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Poetry and Technique - Concrete Poetry

Paulo Franchetti (Unicamp)

The splendor of the Parnassian poetry in Brazil bloomed during the last years of the

Brazilian Empire and the two first decades of the Republic, proclaimed in 1889. By that

time, a phenomenon without precedents took place in the Cultural History of the country:

writers became professionals, mainly through their work in the press and got status as

prominent public personalities. Literary life attracted everyday attention, even defining

what should be fashionable. Linguistic norms, the structuring of a high standard and more

cultivated language, especially after the Republic, became the chief object of attention and

of the debates as a way of national unity and civilization instrument. Meanwhile literature

is made into an institution, a process that in 1897 led to the foundation of the Academia

Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) by Machado de Assis, of which the

great novelist would be its lifelong president. So that if we want to use the terms Antonio

Candido employed to describe the History of Brazilian Literature, we should celebrate the

Parnassian moment as the one in which literature was fully constituted as a system. In this
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system author and public interacted through a style and a set of themes widely divulged and

accepted as the ideal of culture.1

Soon after World War I, however, and with the Modernist Movement that was

disclosed in the Week of Modern Art in 1922, the Parnassian and Realist prose and poetry

- especially the poetry - were harshly attacked by the new writers that were more

identified with European avant-garde ideals. The Week, the Modernism emblematic

moment, can also be seen as the moment in which a new phase is opened in the national

culture after the Parnassian integration. It is the moment of the vanguards whose most

evident characteristic from the reception point of view is the divorce between the writer and

the public. The happening was greeted with boos, which were undoubtfully the refusal or

an aesthetic resistance to the new, as well as a protest against the breaking-up of what the

“bourgeoisie” saw as a cultural pact, since the young vanguards noisily discarded and

disqualified the literary ideals and values formerly presented as a path to civilization in the

Republic’s early years. That is why a great deal of this public kept loyal to Parnassian

authors and hostile or indifferent to modernists of the first generation. That is also why

Parnassian revivals show up along the History of Brazilian poetry up to these days.

After 1930 the Modernist Literature conquered a greater public with the so-called

“the 30s generation”. That was the moment when the novel from the Northeastern Region

and the poetry in free verse gained ground and brought out the work of Brazilian writers

such as Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Cecília

Meireles, to name just a few.

In 1945, with the end of World War II, the modernist period came to an end and

literature no longer seemed to have the same importance in shaping Brazilian culture.
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In the literary field, willing to mark the post-war period, the new generation of

writers, called “the 45s Generation”, shared clear nostalgia for Classicism following the

world tendency of the time, while it promoted a kind of Parnassian revival regarding the

tone of the speech and the restored interest for fixed forms of the poetic tradition in the

Portuguese language. However, the splendor of the literary system in the early Republican

period had already vanished, and the general impression in the 50s was that people’s

interest in literature had dropped drastically.

In the second half of the twentieth century, this theme is so persistent in the

considerations about poetry, especially by the poets themselves, that is seems difficult to

ponder the actual movement of recent Brazilian Literature – especially poetry – without

taking the public decline into account.

This article focuses on this decrease, starting with some reasonings about the

propositions of the most significant poet that arised in 1945, João Cabral de Melo Neto.

Then it goes on, analyzing the response of Concrete Poetry to the challenges over time,

focusing on the place of poetry in a world dominated by technology and culture industry.

I. Cabral and the modern poetry function

In 1954, in the city of São Paulo, an important International Congress of Writers

was held as part of the 400th city anniversary celebrations, promoted by the Committee of

festivities and sponsored by UNESCO.

At the section dedicated to poetry Aderbal Jurema reviewed that literary moment

reading a paper titled “Notes on the nipponisation of poetry” on 11 August, in which he

stated that the newest generation reacted very badly to the challenges of modern times.
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According to him the new writers loved to boast a reactionary attitude: instead of fully

living the “drama in the boundaries of technique”, they took refuge into a “suicidal

craftsmanship”, which placed poetry far beyond the public and which had shelter only in

the “compliance of the Sunday supplement”.

