in
falling
leaves
summer
memories
The art of creating a visual response to a piece of writing is known as a reverse ekphrasis ie the inverse of the centuries old poetic form of ekphrasis.
The most well known example being Charles Demuth 'Figure 5' based upon a W C Williams Poem.(see link in notes above)
EMAGI is a recent (fun) variation of a reverse ekphrasis derived by the advent of the widespread use of hand held digital communication devices -where words in digital symbols /letters can be represented as a shape
and uses a poet's poem to inspire the digitised 'drawing'
Edward Thomas 'HAYMAKING'
\\///
//\\
//\\
//\\
.. ..\\///
...... //\\
.. ... //\\
.......//\\
the
high
sun,
soft green,
the stem twisting,
a silver sheen, scented
breezes played, beneath
the summer sun is aglow.
the midday heat begins
to grow, and breathes
its oil into the flow,
while shadows
gently flow, to
wait in quiet
shade, no
resisting.
green
it spun.
to
surrounded by loneliness
like
trees
we live
in a forest
surrounded
by so many
others
yet
remain isolated entities in a
growing crowd in the forest of life
once we held a single
quiet pulse—until the break
struck like shattered glass,
edges cutting through the silence;
pieces fell in crooked angles,
no longer fitting into place~
the heart
split
in
sharp
shards
rising
in slow
circles of
morning glow,
the spiral lifts
from the pond’s quiet
mirror, turning toward
the leaf’s bright
edge— a soft
curl of new
day learning
how to
breathe light
into the
waking world
Library
Off to bury
Minds, spending time
Reading, soaring to imaginative levels
Harvesting curious ideas, challenging the devil
Experiencing many worlds, action always in a swirl
Around their setting, where the conflict can be upsetting
But when, the story comes to an end, happiness wins over the sin
If not in a hurry, destiny, visit the library, where the imagination will come alive, and cry
A good book is the way, to carry a day, under the sky blue, enjoying fantasies that are cool
---------------------------------------------------------------
Books
by
Angela Greenfield
---------------------------------------------------------------
Foreword with inspirational quote:
"If the wind will not serve, take to the oars."
-- Latin Proverb
List of Chapters
Prologue
Words upon words written in paragraphs. Prose style bets as the best style. Words satiate your curiosity. Words carry meanings . . . not always literal!
Most books harvest seasons of knowledge. Other books dim your brain while dimming your destiny.
Ripped page within this:
----------------------------------------//////
Some books print their messages in black and white. Other books scribble their words in red, white and blue.
Books never crash, books can only burn. Each book whispers its message.
Epilogue
Author Bio
I love curling up with a great book
especially when It is gently raining
What it lacks in physical exercise
it makes up for in thought reframing
I can go anywhere and do anything
to see how those different folks live
Or ride in a rocket to the farthest star
full of curiosity just to see what gives
I can take part in a harvest of blue
as the blueberries drip from my lips
Or contemplate if my future destiny
includes sealing wax & sailing ships
I hope to carry all that I’ve learned
in my mind until I have passed away
But lest I forget this important fact
that carpe diem means seize the day!
blue harvest dusk
gathers at the book’s edge~
I carry its questions
forward, each page leaning
into whatever waits
to be read
FLOWING GRACE
In faith’s nourishing soil
Fresh hope blossoms
And her ripe fruits
Drip sweet juices
Of flowing grace
That God
Sends
Us
Hello Today
My blinds read aglow___|
as if illuminated loose leaf__|
I'm drawing the tasseled strings_|
with a hearty anticipatory hopeful _ |
Precious Lord what might today bring_ |
When Things are going great for an extended Period of time,
Watch Out! Something's Bad is about to happen.
It's Due.
Something
Old
New
Borrowed
Red, White and Blue
()
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ___ ]
Happy 250th Birthday America
sweat fertilizes teardrops
urine soil capture to
our & angels fashion
flush dissolves while double
'
we in bubbles rainbows
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
we flush our urine
sweat fertilizes soil &
dissolves in bubbles
while angels capture teardrops
to fashion double rainbows
Introduction
A concrete poem asks the eye to begin reading before the mind has settled into sentences. From a distance, the page may present an object, motion, boundary, or field; at closer range, individual words complicate that first impression. The pleasure lies in moving between those scales. A design that initially seems playful can hold grief, satire, tenderness, or unease once its language comes into focus.
