Concrete Poetry

As illustrated in one of my previous blogs about Thomas Allen's 'Pulp Fiction', books can take on many shapes and forms, both 2D and 3D. Here again is another interesting and inventive example of how works of poetry, can become interactive and take on a different form.

The Artist Book "Concrete Poetry" was designed & printed in the Edition + Artist Book Studio in 1996. This book has a sculptural figure that resembles a book, which has a surreal feel about it but still opens and shuts like an everyday book. Its triangular shape can still open out like a normal book, but can also change its structure to resemble shapes. The artist book is not meant to be handled as a normal reading book, but instead with white cotton gloves in the presence of others, i think you can see why.

Play, interaction and movement often disrupts our common experience of reading, as does non-linear text. Bernadette Crockford’s Concrete poetry 1996, with its origami-like folds, opens like a flower to reveal text that follows the paper creases. The reader must turn the book to read, playing with different combinations of sentences along different folds, and making up a different poem each time the book is read.

To come to some sort of conclusion, i think that the subject matter of books ought to determine the design of the book they are inscribed in. In this case, poems are emotive, generate feeling and reaction, so by designing a book where the shape generates a similar response seems to work well with its content.