Relishing the physical in the digital: review of "The New Concrete"

2015-08-20T13:49:00-04:00

Although jaded art critics might argue that there is nothing new under the sun, they are overlooking the fact that there is important work that has been shaded by time. Concrete poetry, an art form that emphasizes the physical arrangement and visual presentation of poetry as much as its literary content, is widely presumed to have reached its zenith in the 1960s, only to become obsolescent in the digital age. "The New Concrete," a collection of contemporary concrete poetry edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, not only proves this assumption wrong, but spotlights a form that is perhaps the inadvertent template to our daily onscreen lives.

"Many of concrete poetry's ideas about language's materiality have ended up being mirrored in our computational systems and processes," argues Kenneth Goldsmith in the book's introductory essay. "When we click on a link, we literally press down on a word. When, in the analogue age, did we ever press down on words?...The Internet itself is entir...

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Relishing the physical in the digital: review of "The New Concrete"