Reading these works side by side makes their creative choices especially visible. One poet may guide the eye through a clear route, while another may invite several possible starting points. Some writers build a clean silhouette; others rely on gaps, scattered letters, density, symmetry, or typographic disruption. The verbal styles can vary just as widely, from compact lyric utterance to narrative fragments, wordplay, meditation, and dramatic voice. Even when two poets choose a similar subject, their treatment of space can create entirely different pacing and emotional pressure.
Browse the poems in this collection as both poems and visual events. Notice what you understand immediately, what becomes legible only after sustained attention, and what changes when you return to the whole design. Reading beyond the first example reveals how much interpretation is possible within a form whose page is never a neutral container. Comparison also sharpens judgment: it helps readers distinguish an outline that merely identifies a topic from an arrangement that actively contributes tension, emphasis, movement, or surprise. Each community poem offers another answer to the central creative question: what can placement communicate that ordinary lineation cannot?
Reading Guide
Approach each poem in stages rather than rushing directly into its wording. First register the visual field: its density, balance, empty areas, edges, and implied direction. Then follow the language closely, noting whether the arrangement confirms, delays, or unsettles your first impression. Finally, step back and ask how the visual and verbal experiences alter one another. As you read the community poems, this repeated movement between seeing and reading will help you compare artistic decisions without treating visual neatness as the only measure of success.
- Examine the first visual impression. Before reading individual phrases, notice what the page makes you anticipate. That expectation becomes part of the poem's emotional machinery. When comparing examples, ask: does the language fulfill the visual promise, complicate it, or expose it as misleading?
- Trace the reading route. Look for cues that lead the eye downward, outward, inward, around an edge, or across separate clusters. Direction controls suspense and emphasis. Ask: can I tell where to begin, and does uncertainty create productive exploration or merely confusion?
- Attend to white space. Blank areas may suggest silence, distance, rupture, isolation, openness, or withheld language. They are not simply unused page. Ask: what emotional or conceptual work would disappear if these spaces were closed?
- Compare visual density with verbal intensity. A crowded region can feel urgent, trapped, abundant, or noisy; a sparse region may feel fragile or exposed. Ask: where does the poem concentrate words, and does that concentration coincide with its strongest feeling?
- Listen beneath the design. Read the words aloud in a plausible order. Sound reveals whether the poem has rhythm, tonal control, and memorable phrasing independent of its appearance. Ask: does the language remain compelling when the silhouette is no longer visible?
- Notice the relationship between image and subject. Literal agreement can offer clarity, while contrast may create irony or emotional depth. Ask: is the design illustrating what the words already say, or adding a second layer of meaning?
- Study the final point of attention. Closure may occur at the bottom, center, outer edge, or wherever the eye arrives last. Ask: how does that location affect the force of the final word or phrase, and could another route produce a different ending?
Compare several poets' approaches before deciding what the form can accomplish. The most revealing differences often emerge not from the objects represented but from how each poet manages attention, silence, sequence, and rereading.
Writing Tips
In workshop, begin by separating your poem's visual idea from its verbal necessity. A recognizable design can attract attention, but it cannot supply emotional development, precise imagery, or a persuasive voice. Draft with two questions in view: what must the reader see, and what must the reader discover by reading? The strongest work allows those answers to interact rather than making one serve as decoration for the other.
- Choose material with a spatial logic. Subjects involving enclosure, dispersal, ascent, collapse, orbit, growth, division, or repetition often give the page meaningful work to do. Do not select an image only because it is easy to outline. Ask what movement, pressure, or relationship within the subject could become visible.
- Write a verbal core before polishing the design. Gather vivid nouns, active verbs, sensory details, tonal contrasts, and essential statements. This prevents the common beginner mistake of padding an outline with weak phrases merely to fill space. Every word should contribute more than area.
