Visual Poetry: Concrete Poetry and Calligrams

Concrete poetry is a form of text art, like ASCII art and typewriter art. It’s also poetry, the genre known as visual poetry. Concrete poetry uses words and drawings to illustrate a poem. The words are in the image. The text itself forms a visible picture on the page, like a silhouette.

Calligram seems to be another word for concrete poetry.… Read the rest

Alice in Wonderland Visual Poem

Standard red-cloth Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (1876 reprint shown here) (interior page). This is the mouse’s tale/tail, an early example of concrete poetry. Its typography echoes that of the hand-drawn tail that Carroll included in his gift manuscript to Alice Liddell. The editorial content and typography of the tale evolved over the course of the Carroll-directed Victorian editions (and posthumous editions) of Wonderland.

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