When Roth first started making Concrete poetry, in the mid-1950s, he termed his compositions “ideograms”; in them, pictures are formed out of letters, punctuation, or other letterset characters. As the rigor of this exercise began to wear on him, he found release in a visually related but philosophically distinct activity, which he called “stupidograms.” Working from a grid of printed commas, he used a pen or pencil to coax out looping chains, teacups, toothbrushes, and other forms, mimicking word-search games. As part of his increasing play with verbal-visual equivalency, here the artist circled punctuation to form pictures rather than circling letters to form words.