The Reinvention of Reading

Abstract

The concrete poetry movement started simultaneously in Europe and in Brazil. Although they agreed on fundamentals, the Brazilians/Portuguese—with a background in traditional poetry—were concerned with spatialization of the text and its relation to music, while the Europeans—with a background in graphics and architecture—were more influenced by the plastic arts. For both the concrete poem becomes a relational field of functions yielding tensions of word-things in space-time, and extending the boundaries of reading beyond the traditional literary limits. The author illustrates and discusses her own "image-texts"—studies in the illegibility or ambiguity of writing and the disintegration of language.