- Design a reading route, not just a perimeter. Decide where attention enters, where it hesitates, and where it should arrive. If several routes are possible, make that multiplicity purposeful. A poem about confusion may reward wandering, while a poem about impact may need a swift, unmistakable path.
- Use white space as an active element. Gaps can enact breath, loss, resistance, distance, or interruption. Test whether each opening intensifies the subject or simply makes the arrangement harder to follow. Empty space is most powerful when the reader feels why language cannot occupy it.
- Let diction resist visual predictability. If the page immediately announces the subject, the words need not repeatedly name or explain it. Use language to introduce memory, conflict, voice, or an unexpected perspective. The design can provide recognition while the poem supplies discovery.
- Revise sound even when reading order is flexible. Check consonance, vowel music, stress, repetition, and awkward clusters. Read every likely pathway aloud. If rearrangement produces accidental monotony or broken syntax, decide whether that friction supports the poem or distracts from it.
- Match pacing to emotional movement. Narrow passages can accelerate or constrict; broad stretches can slow the eye or create expansiveness. Alter word length, spacing, and phrase duration deliberately rather than forcing complete sentences into inconvenient areas.
- Give the speaker a reason to inhabit the design. Voice can keep the poem from becoming a caption. Consider who is speaking, from what position, and under what emotional pressure. A playful, grieving, defiant, instructional, or unreliable speaker will change how the same visual structure is understood.
- Plan an ending that occurs both verbally and visually. The final phrase should do more than occupy the last available corner. It might sharpen the image, reverse an assumption, release tension, or leave a charged absence. Test where the eye naturally stops and whether that stop feels earned.
During revision, print or display the draft at the size readers will encounter. View it from a distance, read it closely, and then read it aloud without looking at the overall design. Simplify forced syntax, replace filler, strengthen sensory language, and clarify any unintended reading routes. Finally, ask another reader where the eye traveled and what changed after the words were understood. Their route may reveal both hidden possibilities and practical obstacles.
Interesting Facts
- A concrete poem can produce two first impressions. From afar, a reader encounters proportion and contour; up close, diction and syntax take over. A memorable piece often creates tension between these distances rather than delivering the same information twice.
- Immediate recognition is not the same as poetic success. A clear visual subject may demonstrate technical control, yet the language still needs resonance. The design attracts the eye; image, voice, sound, and implication give the reader a reason to remain.
- White space can carry more emotional weight than printed text. An opening within a dense field may suggest absence, danger, breath, or separation. Because the eye crosses blankness physically, silence becomes an experience rather than merely a topic.
- The same visual arrangement can support opposing tones. Symmetry may feel harmonious in one poem and oppressive in another; fragmentation may suggest play, injury, memory, or liberation. Meaning depends on the relationship among placement, vocabulary, and voice.
- Reading order becomes a form of interpretation. When several routes are available, readers partly assemble the poem themselves. Experienced poets can use this freedom to create simultaneity or uncertainty, but they provide enough verbal and visual guidance to keep exploration meaningful.
- Sound remains essential even in a strongly visual work. Repeated letters, clipped phrases, internal echoes, and changes in stress can reinforce motion or mood. Reading aloud exposes whether the poem's sonic texture supports its visual energy or has been neglected.
- A collection reveals possibilities that one example cannot. As you browse the community poems, compare how different writers handle scale, legibility, direction, and closure. Variation shows that visual precision and verbal richness need not be pursued in the same way.
Popular Themes
Subject matter matters here because every topic brings its own possible geometry, motion, texture, and emotional distance. The following themes are creative possibilities rather than claims about statistical popularity. Their value lies in how readily visual arrangement can become part of the thinking rather than a frame placed around completed words.
- Nature and weather. Branching, falling, drifting, rippling, blooming, and erosion can influence how language spreads or contracts. A poet can make natural process determine pacing instead of merely describing scenery.
- Love and separation. Nearness, overlap, division, symmetry, and empty space can embody intimacy or estrangement. A familiar emblem becomes more interesting when the words complicate its promise with conflict, memory, or doubt.
- Animals and living creatures. Movement, posture, tracks, wings, shells, and habitats offer visual possibilities. The challenge is to move beyond identification and reveal behavior, vulnerability, personality, or the observer's relationship to the creature.
