About Mary Ellen Solt
Mary Ellen Solt (July 8, 1920 in Gilmore City, Iowa – June 21, 2007) was an American concrete poet, essayist, translator, editor, and professor. She became known in academic and poetic circles worldwide after the publication in 1968 of her influential book Concrete Poetry-A World View. Solt had been experimenting with concretism in her own poetry since 1963, after having been introduced to the movement by none other than Ian Hamilton Finlay, whom she met in Scotland in 1962. Through Finlay, and his struggling publication Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., Solt entered into contact with some of the main players in concrete poetry: Eugen Gomringer, Max Bense, and the de Campos brothers, Augusto and Haroldo. The genesis of the anthology is in many ways emblematic of Solt's approach to literature, in which formal discoveries were not entirely dissociated from events in her personal life. To use a poetic cliché, Mary Ellen Solt was absolutely modern, a poet moving with ease between the domestic and public spheres and responding with immediacy to the events that shaped her era. In a later essay, "Memoirs of Concrete," describing how the anthology came to fruition, she credits Willis Barnstone-who had invited her to organize the anthology as a special issue of the journal Artes Hipánicas/Hispanic Arts-with improving the book's structure with his "excellent suggestions"; she also names the translators who worked under her close supervision and the two graduate students who designed the award-winning volume. Putting a book together, Solt seems to suggest, is a collective effort, and it was her openness to new ideas and the ability to bring the right people together that made her book such a model anthology.Among the many distinctive elements of Concrete Poetry-A World View, perhaps the most important was its selection of manifestos from all over the world about the new approach to material poetry. This was the first time, for instance, that Öyvind Fahlström's "Manifesto for Concrete Poetry" was published outside Sweden, in a translation by Solt and Karen Loevgren, the wife of a Swedish colleague of Solt's at Bloomington. Fahlström's manifesto had received very little attention when it was first published in Stockholm in 1953 in the mimeograph journal Odissé, and it remained virtually ignored for over a decade, until it was reissued together with a selection of his early concrete poems, in Bord (1966). Its inclusion in Concrete Poetry-A World View represented a major contribution to the elucidation of the complex genealogy of concretism.
She married Leo Frank Solt, who was a historian, with books on old and early modern English history and Puritanism. They both taught at Indiana University and she was also director of the Polish Studies Center.
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