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September 28, 2002

Is this poetry? How about this, this or this? They're all examples of visual or concrete poetry, which has a long history. The modern version grew out of Lettrisme and helped give birth to the worldwide mail art movement. Two leading visual poets, Uruguayan activist Clemente Padin and Argentinian Edgardo Vigo, both had serious run-ins with dictators during the 1970s. The huge Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry puts gem after gem at your fingertips. Another great collection: Brazilian Visual Poetry. [more inside] [read more]

The text above is chock full of links (in the original mefi post) that you must check out. They relate to an art movement I knew nothing about. This stuff is amazing. Those wild and crazy French!

The most immediately striking feature of Lettrisme as a form of visual poetry is its extensive use of calligraphic techniques and the invention not only of fluid letter forms, but of new and ever changing letters themselves. This can move into surprising areas, such as painting directly on cinematic film and then projecting it as a movie. And it can extend into everything from furniture design (see particularly Alain Satié's work elsewhere at this site) to architecture. Lettrisme always carries the individual artist's personal hand, the workman's most basic signature, in all its productions, providing not only a critique of industrial society but suggestions for humanizing it. From its early stages, superimposing letters on various objects, and on other letters, has been important, and the art has at times been called hypergraphie. In many surprising ways, it foreshadowed layering and other computer techniques that hadn't yet been invented, and even characteristics of world wide web graphics.

The above example is from a collection that is one amazing image after another — Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry