Abstract

This article explores the evolution of Japanese concrete and visual poetry from the early 1920s until the 1970s. Even though Japanese poets were initially inspired by French Symbolism and the literary, phonetic, and visual tendencies of Dada and surrealism, their transcultural, multilingual, ideological, and theoretical exchanges with Western modernist literary figures like Ezra Pound and the pioneers of the international vanguard concrete poetry movement, including the Brazilian Noigandres group, Eugen Gomringer, Luís Carlos Vinholes, and the French poet Pierre Garnier, were equally influential in developing their poetic métiers. With their experimental and innovative concrete and visual poetry, Japanese poets like Kitasono Katué, Niikuni Seiichi, Fujitomi Yasuo, Kamimura Hirō, and Yoshizawa Shoji created works that incorporated poetry with the visual arts, revolutionizing the distinctions between “word” and “visual object,” and literary and aesthetic discourses.