the.com/concrete poetry

means A style of poetry where the visual arrangement of words and letters on the page forms a shape that reflects the poem's subject, so the layout itself carries meaning alongside (or instead of) the words.

from The term borrows 'concrete' from its opposite usage in philosophy — the 'concrete,' as opposed to the 'abstract,' meaning something made tangible and physical rather than purely conceptual. Poets in Brazil (the Noigandres group) and Europe in the 1950s pushed this idea onto the page itself, treating typography, spacing, and shape as the material of the poem rather than just a vessel for words. So a poem about rain might fall down the page like rain; a poem about an apple might be shaped like one. The movement had roots stretching back to earlier experiments with visual verse, but it crystallized as a named, international practice in the mid-20th century.