Solt, Mary Ellen 1920-2007 (Mary Ellen Bottom Solt)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 8, 1920, in Gilmore City, IA; died of complications from a stroke, June 21, 2007, in Santa Clarita, CA. Educator, poet, and writer. Solt is known as a champion and consummate practitioner of the art of concrete poetry. Concrete poetry blends words with shapes and typography to create a visual representation of the meaning and symbolism of words. A poem about a gate, for instance, might be laid out in the shape of a gate. In Solt's case, her poem about forsythia, with the words arranged as branches springing from a vase, has been reproduced frequently as a perfect example of the aesthetic form. The concrete poetry movement reached a peak in the United States during the 1960s, when Solt herself was most active, along with other poets like e.e. cummings. Solt's poetry appeared in the collections Flowers in Concrete (1976), A Trilogy of Rain (1970), Marriage: A Code Poem (1976), and in literary magazines. Because of its visual power, the work was also shown in exhibitions at museums and art galleries. But, as Solt herself pointed out, the 1960s movement had blossomed in Europe and South America several years earlier, and may have emerged indirectly from roots that sprouted centuries earlier in the highly stylized verse structures of Elizabethan sonnets. Elements of the form have also shown up periodically over the years, according to Solt, in the work of James Joyce and others. She examined the history of concrete poetry in the introduction to her edited anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). Solt entered academia after ten or twelve years as a high school teacher. She joined the English faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1970 and remained there as a professor of comparative literature until retiring more than twenty years later. While at the university, she also served as the director of the Polish Studies Center.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 29, 2007, sec. 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, June 2007, Mary Rourke, p. B11.

New York Times, July 3, 2007, Margalit Fox, p. C10.