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The Evolution of a Revolution:
50 Years of Concrete Poetry in Brazil
Marco Alexandre de Oliveira
Concrete Poetry emerged as a revolutionary,
avant-garde movement during the early 1950s, developing from spontaneous
aesthetic and theoretical impulses forming concurrently in both Europe
and the Americas. Relatively isolated, albeit coincidental, phenomena
coalesced into a movement whose impact immediately created significant
repercussions for both communicative and poetic language. According
to Mary Ellen Solt, editor of an international anthology of Concrete
Poetry, the term “concrete poetry” generally refers to “a
variety of innovations and experiments [. . .] which are revolutionizing
the art of the poem on a global scale and enlarging its possibilities
for expression and communication.”1 Inasmuch
as radical innovation and experimentation arise from a necessity for
transformation and renovation under the guise of revolution, concrete
poetry thus developed from a perspective that realized that “the
old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced
processes of thought and communication in our time.”2
Such a position necessarily generated polemic discussion amidst much
controversy which continues even to this day, especially in one of the
movement’s primary countries of origin – Brazil –
where according to Charles A. Perrone, “the theory and practice
of concrete poetry developed more intensely than anywhere else.”3
My presentation follows the emergence and development of concrete poetry
in Brazil as the evolution of a revolution that, in effect, represents
both a culminating moment and a foundational transition for the medium
of poetry (or poetics) in a new media age.
In 1953, the term “concrete poetry” originally appeared
in the title of a relatively insignificant “Manifesto for Concrete
Poetry” by Swedish poet Öyvind Fahlström, who began
writing his concrete poems as early as 1952. In spite of this, the Swiss-Bolivian
poet Eugen Gomringer is widely credited with being the sole founder
of the movement in Europe. Seemingly unaware of related contemporary
developments, Gomringer composed concrete poems that he initially called
“constellations” during this same period, and subsequently
published manifestos entitled “from line to constellation”
in 1954 and “Concrete Poetry” in 1956, in addition to later
articles. Meanwhile, in Brazil three poet-intellectuals from São
Paulo – Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio
Pignatari – founded the Noigandres group in 1952, publishing a
magazine by the same name. The following year Augusto de Campos wrote
a series of concrete poems entitled “Poetamenos,” and in
1955 he employed the term “poesia concreta” for the first
time as the title of an article included in Forum, presenting
a preliminary poetics of the new movement. By the end of 1955, Décio
Pignatari had met personally with Gomringer in order to exchange ideas
and eventually combine related developments under the general classification
of “Concrete Poetry.” According to Solt, this “meeting
of mutual interest and surprise can be taken as the beginning of the
international movement of concrete poetry.”4
In December of 1956, almost exactly fifty years ago today, the Brazilian
poesia concreta movement was officially launched during the
Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta at the Museu de Arte
Moderna in São Paulo. This event, also exhibited in Rio de Janeiro
the following February of 1957, featured abstract paintings and sculpture
alongside concrete poster-poems composed by the Campos brothers and
Décio Pignatari, in addition to works presented by relative newcomers
Ronaldo Azeredo, Wlademir Dias Pino, and Ferreira Gullar. Through these
and other exhibits, poesia concreta received extensive media
coverage and nationwide attention in newspapers, journals, and magazines.
As both critical acclaim and disapproval were increasing with respect
to the revolutionary poetic innovations and experiments, a schism occurred
between a primarily paulista movement and the carioca
poet collaborators Oliveira Bastos, Reynaldo Jardim, and Ferreira Gullar,
eventual founder of the short-lived neoconcretismo movement.
Nevertheless, by the end of the decade the original Noigandres group
had expanded to form the group Invenção, which also published
a magazine with the same title. More recent adherents now included poets,
critics, and translators such as José Lino Grünewald, Pedro
Xisto, Edgard Braga, and José Paulo Pães.5
In the 1958 edition of Noigandres 4, Augusto de Campos, Décio
Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos published a revolutionary manifesto
synthesizing various essential elements derived from an emergent concrete
poetics that had been outlined in previous theoretical expositions and
critiques. The “pilot plan for concrete poetry” thus further
consolidated and established the poetics of a Brazilian avant-garde
movement that by then was rightfully earning international exposure
and worldwide recognition. Exhibiting an acutely conscious awareness
of the historical significance of the movement’s emergence as
a “critical evolution of forms” by pronouncing an imminent
end to the “historical cycle of verse,” the concrete poets
assumed a “total responsibility before language,” seeking
through the non-discursive metacommunication of an isomorphic,
verbivocovisual “structure-content,” a “general
art of the word.” The concrete poem or “poem-product,”
however, was also meant to be conceived as a “useful object”
for consumption, at least according to the “plan.” Not content
to limit the scope of such an evolution of forms to aesthetic and theoretical
principles of form and content, during the early part of the next decade
the concrete poets radically shifted the focus of the movement towards
more socio-political topics and concerns, just as tumultuous upheavals
and national discontent were paving the way for a military coup and
subsequent cultural repression.6
After the formation of the Invenção group in 1960, the
following year is marked by Décio Pignatari’s announcement
of a significant “salto participante” (“participatory
leap”) for concrete poetry in Brazil. An indicative post-script,
quoting an infamous slogan by the Russian poet Mayakovski, was added
to the “pilot plan,” provocatively declaring that “sem
forma revolucionária não há arte revolucionária.”
