Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the literary journals Wurm, Ophir and Izwi published a
significant amount of formally experimental poetry by several local as well as a few
European writers. This work included the specialised forms of procedural and permutation
poetry, which were popular internationally during this time frame, but which also fall into a
longer tradition of concrete poetry and its related forms. In the following article, I explain
these specific forms in relation to a global literary-historical framework. I then provide an
overview of what my work with the journals’ archives indicates to be all of the permutation
and procedural poetry published by these three periodicals within the decade, 1965-1975, and
provide a descriptive analysis of the texts.