This collection presents one of the most interesting and lively developments on the international poetry scene in recent years.
Concrete Poetry has been growing in many countries, from Brazil to Japan, and especially in England and Europe. Its ancestry goes back to pre-historic picture writing and the anagrams of early Christian monks; it has affinities with the oriental ideogram, and, in our century, with Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the work of Klee and Schwitters, and the experiments in "visual form" of Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and the Dadaists and Surrealists.
Once Again
is not so much an anthology, though it includes the work of 54 poets from 10 countries, as a group presentation, designed to be read as a consecutive "visual happening." It has been assembled by Jean-François Bory, an editor of the Paris magazine
Approches
and the author of
Plein Signe
,
Height Texts + 1
and other "Concrete" books. Bory has provided an introduction which traces the history of the movement and analyzes its aesthetic. He also comments on individual poems.