The concrete poets thereby assumed a role of social responsibility and
commitment without renouncing formal innovation and poetic experimentation
per se. Social criticism and political satire became more prevalent
in concrete poems that, in addition to further exploring the communicative
possibilities of poetic language, sought to reach out to a more generalized
audience without conforming to the nationalist tendencies or populist
rhetoric of traditionalist engagé art. During this period
the concrete poets established a constructive dialogue with the mineiro group Tendência, who defended the idea of a “vanguarda engajada.”
Together the two groups formed an aesthetic “front” that
proposed a certain “nacionalismo crítico,” and in
1963 the collective poetic project of a “vanguarda participante”
was officially realized at the Semana Nacional de Vanguarda in Belo
Horizonte. Despite efforts to critically interact with a politically
sensitized public, a socially engaged concrete poetry appeared to be
more readily produced in theory rather than in practice, especially
due to its relative opacity and elitist intellectual character, and
therefore the historical efficacy and efficiency of the project is questionable.7
By 1964 the collective vanguard spirit began to wane as individual projects
and particular approaches simultaneously evolved in various directions.
As an ultimate departure for the concrete poetry movement, Décio
Pignatari and Luiz Ângelo Pinto launched the poema-código
(ou semiótico) series with accompanying theoretical
texts that outlined a process by which a purely semiotic poetry without
words envisaged a visual form of universal communication. Meanwhile,
Augusto de Campos produced a poster-series of collage-poems entitled
popcretos, thereby engaging the avant-garde with a rising pop
culture through the technique of montage. In 1966, Edgard Braga composed
calligraphic tatuagens (“tattoo-poems”), as Pedro
Xisto explored the figurative dimensions of the word in his logogramas.
Haroldo de Campos, for his part, was already developing his own monumentally
experimental concrete prose-poetry project Galáxias.
The fifth and final edition of Invenção was released
in 1967, which incidentally marked the beginning of Tropicalismo, a
pop-cultural vanguard movement with significant ties to both poesia
concreta and the concrete poets. With the rapid, albeit temporary diffusion
of various other vanguard groups – such as Neoconcretismo, Poesia
Práxis, and Poema-Processo – the methodological unilateralism
of concrete poetry eventually ceded to an ideological pluralism as members
of the movement essentially moved on to other objectives, or
to other things in other words, while never quite
abandoning what Perrone has called the “imperative of invention.”
The revolutionary impact and legacy of concrete poetry in Brazil is
evident in the dynamic evolution of poetry and poetics after the 1960s,
whether through concomitant developments or reactionary attitudes in
art and culture. Asked to evaluate the significance of concrete poetry
in retrospect, Augusto de Campos states that “se a nossa produção
poética tiver valor, será avaliada, coletiva e individualmente,
como a de todos os poetas que abriram caminhos imprevistos para a poesia,
participando dos movimentos artísticos de renovação
do seu tempo.”8 Similarly, in another interview
he affirms that “our aspiration was that poetry, after this violent
radicalization, would never be the same.”9
Other critics, such as Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, have posited
that concrete poetry was “a true schism in Brazilian aesthetic
thought, especially in poetry [. . .] Any analysis of today’s
best poetry is impossible without a broad consideration of concretism
[. . .] Brazilian poetry today revolves referentially around the concretist
movement.”10 Perrone likewise attests to
the legacy of concrete poetry by adding that in order to determine its
“influence beyond the sixties splinter groups, one must take into
account its part in the poetry of song and the postconcrete constructivist
poetry of the 1960’s – 1990’s.”11
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a poetic subculture evolved
around a diverse range of artists who adapted concrete techniques to
a more pluralistic and individualized approach. The so-called “post-concrete”
constructivist poetry primarily focused on intersemiotic experiments
with language that have since culminated in the development of multimedia
and hypermedia poetry. Intersemiotic poetry initially appeared in publications
such as Polem, Artéria, and Navilouca,
while the term “intersemiotic creation” was employed as
the subtitle of the journal Qorpo Estranho 2. According to
Perrone, the term intersemiotic creation “accounts for
the interplay of varied sign languages: the printed word in multiple
typographic and spatial representations, illustrated verse, graphics,
photography, and mixtures thereof.”12 This
“media awareness” of intersemiotic creation is echoed by
Omar Khouri, organizer of the second number of Artéria,
who states that, in fact, “poetry has always been associated with
other codes/other arts, in more or less explicit alliances. With the
advent of the many modernisms and their developments, poetry takes on
the role of an intersemiotic art, invading other fields, coupling itself
with other universes, breaking [. . .] existing borders.”13
Examples and varieties of post-concrete poetry are quite numerous, and
include such artists as Bené Fonteles, Lenora de Barros, Omar
Khouri, Philadelpho Menezes, and Walter Silveira, in addition to the
original concrete poets themselves.14 Paulo Leminski,
whose earliest work initially appeared in Invenção,
managed to forge a creative synthesis between constructivist poetry
and poesia marginal, while Arnaldo Antunes has represented
a rather unique convergence between the traditions of MPB (Música
Popular Brasileira) and concrete poetry. As a whole, post-concrete poetry
exhibits significant features from its immediate predecessor, though
most would acknowledge that this influence is constructive or productive
rather than obstructive or prescriptive.
