Concrete poetry

I found the class about concrete poetry to be very helpful in thinking about the function that shape can provide in poetry. It made me think about creating poetry from a different angle. Instead of trying to get a message across only through my words/metaphors/imagery, I realized that altering how a poem looks can often times say a lot more. Until this point I have done the free verse style, which is now quite expected from contemporary poets so I think I should try to step outside the box a bit with my poems. One thing that prevents me from doing this however is the fact that our poems must be submitted online. I feel like this restricts my the amount of creativity I can have in terms of playing around with the shape. I also f0und that some of the poems in the "concrete" packet to take this idea a bit too far. For example, the poem with only U's did not really seem like a poem to me. Even though it still has a certain message I think it is too abstract for me to appreciate as actual poetry, as I still like something that I can actually read. So in certain extremes I find it hard to appreciate concrete poetry as poetry rather than a form of abstract art.