Concrete poetry in three languages

Abstract

This paper analyzes different paths of the development of both the movement and the notion of concrete poetry in three linguistic regions. The German-language konkrete Dichtung turns out to usually denote the original, historical shape of the movement, which was partly created in German- speaking countries and which has been treated as a literary phenomenon. The Englishlanguage term concrete poetry is a much broader category which also encompasses visual poetry and avant-garde texts that are distant from the sources of concretism in its early form. The Polish understanding of ‘poezja konkretna’ [concrete poetry] was influenced by both German- and English- language books and by the movement’s regional version, which appeared in Poland as late as in the 1970s. The selected linguistic areas allowed the author to show three basic ways of thinking about concretism, i.e. about its initial, international, and regional versions.

Keywords

• poezja konkretna
• awangarda
• recepcja