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Sometimes image, sometimes word, and often both or neither, concrete poetry emerged out of an era of ground-breaking social and technological developments. Television, nuclear weapons, radio transistors, space travel, and colour photography all combined to drastically alter the representation of the world in the period following the Second World War. While never fully embraced as poetry or as visual art, and often criticized for an aesthetic that veers too closely to commercial design, concrete poetry is an ambitious critical project that strives to break free of national languages and narrow literary traditions. Crossing national and disciplinary borders to highlight connections between poems and a variety of other cultural material, in this book--the first major study of concrete poetry's international character--Jamie Hilder asks fundamental questions about the ways in which the work has been critically received over the past fifty years. Designed Words for a Designed World positions the work of the movement within a new global context, pointing out how its international character predates and initiates some trends now associated with globalization. Hilder places concrete poetry alongside such transformative projects as the modernist city of Brasília, the development of computers, and the rise of conceptual art in order to accentuate its significance as one of the major poetic movements of the twentieth century. Heavily illustrated with examples of poems that exhibit the politically engaged, complex, and varied aspects of the movement, Designed Words for a Designed World illuminates how a group of poets fascinated by the possibilities of a rapidly transforming cultural geography operated within an emerging global imaginary.

Concrete poetry --- History and criticism. --- Poésie concrète --- Histoire et critique.