Mary Ellen Solt | Flowers in Concrete

Mary Ellen Solt

Flowers in Concrete

Bloomington, USA: Indiana University, 1966

[29], 19.5 x 19 cm.

Edition of 135 numbered copies

Mary Ellen Solt was an early practitioner of concrete poetry, and one of the highest profile women in the genre. In addition to her own books and pamphlets (A Trilogy of Rain, The Peoplemover, A Demonstration Poem, and Marriage: A Code Poem), she was the editor of the canonical 1968 volume Concrete Poetry: A World View. Her lengthy introduction, "A World Look at Concrete Poetry," is a critical history of the movement. 

Her visual poems have been published in anthologies and magazines including Der Speigel, Newsweek, McCalls, and Harper’s Bazaar. She is one of very few women to appear in Emmett Williams' Anthology of Concrete Poetry and is featured heavily in Primary Information's more recent Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (and is cited as "a big inspiration" for the publication). 

Her works have been exhibited in museums and art galleries such as La biennale de Venezia (1969); the Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam (1971) The Jewish Museum, New York, (1970); and the current Venice Biennale. 

Solt corresponded with a number of poets including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams, whose work she would write extensively about. In a letter from April 1960 , Carlos Williams wrote her: 

“Flossie read me your poems this morning. They are excellent, they are so excellently conceived that I do not trust myself to praise them… You have a conception of the poetic line which is revolutionary and may lead you anywhere, with its implications…” 

Flowers in Concrete was published by the Fine Arts Department of the University of Indiana in December of 1966. It includes an introduction by George Sadek and one of Solt's best known works, 

"Forsythia". 

Mary Ellen Solt died of a stroke on June 21, 2007 in Santa Clarita, California.

 "As a poet, Mary Ellen Solt is a pioneer theorist, anthologist, and poet of the international concrete movement—no one has contributed more to the diffusion of concrete poetry in the United States and abroad… CONCRETE POETRY: A WORLD VIEW (1968) is the most comprehensive anthology of concrete poetry and theory. Her poems reveal far-reaching interests, from moon rocketry to semiotics. As a sensitive observer of nature and people, her impeccably crafted poems unite verbal and visual arts in unique creations."

- Aliki Barnstone & Willis Barnstone, Anthology of Women Poets From Antiquity to Now

Concrete Poetry: A World View

Mary Ellen Solt [ed]
Concrete Poetry: A World View
Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press, 1970
312 pp., 26 x 22.5 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown

A global survey of concrete poetry with contributions by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Edgard Braga, Pedro Xisto, Claus Bremer, Max Bense, Hansjörg Mayer, Franz Mon, Ferdinand Kriwet, Ernst Jandl, Di[e]ter Roth, Ladislav Novák, Öyvind Fahlström, Pierre and Ilse Garnier, Henri Chopin, Julien Blaine, Jean-François Bory, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Adriano Spatola, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Salette Tavares, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, John Furnival, Robert Lax, Emmett Williams and Sold herself, who also provides the introduction.

Available here for $90. US, or on Ubuweb, here, as a PDF.


"The term "concrete poetry" is now being used to refer to a variety of innovations and experiments following World War II which are revolutionizing the art of the poem on a global scale and enlarging its possibilities for expression and communication. There are now so many kinds of experimental poetry being labeled "concrete" that it is difficult to say what the word means. In an article in THE LUGANO REVIEW (1966), the English critic Mike Weaver, who organized The First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry in Cambridge in 1964, distinguishes three types of concrete poetry: visual (or optic), phonetic (or sound) and kinetic (moving in a visual succession). And he sees individual poems within these three classifications as related to either the constructivist or the expressionist tradition in art. The constructivist poem results from an arrangement of materials according to a scheme or system set up by the poet which must be adhered to on its own terms (permutational poems). In the expressionist poem the poet arranges his material according to an intuitive structure. Weaver's definitions and classifications are most clarifying when applied generally; but when we are confronted with the particular text or poem, we often find that it is both visual and phonetic, or that it is expressionistic as well as constructivist. It is easier to classify the kinetic poem because it incorporates movement, usually a succession of pages; but it is essentially a visual poem, and its words are, of course, made up of sounds. We need only to look at Emmett Williams kinetic book SWEETHEARTS to see that it is possible to incorporate everything we have said about concrete poetry in this paragraph in one poem. Often concrete poems can only be classified in terms of their predominating characteristics."

- Mary Ellen Solt, Introduction