This review is taken from PN Review 284, Volume 51 Number 6, July - August 2025.

on Mary Ellen Solt

Greg Thomas
Mary Ellen Solt, The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt, edited by Susan Solt (Primary Information) $24
Concrete Flowers

Mary Ellen Solt is best remembered as the editor of the 1968 anthology Concrete Poetry: A Worldview, the most authoritative of the various compendiums of concrete poetry that appeared during the late 1960s. As her daughter Susan Solt notes in an afterword to the present volume, that anthology, which includes a series of lucid prose statements by its editor, remains Mary Ellen’s ‘signature work of scholarship’.

The poem adorning the cover of Concrete Poetry: A Worldview, Solt’s telegraphic acrostic ‘Forsythia’ (reproduced in the present volume), might seem to signal gentle dissent against the hard-edged linguistic abstraction that held sway across much of the book’s contents. Concrete poetry in the classic sense had been coded as minimalist, anti-expressionist, perhaps above all non-pictorial. Yet here was a flowing, floral paean preserving both the rhythm of demotic speech and the figurative possibilities of visual poetics.

The title word ‘FORSYTHIA’ is spelled out in serifed capitals across the base of the visual frame, with a further word blossoming upwards from each letter: ‘Forsythia Out Race Springs’s Yellow Telegram Hope Insists Action’. beyond the terminus of each word, the opening letter reaches still further upwards in a wavey petal shape, repeated in between iterations of its morse-code equivalent, a coded reference (literally) to the metaphor of the forsythia as a telegram, breaking the news of the returning sun. This beautiful poem was part of a series, Flowers in Concrete, first published as a portfolio of letter-pressed posters in 1966 by the Fine Arts Department at the University of Indiana, where Solt ...
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