CONCRETE POETRY

Concrete poetry is sometimes also called shape poetry or visual poetry.

It is a type of poetry whose visual appearance matches the topic of the poem.
The words form shapes which illustrate the poems subject as a picture, as
well as through their literal meaning.
In essence, works of concrete poetry are as much pieces of visual art made
with words as they are poems.
This does not have fixed number of stanzas, lines or syllables per line.

This type of poetry has been used for thousands of years, since the
ancient Greeks began to enhance the meanings of their poetry by arranging
their characters in visually pleasing ways back in the 3 rd and 2nd Centuries BC.
The name Concrete Poetry, however, is from the 1950s, when a group
of Brazilian poets called the Noigandres held an international exhibition of
their work, and then developed a manifesto to define the style.
The manifesto states that concrete poetry communicates its own
structure: structure = content.
Examples:

HAIKU

A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line

poem with seventeen syllables, written in a

5/7/5
syllable
count.
Often
focusing
on
images
from
nature,
haiku
emphasizes
simplicity,
intensity,
and
directness
of
expression.
Haiku began
in
thirteenthcentury Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas
long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from
renga in the sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho,
who wrote this classic haiku:
An old pond!
A frog jumps in
the sound of water.
Ezra Pound, who noted the power of haikus brevity. The influence of haiku on
Pound is most evident in his poem In a Station of the Metro," which began as a
thirty-line poem, but was eventually paired down to two:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Examples:

A Japanese
haiku that has
5-7-5
syllable .
Other Example:
Other Example:
Suicide
Shivering
Walking back
to from cold
You
helped
How sweet
you
it must
beme with a
warm
To feel
Minutes
all theofpain atcoat
Starting our frienship
uncertainty
once
I Then,
wont never
let youagain
go

Vocabulary Corner:
brevity - (n.) use of
few words to say
something