Concrete Poetry: A Response

Concrete poetry is essentially an art form within poetry. They way the words are placed on a page, or the sound of the words on the page, or both, is often more important than the actual words on that page. With concrete poetry, the meaning of the words is more important than the words themselves. Sometimes the author’s goal is to simply create a certain rhythm or sound, sometimes it is to create a striking visual image. What concrete poetry requires more than traditional poetry is the poem is read inwardly rather than being spoken out loud. Sometimes the visual created by the poem is more meaningful than the words used to create that visual.


I think that one would want to experiment with this type of poetry because it is very flexible. It has the potential to offer either more room for individual interpretation, or narrow meaning as to avoid misinterpretation, depending on the goal of the author.
For example, the poem “Soleil” by Ilse and Pierre Garner seems to offer room for individual interpretation. In contrast, Nikuni’s poem “Rain” is simply that- rain on a page. They are both examples of concrete poetry, yet they have different goals.


The combination of hand-written and typed words, like in Maciunas’ “A Manifesto for Fluxus” is something that I think would be really great to incorporate in my own work… mixing not only fonts, but because there is that hand-written element, it seems very personal, as if he wrote it especially for me and passed it to me in a note. That personal element is something that I enjoy about concrete poetry; the ability to reach the audience is evident in all of our examples.