Mary Ellen Solt
Mary Ellen Solt, née Bottom (July 8, 1920 in Gilmore City, Iowa – June 21, 2007) was an American concrete poet, essayist, translator, editor, and professor. Her work was most notably poems in the shape of flowers such as "Forsythia", "Lilac", and "Geranium". They were collected in Flowers in Concrete (1966).
Also recorded as Mary Ellen Bottom · Mrs. Leo F.
Mary Ellen Solt
- Full name
- Mary Ellen Bottom.
- Born
- 1920.
- Died
- 2007.
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Mary Ellen Solt, née Bottom (July 8, 1920 in Gilmore City, Iowa – June 21, 2007) was an American concrete poet, essayist, translator, editor, and professor. Her work was most notably poems in the shape of flowers such as "Forsythia", "Lilac", and "Geranium". They were collected in Flowers in Concrete (1966).
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In 1968 Solt edited the groundbreaking and historically significant anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View, which the New York Times wrote was "considered one of the major anthologies of the form." In Concrete Poetry: A World View, she collected, translated, introduced, and contextualizing the global movement of concrete poetry that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s: the first international literary movement. Solt is the subject of issue #51 of the Swedish journal OEI. The issue is entitled, "Mary Ellen Solt – Toward a theory of concrete poetry." She married Leo Frank Solt, who was a historian, with books on old and early modern English history and Puritanism. They both taught at Indiana University and she was also director of the Polish Studies Center.
• Editor • "Concrete Poetry: A World View," Indiana University Press, 1970 • Poetry • Flowers in Concrete, Design Program, Fine Arts Dept., Indiana University, 1966
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- 1.Poesia concreta. [Hrsg.] Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos. Serviço de Propaganda e Expansão Comercial da Embaixada do Brasil, Lisboa 1962. 32 Seiten. Dieser Band wurde selbst Gegenstand von literaturwissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen.
- 2.Zitat aus: Emmett Williams: Anthology of Conrete Poetry. 1967, S. 340: „I became interested in concrete poetry when I visited Ian Hamilton Finlay in Edinburgh in August 1962. He showed me the Brazilian anthology Poesia Concreta, which I sent for when I returned to the United States and which I received from Augusto de Campos in December. I studied the poems with great interest and excitement for several weeks with the aid of a Portuguese dictionary. That spring I began to write flower poems using visueal forms. These poems were not like the Brazilian poems. Eventually they became the poems of Flowers in Concrete. I was unable fully to comprehend the esthetic arguments in the Brazilian "pilot plan for concrete poetry" as I had at that time had practically no experience of concrete art of any kind, but they interested me greatly. The flower poems are probably more the result of several years' study of the objectivist method of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky except that until I saw the concrete poetry of Brazil I had been unable to find for myself a satisfactory way to go on from what had been done by Williams and Zukofsky. I have also been greatly influenced by the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, particularly the fauve and suprematist poems, and by the introduction to them in Typographica 8 by Dom Sylvester Houédard.“ Zitat Ende.
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