Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 is expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.

The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres Group. While some works are easily recognized as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.

 

Title: Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959-1979
Publisher: Primary Information, 2021
Author: Alex Balgiu (Ed.), Mónica de la Torre (Ed.), Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, Mira Schendel, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, Giovanna Sandri, Amanda Berenguer, Suzanne Bernard, Ilse Garnier, Blanca Calparsoro, Paula Claire, Jennifer Pike, Betty Danon, Mirtha Dermisache, Bohumila Grögerová, Ana Hatherly, Salette Tavares, Madeline Gins, Mary Ellen Solt, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, and Rosmarie Waldrop, Irma Blank, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Chima Sunada, Katalin Ladik, Bogdanka Poznanović
Photographer: -
Graphic Design: -
Format: Softcover
Size: 22 x 23 cm, 480 pages
ISBN: 9781734489729
Edition: -