Concrete Poetry Guide: How to Write a Concrete Poem

A concrete poem, or shape poem, is an arrangement of words on a page into shapes or patterns that reveal an image. Concrete poems, or visual poems, are an artistic blend of the literary and the visual arts. Readers experience a concrete poem via its words, typography, and the visual representation of the subject of the poem. In this type of visual poetry, what the words mean and how they look are often equally important.

Within the graphic space of their work, concrete poets also rely on color and typeface to further characterize the poem and image at hand. Sometimes only a handful of words—repeated throughout the poem—are needed to help illuminate an image.

Pattern poetry and concrete poetry are both playful visual forms of poetry. Both rely on spacing words out in such a way that further communicates the ideas of the poem. The difference is that while concrete poems are often a string of words repeated to illustrate an image, pattern poetry maintains its meaning apart from its typography. Pattern poetry can be read aloud and hold its purpose, whereas concrete poetry is as much a visual medium as it is a literary one.

Though visual poetry has evolved over thousands of years.

• Early pattern poetry: The American poet E. E. Cummings and the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote pattern poems in the first half of the twentieth century, spacing out and styling words on the page for poetic expression. These poets rose to prominence before the concrete poetry movement formally entered the mainstream.
• Mid-twentieth century: While the art form has a long history, concrete poetry has only been a widely shared term since the mid-twentieth century. Poetry as a form was evolving; Dada artists explored sound poetry, introducing new, aural ways to experience poems, primarily via performances that blended music and text.
• Development as a visual art form: In 1950s Brazil, writers affiliated with the São Paulo magazine Noigandres experimented with visualizing words on a page. Members of the Noigandres group—including Brazilian writers Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos—showed their work at an art exhibit. These avant-garde artists carved a new path, blazing a trail for an art movement that was also a literary movement.
• Anthology: This artistic medium flourished throughout the twentieth century. In 1968, Mary Ellen Solt published Concrete Poetry: A World View, a definitive collection of the concrete poetry movement.

In his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll created a shape poem known as “The Mouse’s Tale.” The poem described a mouse’s tale while also being shaped like a curving mouse’s tail. The tools Carroll employed are ones you can use in creating your own concrete poem:

1. 1. Choose an image for your poem. You’ll first want to know what eventual image you wish to create via your concrete poetry. Pick something familiar and recognizable, like a tree, lamp, or another item that you can easily create and that readers can quickly identify.
2. 2. Sketch out the shape. Now that you have an image in mind, sketch out its general shape. The sketch will act as your guide in choosing where certain words should go to create the outline of your selected image.
3. 3. Fill the shape in with the text. As in “The Mouse’s Tale,” you can write a story that gives your image a narrative. Or, you can choose a series of letters and words that repeat to flesh out your picture.

Writers from around the world have created visual poems.

1. 1. “Easter Wings” by George Herbert (1633): The Welsh poet George Herbert created “Easter Wings,” one of the most famous examples of concrete poetry. “Easter Wings” was originally printed sideways—with words not running left to right but up to down—so that readers had to turn the book 90 degrees to read the work. The piece, a religious meditation on Jesus’ atonement, comprises two stanzas that resemble two pairs of angels’ wings.
2. 2. “Silencio” by Eugen Gomringe (1953): Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio” shows the title word printed fourteen times to form a box with a hole in the middle, in which another instance of “silencio” would fit. In that hole, the Bavarian-born German poet seems to be showing a visual form of silence.
3. 3. “Ho/Horizon/On” (1968): Ian Hamilton Finlay published his first collection of concrete poetry, Rapal, in 1963. In “Ho/Horizon/On,” this Scottish poet uses a combination of the words “ho,” “horizon,” and “on” to create a triangular image with a small gap in the bottom center of the concrete poem. The gap could be interpreted as the sun, sitting on the horizon with all the letters above it acting as the illuminated sky.

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