Mary Ellen Solt (1920–2007)

Nearly five decades of work by the beloved American critic and concrete poet best known for her flower-shaped poems

This volume brings together a half century's worth of work by the renowned American concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt. One of the few Americans, and rare women, in the concrete poetry movement, Solt edited the influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a poet but as an acclaimed critic. While Solt was show more justly celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete (1966), much of her work has remained little known or unpublished. From her lyrical engagement with the idiom of William Carlos Williams to her masterful forays into visual and concrete poetry, this volume, assembled and edited by her daughter Susan Solt, provides an in-depth document of a truly singular writer who was at the center of some of the most daring global poetic developments of the mid-20th century. The centerpiece is the section "Words and Spaces," which presents Solt's concrete poems as she envisioned them: typographically precise, visually stunning and commanding on the page.
Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007) was a writer, a scholar and an early practitioner of concrete poetry. Solt authored several poetry collections including A Trilogy of Rain (1970) and The Peoplemover 1968: A Demonstration Poem (1978). Her flower poems have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Getty Center in 2017. show less

Yet another bk of Concrete Poetry. How many are there? Not many. This one has some color illustrations & more explanatory texts & manifestos than in the 2 other main ones I have. In my copy, pages 17 to 32 are upside-down & backwards. That seems like a binding error. I wonder if they're all like that? After some prefatory remarks concerning the widespread & somewhat ambiguous use of the term "Concrete Poetry", Solt, the editor, states that "there is a fundamental requirement which the show more various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made."

That, in itself, seems to fail as a definition for me. The cover's poem has the word "FORSYTHIA" at its base w/ other words growing out of it that begin w/ the same letter that these words originate from. From these words come the beginning letter placed as if they're buds or flowers on a limb of the forsythia plant. It's not a very complicated poem, it's a simple picture poem. I like it just fine but is it really an example of "concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made"? It seems to me that the poem is made from the physical materials of paper, ink, & paint. Maybe the pigment is made from a forsythia plant. I reckon it's possible that the pigment & the paper cd both have plant origins. My point is that Solt seems to be conflating what the words refer to w/ what they are physically.

That aside, I don't really care to nitpick here. It was just something to write. The bk's full of interesting pictures that create calculated relationships between words & images & that's something I totally enjoy. There's even the following Ronald Johnson piece that I'd forgotten about:

eyeleveleye

I made a window shade once that had that cut out of it. As the window shade went up or down, the eye level went up & down w/ it. show less

Survey, with inclusions, of "concrete" poetry--post-WWII poem artifacts--all over the world. Using Weaver's types of concrete-ness (optic, phonetic, and kinetic), Solt presents many experiments as well as "classics". Also has a section of essays.