Emmett Williams as Editor

One of the most important books of my early writing life was Emmett Williams’ Anthology of Concrete Poetry. I daresay I am but one writer among many whose writing took off to unexpected locales with this collection. As poet and artist, Williams’ work may require a collected poems, a retrospective–if that can ever be done, so varied was his output–to fully evaluate; as editor, this one book puts him in the avant-garde pantheon. Simply put, Anthology of Concrete Poetry is one of the most influential poetry books of the 20^th century.

I encountered this 340+ page collection of international concrete poetry innumerable times in libraries and bookstores (the book apparently got thorough distribution, unlike much poetry today) before it struck me. But once it hit, it sent me head over heels. That poetry could break not only out of its rows, but could run off the page, typography seemingly run amok, that poems could be without words, could be drawing, could be as much art as poetry, whatever those terms meant (such was the ultimate delight in my confusion), turned my writing world upside down. I have not stood on the same two feet since.

In the early 1980s, when I started collecting all the concrete poetry anthologies I could find, I found better anthologies (I argue Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View is perhaps the strongest book in the field because of its superb introductory essay, “A World Look At Concrete Poetry” and its feisty collection of manifestos), yet the Williams’ anthology will retain its glow because it’s the book I lost my virginity with.