Concrete Poetry vs Creacionismo
具体詩／コンクリート・ポエトリー / クレアシオニスモ
Both sit in Experimental Typography, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as layout. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Concrete Poetry
Treats the placement, repetition, blank space and sound of words as the poem itself, not only what they mean.
Creacionismo
A movement begun in Chile and carried through Paris, which declared that poetry does not copy nature but creates new facts. It produced visual poems in quantity, arranging letters as shapes and making the border between language and page a subject of experiment. With Ultraismo, one of the two pillars of the Spanish-language avant-garde.
| Concrete Poetry | Creacionismo | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1950s–1970s | 1916–1930s |
| Family | Experimental Typography | Experimental Typography |
| Kind | Layout | Layout |
| Cues | Repeated words / Shapes made of letters / Large blanks / Dismantled reading order | Letters arranged as shapes / Lines of verse recomposed visually / Type without ornament / The white ground used as a component |
| Best used for | Print pieces where a few words carry the reading speed and the pauses · Exhibitions and wall works that take language itself as the subject | Posters and titles where the words physically form the image, with no illustration and no photograph · Book and exhibition typography for texts that must be read as constructed objects rather than transcribed speech |
| Type | One face at one size, emphasis from position and repetition only | One plain face at several sizes, with the change of scale as the only expressive device. |
| Composition | Place words on a grid so reading can start from any direction | Words positioned as objects in a field, the white ground measured as carefully as the type, alignment abandoned wherever the sense requires it. |
| Material | White paper and one black ink, quality carried by register and margin | Black on white and nothing else: no rule, no colour, no image to fall back on. |
| Caution | When making a shape comes first, the meaning of the words stops answering their position, and the piece is only letters poured into a picture. | Scattering words for the look of it: here the position of every word is an assertion, and arbitrary placement leaves only a shape. |