The Death of Concrete Poetry is an interactive poetry environment that runs in the simulation game Teardown. It was composed using 3D letterforms modeled in MagicaVoxel then imported into the game's local assets and placed in a digital environment using the level editor. Their in-game behavior is scripted in the Lua programming language, and, once imported, users can spawn and interact with these text objects in virtual space. I produced a videographic excerpt of the poem by recording myself interacting with the text in-game, though it documents only one of many ways users might interact with the text. By invoking concrete poetics in virtual space The Death of Concrete Poetry speaks directly to analogue traditions and the ephemerality of digital systems. Concrete, both the building material and the poetic genre, are made transitory, inconsequential, and fragile by their simulation in-game, where users can manipulate and annihilate them on a whim. TEAR DOWN POEMS

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Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and his first book, Barcode Poetry, was published in 2021. Kyle's first trade book of poetry, Supergiants, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn in 2025. His most recent chapbooks include WikiPoems from 845 Press and Gourmand from Paper View Books.