” … there is a fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made. Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials of poetry. … Generally speaking the material of the concrete poem is language …” (Concrete Poetry — A World View. 1968.)
Book Art Backgrounders at Deeplinking

Robert The: “I kinda blew a fuse in my senior year—something very strange happened—and I lost my ability to read for a period of a month or two. This sharpened my interest regarding what was actually going on with the symbols that convey meaning on a concrete level.”
“To accurately approach research on a project exploring the progression and cadence of American poet, E.E. Cummings’ 1944 collection, “I X I,” it became clear that one of the few seemingly appropriate ways to “analyze” a poet whose core relation is a belief in love and feeling over thought, would be to create a mode through which I could explore his poetry that would remain true to the poet’s writing.”
“Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics….”samples from the massive archive:
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man
Balkan Baroque 1999
John Cage in Conversation with Richard Kostelanetz [John Cage:"We do very good work when we don't know what we are doing."]
“A death of someone is actually nothing more than what the death causes to leave behind, to bring into view.* Emmett Williams—one of the more famous of the concrete poets, a Fluxist, and simply an otherstream artist of our time—died in Berlin this Wednesday [Feb 14,2007], on Valentine’s Day….”
“Text becomes picture.”
The late sixties and early seventies saw Suknaski produce work for at least ten concrete poetry chapbooks (including two anthologies) while publishing many titles by others (Dennis Lee, Stephen Scobie, bp Nichol, Earle Birney, and Sid Marty, to name a few) as well with his own Elfin Plot Press. He floated poems and magazines rolled up in Al Purdy’s cigar tubes down the North Saskatchewan River. He folded an issue of Elfin Plot into paper airplanes and had them dropped from an aircraft flying north out of Edmonton. He buried others on mountaintops, or left them on beaches melted into tablet-like candles abandoned for strangers: something to light them home. It was undoubtedly actions like these that prompted Douglas Barbour’s wry comment that Elfin Plot was “the most underground of underground magazines.” The output during this time was frenetic, sprawling, brilliant, compulsive and voluminous, especially considering his transitory lifestyle and constant poverty.
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