Mary Ellen Solt

Edited by Susan Solt

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 Celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete, much of Solt’s work has remained little known or unpublished.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.

The centerpiece of The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt is the section “Words and Spaces,” which presents Solt’s concrete poems as she envisioned them: typographically precise, visually stunning, and commanding on the page. As Aram Saroyan writes in his foreword, these poems are “vivid, intimate inventions.” “The Peoplemover 1968,” a series of rarely seen political posters that grapples with the social upheavals and horrors of the late 1960s, combines Solt’s characteristic humor with a healthy dose of semiotics. Yet Solt was also composing works that encompassed everything from a brief and exacting love of nature to the sly observation of candid conversation; and, in an esoteric visual poem constructed purely from symbols, a meditation on marriage.

One of the few Americans, and rare women, in the concrete poetry movement, Solt edited the influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a poet, but as an acclaimed critic. After a prominent career as an independent scholar, Solt became a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she and her colleagues developed and expanded one of the first interarts studies programs in the United States.

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.