PARTISAN REVIEW
107
Wildman's anthology is modestly ahistorical.
As
the editor ex–
plains, it aims less at "comprehensiveness" than at the production of
"a concrete book," in which each turning of the page should be
part of an adventure in time and tempo - for "a book is something
that unfolds itself," and in this case the unfolding has something like
the semblance of a plot. Since it does illustrate a fair range of differ–
ent effects available to concrete poetry, is quite easily accessible to the
English-speaking reader, and has a persuasive and charming "after–
word" by Wildman, this anthology is probably the one I would pick
for a high school or college text, if I had to pick just one.
This last function has considerable importance. For anyone with
an ounce of pictorial or verbal imagination -that is, all children and
some adults - concrete poetry in its simpler forms should be catching
as £leas. In a writing workshop I taught last year, one quiet young
man showed up at the first session with a small concrete poem. I
feared for him in the jungle of his egomaniacal young peers. None of
them had ever heard of such things. "What is THAT," they jeered.
In two weeks they were eating out of his hand. Nobody would go
home until they had crowded and shoved each other over his latest.
By
the end of semester they were performing his concretes and mak–
ing their own. Incidentally, "Sesame Street" clearly runs on concrete
tracks - probably independently invented.
As
to larger, more complex, or more experimental forms - con–
crete principles have already influenced work in the plastic and per–
forming arts. They will doubtless continue to do so. How much in–
fluence they will have on literature is an open question at this point.
In the United States, the movement has been relatively weak com–
pared to its strength in other parts of the world. Perhaps interna–
tionalism is a handicap in a country whose literary life is so mono–
lingual and whose literary people do so much domestic navel-gazing,
as our own.
Americans do seem better at
exporting
cultural move–
ments than at
importing
them. Still, Planet Earth
is
Planet Earth.
It
bears watching.
1 Mary Ellen Solt, ed.,
Concrete Poetry : A World View.
(Bloomington:
The Indiana University Press, 1953 ). Emmett Williams, ed.,
Anthology of
Concrete Poetry
(New York City: Something Else Press, Inc., 1967).
Eugene Wildman, ed.,
Anthology of Concretism
(Chicago: The Swallow
Press, Inc., 1967).
