Hey Doodle Doodle

ANTHOLOGY OF CONCRETISAA. Edited by Eugene Wildman. 157 pages. Swallow Press. $2 (paperback).

AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONCRETE POETRY. Edited by Emmett Williams. 342 pages. Something Else Press. $2.95 (paperback).

What is a would-be poet to do when he finds he has nothing to say? Fortunately for him, the 20th century has an art form for everybody. The dumbstruck poet may now make his mark as a "concretist," practicing a definition-defying new discipline derived in equal measure from pop art, typewriter doodles and the undeniable truth that a poem is, after all, just so many letters arranged on a page.

The concretist movement began simultaneously in Europe and Brazil in the early 1950s, and has now washed up in the U.S. Its antecedents go all the way back to prehistoric picture writing, with such variations along the way as the anagrams of early Christian monks, Apollinaire's Calligrammes, and the alphabet drawings of Painter Paul Klee. According to concretism's boosters, it has attracted scores of practitioners--designers, architects, mathematicians, composers, communications theorists--everybody, it would seem, but poets. The goal, explains Concretist Ronald Gross, is "poetry designed to appeal to the eye as well as to the heart and mind. Meaning springs from the juxtaposition of fragmentation of the words or letters on the page."

To judge by these anthologies, concretism is longer on juxtapositions and fragmentations than it is on meanings. Aram Saroyan's Blod, in its entirety, goes like this:

Blod

Admittedly such efforts speak only to a special few. But his longer works also ask a great deal of the reader: wwww wwww waww wakw wake walw walk

To which German Concretist Gerhard Riihm retorts:

wand wand wand wand

bild bild bild wand wand wand wand

bild bild bild wand wand wand wand wild wild hand

wild

hand hand wild

wund

In its more elaborate manifestations, such as the swirling nonsense nebulae of France's Jean Francois Bory (see cut), concrete poetry has some of the appeal of pop posters, and the same sort of esthetic justification. But the movement as a whole raises an important question: Did Joyce Kilmer miss all that much by never having seen a poem lovely as a t ttt rrrrr rrrrrrr eeeeeeeee ???

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