Over at Steamboats, Caleb Crain has lately expressed a concern over the use of camel case letters.
We are not opposed to the use of camel case in a corporate logo, particularly where Concrete poetry might find a place in commerce.
We went to An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Emmett Williams, ed., 1967, Something Else Press), remembering some camel casing there, but spacing is a more prevalent tool. Remember that most of the old Concrete poems were chiseled out on manual typewriters.
The John J. Sharkey poem, “Schoenberg” (1963), is shown in the Anthology in two versions. The first (left) was rejected “…because the publisher does not use upper-case letters in his graphic production style.”
The second version was “interpreted typographically by Simon Lord…,” and Sharkey apparently liked it less than his original.
There’s often a reason for things like spacing, capitalization, reading silently – and then the reason becomes the rule, and remains the rule, even after we’ve forgotten the reason; then we might invent a new reason to support what we now don’t want to change.
Note: The title to this post is a Concrete poem, created with camels:
MEN PIT & Ete POEMS.
The Coming of the Toads 