ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the roots, growth, flourishing and cross-pollination of different phases of ‘concrete poetry,’ over time and space. It explores the geographical and temporal transmission of ‘untranslatable’ concrete poetry, and the consequent, necessary reinvention of translation in the process. The book offers a variety of perspectives and instances of scholarship and practice on some continents, extending from the Americas through Europe to Asia. It looks at the translations that have occurred as concrete poetry has been reassessed and integrated into the digital poetics of the 21st century. The book aims to relate the pleasurable playfulness of concrete poetics to its manifestation in poetry more generally; nevertheless, the conceptual wittiness of concrete poetry does seem to demand particularly inventive responses from those who seek to reconstitute it anew in a different language.
