Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

When was the last time you ran across a concrete poem? Poems whose words and line arrangements look like a physical object. You know, like George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings‘ which used to be on every high school English syllabus. This is a rabbit hole you can easily lose yourself down for days. A quick dip into internet-land will show you the dizzying variety of concrete poetry from the Baroque through the 20th Century avante-garde to the ASCII art of the early computer age.

This issue of “Poetry” magazine has two simple concrete poems from Alison C. Rollins, one in the shape of a bell, the other an arrow. ‘A Bell Is A Bearer Of Time’ starts with an instruction by the poet:

To be performed with bells on. All “writing” is performance, some performance is “writing.”

Those you follow me over on BlueSky and/or Instagram already know that I featured this poem earlier this week, drawing attention to the lines

I am less a writer / who reads than a reader who writes

This line has stuck with me for a few days, as has the shape of the poem. I haven’t really considered writing a concrete poem myself since probably high school. The form never really struck me as more than a cute gimmick. I know, I know, that is a very simple, reductive way to look at it. But now that I stop and really think about it, is a shaped concrete poem really that far removed from the process of carefully and deliberately crafting line breaks?

This is what is driving my creativity this week. The age old exploration of how form and structure interact with meaning.