What Is Concrete Poetry?
Quick answer: Concrete poetry is verse whose visual shape on the page carries meaning: words arranged as wings, rain or falling type. History and how-to inside.
Concrete poetry is poetry in which the visual arrangement of the words on the page is part of the meaning: the poem about wings is shaped like wings, the poem about rain falls down the page, or the typography itself becomes the subject. The layout is not decoration added afterwards; it is a working component you read alongside the words.
The idea is old, George Herbert shaped 'Easter Wings' like two pairs of wings in 1633, and Lewis Carroll curled 'The Mouse's Tale' into a tail in Alice in Wonderland, but the name dates from the 1950s, when Brazil's Noigandres group and Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland launched concrete poetry as an international movement. Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes of the 1910s, poems drawn as fountains, ties and rain, are the bridge between the two eras.
Shaped verse vs strict concrete
It helps to separate two overlapping practices. Shaped (or pattern) poetry arranges an otherwise ordinary poem into a picture: Herbert's wings still scan and rhyme, and you could read them aloud unshaped. Strict concrete poetry, as the 1950s movement defined it, goes further: the spatial arrangement is the primary syntax, and the poem may be untranslatable into speech at all. Gomringer's famous 'silencio' arranges the word silence in a grid around a central gap, and the gap is the poem.
Most contemporary practice sits between the poles: poems where lineation, spacing, columns or scattered words enact their subject, from a poem about a divorce set in two divided columns to typography that disintegrates as a memory fails.
How shape makes meaning
The page becomes a stage. Falling words enact falling; widening lines enact opening; a hole in the text enacts loss more directly than the word 'loss' ever can. A worked micro-example: a poem about a lift conversation could set each awkward exchange one floor lower on the page, with white space for the silent floors between. Nobody needs the trick explained, which is exactly the point: the eye understands before the mind translates.
The risks are equally clear. If the shape merely illustrates ('poem about a cat, shaped like a cat'), the device adds nothing the title did not. And a shape that fights readability, lines sliced into confetti, spirals requiring the page to rotate, spends more attention than it earns. The test is always subtraction: reset the poem as plain stanzas, and if nothing is lost, the shape was wallpaper.
Writing one, practically
Start with a subject that has inherent shape, movement or absence: rain, stairs, a scar, an emptying house, a flight path. Draft the words first in plain lines until the language is strong, then experiment with arrangement; weak words in a clever shape stay weak. Work in a tool that gives you spacing control, and check the poem survives both printing and screen display, since concrete poems are fragile travellers between formats.
Be careful with submissions: contest and journal portals that strip formatting will flatten your poem into gibberish, so favour PDF submissions where allowed, or keep a version whose shape survives plain text. When shape and language genuinely work together, the result scores well on creativity, the visual wit is instantly visible to any judge, but the language must hold up once the surprise fades.
What poets can take from this
- Choose subjects with built-in shape, motion or absence; abstractions rarely reward the treatment.
- Perfect the words as plain text first, then shape them; the layout cannot rescue weak lines.
- Apply the subtraction test: if the poem loses nothing reset as normal stanzas, drop the shape.
- Prefer shapes that enact meaning (falling, dividing, eroding) over shapes that merely illustrate the topic.
- Check your poem survives the formats it will travel through: print, screen, and submission portals.
- Study Herbert's 'Easter Wings', one Apollinaire calligramme and Gomringer's 'silencio' as the three poles of the form.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about something disappearing, a glacier, a signal, a parent's memory, in which words physically thin out, spread apart or drop away down the page as the subject fades.
Questions
What is the difference between concrete poetry and shape poetry?
Shape poetry arranges a readable poem into a picture of its subject; strict concrete poetry makes the visual arrangement the poem's primary grammar, sometimes beyond reading aloud. In everyday use the terms overlap, with concrete as the umbrella.
Who invented concrete poetry?
Shaped poems go back centuries, to George Herbert and earlier Greek pattern poems. The named movement began in the early 1950s with Eugen Gomringer in Europe and the Noigandres group (the de Campos brothers and Décio Pignatari) in Brazil.
Can concrete poems be read aloud?
Some can, shaped poems like 'Easter Wings' read perfectly well, while strict concrete works may exist only for the eye. Many poets prepare a spoken adaptation, but the page version remains the real poem.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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