Saturday, March 22, 2008

Concrete poetry

Trolling for new ideas and methods, I discovered a discipline described as "Concrete Minimalist Poetry". It is about (verbal?) immediacy delivered by (often "quasi-") linguistic symbols (combinations of parts of letters and words) and their visual composition on the page (or "page"). In some cases (see Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, for example) the poet departs from anything resembling lettering (and, therefore, language?) altogether. 

Maybe "Where is the line between poetry and drawing/painting/etc.?" Whenever a question like this arises I say "Who Cares? (There is no line.)"