In 1999 David Jackson of Yale’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese orga-
nized a symposium in honor of the seventieth birthday of the Brazilian poet
Haroldo de Campos. Known chiefly as one of the founders of the Concrete
movement, Haroldo went on to produce important theoretical works as well
as what I call here “Concrete prose.” I wrote a paper for the occasion and
then enlarged it to include contemporary U.S. poets whose work moves in
similar directions. The essay was published in the special issue on the nine-
ties, edited by Thomas Gardner for Contemporary Literature (2001).
9
The Invention of “Concrete Prose”
Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias and After
[Gertrude Stein’s] prose is a kind of concrete poetry with justi¤ed margins.
David Antin, “Some Questions about Modernism”The language act is also an act of survival. Word order = world order.
Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, “The Search for Non-Narrative Prose”On the face of it, Concrete poetry and prose poetry (or poetic prose) would
seem to represent two extremes, with the lyric (lineated text framed by white
space) as middle term. The Concrete poem is, by common de¤nition, a visual
constellation in which, as the “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” published
by the Noigandres poets of Brazil put it, “graphic space acts as structural
agent.”^1 Indeed, in the words of Dick Higgins, the Concrete poem charac-
teristically “de¤nes its own form and is visually, and if possible, structurally
original or even unique.” And further, unlike the Renaissance pattern poem
or the Apollinairean calligramme—forms that are in many ways its precursor—
the Concrete poem’s “visual shape is, wherever possible, abstract, the words
or letters within it behaving as ideograms.”^2 But unlike, say, Ezra Pound’s
ideograms in The Cantos, the text from which the Noigandres poets of Bra-
zil took their name,^3 the Concrete poem is usually short: “its most obvious
feature,” as Rosmarie Waldrop puts it, “is reduction.... both conventions
and sentence are replaced by spatial arrangement.”^4 “We do not usually see
words,” Waldrop remarks, “we read them, which is to say we look through