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

Peter Finch | Typewriter Poems

[Peter Finch, editor]

Typewriter Poems

Cardiff, Wales / Millerton, USA: 17 Second Aeon Press / Something Else Press, 1972

52 pp., 21.5 x 14 x 0.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

Few titles from the Something Else Press - my all-time favourite publisher of Artists’ Books - have appeared on this site because I imagine one day taking a month off and writing comprehensive entries for their entire unrivalled output. I have amassed a collection that is nearly complete - missing only the two boxed works which are far out of my price range. 

Typewriter Poems is perhaps the least characteristic of their output, given that it was a co-publication, and the input from proprietors Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles appears to be minimal, possibly just a financial contribution. 

Second Aeon was a British literary periodical published from late 1966 to early 1975. It ran for 21 issues and was edited by Peter Finch.  Second Aeon Publications was a spin-off of the magazine - a series of booklets, broadsheets and bound volumes that eventually reached 100 in number.

"As far as I know it was the very first book to anthologize typewriter work," Finch told me in 2014. Unlike Anthology of Concrete Poetry [see below*], the slim Typewriter Poems concentrated entirely on British artists. The slim volume gathers together twenty-two practitioners of the art of the typewriter poem, including Alison Bielski, Paula Claire, Thomas A. Clark, Bob Cobbing, Michael Gibbs, John Gilbert, and many others.

Higgins had not been informed that the anthology was entirely British and was reportedly dissatisfied with the end results.  He was said to have suppressed the American run, possibly even destroying many  copies. 

Printed Matter has one available for the low price (very low, compared to other titles from the publisher)  of $15.00, US, here, calling into question this account. 

*Another co-publication for the Something Else Press, the Anthology of Concrete Poetry features a textual cover graphic that serves as another precedent for the XTC album cover [see post earlier this week]. It is available from Printed Matter, here, for $225 US. 

Paul Dutton | The Plastic Typewriter

Paul Dutton

The Plastic Typewriter

Toronto, Canada: Writer's Forum, 1993

[22] pp., 27 x 21 x .5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Best known as a sound poet (in collaboration with Michael Snow and Jon Oswald in CCMC, and previously as a member of the Four Horsemen, alongside bp Nichol), Paul Dutton was an accomplished writer and poet, who produced many books, as both author and publisher of Underwhich Editions. He died on the 27th of May, 2025, at the age of 81.

Completed in 1977, this collection of typewriter poems was made with a disassembled plastic typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons, carbon paper, a metal file and white bond paper. 

Excerpts are included in Barrie Tullett’s Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology [below].

"Before I met bp, I had had a few poems published in litmags, as we called them in those days. But once Beep’s major artistic influence and personal friendship came into my life, from that point on the whole of my arts practice became focused on incorporating the concept of “borderblur,” a term coined by British typewriter artist and visual poet Dom Sylvester Houédard (or just dsh, as he signed his works). My whole practice revolved around the conviction that poetry and writing could incorporate visual and sound elements, which I still like to refer to as arising from an expanded view of language. But of course those are elements of language anyway. The sonic and visual components of language are inherent at a certain point in history. First, from day one, the sonic in everyday speech, and the visual once writing came into play. 

So my work and the work of many of my colleagues and peers in those areas just amplified those elements, while not abandoning the more conventional forms of literary expression, however unconventionally practised. At the same time, there are plenty of poets who work exclusively within the spheres of sound poetry and/or visual poetry.”

- Paul Dutton

Typewriter 4

[Robert Caldwell, editor]

Typewriter 4

New York City / Iowa City, USA: Typewriter, 1973

[44] pp., 8 x 8.5”, softcover

Edition of 300

Issue number four [of ten, see below] of Typewriter, a publication largely focused on visual and concrete poetry. The volume is edited by Robert Caldwell with contributions by  Jeremy Adler, Bob Cobbing, Peter Finch, Hugh Fox, Michael Gibbs, Peter Mayer, David Mayor, David Oshel, Alan Riddell, Kent Zimmerman, and others.

bill bissett | Image Being

bill bissett 

Image Being 

Vancouver, Canada: blewointment press, 1975

[32] pp., 15 x 15 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 300

Called “the greatest living poet today” by no less an authority than Jack Kerouac, bill bissett is the author of over seventy books. This early title is still available for around twenty-five dollars, despite being limited to three hundred copies and over fifty years old. 

The handmade book (with the cover and verso text hand scrawled) consists of typed poems, typewriter poems and simple marker drawings. 

My copy is signed to me and also contains the name of its previous owner: poet Earle Birney. 

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay died on this day twenty years ago, at the age of eighty. 

