Cupcake

Kim M. Russell, 15th May 2025

We’re meeting the bar with Björn at the dVerse Poets Pub today, and having a bit of fun with the shapes of poems on the page, something I have done before for a number of prompts.

He tells us that concrete poetry “emerged from the major hubs of Concrete Art in Northern Europe and Latin America during the 1950s and sought to bring the same clarity and simplicity of composition that defined that movement to the written word, and goes on to say that it’s “a kind of linguistic art in which the way words and letters look is as important as what they mean”.

He has shared the earliest known example, Eugen Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’, with its simplicity of shape and the void in the pattern, which is a visual representation of the word.

A more complicated example is ‘Pik Bou’, a poem by Pierre Garnier, in which the title is a local term for the green woodpecker, and the words inside the concrete poem are onomatopoeic representations of the poem.

For more inspiration we can check out Gay’s prompt from 20th October 2011.




24 thoughts on “Cupcake”

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.