Concrete Poetry in rural France
The international movement of Concrete Poetry is described as ‘works where the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, i.e. the words, the rhythm, the rhyme and so on’ – the words themselves form a picture. The 1950’s pioneers were the De Campo brothers Haroldo and Augusto (who published Teoria da poesia concreta in 1965), and the CDLA exhibition also carries works of Ian Hamilton Finlay (founder of Wild Hawthorn Press, publisher of the Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. periodicals), the French poet Pierre Garnier, Robert Lax, Liliane Lijn, Paul de Vree, Bob Cobbing and Dom Sylvester Houédard to name a few. In an epoch where the world’s publishing industries look to how literature might be played out on new digital platforms, it’s fascinating to see how these poets, typographers and designers from the 1950s onwards were creating these visual feasts using letters, words and poetry – the very page acting as platform