The public decline issue covered most part of the speeches dedicated to poetry, no matter

what the speaker’s nationality was. Brazilian speakers colored their speeches differently for the

emphasis they gave on the relating cause between the divorce author/public and the growth of

new means of mass communication and on the perception that there is a wild competition

between refined and mass culture, with a clear detriment of the former:

By the way, that is how Afranio Coutinho, one of the most distinguished men of

Letters in the country, expressed his point of view:

“Is it natural for today’s artist, just because he does not want to mingle with

inferior forms or just because he fears that new diffusion methods will endanger his

dignity, is it natural for the artist to avoid participating and building, to silence and

not to compete? It seems it is not. The artist’s duty is to adapt to new conditions and

naturally to safeguard his integrity and the quality of his standards. If the new ways

are considered to be wicked, to escape, to isolate from them is to give in to the

devil. This is not what the spirit should do. Rather it should defeat the prince of

darkness.”2

At that very time, the competition between arts and culture industry was worthy of

analytical attention by another highly acclaimed critic, Antonio Candido, who mentioned

the problem in a text that was split into two parts. The first part was published one year
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before the Congress and the second one in the following year after the Congress. The title

of the text was “Literature and Culture from 1900 to 1945”. 3

In that well-known text Candido stated that from 1930 on there had been a large

increase in the number of literature readers due to education improvement and to illiteracy

decrease. However, he would say “as this new public increased it was at the same time

swiftly conquered by the great development of new means of communication”, which

according to him were the radio, the movies and the comic books. And so he went on:

“Before instruction consolidation could fully consolidate the divulgence of literary

literature, that is to say, those means of communication enabled a larger number of people

to participate in that share of dreams and emotion that assured the traditional prestige of

books due to oral speech, images and sounds (which can surpass what in the written text is

limited for those who did not fit in that reading tradition)”4.

Finally, the critic pointed out the extreme responses to face the situation: the

temptation to approach literature to daily life in order to communicate better with the public

and compete with the radio and the newspaper or to deepen into the singularity of literary

literature, which would make literature more restrictive to the general public.

To expand as well as to conquer the public was the current problem of that time.

This issue had already been brought up by one of the most renowned poets João Cabral de

Melo Neto, who started writing in the 40s. In 1952 in a conference entitled “Poesia e

Composição” (Poetry and Composition) at the City Library in São Paulo, an emblematic

place for the Modernism Movement, Cabral drew the attention to the communication

problem of post-war literature, focusing on poetry.

At that conference, Cabral contrasted two kinds of composition (to what he called

“inspired” and “constructive”) from which two families of poets would derive. For the ones
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from the “inspiration family” poetry would be a real find, something that happened to the

poet. For the ones belonging to the “construction family” poetry would come as a result

from diligent elaboration.

What makes this opposition dynamic, which in a certain sense takes back Schiller’s

typology, is the contrastive picture Cabral draws between modern condition and the “happy

times” of non-modern times. At those “times of balance”, as he used to say, spontaneity

meant “identification with the community”, “the work of art includes inspiration”, rules of

composition are explicit and universally accepted, “the demand from society towards

authors is great” and, because of all that, communication is the core of literary practice. On

the other hand, in modernity the conditions are just the opposite: what defines modernity is

the losing of readers (and of the critic, the reader’s epitome) as “a writer’s indispensable

counterpart”. Without this control the two kinds of composition diverge in radical

opposition, generating distinctive and distant poetic families, condemned, however, to meet

after the development of their inclinations (that is, after the inspired are drained away

because of their “babbling” unable to apprehend the ineffable and after the “builders” are

dragged to a furious craftsmanship that leads to “the suicide of absolute intimacy”) in

solipsist isolation derived from “the death of communication”.

In this modernity described almost as a dead end, Cabral made the option for the

constructive pole instead of the spontaneous one. And he did it strictly as confirmation and

ultimate development of modern condition, because he believed that the constructive poet

would take individualism to the last consequences, as he assumed as reference to his

writing “the consciousness of other poets’ dictions that he wants to avoid, the sharp

consciousness of what in his voice is an echo and which must be eliminated at any cost”
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This is the topic Cabral mentioned again in the thesis he read at the Congress in

1954 and in which he pointed out the relationship between poetry and new means of mass

communication.

In that text although Cabral still affirmed the multi-shaped feature of “modern

poetry” he believed it was possible to have a common ground with contemporary practices:

a “mood for formal research”. Following what he had presented at the City Library two

years before, he worked on the opposition between “the two families of poets”. But what

was relevant to him then was that none of the families were engaged to promoting the

“poem adjustment to its possible function”. As a consequence, contemporary poetry had an

intransitive and innocuous character regarding the demands of the time. It was an

imperative task, he said, to seek a meaningful function for a poem in the modern reader’s

life either through the adaptation to new means of communication (the radio, the movies

and the television), or through the return to forms that could intensify the communication

with the reader such as narrative poetry, the Catalan aucas (which he considered as the

comic books ancestors), the fable, the satiric poetry and the song lyrics. Bearing that in

mind, he ended his text urging the poets to fight “the abyss that currently separates the poet

from his reader” by discarding intimate and individualist themes and by developing more

functional forms that would “lead poetry to modern man’s doorstep”.

