Minerals
Jess Clancy
Concrete poets experiment with language to push the boundaries of both communication and literature. Shape poetry, which could be considered an early form of concrete poetry, was practiced in Alexandria as far back as the 2nd and 3rd century BCE. Poets would arrange letters into shapes to enhance the poem’s meaning. For my part, I have been influenced by the modern concrete poetry movement that emerged in Brazil during the post war years. Concrete poetry pioneer Mary Ellen Solt wrote that two key characteristics of the form are that it (1) involves a “concentration upon the physical material from which the poem of text is made” (1969, 7), and (2) incorporates “reduced language” (1969, 7). I’m interested in concrete poetry’s unique ability to express complex ideas and multiple meanings at once, while affecting an intuitive understanding in viewers/readers.
Jess Clancy is a writer and singer working out of Perth, Western Australia. Her debut poetry chapbook Compositions: a series of ekphrastic poems on Wassily Kandinsky’s 10 Compositions is being published by Stale Objects dePress. She is currently working on a novel while undertaking a Master of Philosophy specializing in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. Jess occasionally moonlights as an opera and cabaret singer, and has a very fluffy cat named Lucy. She’s thrilled to have a concrete poem included in the fourth edition of ROAM - “Living in the ‘Here and Below.’”