A Scanthology of Concrete Poetry is a collectively altered edition of the seminal and now canonical Something Else Press collection An Anthology of Concrete Poetry edited by Emmett Williams (1967) in the reedition of Primary Information (2013). In a sense, it implements the “To Be Continued” prompt with which Williams’s edition ends. The new version, with significantly fewer pages and a different order than the original, was created in Danny Snelson’s 2017 class “Print on Demand Poetry: Making Books After the Internet” at Northwestern University. Snelson brought copies of the book, which his students tore apart page by page (excluding the preface and biographies) and then altered and scanned. Not all poems were used, and some were altered multiple times.

The transformations often make direct reference to the subject or visual appearance of a poem, as when the words “WORD OPEN” from a poem film by John J. Sharkey (1964) are answered by a hand punching through the page from behind. Another student seems to be puzzled by Eugen Gomringer’s famous constellation avenidas, which he crosses out line by line with the comment: “I YELLED AT THIS POEM AS IT WAS SCANNING TO NO AVAIL.” In the course of reading, one learns to distinguish the handwriting of individual students.

Aside from the physical deformations, overwritings, and additions made to the pages, they were also purposefully altered by the scanning process itself, producing glitches, distortions, and fragmentary reproductions. By this, A Scanthology of Concrete Poetry offers not only a reading of the original anthology, but also an investigation into the materiality of poetry and books, expanding the poetics of concrete poetry to practices of perception, reproduction, and distribution of text.

Participating in the project were Izzy G, Paola de Varona, Courtney Bankston, Faheem Tapia, Michael Gross, Gabrielle B, Georgia Bernstein, Olivia Heller, Jonathan Gelb, NUPoD17, Garrett M. Goehring, Flemish Cann, RK, Orli, Sylvia Shim, Olivia Korhonen, Ashley Braddock, Meg Biederman, and Danny Snelson.