Ian Hamilton Finlay | Homage to Robert Lax

 

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Homage to Robert Lax

Dunsyre, Scotland: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1974

12 pp., 25.5 x 10.5 cm., saddle-stitched

Edition size unknown

"Homage to Robert Lax comprises a poem, printed in red and black on plain white pages, consisting of combinations of four words: Richthofen, Reinhardt, crimson and black.

The work is a response or possibly even a riposte to Robert Lax's poem 'For Ad Reinhardt', a work itself consisting of the two words: black, blue. Lax was a close friend of the American minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt, best known for his 'black' paintings of the 1960s, works composed entirely of different shades of black.

Finlay's homage recalls the layout of many Robert Lax poems in the form of slim vertical columns, giving each syllable its own line, often reproduced from handwriting rather than typeset.

Departing from its source of inspiration, Finlay's poem extends into a theme common in his work and encountered in other of his homage series, that of military iconography. Thus he matches 'Reinhardt' with the name of Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the famed World War I German fighter pilot, also known as the Red Baron and on the cover, juxtaposes the Iron Cross with a second cross of simple compositional design favoured by Ad Reinhardt in many of his paintings.

Finally, where Lax invariably used the simplest colour-words, Finlay invokes poetic associations with 'crimson’.”

Ian Hamilton Finlay | Earthship

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Earthship

Edinburgh, Scotland: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1965

[19] pp., 20 x 31 x 11 cm., boxed accordion fold

Edition size unknown

It’s estimated that fewer than fifty copies of this work were produced, and possibly no more than twenty which included the cardboard shoebox, designed by Alistair Cant. Many of these are held in institutions and the item is rarely available on the secondary market, with a value higher than £4000. 

Finlay's text, running from conjoined sheet to conjoined sheet reads as follows: 'fin / funnel / eye / hold / bow / stern / star / number / root / branch / sail / sap / screw / ihf'.

Kelly Mark | Important Instructions For Changing the World

Kelly Mark

Important Instructions For Changing the World

Winnipeg, Canada: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2001

144 pp., 20 x 18.2 x 1.2 cm.,  softcover

Edition size unknown

This catalogue, to accompany an exhibition curated by James Patten in 2001, features a few photographic and video based work, but primarily documents Kelly Mark's early drawings using Letraset dry transferable lettering. For almost two decades the artist produced abstract visual compositions by applying the Letraset directly onto matte board. Each of the works in the exhibition was the uniform size 28 x 36 cm., but subsequently the drawings have grown into sprawling works, with one (purchased by the National Gallery of Canada), being over thirty-three feet long.

The works share traits in common with Concrete Poetry, but Mark would have balked at such comparisons, preferring to think of them as ‘drawings’, similar to her three-dimensional objects covered in graphite. 

Mark's Letraset Drawings has been reproduced as album cover art, promotional posters, wine bottles, magazine covers and a number of tattoos. 

We own the example featured on the cover of the book [see below], from a trade many years ago. 

"Kelly Mark's Letraset 'drawings' are compositions of meticulously arranged transfer lettering on mount board. The black and white designs are ambiguous and suggest an unseen source material such as aerial mapping, sewing patterns or convoluted text-based bar code. More graphic and formally driven than her other work, they allow her the pleaseure of making and designing in a dynamic and architectural way."

- Terri Whitehead, Art Review Magazine (UK) 

"Kelly Mark's work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving accross page and frame to frame. While the indivivual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organizes flow from from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century's dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favour of engineered renderings of chocolate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter."

- Timothy Comeau, Blog TO

Henri Chopin | The Last Novel of the World (History of a Western or Eastern leader)

Henri Chopin

The Last Novel of the World (History of a Western or Eastern leader)

Paris, France: Edition Cyanuur, 1970

[unpaginated], 20.5 x 20.5 cm., w/ 45 rpm record

Edition of 1150 numbered copies

First published in French as Le Dernier Roman du Monde, this artist book is accompanied a 7" single containing the 1957 audio poem "Peche de nuit", which can be heard on Youtube, here. An additional deluxe version of fifty signed and numbered copies contained three silkscreen prints by Raoul Haussman and a silkscreen print by Bertini, housed in a red stamped paper portfolio. 

The text dates back to 1961 and is the first of three books that Chopin published satirizing dictatorship. 

Available for $525 CDN, from Toronto bookseller Karol Krysik Books, here.  

Gerhard Rühm | i in the mirror

Gerhard Rühm

i in the mirror

Köln, Germany: Galerie Schüppenhauer, 1975

19 x 19 x 19 cm.

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

A sweet bit of object-concrete poetry: the letraset 'i' in the mirror is reflected back as an exclamation mark to itself. The work is signed, titled and numbered in pencil by Rühm.