A Fun Rant

via Bill Knott's billknot:

I wonder what other poeticules of diversionality PSA Prez Alice Quinn has queued up for future honors—

what other freakish oddities of the past does she plan to revive,

what other obsolete stunt-acts resurrect—

maybe she can find that "Found Poetry" guy, what was his name?—

or what about "Exquisite Cadaver", or Clerihews;

if it's Concrete today, why not Palindromic tomorrow . . .

there are after all many entertaining playtime pastime recondite forms of vacuous verse to waste away the rainy afternoons with idle fun and frivolous games . . .

she did the VizPo gimmick this year, so why not next year pick a similar trivial arcane amusement like refrigerator haiku, or limericks?

Kenny Goldsmith Interviewed

via Archinect:

The idea behind concrete poetry (and it's a very interesting idea) is that it emerges around the time of tendencies toward world languages--Esperanto say. And there is a utopian idea of concrete poetry, that says, imagine a poetry that transcends language, that is a visual poetry that can be understood with maybe a key of just one or two words, that can be understood by anybody anywhere around the world. Hence creating a truly global poetry movement and that is the kind of utopian--mid-century utopian idea behind concrete poetry. And it did in fact, people were able to write very simply and very visually using very few words.

Concrete Objectivism

via Josh Corey's Cahiers de Corey:

I don't know why it didn't quite consciously occur to me before, but of course Concrete Poetry has obvious affinities with Objectivist writing, which in turn of course derives from Imagism and "No ideas but in things," etc.