Sweethearts, the seminal concrete poetry piece by Emmett Williams is back in print! A founding member of Fluxus and the concrete poetry movement, Williams made several performances and poems that stand today as defining gems of those genres. Sweethearts is an anagrammatic erotic encounter between a “he” and a “she,” whose entire vocabulary is derived from the word “sweethearts.” The letters maintain the same spacing in every word on each page, lending the volume a flipbook dimension that Williams enhances by organizing the text to read backwards, so that the reader can flip the book with her or his left hand (thus the front cover is on the back, and vice versa).
Spread photo by Rob Giampietro. Text details from John Philips’ Concrete Poetry page.