Franklin Furnace

Concrete Poetry (1988)

Franklin Furnace archivist Matthew Hogan curates a selection of poetic works as part of Concrete Poetry (1988). This exhibition featured books, recordings, and videotapes of concrete poetry—a form of poetry depicted through semantic, visual, and phonetic elements of language. It drew from Franklin Furnace’s artists’ books collection—the nation’s largest repository of the avant-garde book form at the time—and also included materials on loan from anonymous donors. These pieces expand upon the motifs of pop-up poems, constellation poems, and typopoems in Concrete Poetry: The Early Years (1986). This presentation of Concrete Poetry (1988) included poetic works by Augusto de Campos, Emmett Williams, Paul de Vree, Jiri Kola, and Wolfgang Schmidt.