Pattern Poetry

Guide to an Unknown Literature

By Dick Higgins

Subjects: Poetry
Paperback : 9780887064142, 284 pages, July 1987
Hardcover : 9780887064135, 284 pages, July 1987

Table of contents

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

A Short History of Pattern Poetry

CHAPTER TWO

Pattern Poems by Language and Literature

Greek

Latin

Hebrew

Hungarian

Italian

French

German

Scandinavian

Dutch and Flemish

British and English-language Literatures

Hispanic

Slavic: Polish

Slavic (continued)

Other European Languages and Literatures

CHAPTER THREE

Analogues of Pattern Poetry from Outside the European Languages and Literatures

The Far East

The Citrakavyas and Other Analogues in India

Islamic Literatures

Languages and Literatures in which no Pattern Poems have been Reported or Published

CHAPTER FOUR

Analogues of Pattern Poems

Acrostics, Telestics, and Mesostics

Lapidary Inscriptions

Leonine Verse

Magical Inscriptions and Formulae

Mathematical Arrays and Poems
Musical Analogues of Pattern Poetry
Proteus Poems

Rebuses and Other Puzzle Poems

Shaped Prose

Sound Poetry

CHAPTER FIVE

The Life and Death of Forms

Labyrinths

Manuscripts

Hypotheses Towards a Theory

APPENDIX I
Chinese Patterned Texts

By Dr. Herbert Franke

APPENDIX II

Sanskrit Citrakavyas and the Western Pattern Poems

By Dr. Kalanath Jha

APPENDIX III

A Glossary of Terms

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

Books

Dissertations

Supplemetary Bibliography

INDEX

Description

Pattern poetry—poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art—has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt. Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures.

This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.

Dick Higgins is an artist, poet, and Research Associate of the School of the Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase. He has been studying pattern poetry since 1968, when he was publisher and designer of Emmett Williams' Anthology of Concrete Poetry, which introduced that type of modern visual poetry to North America. He keeps his studio and library in a former church at Barrytown, New York, in the Hudson River Valley.