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Summary
Pattern poetry--poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art--has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt. Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures.
This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.
Dick Higgins is an artist, poet, and Research Associate of the School of the Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase. He has been studying pattern poetry since 1968, when he was publisher and designer of Emmett Williams' Anthology of Concrete Poetry, which introduced that type of modern visual poetry to North America. He keeps his studio and library in a former church at Barrytown, New York, in the Hudson River Valley.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
A Short History of Pattern Poetry
CHAPTER TWO
Pattern Poems by Language and Literature
Greek
Latin
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
French
German
Scandinavian
Dutch and Flemish
British and English-language Literatures
Hispanic
Slavic: Polish
Slavic (continued)
Other European Languages and Literatures
CHAPTER THREE
Analogues of Pattern Poetry from Outside the European Languages and Literatures
The Far East
The Citrakavyas and Other Analogues in India
Islamic Literatures
Languages and Literatures in which no Pattern Poems have been Reported or Published
CHAPTER FOUR
Analogues of Pattern Poems
Acrostics, Telestics, and Mesostics
Lapidary Inscriptions
Leonine Verse
Magical Inscriptions and Formulae
Mathematical Arrays and Poems Musical Analogues of Pattern Poetry Proteus Poems
Rebuses and Other Puzzle Poems
Shaped Prose
Sound Poetry
CHAPTER FIVE
The Life and Death of Forms
Labyrinths
Manuscripts
Hypotheses Towards a Theory
APPENDIX I Chinese Patterned Texts
By Dr. Herbert Franke
APPENDIX II
Sanskrit Citrakavyas and the Western Pattern Poems
