Concrete Poetry

Concrete Poetry : A 21st century Anthology presents a selective yet wide-ranging anthology of concrete poetry edited by curator Nancy Perloff and dedicated to singling out the most distinctive and significant works of this influential, interdisciplinary movement. Perloff's choices exemplify poets whom she believes are especially important, and who represent the real strengths of the movement. She includes works by 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 examples from 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 have formerly been dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts. This substantial new collection redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.