Typography, Page Layout and Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry is a genre in which words and letters that transmit the written content have equal presence as the content itself. When a text is transmitted onto a page, the way it is transmitted change and diversify its meaning. Typography, which makes language visible on page, makes arrangements of letters, words, spaces on a page; it transfers text to page. Page layout and typography on conventional poetry looks ordinary, focuses on reading and is “silent”, while in concrete poetry it is active —and in some cases, dominant. Concrete poetry is a transdisciplinary genre that has a potential to give birth to new products in which content comes into existence together with form, poetic language collide with graphic language and meanings are collated to create new. Concrete poetry became popular after 1900's and the strongest examples were seen as part of Futurism and Dada art movements; it is a genre that produced works that are as significant to literature and poetry as to graphic design and typography. The poets and typographers who broke the linearity in the very nature of letterpress and typesetting have given a new perspective to the art of type and poetry. Today, the metal type and letter press technology left its place to “virtual” pages, keyboard and mouse which mimic that technology. The emerging desktop publishing technologies and widespread of word processing software, made it possible to work with type. It is significant to take another look at concrete poetry at this age of fast developing computer technologies to break the “virtual” linearity that is forced by word processor software and page layout.