Often I think that Concrete poetry’s been trapped on a Mobius strip. Perhaps this poetry is lost in some box canyon, at a dead end. True, there is some very beautiful and provocative work to be found on occasion. Current practitioners of Concrete poetry display vigorous imagination in their poems. Yet, the poetry, I fear, like the Galapagos marine iguana, faces rapid and complete extinction with each and every passing issue of some dominating conservative or even progressive magazine. The Golden Age of Concrete, the 1960s, produced a visual poetry of great diversity, innovation and purpose. Allow me to mention, for instance, Ian Hamilton Finley who moved from a written Concrete to Concrete sculptures, silent monuments and into his Concrete garden; Ronald Johnson who refined his Concretions into a word music; and d a levy who utilized Concrete’s potential to further his political agenda. The mimeo machine and photocopier became ready tools to enhance and further the work of classic masters like Eugen Gomringer and Augusto de Campos and their primordial Concrete. Innovation and variation were accepted and anticipated. Innovation was expected. And then, Disco, and the fashion of poetry shifted and, for various reasons, Concrete slipped into a proletarian, outsider form of poetry. Current practitioners have rediscovered the poetical potential of Concrete and a great reinvention of visual poetry, a Second Coming, has begun slowly crawling towards Bethlehem. Now years into this renaissance, after resurrecting and scrutinizing the master poets, like bp Nichol, visual poetry is ripe to become innovative once more. What might this innovation be? I suggest here what might be ways to compose and consider The New Concrete.

First and foremost The New Concrete must move beyond eye candy and become a truly readable, performable form of poetry. The antique way of reading narratives and abstract narratives and any premeditated form of reading should be abandoned. Reading aloud, the enactment of the Concrete poem, must become the fashion of engagement with this multi-faceted, re-invented form of Concrete. Concrete must have the ability to transform, translate and release its mute character into spontaneous aural Concrete.

The New Concrete is aural Concrete. There is no silent reading. But New Concrete is not a sound poetry because New Concrete is not a score. New Concrete is read as a spontaneous improvisation founded on any poet’s ability to translate a Concretion into an aural constellation. The poet/reader interprets and enunciates Concretions. Not the abbreviated haiku, minimalist form of Concrete now exemplified widely, The New Concrete is a complex Concrete designed for aural improvisational impact and not Zen. To achieve aurally The New Concrete must become an expressionistic word collage that draws from all arts yet remains anchored, slavishly to words. Activated New Concrete opens a portal to the poet’s imagination releasing a picnic poetic Concrete concert.

The notion of a beginning and a conclusion or end are standards that must pass into antiquity. The convention of left to right, top down reading has lost its value. The New Concrete has multiple entry points. The poem may be engaged from any point, bottom, top, and side. Composed of active color, stuff, the newspaper, film, scholarship, cursive text, images of Lara Croft, paint, symbols, the Gods, word fragments, rewritten text, cartooned letters, 186 languages, written in magic marker, all juxtaposed, symbolic and interpretive and shepherded by duende and pixies, The New Concrete excites the poet and/or reader to verbalize meaningful poetry and glossolalia. For instance, this simplistic example: A black and white image of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, colored yellow, appears within a New Concrete poem and next to it is drawn, in supermarket magic marker, a painful letter O. How to read it? A New Concrete improvisational translation might be:

I am enNuNciating the Sea of yellow Dracula’s o. OH Belle Bella Bells Bells, Balls of Dracula of O are Os! OO)OO)Oo0o0oO)lablugosaO)Oo0o! Yellow O! moth and month of Dracula, my tortured O sings for you awaits you yellow Dracula school bus and canary and sun and chicken fat Bella you addict of Os Rock and Roll.

The sound generated by New Concrete depends upon the content and the state of the poet’s imagination cued to improvise at the moment the poet engages her own poem. The poem is only a form of map, which might, or might not, suggest areas the poet could engage. And after all, the poet places the images within the map. Parameters and themes can be set and/or abandoned. Ah, the children of the night, what music they make. The multiplicity of images, strings of vowels, interpretations, etc., results in an instant ad-lib aural reading, an improvisational rendering. Meaning, the pompous form, is relegated to antique text.

The poet’s aural potential and the immediate creation in translation of The New Concrete is a great leap forward in the arena of Concrete poetry. Meditation is out. By the same token, listening to New Concrete is an other experience. One does not sit back and wait for the profundities of the academy. A New Concrete audience relishes the working out of repetitions and spontaneous creations, riffs, refrains, distorted and ordinary sounds and words, phonetic fragments, syllables and spoken letters and real antique dictionary words emerging as an improvised constellation cuneiform New Concrete aural string poetry. Without break or space reading The New Concrete is a form of sonic cuneiform. There are mistakes. There are dull, fumbling sections. I have not been to any poetry reading where this has not been the case. I say, in The New Concrete, the dull, fumblings are challenges to innovation and should be incorporated in the aural New Concrete cuneiform translated presentation. Speech reading, speech-ticks and various stumblings should be invited, invented and incorporated into The New Concrete concretions.