II. Concrete Poetry

When, by 1957, the International Congress minutes were finally published, Cabral’s

considerations had already found an extensive programmatic answer and had radically bet

on the integration of poetry into the daily modern life. The presentation, adjustment and
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transformation of that answer would then constitute the energy core of Brazilian poetry

along the next fifty years: Concrete Poetry.

In order to understand the specificity of the movement it is necessary to look over

two texts by Augusto de Campos published in 19555. In these texts Augusto affirms the

existence of a main evolving line of Modern Poetry which Concrete Poetry would join and

respond to.

The truth is that Mallarme’s “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea”, Pound’s

ideogram method, Joyce’s simultaneity and Cummings´ verbal mimic converge at a

composition new concept - a science of archetypes and structures for a new concept

of form – an ORGANOFORMA (ORGANIFORM) – in which traditional notions

such as beginning, middle, end, syllogism tend to disappear before the poetic-

gestalt, poetic-musical, poetic-ideogram idea of the STRUCTURE.6

Therefore, at this very first moment of Concrete Poetry project, the new poetry was

not presented as an attempt to overcome the abyss between author and public. In fact, the

poetry was just at the opposite pole, making the reader search for erudite, refined references

so that he could rate avant-garde art as a result of “an intense craving for

culturmorphological overcoming”7. That is why the new poetry would demand hard and

devoted work from the author as well as from the reader. But the revival of traditional

forms, which characterized the 45’s Generation was strongly condemned by Haroldo 8

The following step of the project was one of the most interesting and tense issues of

Concrete Poetry program, as it would appear on the occasion of the movement national

launching: to make the need for “culturmorphological” evolution coincide with modern
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world demands, marked by technique and dominated by means of mass communication.

That is, to make poetry ( which was elaborated built upon a negative pole, upon the

reader’s refusal, just as Mallarme’s poetry, and which was articulated just as the example of

Joyce’s craftwork) be also a way for the positive integration of the poem into the industrial

world. And also to make the poetry that is expected to be more refined originally be at the

same time the most adequate poetry for immediate communication with the lay and

uneducated reader.

In this scenario the verse crisis and the abyss between author and public were

explained by the inadequacy of the verse to modern times. The correct and consequent

situation concerning form evolution did not seem to satisfy poetry any more. Form

evolution should then be valued and understood in accordance with the appropriation and

usage of the available technological resources, which were, also in a sense, the path to lead

poetry to the world of industrial objects.9

This issue was resumed by João Cabral de Melo Neto at the 1954 Congress. As far

as his considerations were concerned, however, they differed considerably on the

fundamentals and emphasis. The first difference is the verse refusal – that is, a refusal of all

the arsenal of traditional forms – as a strategy to recover poetry communicability at modern

times. That strategy was to mingle poetry with mass media means of communication and

with the principles on which those means were based. Cabral’s opposition between

“expression” and “construction” got stronger with the disqualification of the former pole

and with the absolute affirmation of the latter as the only one to be adequate to new times.

Economy, objectivity and swiftness were the key-words of that moment of Concrete Poetry

so that poetry could integrate into everyday life as an industrial object of consumption.10
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In the years immediately after the Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (National

Exposition of Concrete Art), the emphasis given on the rational, economical and integrated

features of a poem tended to be replaced by a change on how to understand the new poetry

in the first texts of those who joined the Noigandres group. After those initial moments, the

usefulness of a poem, as a vehicle of commercial advertising or as an ornament of modern

architecture, were not so highlighted any more. As Haroldo already said in May 1957, the

concrete poem would have a “language meant to communicate the world of things in the

most rapidly, clearly and efficiently way to create a form”, “to generate a parallel world

with the world of things -- the poem”.11

Augusto de Campos wrote following the same idea, signalizing an expressive

change of perspective, in which poetry would integrate into daily life and would conquer

the public:

Even when circumstantially divorced from the great public, as it is today,

(and in this case the social mission of poetry would be limited to a more allegoric

plan than to a real fact) poetry is believed to intervene even if a posteriori, as time

proportionally permits the absorption of new forms, in the sense of, at least in a

certain way, compensating the atrophy of the language after it was consigned to a

mere communicative function.12

Technique is of utmost importance for the concrete poetry project as well as the

communication issue. What changes drastically in the first years of the development of

Concrete Poetry project is, on one hand, the nature and the place of the technique and on

the other hand what is communicated with the technique. In that particular moment the
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concrete poem, an independent object, “parallel to the world of things”, would first of all

communicate its own new form. And that form only.

