Once Again, Paperback

Concrete Poetry has been growing in many countries, from Brazil to Japan, and especially in England and Europe. Its ancestry goes back to pre-historic picture writing and the anagrams of early Christian monks; it has affinities with the oriental ideogram, and, in our century, with Apollinaire's Calligrammes, the work of Klee and Schwitters, and the experiments in visual form of Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and the Dadaists and Surrealists. Once Again is not so much an anthology, though it includes the work of 54 poets from 10 countries, as a group presentation, designed to be read as a consecutive visual happening. It has been assembled by Jean-François Bory, an editor of the Paris magazine Approches and the author of Plein Signe, Height Texts 1 and other Concrete books. Bory has provided an introduction which traces the history of the movement and analyzes its aesthetic. He also comments on individual poems.