Concrete Poetry: an International Anthology

Stephen Bann [editor]

Concrete Poetry: an International Anthology

London, UK: London Magazine Editions, 1967

197 pp., 19 x 19 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

In 1966, Stephen Bann guest edited an issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal dedicated to the then burgeoning Concrete Poetry movement, predating many of the important anthologies that would follow shortly thereafter. 

A year later he edited volume 13 of London Magazine Editions, with a similar focus on the scene. Concrete Poetry: an International Anthology includes work by Claus Bremer, Eugen Gomringer, Hansjorg Mayer, Ernst Jandl, Decio Pignatari, Haraldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Pedro Xisto, Mathias Goeritz, Pierre Garnier, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houedard, John Furnival, Edwin Morgan, Emmett Williams, Jonathan Williams, Robert Lax and others. The title includes an extensive twenty-page introductory essay by Stephen Bann and short biographies for each of the contributors.

For a genre assumed to be admired more than enjoyed, it’s rare to find a copy of this book that doesn’t appear well-loved. This copy is available for $200 US, here. 

"London Magazine Editions published the London Magazine, where I published my first article. I think it was probably Reg Gadney who introduced me to the magazine. It was being run, I don’t know whether at a loss, but certainly Alan Ross had a wife, Jennifer, who was really rather wealthy, so I don’t think it was necessary for him to make a great profit. He’d also started this collection of books, London

Magazine Editions, and he gave me the go ahead to do this Concrete poetry anthology and put me in touch with a designer called Ron Costley (alas he died just a few weeks ago), who became a very close collaborator for [Ian Hamilton] Finlay over many years. But this was his first attempt to design a Concrete poetry book and Alan Ross went off to cover a cricketing tour in Australia, because he was also, among his many talents, a cricket correspondent, and so he more or less left us a free hand and I think, in fact I know, that we spent more on the publication than he had bargained for. When he came back he thought we had probably bankrupted the London Magazine Editions, but in effect that was not the case, it actually sold out really quite quickly and at a later stage, I think 10 years later the TLS did a survey which said that it was the most widely held poetry anthology in the British public libraries which they’d actually surveyed. This was partly because it got a very good review from one of the leading critics at the time, Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times. I think it was a close connection with Alan Ross

there, so we were again very lucky. So Finlay effectively said, “Will you do this?” and from time to time I got names from him and so on and I had some of the names already myself. For example, I came across a letter the other day from Hansjörg [Mayer] because I’d got in touch with him about Claus Bremer in Germany and he gave me the address. So effectively I got the names together and went ahead. We made a decision, for example, that we would have just one colour printing which would be a sort of bright orangey yellow and this would work notably for a famous poem by Garnier which was to be printed in colour, and for one of my poems and also for a poem by Dom Sylvester which was produced in a definitive version. It was something that I was doing at the same time as completing my PhD. The book was actually published a few months afterwards, in autumn 1967, but I’d done all this preliminary work in the previous year, with a lot of advice from Finlay, but certainly he never would say, “You must publish this or that”. I had a free choice and he generally agreed with the poems that I featured in it.

- Stephen Bann