Klaus Peter Dencker contributes an essay, From Concrete to Visual Poetry with a Glance into th Electronic Future: Since the 1960s I have established myself in the middle ground between literature, visual art, and film, practically and theoretically; what has been especially exciting has been investigating the origin and history of these border zones. Thus, beginning with the origins of writing, the picture alphabets, we have examples of the mixing of image &nd text from the Greek magical papyri to the early figure poems of the Greek bucolic poets, Porfiry's Latin gris poems, the variants of the successors to the Carolingean Renaissance, the Baroque text figures, the scrolls of the sixteenth century and their predecessors up to the free text-pictures of the turn of the century somewhat as in Mallarme and Apollinaire, which the experiments of the futurists and dadaists followed, continued, and expanded, to entirely unique forms brought through by the artists of concrete and visual poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Concrete poetry got its name at the beginning of the 1950s. It is a language form that is closed, international, and non-mimetic, proceeding from the material qualities of language: from the verbal, sound, and visual materiality of words. The graphic forms of single letters, the white space of the book page, the constellation of letters vis-a-vis one another, the change of reading habits, the combinatory possibilities of letters and words on a surface, the ignoring of syntax and metaphor, the free play with language material that simultaneously goes against the literalness of language-this calls for a whole new reception attitude on the reader's part. No customary left-right reading will work, no usual sentences, no given sequencing, not even words that had once been complete-the reader must himself become productive, discover constellations, determine double meanings of words, develop his own history with the language material being offered. The term concrete poetry emerged in 1953 in a manifesto by the Swedish artist Ovind Fahlstrom. In 1954 Eugen Gomringer defines and describes concrete poetry in his manifesto "Vom Vers zur Konstellationen" (From Verse to Constellation), without using the term. This he first uses in 1956, after which he met the representatives of the Brazilian Noigandres group at the Ulm Hochschule (Ulm College). There Gomringer was secretary to the Swiss constructivist Max Bill; this line of connection shows the closeness of concrete art and concrete poetry. The term concrete poetry, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was often used synonymously with visual poetry. But this description merely refers to the visual/ form of appearance of concrete poetry. This visual realization of concrete poetry texts must be strictly differentiated- based on different qualities, predominance, and functions of elements foreign to art-from works of international visual poetry that have been developing in parallel. Put otherwise, only by force do the visual components of concrete poetry emerge from this poetry's already inevitable organization of text- and letter-material. Thus, the end product appears not as picture but as constellation, of whose necessary space and surfaces we become conscious. The internally orderly constellation of concrete poetry was in principle an artistic form in the best of cases had a representational character. The words were investigated as words and were not seen with their regard to their environmental function. Concrete poetry understood the word as material word, as sign. Visual poetry can make use of the word always only in context, in connection with its source or origin, its environment (poster, advertisement, catalogue, letter, and so on). The source must be recognizable; only then is it worth it to place this word in its entirely special context function, so that aspects result that are critical, humorous, or even theoretically recognizable. In this way, several tasks come together-language criticism, social criticism, criticism of more complex or more primitive language communication, and so on. Visual poetry: It doesn't limit itself to a definite culture area of language condition: visual poetry is international, found on all continents, and has existed for centuries. It is intermedial and interdisciplinary; that is, it is not limitable to a definite artistic discipline like literature, visual art, film, photography, computers, and so on: it is found among all the arts and therefore among all the media. It is not the object of science, yet at the same time is the object of many disciplines; literature, art, typography, advertising, media, and so on. It seemingly possesses no history, yet at the same time ties together many lines of development and influences, not the least being a paradigm shift from the culture marked as literary to that of the visual and of media of this century. It seems to be absent from the awareness of publishers and gallery owners, or it is regarded as out of date, but at the same time it is present in many of the world's great collections and museums; it is regarded as not "marketable" by big presses or known galleries, but continues with an unbroken power of production to be exhibited in a plethora of subversive exhibition spaces and goes on being published by small presses. It possesses no single form of appearance and does not allow itself to be frozen on certain techniques, materials, formal or content programs: its versatility is its program. Finally, visual poetry can be seen as a possible form of expression in the development of our information- and communications society. Visual poetry can react to the new forms of media (video, computer, holography, laser, and so on, is a form of expression independent of a certain medium, which can enter creatively and innovatively into interactive communications models. Or plain and simple in a sentence: If concrete poetry has been made to serve against the wearing out of language and for the discovery of a new literalness, a new material and language awareness, the chief service of visual poetry lies in the discovery of a new context awareness and new language reference systems, whereby language no longer means alphabetic language. (...) Paradigmatically, a genre like visual poetry itself could now innovatively embrace the audiovisual media and with them become interactively productive for recipients (and vice versa), to counter the danger of increasing reproductivity that is able through a flood of pictures, the exhaustion of language, and word reduction-to work against the ominous leveling of reception ability being driven by the rapid development of technology."found" each other in this linguistic laboratory, from which technological society has taken ideas and suggestions of all kinds. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.