The turning point is an allegorical formulation.

The relationship between concrete poetry/tradition and concrete

poetry/contemporary world is now established by a kind of “as-if” rule. And so this

relationship is the answer to the disturbing question of how to make the cultivated vanguard

and the mass media art meet.

The concrete poem is produced as if it were an industrial product. At the same time

it must be read as that it claims to be: the refined heir to the main evolving stream of

Western Literature.

It is up to the reader, naturally to an educated reader, to gather the suggesting

elements of those ties to build “the probable content structure related to the structure-

content of the concrete poem”.

Conceived so, the concrete poem is acknowledged to be “the physiognomy of our

times” and the hope in future because, though not fully understood by the general public, it

would be communicative enough a posteriori, when it could be absorbed and then

transformed into a kind of antidote to the atrophy of merely communicative language.

III. Poetry as technological scene and refined utopia

However, adequacy to time is still the ground for of the idea that Concrete Poetry

represents the last stage in the evolution of western poetry.

That is why the homologies become stronger. They are homologies between the

poetic technique (Mallarmé’s blanks and Cummings’ use of space), Simias’ and
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Apollinaire’s calligram, Carroll’s and Joyce’s portmanteau word, paronomasia) and the

technique of mass media and new technological resources ( the visual appeal of newspapers

and posters, the typographical set-letter and computer possibilities, the effects of

holography and television)13.

Since the “structure” is what really communicates, technique comes first of all. The

poem does not communicate something through a technique. Actually what the poem

communicates is the technique itself, that is, the literary technique, which is brought to the

reader.

What defines a technique as literary and what makes it oppose to a merely industrial

technique (which Concrete Poetry does not try to imitate or to incorporate any more, but to

anticipate) is its insertion in an evolving vector built by literary and theoretical speech. This

literary vector, as one may say, runs parallel to the historical vector that determines the

forms of industrial communication.

Due to this need for distinction, which implies the reinforcement of the independent

feature of literary development in manifestoes and theoretical texts, the concrete

“explanation” of the poem is reduced to the exposition of its technical fundamentals, to the

analyses of the poem’s technical functioning and to the definition of those fundamentals

and of the specific updating form in a scenario where there is an evolution in the procedures

of refined literary practice.

With regard to that, in the homology combination or affirmation of those two

technical tendencies, the refined one stands out, once Concrete Poetry is meant to be

“poetry” and not an object of the industrial world, and also because it claims to be the only

poetry that is consequent upon contemporary times. On the other hand, the assumption that
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it is the only true contemporary poetry of that present time makes one also assume the

equivalence of the several present times along the temporary axis: for each moment there

might be its “concrete poetry”, that is, the poetry that (in relation to that time) occupied the

same place that Concrete Poetry does today. The assumption of this equivalence is due not

only to the theoretical speech that defines the “predecessors”, but also mainly to poetry

translation that makes the many moments of the past equal to the present of Concrete

Poetry.

The controversy surrounding Concrete Poetry is always double and involves a

question of legitimacy or right: the right of an object that encourages the erudite and

industrial superposition to claim the name poetry as well as its tradition. And this debate

also brings up the exclusiveness issue, that is, the sense that the only contemporary and

worthy poetry is the one which performs this superposition.

Because the technical issue is the real core of the poem, technology (integrated into

the erudite and as the element that defines poetry’s contemporaneity) turns to be the very

modern performance, so to say, of concrete poem.

Thus, at the same time, there are the proposition and the claim that a) Concrete

Poetry is the radical and conscious modernization of an old experience: the experience of

poetic invention, that is, the poetry experience; and b) the statement of the radical

difference between past and present, because the technique that displays as a show is not

only based on refinement but mainly on technology.

The main aporia of the concrete practice derives from this last proposition.

In order to expose this aporia one must consider that the “technological technique”,

by its own nature, changes more rapidly than the poetry “traditional technique”.
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Meanwhile, the process of technique advance is refrained by authorship control from which

the concrete poem does not resign.

