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The following posts have been extracted from Rebecca Sharp, Peter McKinney and Seamus Ross's 2003 article Visual Text: concrete poetry, hyperfiction and the future of the narrative form.

1. APA: Sharp, R., McKinney, P., & Ross, S. (2007). Visual text: Concrete poetry, hyperfiction and the future of the narrative form. Glasgow: Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), at http://www.ed.ac.uk/iash/vkpublication/Sharp_McKinney_Ross. pdf, accessed, 31 12 2013
2. Chicago: Sharp, Rebecca, Peter McKinney, and Seamus Ross. "Visual text: Concrete poetry, hyperfiction and the future of the narrative form." Glasgow: Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), at http://www.ed. ac.uk/iash/vkpublication/Sharp_McKinney_Ross. pdf, (2007), accessed, 31 12 2013.

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In 1953, the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer published a collection of his works, each only one word in length. He referred to them as constellations and insisted that it was the positioning of the word on the page that was of more importance than the meaning of the word itself. In that same year, in Sweden, Oyvind Fahlstrom wrote a Concrete Poetry Manifesto, however he apparently had no knowledge of Gomringer’s work. Simultaneously and similarly oblivious to the new style emerging in Europe, a group of Brazilian poets, the Noigrandres, were experimenting with poetry as a visual medium, using the object form of the ideogram and would later name this style Poesia Concreta. It was a time of great co-incidence, given the contemporaneous experiments with structure and form in the fields of music and painting, and the recurring use of the word ‘concrete’.

More than that, however, it signalled a global desire to progress beyond traditional linear representation and start manipulating the very substances out of which art is made.

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The concept at the heart of it all, the word as visual image, was far from new. In the early 20th century, Guillaume Apollinaire constructed complex visual collages from letters, words and phrases in Calligrammes, exploring spatial relationships and offering multiple non-linear readings of the text. Similarly at that time, the Futurists, Dadaists and Cubists emphasized semiotics and materiality. Earlier still, the optical poems of the Baroque period made visual forms, such as a labyrinth, from lines of text. An example from 1637 presents an early form of interactive writing. A wedding poem, whose lines take the form of a drinking goblet requires the reader to turn either the paper or their head around in order to follow the text, the resultant dizzy feeling recalling the sensation of having drunk a goblet of wine.

In concrete poetry, however, rather than the visual element being illustrative or incidental, the physicality of language instructs and indeed constitutes the structural form. Poets would actively communicate the space between words and letters, manipulate typography, and introduce design elements borrowed from popular culture.

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Concrete poetry by necessity involves a reduction of language. Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials here and so it is the language itself that is dismantled in terms of form, design and function. Significant also was the new relation to space; no longer an impermeable yet impotent backdrop against which text must rigidly stand, the new writing broke out and into the areas all around the text, allowing the eye to form patterns of its own and the mind to make new, independent inferences. In so undermining the security between word and page, concrete poetry also dislocated word from meaning and furthermore, destabilised the traditional relationship between the text and the reader.

This then heralds one of the most significant features of the style: In order for meaning to be communicated, the reader must actively engage in the text; deciphering its layout and typography, interpreting its shapes and spaces, viewing the work as an object and thereby playing an active role in its creation.

The discoveries made by this genre were at once progressive and contingent on past experiments, with several sub-genres such as kinetic, spatialist, instamatic and code poetry emerging from within. To trace these developments toward the present day is one road into the crux of the issues surrounding current endeavours in digital technology.

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Emmett Williams wrote of concrete poetry, '...It was born of the times, as a way of knowing and saying something about the world now, with the techniques and insights of now.’ (Emmett 1967, vi) The same is true of narratives in the digital realm. However, not content with mere manipulation of the linguistic and graphic qualities of words, in digital media time itself becomes a malleable object, with animation and interaction as actual rather than implied properties. Reader interaction too becomes a more literal aspect of works in new media; it would seem that the Barthesian ‘writerly reader’ has found a new home.

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Advances in new technology and the trend towards non-linearity in various narrative forms have occurred in tandem during postmodern times. The departure from linearity was not the revolution it might have seemed, however, with each new technological development, writers have been able to expand their perspectives and delve deeper into the issues at play. Thus, the multiform story with its multiple plotlines and intertextual connections can be seen to reflect the fragmentation of personal identity in postmodern culture.

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Semiotics and deconstructionist theory have taught us that all beings and objects constitute and are constituted of signs within a vast network of signs, each reliant on the others to gain inferred validation, devoid of meaning beyond this complex construct. What right then does any person have to claim authorship of a text, when its creation is by implication contingent on so much more than just one person’s imagination?

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Williams, Emmett (ed.): An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, (New York, 1967), p.vi.