Concrete Poetry

Concrete Poetry: 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, curator of an important Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, includes examples from the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe. These groups, 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. Perloff also incorporates key poems by Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, and others, and includes 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 contextualise the work. This approach allows 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.