The “technological technique” is contrary or foreign to authorship notion. For that

very reason, in the long run, the importance of the “technological technique” performance

tends to rapidly decrease to zero. In the cybernetic and mass media world to go form the

most updated resources to the old-stuff museum is quite a fast step. And as a matter of fact,

this step is the secret force that moves not only the perception and satisfaction of the

restless modernity, but also the industry and commerce of cultural instruments and

contents.

Due to this need for authorship and to the assumption that literary and technological

technique may coincide, and furthermore, that tradition, the repository of western

literature’s evolution of form, must be present at the moment of the concrete poem

decodification, there is a consequent decaying and merely historical character of more

radical experiments such as poems with holograms, computer cards and synthesized

sounds. Nevertheless, these experiments had a striking “conservative” character from the

technical point of view to anyone who is familiar with the technological world; and that

familiarity became virtually universal as personal computers got more and more popular in

the1980s and also with the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s).

In consequence, there is still another relevant and very disturbing aspect: today that

the concrete poems that stemmed directly from computer technology are interesting enough

only if historical documentation is taken into consideration, since their old and outdated

style (from the technical point of view) makes them more appealing as a picture in a

science and technology museum than in a poetic anthology.

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On the other hand, the ones that are not read or mainly read as testimonies of a

technological past are the ones in which the typography or the typology comes to the

foreground (the ones from the orthodox phase as Décio´s ideograms, “Augusto´s package

poems”), those in which the skilled (and anti-industrial) character is more sensitive (such as

‘Poetamenos’ (Poet minus), ‘Poemóbiles’ (Poe mobiles) or ‘Caixa preta’ (Black box) and

those in which the “refined technique” surpasses the technological technique”, as ‘A

máquina do mundo’ (The world machine) and ‘Crisantempo’ (Crisantime).

The point of honor of the concrete program, the inclusion of technique in the board

of refined culture, turns to be more and more an impossible mission, a challenge that was

lost.

The concrete poet chose not only the refusal (all the mature work by Augusto de

Campos sticks to the idea of resistance, denial, subtraction to present demands14 ) but also a

touch of nostalgia and melancholy that runs through all the last phase of concrete poetry.

In this sense, the decisive experience is the contemplation of computer animation,

computer versions of concrete poems. The slow rhythm gives these exercises a strange

solemnity because it is seriously played, with no trace of fun or parody.

Compared to musical video-clips, for instance, which are extremely fast, and to the

anonymous animations on internet, the concrete poem simultaneously suffers from the

precarious technological means and resources (which is rather fatal for a poem since it

wants to keep its artistic form as an ever-lasting composition) and from the displacement

of meaning that this precariousness causes on its own kernel, that is, its avant-garde

character, its future-belonging sense as a way of organizing the perception of the present.

In the era of the dissemination of digital visualization, Concrete Poetry is unable to

reproduce the alliance with the techniques of vanguard literature and of high-technology.
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And, although there was a time that that alliance seemed to be possible, today it is

definitely not so. So now Concrete Poetry is comes to the fore not as the denial of

humanism (as it was seen even by the contemporaries) but, on the contrary, as one of the

last sighs of utopian humanism, a moment of optimistic splendor of the modernity that was

at its end.

Bibliography:

CAMPOS, Augusto et allii. Mallarmé. São Paulo: Perspectiva/Edusp, 1974.

CAMPOS, Augusto et allii. Teoria da poesia concreta. (Theory of concrete poetry) São Paulo: Duas

Cidades, 1975.

CAMPOS, Augusto. Despoesia (Dispoetry) (1979-1993). São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1994.

CAMPOS, Augusto. Expoemas (Expoems) (1980-85), serigrafias de Omar Guedes (serygraphies by Omar

Guedes). São Paulo: Entretempo, 1985.

CAMPOS, Augusto. Não (No), plus CLIP-POEMS [on CD-ROM]. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003.

CAMPOS, Augusto. Poesia da recusa (Poetry of refusal). São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2006.

CAMPOS, Augusto. Viva vaia (Hurray for boos) (Poesia 1949-79). São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1979.

CANDIDO, Antonio. Literatura e sociedade (Literature and society). São Paulo: Companhia Editora

Nacional, 1975, fourth edn.

Congresso Internacional de Escritores e Encontros Intelectuais (International Congress of Writers and

Intellectual Meetings), São Paulo, Editora Anhembi Limitada, 1957.

