Concrete poetry uses visual layout as part of meaning. Learn its history from Mallarme through the Noigandres group to Augusto de Campos, key works, and how it shapes digital art today.
In 1897, the French poet Stephane Mallarme published a poem called Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard ("A throw of the dice will never abolish chance"). The poem spread across eleven pages of a book in varying type sizes, with words scattered across the page at different angles and positions. Mallarme insisted that the spacing was not decorative. The blank spaces on the page, he wrote, were "substantive elements of composition." For the first time, a poet had argued that the visual arrangement of words on a page was not a container for meaning but meaning itself. Sixty years later, poets on three continents would take this idea and turn it into a movement.
Concrete poetry is poetry in which the visual layout of the text is an inseparable part of the poem's meaning. The arrangement of words on the page, their size, their color, their spatial relationship to each other and to the blank space around them, all carry meaning that cannot be separated from the words themselves. A concrete poem cannot be read aloud and retain its full meaning. It must be seen. The term "concrete" was borrowed from concrete art, the postwar movement that rejected representation in favor of pure geometric form, and it signals the same intention: the poem is not about something. It is something.
This entry covers what concrete poetry is, how it emerged simultaneously in Brazil, Switzerland, and Sweden in the early 1950s, which poets defined it, and how it continues to influence digital art and graphic design in 2026.
A concrete poem treats language as material. Words are not vehicles for narrative or emotion in the conventional sense. They are objects with shape, weight, color, and spatial presence. The poet arranges them on the page the way a painter arranges forms on a canvas. The reader does not simply read left to right, top to bottom. The reader scans, circles back, notices patterns, and absorbs the visual structure as part of the semantic content.
The Noigandres group, the Brazilian poets who gave the movement its theoretical foundation, used the term "verbivocovisual" to describe this quality. The word, coined by Augusto de Campos, fuses "verbal," "vocal," and "visual" into a single concept. A concrete poem operates on all three registers at once. The words carry verbal meaning. The arrangement produces vocal rhythms when read aloud. And the visual structure communicates meaning that neither the words nor the sound alone can convey.
The key distinction is between concrete poetry and visual poetry more broadly. Visual poetry, as scholar Johanna Drucker has noted, can refer to any poem that pays attention to visual arrangement, a tradition as old as writing itself, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to medieval illuminated manuscripts. Concrete poetry is more specific. It refers to the international movement that emerged in the 1950s and committed itself to a particular set of principles: brevity, spatial organization, the ideogram as compositional model, and the rejection of the linear verse line as the primary unit of poetry. Read more about this distinction in Nancy Perloff's edited volume Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology at Monoskop.
Mallarme's Un coup de des (1897) is the most frequently cited precursor, but the lineage runs through several other figures. Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918) arranged words into visual shapes: a poem about rain in the shape of falling water, a poem about a tie in the shape of a necktie. Ezra Pound's Cantos, begun in 1915, used the ideogrammic method, juxtaposing fragments of text from different languages and traditions to create meaning through spatial association rather than linear argument. e.e. cummings broke syntax and scattered words across the page in poems like r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r (1923), where the letters of "grasshopper" are disassembled and reassembled as the insect itself seems to leap. The Italian Futurists, particularly Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, experimented with typographic layout in the 1910s, using varying fonts and sizes to simulate the sounds of battle in works like Carlo Carra's Atmospheric Swirls: A Bursting Shell (1914).
Concrete poetry emerged independently in three places at almost the same time. In 1952, three poets in Sao Paulo, Augusto de Campos, his brother Haroldo de Campos, and Decio Pignatari, formed a group they called Noigandres, a word borrowed from Pound's Cantos that puzzled literary scholars. They began publishing a magazine of the same name. In 1953, Augusto de Campos completed poetamenos, a series of poems inspired by Anton Webern's "Klangfarbenmelodie" (tone-color melodies), using color to direct reading and designate word themes. He later said he had wanted to use "luminous letters which could automatically switch on and off as in street advertisements" but could not afford them, so he used colors instead.
In the same year, 1953, the Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer published his first book of Konstellationen (constellations) while working as secretary to Max Bill, director of the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. Gomringer's poems were short, spatial arrangements of single words that the reader could approach from any direction. And in Stockholm, the Brazilian-born Swedish poet Oyvind Fahlstrom wrote his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry. None of these three groups knew about each other at first. The meeting that launched the international movement occurred in 1955, when Pignatari visited Ulm and met Gomringer. Read the full history at UbuWeb.
In 1958, the Noigandres group published their "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" in the fourth issue of their magazine. The document, signed by Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Decio Pignatari, laid out the movement's theoretical foundation. It described concrete poetry as "a product of a critical evolution of forms" and declared that "the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed." The poem, they argued, should be understood as "a space-time structure instead of mere linear temporistical development." The ideogram concept, drawn from Pound and from Eisenstein's theory of montage, was central: meaning is produced through the "direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements." Read the full text of the Pilot Plan at University of Dallas repository.
In 1956, the First National Exhibition of Concrete Art in Sao Paulo included concrete poetry alongside concrete painting and sculpture. In 1962, the Noigandres poets published the final issue of their magazine and regrouped under the name Invencao. The movement had established itself internationally, with exhibitions and publications across Europe and the Americas.
Augusto de Campos has continued to push concrete poetry into new media. From 1990 onward, he has presented poems on electronic billboards, in video text, neon signs, holograms, lasers, and computer graphics. His Poemobiles (1974) and Caixa Preta (1975), created in collaboration with artist Julio Plaza, were poem-objects: movable, interactive works that combined text with physical form. This trajectory from the printed page to digital and electronic media has made de Campos a bridge between the analog origins of concrete poetry and contemporary digital art practices.
