Mary Ellen Solt, née Bottom (July 8, 1920 in Gilmore City, Iowa – June 21, 2007) was an American

concrete poet Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...

, essayist, translator, editor, and professor. Her work was most notably poems in the shape of flowers such as " Forsythia", " Lilac", and " Geranium". They were collected in ''Flowers in Concrete'' (1966). In 1968 Solt edited the groundbreaking and historically significant anthology ''Concrete Poetry: A World View'', which the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' wrote was "considered one of the major anthologies of the form." In Concrete Poetry : A World View, she collected, translated, introduced, and contextualizing the global movement of concrete poetry that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s : the first international literary movement. Solt is the subject of issue #51 of the Swedish journal OEI. The issue is entitled, "Mary Ellen Solt – Toward a theory of concrete poetry." She married Leo Frank Solt, who was a historian, with books on old and early modern English history and

Puritan The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. ...

ism. They both taught at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

and she was also director of the Polish Studies Center.

Selected publications

;Editor *"Concrete Poetry: A World View," Indiana University Press, 1970 ;Poetry *''Flowers in Concrete,'' Design Program, Fine Arts Dept., Indiana University, 1966

References

External links

Poems
at

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Philo ...

''Concrete Poetry: A World View''
at UbuWeb 1920 births 2007 deaths 20th-century American educators People from Humboldt County, Iowa American women poets 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women {{US-poet-1920s-stub