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4 Amrita R. JoshiThe Concrete PoemThe Concrete Poetry movement with its beginnings in the1950s and continuing up to the present with post-concrete creationsincluding New Media Poetry and Conceptional Poetry is a manifestationof the avant-garde in the fields of literature and in the visual arts.Concrete Poetry as a movement initially reacted to conventionalizedlinear syntactic structures, basing its creative expression on the factthat the machine age, the era of technology, the speed and the pace ofmodern life and the nature of contemporary languages required adifferent form of expression than what was seen in conventional formsof verse. According to the Concretists, the new world required newmodes of reading and expression. This search led them to the individualunits—the word and the letter.Mike weaver (1976) distinguishes three types of ConcretePoetry: visual (optic), phonetic (sound) and kinetic (moving in a visualsuccession). According to him,The act of perception itself is the first preoccupation ofconcrete poetry. The optic or visual poet offers the poemas a constellation in space; the kinetic poet offers it as avisual succession; the phonetic poet offers it as an auditorysuccession(Weaver 1976 (6):294)Many of these poems require the cultivation of a differentapproach to reading as they consist of “a single word or phrase” or aminimal textwhich is subjected to systematic alterations in the orderand position of the component letters, or else are composedof fragments of words… letters, numbers and marks ofpunctuation(Abrams 1993:35)PDF compression, OCR, web optimization using a watermarked evaluation copy of CVISION PDFCompressor