A Fresh Perspective

 

The resurgence of concrete poetry evidenced in the 1990s as written by Peter Mayer makes an interesting argument.  “In digital 1990s, the innovations of concrete poetry are starting to make a new kind of sense. In the ‘rule–breaking’ page mutations of David Carson, the typographic riffing of “Tomato,” and the abstract electronic mark-making of Neville Brody’s “Fuse,” the concrete poets of an earlier generation have found a perhaps unexpected legacy. Thirty-year-old ‘verbicovisual’ experiments of the McLuhan era, painstakingly worked out at the typewriter or laboriously drawn by hand, are beginning, like the newly resurrected media prophet himself, to look prescient and timely again.”

Mayer goes on to suggest that the resurgence of concrete poetry is in part due to the counter-culture authenticity of the movement in countries under which free expression is sharply curtailed by political censorship.   But what does that mean? Has the spiritual aspect of concrete poetry over time become another tool of propaganda and its true authenticity been lost under the rush of another generation?