Reexamining the perceived contribution of concrete poetry to contemporary
poetic discourse, Augusto de Campos observes that the movement has “made
a serious contribution toward the regeneration of poetic language and
the criticism of contemporary poetics [. . .] Moreover, Concrete Poetry
signals the future [. . .] Some current experiences that are now just
incipient, such as computer graphics, videotext, holography, and recording
techniques, demonstrate that Concrete Poetry is at the base of a viable
language for these media. Having little in common with the traditional
forms of discourse, they are going to require new forms of linguistic
codification that imply a stricter involvement between the verbal and
the non-verbal, which is exactly Concrete Poetry's field of action.”15
Inasmuch as the future of intersemiotic, multimedia or intermedia poetry is concerned, Augusto posits that “what remains to be done”
will be realized in the “exploration of new technological media,
and in their interaction with the spectacular arts or multidisciplinary
events.” He thereby observes that the “virtual movement
of the printed word, the typogram, is giving way to the real movement
of the computerized word, the videogram, and to the typography of the
electronic era. From static to cinematic poetry, which, combined with
computerized sound resources, can raise the verbivocovisual structures
preconceived by Concrete Poetry to their most complete materialization.
In this moment of transition [. . .] poetry can leave saturation and
impasse for unanticipated flights into the beyond-the-looking glass
of video, and depart on a broad inter- or multi-media voyage.”16
Augusto de Campos, who of all the concrete poets has adhered most closely
to the original precepts of the movement in his later production, once
described the historical evolution of poetry as a history of revolution.
It therefore seems evident that the emergence and evolution of intersemiotic
and multimedia poetry, comprising techniques anticipated by earlier
generations, in effect realizes the lucid dream of a constructive continuity
within a revolutionary tradition of innovation, experimentation, and
rupture in the poetic arts. As a culminating movement of the avant-garde
in Brazil, concrete poetry produced a poetry for export not as raw material
but as a finished product, exploring new means for both poetic expression
and the actual medium of communication itself. Though concrete
poetry in a broad sense has since come to encompass an ever increasing
and complex variety of visual and sound poetry, in addition to interactive
media, in its original materialization and most concrete form, the “verbivocovisual” material of concrete
poetry is essentially prefigured by the materiality of both
language and the word itself as figural and figurative script. The inscription
onto things of an incommunicable presence is represented by
the transcription into words of its communicable absence, and
the harmonious tension of these “things-words in spacetime”
thereby marks the evolution of a revolution, from its mimetic origins
to its never-ending beforeverafterwords, as the beginning of
the end of the beginning of the end . . .
*Originally presented at the South Atlantic
Modern Language Association Convention (November 10-12, 2006)
Footnotes:
1 Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry:
A World View. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1971. (p. 7)
2 Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry:
A World View. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1971. (p. 7-8)
3 Charles A. Perrone, Seven Faces:
Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism. Durham: Duke University Press,
1996. (p. 25)
4 Mary Ellen Solt. Concrete Poetry:
A World View. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1971. (p. 8-12)
5 Iumna Maria Simon and Vinicius Dantas,
Poesia Concreta. São Paulo : Abril Educação, 1982. – (Literatura Comentada) [p .6, 12]
6 Iumna Maria Simon and Vinicius Dantas.
Poesia Concreta. São Paulo : Abril Educação, 1982. – (Literatura Comentada)
7 Iumna Maria Simon and Vinicius Dantas.
Poesia Concreta. São Paulo : Abril Educação, 1982. – (Literatura Comentada)
8 “A Certeza
da Influência.” Jornal de Poesia. 22 June 2005.
<http://www.secrel.com.br/jpoesia/har08.html>
9 Greene, Roland. “From Dante to
the Post-Concrete: An Interview with Augusto de Campos.” UbuWeb. <http://www.ubu.com/papers/greene02.html>
[from The Harvard Library Bulletin
3.2 (1992)]
10 Quoted in Seven Faces (p.57)
11 Seven Faces. (p. 58)
12 Seven Faces. (p. 133)
13 excerpt from “INTERSEMIOTIC,
INTERMULTIMEDIA POETRY: THE POETRY OF THE POST-VERSE ERA:”
14 Brazilian Visual Poetry / Poesia Visual
Brasileira (http://www.imediata.com/BVP/)
15 Roland Greene. “From Dante to
the Post-Concrete: An Interview with Augusto de Campos.” UbuWeb. <http://www.ubu.com/papers/greene02.html>
16 Roland Greene. “From Dante to
the Post-Concrete: An Interview with Augusto de Campos.” UbuWeb. <http://www.ubu.com/papers/greene02.html>
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