AP News, July 3rd, 2007
Mary Ellen Solt, who used letter and word arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem and was a leader in the "concrete poetry" movement, has died. She was 86.
Solt died June 21 in Santa Clarita after a stroke, her family said.
Her most popular work, "Forsythia," which is written as a flowering shrub, is the clearest example of her concrete verses. The title appears at the bottom of the page and each letter has a different word growing out of it to form a branch of the plant.
Solt traced the concrete form, which emerged in the United States in the 1960s, to 17th-century English sonnets through the stream-of-consciousness writing of symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, novelist and poet James Joyce and E.E. Cummings. All three writers experimented with arrangement of words on the page.
Among the form's best known examples is the mouse's tale from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865. Declaimed by a mouse, the poem is typeset as a long undulating tail.
A poem is "an object in its own right for its own sake" that "communicates first and foremost its structure," Solt wrote in "Concrete Poetry: A World View," which she edited with Willis Barnstone.
Solt was born in Gilmore City, Iowa. Originally trained as a pianist, she became interested in poetry as a student at Iowa State Teachers College. She earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the college in 1941 and a master's from the University of Iowa in 1948.
She taught poetry and comparative literature at Indiana University and American poetry at the University of Warsaw. She was also director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana for several years.
She is survived by two daughters, Catherine Solt and Susan Solt, and a sister, Jean Peterson.
