say though I don't get how this is a "21st-Century Anthology," because outside the tiny last chapter and last three pages of the intro, there's not much 21st century in this book. The idea apparently is that we have (now) a better view of concrete and its influence and effect and legacy etc., but these just seem like they're of such minor interest to the book that it makes the name a little weird. This is more like a global anthology bla bla bla
----
Concrete has grown on me a little bit, especially as I've read/seen more of it (and in color). It can be emotional, it can have memetic force, but can it rock your world? Can it make you cry? Can it be something that wouldn't be right at home printed onto a glass wall at Birmingham Airport? It hasn't happened to me yet, but still, a lot of this stuff is really cool and fun to read, and if you can take it seriously it improves the experience, and anyway that's enough concrete for now.
Supplement to May Randomizer 4/4
----
[Look maybe I'm breaking da rules a little bit marking this as read because I in fact did not quote-unquote finish this per se before I had to vacate the premises, BUT: I spent a lot of time with this anthology, and I read the intro more than twice, and I think probably I have read almost all the poems, and I made about half a dozen of my friends uncomfortable by pulling this out of my bag, flipping to some page and saying "how would you read this poem aloud." To be precise I haven't finished going through- and focusing on- and reading the descriptions of- the last 30 or so poems, though I think I've read them (they're in the minority by being in English). SO you can ignore my thoughts if you like]
This edition is super valuable for the intro alone, which is a nice and readable historical tour through the main theoretical drivers of concrete. It directly asks and indirectly answers the critical question "what is 'concrete poetry' and how is it different from 'visual' or 'sound poetry'?", which is the reason I picked this book up in the first place, so bottom-line I'm happy.
Editorial practice (by which I mean descriptions and glossing) is good but might not be your cup of tea: Perloff (as David Briers points out in his review of this book) is a gallery curator by trade, and so the descriptions sometimes feel a little gallery-esque in how much they insist on the work's depth, or how they appeal to themes or ideas that often seem way out of the [pieces'? poems'?] league[s], or how much they instruct you in what emotions you should be feeling. Anyway I like it a lot more than the Schizophrenia of Williams' descriptions, almost all extracted from the author's prose which is usually as avant-garde as his/her poetry. Glossing is a big deal of course--most of these poems aren't in English--and is kind of inconsistent: Perloff claims in the intro to be following the de Campos tradition of only glossing two or three words for a whole poem and letting the sound of the words do the heavy lifting, but she only does this rarely (not even for de Campos's works the majority of the time). Now minor points: 1. descriptions sometimes describe details of translations which are not reproduced, which is kinda annoying 2. Half the urls in the notes are dead and unarchived 3. Perloff is majorly addicted to the word 'verbivocovisual' (for which I wrote the Wiktionary page).
I can't really comment on the choice of poems themselves, except to say that despite how much lip service she pays to the "under-appreciated" Japanese concretists, she only reproduces like five of them (obviously Niikuni's are the best in the entire collection). The geographical organization is nice--I guess it's better than the soup that is Williams's. Cool that she reprints a lot of Rühm tho.
Beautiful as an edition. Color added much more than I expected it to. Small, easy to carry, well-printed and all in all quite a nice book. (One complaint: I don't love the font choice in the intro).
Above all it's an anthology by an editor who obviously loves Concrete poetry, and it shows! I have to say though I don't get how this is a "21st-Century Anthology," because outside the tiny last chapter and last three pages of the intro, there's not much 21st century in this book. The idea apparently is that we have (now) a better view of concrete and its influence and effect and legacy etc., but these just seem like they're of such minor interest to the book that it makes the name a little weird. This is more like a global anthology bla bla bla
----
Concrete has grown on me a little bit, especially as I've read/seen more of it (and in color). It can be emotional, it can have memetic force, but can it rock your world? Can it make you cry? Can it be something that wouldn't be right at home printed onto a glass wall at Birmingham Airport? It hasn't happened to me yet, but still, a lot of this stuff is really cool and fun to read, and if you can take it seriously it improves the experience, and anyway that's enough concrete for now.
Supplement to May Randomizer 4/4
----
[Look maybe I'm breaking da rules a little bit marking this as read because I in fact did not quote-unquote finish this per se before I had to vacate the premises, BUT: I spent a lot of time with this anthology, and I read the intro more than twice, and I think probably I have read almost all the poems, and I made about half a dozen of my friends uncomfortable by pulling this out of my bag, flipping to some page and saying "how would you read this poem aloud." To be precise I haven't finished going through- and focusing on- and reading the descriptions of- the last 30 or so poems, though I think I've read them (they're in the minority by being in English). SO you can ignore my thoughts if you like]
January 6, 2024
The book highlights many avant-guard poetry from international poets from the 1950's-1970's. I appreciate the commentary that Nancy Perloff provides, especially translations where needed. I am accustomed to concrete poetry for young readers, and therefore, this book offers a very different perspective, which is helpful in completing the 'bigger' picture of the genre.
October 7, 2025
This is a fantastic anthology that spans time and space to highlight the truly remarkable contributions to the "genre" by various writers and artists. I did wish on numerous occasions that the book and its descriptions felt less personal, less derivative of Perloff's interpretations, but overall the book was a great survey.
January 9, 2026
long and short and clever and marvelous and overly masculine and dated and okay?
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews