**ANNOUNCEMENT!**

Call for Poetry Submissions: Krisis: Poetry at the Crossroads.

Be a part of an upcoming dVerse anthology in celebration of our 15th anniversary! Find more information here.

Hello Friends, 

Today I thought we should have a bit of fun looking at the shape of a poem as it appears on paper. I know many of us have tried to put a shape on a poem, maybe making it shaped like a bell or similar. Today I want us to go further… you probably cannot use the built-in editor of your choice but use some other software that allows you to put text anywhere on the page, or maybe even bring back pens and paper.

Concrete Poetry emerged from the major hubs of Concrete Art in Northern Europe and Latin America during the 1950s and sought to bring the same clarity and simplicity of composition that defined that movement to the written word.

Concrete Poetry is a kind of linguistic art in which the way words and letters look is as important as what they mean. One can draw parallels to Performance art that also mixes visual with the spoken word. 

The earliest known example is the Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio”

Note the simplicity of the shape, and also how the void in the pattern becomes a visual representation of the word itself.

It also shows that the poem in itself does not have to be very complicated as shown in the poem Pik Bou by Pierre Garnier. The name of the poem is a local term for the green woodpecker. And the words inside the concrete poem are onomatopoeic representations of the poem itself.

Often colors can be used to enhance the poem, but remember that if you intend to use the prompt for our Anthology it will only be printed in monochrome.

For more inspiration you can check out Gay’s prompt we had back in 2011

When you have written/created your poem, please post it to your blog, link back to dVerse, link it up to Mr Linky below, leave a comment below and then venture out on the poetry trail leaving comments to inspire and be inspired.