The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt brings together nearly five decades of poetic work. Celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete, much of Solt’s work has remained little known or unpublished. From her lyrical engagement with the “American idiom” of William Carlos Williams to her masterful forays into visual and concrete poetry, this volume, assembled and edited by her daughter Susan Solt, provides an in-depth documentation of a truly original writer who was at the center of some of the most daring global poetic developments of the mid-twentieth century.

Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007), first recognized professionally for her critical writing on William Carlos Williams, was a writer, scholar, and an early proponent of concrete poetry. One of the few Americans in the concrete poetry movement, she edited the highly influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a critic, but as a renowned concrete poet. After a prominent career as an independent scholar, Solt became a professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Solt was the author of several poetry collections: Flowers in Concrete (1966), A Trilogy of Rain (1970), Marriage, ‘a code poem’ (1976), and The Peoplemover 1968: A Demonstration Poem (1978). Her poems, most notably “Forsythia” and “Moonshot Sonnet,” have appeared in countless anthologies over the years. Her “flower poems” have been exhibited internationally; of late, at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Getty Center in 2017.

Edition of 2500
Fall 2024
ISBN: 9798988573692