I Hope these guys Work Night Jobs

WTF is this shit?

Poetry for the thought impaired? Nah, as I have learned in my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Degree Program" this crud is "concrete" poetry. Concrete poetry features a "strong, explicit and formal cohesion between the physical shape of the poem and its content." The poem is laid out in some sense that reflects upon the content of the poem. The concrete poem is normally minimal (it must fit inside its form) and restrained (the tight, yet often varying, line requirements of these poems limit what can be done verbally. In Jonathan Raban's The Society of the Poem ( 1971) he claims that concrete poems:

Stand in relation to the central body of contemporary English and American poetry much as the sacking-and-scrubbed-deal Health Food restaurant does to the steak house. They self-consciously exemplify the virtues of impoverishment and deprivation.(Huk 117)

I go further and say it's poetry for the thought impaired as it gives a simple and confining (in at least two sense) definition of what the poem is up to. The thought impairment resides in the poet who is looking for a "trick" with which to give their poem some impact that it does not have as a merely lingual construct. I don't mean to argue that layout tricks can't be done well – some e.e. cummings (obviously someone with issues about the rules of lingualism) is very.. well, clever (and it falls short of being completely concrete by some margin). But usually clever in the perjorative sense that one uses the word in describing something done by a creepy but imaginative child. And the concrete poetry that actually forms the shape of something? At least cummings usually used his layout trickery in the hunt for ways to read poetry they way he would have liked it read, But in a case like that you get something more akin to a clever greeting card than poetry. Sure, a short smattering of sibilant alliteration, at least two internal rhymes and a lovely stump of punctuation. These might or might not be elements of poetry, if used correctly. But the form looks silly and distracts from whatever message the poem is trying to give. Perhaps part of the problem with this concrete approach is that poems are multidefinitional and these simple forms (and then the dualistic black/white) call for simpler definitions. This particular poem might actually be seen as clever – it isn't "about" the tree, it is in fact "by" the tree. A lesser poet, one who can't adopt a third-person voice, might have struggled for the form of an owl (well, perhaps not, since that form is more complicated) And thus a sixth-grade level of sophistication is neatly achieved).

The form determines the words, and not in a good way. In a Haiku or Villanelle the form also determines the words, but it starts with the words and ends with the words. In the case of concrete poetry you are really placing a carpenter's mold over words – and giving each input equal value. Certainly this chips away at the "Poetic" nature of the result?

The proof that it is a trick can be seen by adding one more layer of affect (stupidity?) on top of the thing. Imagine someone thought, "hey, let's go ahead and add minimalism to this silly mix." Well, someone did as "Letter of Resignation" by nick-e melville (a "poet" who obviously stole at least one move from the cummings playbook) proves. But this is an advertising approach or a joke, or child's play and not poetry. The point is that each "trick" layer you apply to poetry seems to somehow alter the nature of the result in some way that moves it away from poetry and to sloganeering or mere cleverness. It's a rum trick (and plenty more of it, if you care to, here