I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician.  Well, no–Havel was an artist.  He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.

Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:

 

An early visiopunctuational poet.  The first such?  Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know.  Wait–of course not.  My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964.  I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though.  Terrific poem, in any case.  It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.”  That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry.  I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.

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I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician.  Well, no–Havel was an artist.  He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.

Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:

 

An early visiopunctuational poet.  The first such?  Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know.  Wait–of course not.  My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964.  I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though.  Terrific poem, in any case.  It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.”  That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry.  I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.

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