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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.