Eugen Gomringer contributes an essay "Aspects of a Gesamtkunstwerk: Vera Rohm's oeuvre in Time and Space" Stephen Bann's essay is titled "Erganzung: Integration." He writes the following. Visiting Vera Rohm's studios in Darmstadt a few days prior to a lecturing engagement in Brighton set off a series of conjunctions and coincidences in my mind. It was in the centre of Brighton that I had organized a Concrete Poetry Exhibition to coincide with the first Brighton Festival in April 1967. Brighton Square, in the middle of the Lanes, had its perky modern architecture offset by two typographical installations involving Perspex screens and constructions, the first being a communal project on the 'five vowels' produced by the students of Bath Academy of Art under the direction of John Furnival, and the second a set of 'typographical columns' by the German Hansjorg Mayer. In the spaces around the Royal Pavilion, banners designed by the typographer Edward Wright displayed Concrete poems by Claus Bremer and Eugen Gomringer, whilst two poem / constructions made by Henry Clyne for Ian Hamilton Finlay were profiled against the onion towers of the Pavilion itself. For the catalogue of this show, published in Form magazine, Eugen Gomringer wrote a specially commissioned article on 'The First Years of Concrete Poetry'. There he described his gradual realization of the possibility of a new poetic form that would compare with 'the direct method of Concrete Art, which offered a solution to unequivocal problems of line, surface and colour'. Yet this was not to be a merely playful exercise in style. Gomringer asserted in his conclusion that Concrete Poetry was 'fitted to make just as momentous statements about human existence in our times and about our mental attitudes, as other forms of poetry did in previous periods'. In his view, the writing of Concrete Poetry was 'quite definitely a test of character'. Its foundation was 'closely bound up with the individual's "Life with Language", "Life with Words"?The coincidence has been a happy one, in that Eugen Gomringer is the other contributor to this celebration of the work of Vera Rohm. He himself celebrates his 80th birthday in 2005 with the full assurance that his conviction of the seriousness of Concrete Poetry has been vindicated. Moreover, his insistence that the genesis of Concrete Poetry lay directly in the 'unequivocal' aesthetic of Concrete Art has been corroborated in a number of ways. Not least, he himself has extended his range as poet by venturing into constructions. The comments that he has made in a recent study confirm that this is not a mere diversion from the printed page, but a reaffirmation of the point that he was making in 1967. 'Concrete Art and Concrete Poetry are one and the same movement with the same root system. Gomringer comments shrewdly that the history of the term `Concrete Art', which Hans Arp and others devised to counter the implication that non-objective work was rightly termed `Abstract', has now probably run its course. Indeed we are no longer in the middle of that particular debate. But this does not mean that the movement itself, involving both the plastic and the poetic aspects, is also coming to an end. On the contrary, as Gomringer suggests, the more general term 'Constructive' can now be seen as a universally comprehensible designation, covering poetry and the whole range of the visual arts whilst also indicating their profound interconnections. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.