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Emmett Williams (1980)

It was Emmett Williams’s good fortune to learn, back in the 1950s, that English-language poetry could be composed in radically alternative ways—different not only from the academic poetry of that time but also from the declamatory expressionism of, say, Allen Ginsberg. Instead, Williams pioneered the art of “concrete poetry” in which the poet eschews conventional syntax (and related traditional devices) to organize language in other ways, Rather than “free form” (whatever that might be), Williams favored such severe constraints as repetition, permutation, and linguistic minimalism. His book-art masterpiece, Sweethearts (1967), consists of one word (the title) whose 11 letters are visually distributed over 150 or so sequentially expressive pages, the work as a whole relating, as a primarily visual narrative, the evolution of a man-woman relationship. Like Williams’s other work, this one-word novel, literally, is extremely witty. Like much else in avant-garde book-art, it must be seen (and read) for its magic to be believed.