6 While Solt does have more widely discussed concrete poems like her 1966 collection Flowers in Concrete, her most well-known project is scholarly. Solt’s “demonstration poem,” as she calls it, is a revealing engagement with the formal problematics of concretism and the historical contradictions concomitant with the rise of New Left protest politics in the U.S.Īlthough The Peoplemover is the major work of one of concrete poetry’s foremost proponents, it has received scant critical attention.
The work does not merely transform what might otherwise be wall-hung or anthology-bound works of concrete poetry into tools for protest it more fundamentally demands interpretation of what such a transformation of art into activism means in 1968. That is, it dramatizes a question: Are the posters’ back-ideograms only the material supports-literally the sign-handles-of the meaning expressed on their flip sides? Or are these supports objects of passive contemplation, components of a work of art? The Peoplemover answers this question with a dialectical yes. 5 In this way, The Peoplemover links concretist poetry with an avant-gardiste critique of aesthetic autonomy. 1).Īt certain points in the performance these demonstrators flip their posters to reveal what Solt calls their “back-ideograms.” These simple but arresting characters are painted extensions of the posters’ wooden back-scaffolding and signify with its shape, as if attempting to cut through the poem’s idiomatic haze of political speech with concrete picture-thinking. 4 Demonstrators march around the stage and hold aloft the protest posters, which are designed with the typographical manipulations characteristic of concrete poetry (fig.
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On a stage that suggests “a patriotic occasion or a political rally” and accompanied by a tape of fragmented “patriotic songs and marches,” four speakers “weave a series of tapestries of American words” by quoting the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington, Franklin D. In this final form, never to be fully performed, 3 The Peoplemover is an illustrated performance script that juxtaposes concrete poetry’s visual immediacy with a fragmentary arrangement of speechwriting and other political utterances quoted from across U.S.
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2 A full version of the work, published in 1978 by West Coast Poetry Review, draws the libretto together with stage directions and reproductions of the posters.
1 First performed at Indiana University on August 7, 1968, as a “dadaesque” demonstration with participants wielding protest posters, Solt developed The Peoplemover over three performances in the next two years to include a libretto. Mary Ellen Solt’s The Peoplemover: A Demonstration Poem tries to make sense of the political turmoil and resistance unfolding across the U.S. 1 Cover of The Peoplemover (1978) with Timothy Mayer’s photo of the work’s first performance
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