Art & Creativity Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin is doing the rare critic’s trick of praising a movement while quietly demoting it. “Beautiful things” is genuine admiration, but the compliment is immediately rerouted: concrete poetry, he suggests, wins with the eye, not the ear. That distinction matters coming from a poet-publisher who helped cement modern poetry in print; for him, the page isn’t just a surface, it’s a delivery system for voice, cadence, memorability. By calling concrete poems “more visual than oral,” he’s drawing a border around what he considers poetry’s core technology: language as sounded experience, not just arranged typography.

The line about the wall is the real needle. It doesn’t insult concrete poetry as bad art; it reclassifies it as closer to gallery object than literary work. That’s a jurisdictional argument, not an aesthetic one. Laughlin is reacting to a mid-century moment when poetry was colliding with design, advertising, and conceptual art, and the old bookstore ecosystem was losing its monopoly on how poems could circulate. If the poem becomes an image, who is its audience? Who is its gatekeeper? The publisher, the curator, or the viewer?

Then he drops the mask: “I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.” It reads as humility, but it’s also a confession of cultural vertigo. A man who built a canon admits the canon-making era is slipping. The subtext isn’t that poetry is dying; it’s that its next home might not be the book he devoted his life to.