De Campos is the last surviving founder of the Noigandres group and its most prolific practitioner. His poetamenos (1953) established the visual and spatial vocabulary of concrete poetry. His later works, including Viva Vaia (1949/1979) and the digital poems of the 1990s onward, demonstrate a continuous evolution from page to screen. In February 2026, as he approached his 95th birthday, the Luciana Brito Galeria in Sao Paulo mounted pos poemas, an exhibition of his most recent work. The show presented poems as "visual and spatial experiences: letters become images, colors take on semantic roles, and the graphic arrangement establishes rhythms and tensions." Works like Esquecer (2017) and Vertade (2021) demonstrate his continued experimentation: in Vertade, he swaps the letters D and T in the Portuguese words for "truth" and "lie," creating what the gallery described as "a semantic short-circuit that jolts the viewer's trust in conventional reading." Read more at Luciana Brito Galeria.
Gomringer's Konstellationen (1953) were short, spatial arrangements of words that the reader could approach from any direction. His poem avenidas (1952) reads: "avenidas / avenidas y flores / flores / avenidas y flores / y una mujer / y una mujer y avenidas y flores y una mujer y un admirador." The words spiral outward, accumulating meaning through repetition and spatial arrangement rather than narrative progression. Gomringer called his poems "constellations" because, like stars, the words form a pattern that can be read from multiple angles. His 1955 manifesto From Line to Constellation described the transition from the poetic line to the visual poem: "the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object to be both seen and used."
A Benedictine monk who is a contender for the godfather of British concrete poetry, Houedard (known as dsh) produced typestract poems using a typewriter. His works, loaned from the Lisson Gallery, were featured in the 2025 exhibition Dom Sylvester Houedard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain at the Estorick Collection in London. The exhibition also included works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival, and Bob Cobbing, positioning Houedard within a broader British concrete poetry scene that developed in parallel with the Brazilian and Swiss movements.
Though he predates the movement by half a century, Mallarme's Un coup de des (1897) is the foundational text. The University of Iowa Libraries' Sackner Archive, which holds over 75,000 objects related to concrete and visual poetry, recognized Mallarme's poem as the key to the development of visual poetry. The 2025 exhibition A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive at the Main Library Gallery traced how this single poem influenced art and design over 128 years, from laser-etched plexiglass panels to knit sweaters with dice for buttons. Read more at University of Iowa Libraries.
The Brazilian-born Swedish poet wrote his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry in 1953, the same year Gomringer published his constellations and de Campos completed poetamenos. Fahlstrom's manifesto argued for a poetry that incorporated painting, music, and performance, pushing concrete poetry beyond the page into multimedia. His later work as a visual artist, including large-scale paintings and installations, extended the concrete poetry impulse into the gallery space.
Concrete poetry's influence extends well beyond literature. The movement's insistence that visual form is meaning has shaped graphic design, typography, advertising, and digital art. The principle that text can be image and image can be text underlies much of contemporary visual culture, from logo design to social media graphics.
The 2025 exhibition at the Estorick Collection in London, which paired Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry with Dom Sylvester Houedard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain, demonstrated the continuing relevance of concrete poetry to contemporary audiences. The show had, according to reviewers, "the feel of a contemporary installation work with texts enlarged to cover significant expanses of wall." Read the review at Fine Art Ruminations.
In 2026, the Toshio Shibata survey exhibition Concrete Poetry at Gallery Luisotti (June 20 to August 1, 2026) borrowed the term for a photographer who has spent over forty years examining the relationship between natural environments and human infrastructure. Shibata's photographs, which transform engineered structures into compositions that resonate with abstraction and minimalism, embody the concrete poetry principle: form is meaning, and spatial arrangement is content.
Concrete poetry connects to typography, the art and design of arranging type, which shares the concern with text as visual form. It relates to calligraphy, where the visual quality of writing is itself the subject. It overlaps with collage in its use of juxtaposition and fragmentation. The movement's roots in Futurism connect it to Futurism, and its postwar experimental spirit links it to conceptual art, where the idea takes precedence over the material form. For broader context, read our post on modern versus contemporary art.
The best way to experience concrete poetry is to hold the books. The spatial arrangement of words on a page does not fully translate to a screen, where text reflows and resizing distorts the poet's intended layout. The Sackner Archive at the University of Iowa Libraries, donated in 2019, holds over 75,000 objects related to concrete and visual poetry and is accessible to researchers. The Estorick Collection in London has exhibited British and Italian concrete poetry alongside its permanent collection of modern Italian art. For Augusto de Campos's recent work, the Luciana Brito Galeria in Sao Paulo mounted his pos poemas exhibition in early 2026.
If you want to trace the history, start with Mallarme's Un coup de des, then move to Gomringer's Konstellationen, and end with de Campos's digital poems. You will see the same principle stretched across more than a century, each time serving a different expressive purpose. For more, read our entries on typography and calligraphy, or explore our guide to how to read a painting to learn more about visual analysis techniques that apply to concrete poetry as much as to fine art.
Discover other art terms you might be interested in
Bio art uses living organisms as artistic medium, from bacteria to genetically modified organisms. Learn its history from Joe Davis to Eduardo Kac, key artists, and ethics.
Body art uses the human body as canvas, medium, or subject. Learn its history from Yves Klein to Marina Abramovic, key artists, and defining works.
Endurance art is performance that tests physical and mental limits. Learn its history from Chris Burden and Tehching Hsieh to Marina Abramovic, key works, and contemporary practice in 2026.
Read more about this topic on our blog