- Music and sound. Repeated units, rising patterns, pauses, and scattered phrases can suggest rhythm or resonance. Since the page is silent, the contrast between visible pattern and imagined sound can become especially expressive.
- Sports and physical action. Arcs, trajectories, boundaries, impact, speed, and coordinated motion can organize the reading route. The arrangement may capture a decisive instant while the language explores effort, rivalry, teamwork, or disappointment.
- School, learning, and childhood. Letters, diagrams, familiar objects, and playful word arrangements can invite experimentation. Strong poems in this area often preserve accessibility while allowing curiosity, frustration, humor, or discovery to deepen the visual game.
- Celebration and seasonal ritual. Lights, ornaments, gifts, gatherings, and repeated customs lend themselves to patterned presentation. Visual abundance can express delight, while gaps or broken symmetry can acknowledge absence within celebration.
- Conflict, confinement, and release. Compressed text can create pressure, while widening space may suggest escape or disintegration. Here, the reader's physical struggle to move through the words can echo the poem's emotional stakes.
As you read the community poems, compare writers who approach similar subjects. Notice whether they choose resemblance, contrast, movement, or fragmentation, and consider how those choices transform a shared theme into an individual experience.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension is between visual immediacy and verbal duration. The eye may grasp the overall design in an instant, while the language requires time, sequence, and reconsideration. A technically recognizable piece satisfies the first experience; a memorable poem makes the second experience alter it. Its words do not merely label what the page has already shown. They introduce an emotional complication, a hidden scale, an opposing voice, or a movement that cannot be absorbed at a glance.
Structure feels necessary when placement performs part of the poem's thinking. Compression may make a speaker sound trapped; scattering may turn recollection into fragments; a narrowing path may intensify dread or concentration. Editors and attentive readers notice when changing the arrangement would damage meaning, pacing, or tone. They also notice when the layout is interchangeable decoration. The test is not simply whether the design is attractive, but whether spatial decisions create consequences: delayed recognition, competing reading routes, charged silence, accumulating pressure, or an ending whose location matters.
Common weaknesses arise when the desire to complete a pattern overrules the demands of language. Filler words soften intensity, distorted syntax calls attention to construction, and repeated explanation leaves the reader with nothing to infer. Mechanical regularity can drain life from a subject unless rigidity is itself expressive. At the opposite extreme, uncontrolled scattering may create difficulty without purpose. Predictable imagery is another risk, particularly when a familiar visual symbol is paired with equally familiar statements. Development need not mean a long narrative, but something should change: the reader's understanding, the speaker's attitude, the scale of attention, or the relationship between text and image.
Individuality remains visible through diction, humor, restraint, sonic texture, perspective, and the handling of ambiguity. Two poets can begin with comparable visual material yet produce radically different experiences because one emphasizes movement, another silence, and another contradiction. This is why browsing several community poems is so instructive. Comparison trains the eye to look beyond neat execution and the ear to detect verbal vitality. It also reveals that experimentation is most convincing when readers can sense intention: conventions may be followed, adapted, or challenged, but the poem's visual and linguistic choices should feel answerable to the same imaginative purpose.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community poems reshape your sense of what the page can do. Compare where each poet directs the eye, how the words sound, and whether the visual plan confirms or complicates the subject. Thoughtful comments can name a striking reading route, an effective silence, a memorable phrase, or a moment when image and language become inseparable.
Then try making your own visual decisions. Draft, test the poem at different distances, read every likely pathway aloud, and publish the result on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another approach for readers and writers to consider.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 1183 Concrete poems, giving readers substantial room to compare visual strategies, voices, subjects, and reading routes. Within a collection of this size, poets may follow familiar conventions, adapt them to new expressive purposes, or challenge expectations while retaining a meaningful relationship between language and spatial design. Reading several examples helps reveal how differently writers can balance immediate visual impact with sustained verbal discovery.
Concrete Categories
Read wonderful concrete poetry on the following sub-topics:
basketball, christmas, friends, funny, kids, love, music, nature, school, sports
and more.
Definition | What is Concrete in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.