Mary Ellen Solt

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Mary Ellen Solt (born July 8, 1920 in Gilmore City , Iowa , † June 21, 2007 in Santa Clarita , California ) was an American poet of concrete and visual poetry , literary scholar and university teacher.

life and work

Solt, née Bottom, was married to the historian (English history, Puritanism) Leo Frank Solt (1921–1994). She attended Iowa State Teachers College and earned an MA in English Literature from the University of Iowa . Both taught from 1955 at Indiana University in Bloomington . She taught at the Institute for Comparative Literature from 1970 to 1991 and was also the director of the Polish Studies Center there from 1977 to 1984 . She moved in 1996 to live with her daughter Susan in Santa Clarita , California.

In a contribution to Emmett Williams ' anthology of concrete poetry , she stated: In August 1962 she visited Ian Hamilton Finlay in Edinburgh , who showed her the volume Poesia Concreta , which she herself acquired in December 1962 through Augusto de Campos . With the help of a Portuguese dictionary, she studied this Brazilian Concrete Poetry with growing interest. In the spring of 1963 she herself began to bring flower poems into visual form, but not with the intention of the Brazilians from the Noigandres group , whose art-theoretical approaches she implemented in her own way.

Her Flowers in Concrete was published in 1966 by the University of Indiana. Her anthology Concrete Poetry, edited with Willis Barnstorne, is considered a magnum opus . A World View from 1968, which the New York Times wrote was one of the best anthologies for the genre.

During the implementation in print form, she found in John Dearstyne a congenial typographer and printer for her poems designed in flower form.

Publications

Seals (selection)

  • Flowers in concrete. Designed and printed by John Dearstyne. Design Program, Fine Arts Department. Indiana University, [Bloomington] 1966. (29 countless pages, 135 edition)
The poems " Forsythia " , " Lilac " and " Geranium " deserve special mention .
  • The Peoplemover: 1968. A Demonstration Poem. West Coast Poetry Review, Reno, Nevada 1978 (114 pp.).
  • A trilogy of rain. Finial Press, Urbana, Illinois 1970 (uncounted; edition: 30)
  • Marriage. Illinois, circa 1975 (10 uncounted sheets; edition: 50)
  • Time. Carnegie-Mellon University Press, [Pittsburgh] 1978 (uncounted; dimensions: 28 × 71 cm)
  • Picpus: 7-9 messidor, an II de la République. Wild Hawthorn Press, [Dunsyre, Lanark] 1995 (55 uncounted pages).

Literary studies

  • An Historical Study of Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI. Iowa 1948. (Thesis, MA)
  • Concrete poetry. A world view . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1968, ISBN 0-253-11300-8 . New edition as paperback 1970, ISBN 0-253-11301-6 . Text as html on UbuWeb
    • In addition: Concrete Steps to an Anthology. In: Kenneth David Jackson: Experimental - Visual - Concrete: avant-garde poetry since the 1960s. Rodopi et al., Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-5183-959-6 , pp. 347-352.
  • William Carlos Williams. Poems in the American Idiom. Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 1960. (First published in: Folio. Volume 25, No. 1, Winter 1960, pp. 3-28).

literature

  • Emmett Williams (Ed.): An Anthology of Concrete Poetry . edition hansjörg mayer, Stuttgart and Something Else Press, New York 1967, p. 340 (short biography)
  • Leland H. Roloff: The Perception and Evocation of Literature. Scott, Foresman, Glenview, Illinois 1973, ISBN 0-673-07550-8 , p. 259 (via: Forsythia)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Poesia concreta. [Eds.] Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos. Serviço de Propaganda e Expansão Comercial da Embaixada do Brasil, Lisboa 1962. 32 pages. This volume itself became the subject of literary studies.
  2. ↑ Quoting from: Emmett Williams: Anthology of Conrete Poetry. 1967, p. 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 visual forms. These poems were not like the Brazilian poems. Eventually they became the poems of Flowers in Concrete . I was unable to fully 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. ” End of quote.
personal data
SURNAME Solt, Mary Ellen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bottom Solt, Mary Ellen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar and poet
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Gilmore City , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 2007
Place of death Santa Clarita , California