The New Concrete also extends the creative process beyond formalized, straightened, margined, uniformed, typed in Times New Roman, poems on the page. Recently, I had occasion to view a set of early drafts of several poems written by Robinson Jeffers. The poems were hand-written, meaningful scribbles. Scrawled words and phrases that were finding their way into larger units, which were cut back and slashed by dark pencil, formed the poem pieces. The text was alive. It struggled to locate the poetic essence. It sought poetic perfection. It was text in the creative process that was striving to become a poem. I was interested, at that time, for clues to the final form. However, instead, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the manuscripts as New Concrete poems, which could be read with refrains and repetitions and with varying levels of poetry, some of which might not be perfect and that imperfection could be perfect, a perfect imperfection. And also recently I viewed Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnigans Wake notebooks. Joyce’s habit was to harvest his own handwritten notes from his notebooks and incorporate his selections into his prose. Those familiar with Joyce’s notebooks know that he used various colored pencils to cross-out sections, lines, riffs, chunks, of his material as he harvested. The notebooks, loaded with color cross-outs are, New Concrete. Both these authors, and all authors who work via notes, drafts and notebooks, who rework drafts with arrows heading this way and that, with expurgated lines or words are engaged in The New Concrete poetic experience.

What New Concrete proposes is a re-imagining of the poem beyond its previously imagined conclusion, that being the frozen entity chained to the Siberia of the page. The, so-called, finished or published poem is a result of outside impositions. This notion, this convention of finality should be discarded in exchange for liberating a poet’s own work from type, meaning, from the embalming of poetry by editors or publishers of magazines and books. The importance of a clean, completed poem is relegated to history.

The New Concrete proposes that what was once a fair text or complete poem is the point from which to embark upon visual poetry or a re-manuscripting of the poem. The fair text, the frozen text, the formally complete, finished poem becomes the material from which The New Concrete embarks, develops, expands, grows, and progresses into the form of poem that can be read using improvisational techniques.

The New Concrete proposes that all poets should be concretists. With blue, red, yellow marker, with ink and elegant paper, the poet shall take the frozen creation and re-invent it via visual poetics. The caligrification of the poem includes all collage techniques and a re-first drafting of the poem by-hand, cursively to incorporate the mind spirals and leaps only occurring when the poet is in the midst of her imaginative, creative act.

The New Concrete refuses a preordained interpretation. It is not a Polaroid snapshot or a statue for the tomb of Rames the Great. There must be cross-outs, and letter exaggerations that can only be accomplished by that human hand on paper. The poem becomes a work of active and variable poetry. And no it does not lose its definition as poem. Once the notion of static poetry is recognized and abandoned the re-manuscripting of the poem occurs and with this re-germination possibilities for an open Concrete open and re-variant texts occur. Color is introduced, image and various forms of translations appear, and magic, meaningful noise, size and the pitch of the voice and the temperament of the poet comes into play. Play is introduced. Slack is a tool. Simply, the written text is transformed into New Concrete, where lines, narration and the frozen nature of the antique poem are transmogrified into visual text by introducing endless possibility, change, chance, recreation and the notion that as a Concrete poem it must be read aloud in the fashion of The New Concrete. The best place to exhibit such colorful, outrageous, gaudy, beauty is on the Web. The New Concrete should be written to circulate via the Web only. The Web demands such a poem, a poem of image, color, animation, explosion, impulse and improvisation.

Finally The New Concrete poem, with stretched word, pounded and swooned and reshape lines, splattered with color and colored like a coloring book, extended, expanded, collaged with images from Vogue, metamorphosed, reinvented sheet by re-manuscripted sheet, becomes a poem of cartoon. The New Concrete is not the haiku single sheet simple, Zen Concrete or one of two manipulated letters, but a disconnected serial poem and a Cartoon, a Poemtoom, a Poetoom, a Carpoem, a Cartoem. The New Concrete is a comic book of frames of poetry. The poems rise and fall, fly like superheroes, and crash. And there is room for Bizzaro poetry. Characters can speak, sing, blab and blah! the poetry. Letters speak of themselves. Color has a form of voice. Dracula and duende meet, seek, merge, and inhabit a space opened by the innovations of The New Concrete.