Electronic web sites:

Augusto de Campos, Official site <http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/>

Haroldo de Campos, Official site <http://www2.uol.com.br/haroldodecampos/>

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Poesia Concreta (Concrete Poetry), <http://www.poesiaconcreta.com.br/>

• About the author:

Paulo Franchetti is a full professor of Literary Theory at Campinas State University (UNICAMP).

He has published among other books the essays Alguns aspectos da teoria da poesia concreta

(Some aspects of the concrete poetry (1989); Nostalgia, exílio e melancholia – leituras de Camilo

Pessanha (Nostalgia, exile and melancholy – readings by Camilo Pessanha) (2001) and Estudos de

literatura brasileira e portuguesa (2007) (Studies of Brazilian and Portuguese literature) and the

novel O sangue dos dias transparentes (2003) (The Blood of TransparentDays).

Footnotes:

1
See: “Olavo Bilac e a unidade do Brasil republicano”. In Earle, T.F (org) Actas do V Congresso da

Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas. Oxford-Coimbra: Associação Internacional de

Lusitanistas, 1998, vol. II, pp. 697-706.

2
Congresso Internacional de Escritores e Encontros Intelectuais (International Congress of Writers

and Intelectual Meetings), São Paulo, Editor: Anhembi Limitada, 1957, pp.150-1

3
Published in Literatura e sociedade (Literature and Society)
4
Literatura e sociedade, p.137.
5
It refers to “Poesia, estrutura” (“Poetry, structure”) and “Poesia, ideograma” (“Poetry, ideogram”),

published on 20 and 27 March in the newspaper Diário de São Paulo. Both texts were reprinted in

Augusto de Campos et alii, Mallarmé.

6
“Poema, estrutura” (“Poem, structure”). In Mallarmé, cit, p.186.
7
Haroldo de Campos, “Poesia e paraíso perdido” (Poetry and lost paradise), in the newspaper

Diário de São Paulo, on 5 July 1955; reprinted in Augusto de Campos et alii, Teoria da poesia

concreta (Theory of concrete poetry), pp. 26-30.

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8
Ibidem, pp. 27-8.
9
“the verse: crisis. it forces the head-line reader (simultaneity) to a false attitude. the reader can not

be freed from the logical bonds of language: by trying so the reader employs adjectives and does

not reckon the space as a condition of the new rhythmic reality, using it only as a passive vehicle,

and not as a relational element of structure. not-economical, the reader does not concentrate, does

not quickly communicate. and he destroyed himself in the dialectics of necessity and historical use.”

[…]

“a general art of language. advertising, press, radio, television, movies. a popular art.

the importance of the key-phrases in a faster communication: from the neon signs to comic books.”

[…]

“against expression poetry, subjective poetry. for a creation poetry, objective. concrete, substantive”

Décio Pignatari, “nova poesia:concreta” (new poetry: concrete). Published in the magazine ad-

arquitetura e construção (ad – architecture and construction) (São Paulo, Nov/Dec/1956) and

reprinted in May the following year in the Sunday Supplement of the newspaper Jornal do Brasil,

Rio de Janeiro. Reprinted in Augusto de Campos et alii, Teoria da poesia concreta (Theory of

concrete poetry ).
10
CONCRETE POETRY is the language that fits the contemporary creative mind which permits

communication in its fastest degree/it prefigures for the poem a reintegration in daily life similar to

the one BAUHAUS provided for visual arts: whether as a vehicle of commercial advertising

(newspapers, posters, TV, movies, etc) or as object of pure fruition (working in architecture, e.g.),

with a field of possibilities similar to the plastic object/ it replaces the magic, the mystic and the

“maudit” for ÚTIL (USEFUL).

Haroldo de Campos, “olho por olho a olho nu” (an eye for an eye with a naked eye), the manifesto

was published together with Décio Pignatari´s, mentioned before. It is reprinted in the very same

volume.
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11
Haroldo de Campos, “Poesia concreta – linguagem – comunicação” (Concrete Poetry – language

– communication); reprinted in Augusto de Campos et alii, Teoria da poesia concreta (Theory of

concrete poetry), pp. 70-85.

12
Augusto de Campos, “A moeda concreta da fala” (The concrete coin of speech), text published

on 9 Jan 1957; reprinted in Augusto de Campos et alii,Teoria da poesia concreta ( Theory of

concrete poetry), pp. 111-122.

13
A significant set of poems by Augusto de Campos, including not only the reproductions of some

of his early works, but also an excellent set of examples of his experiments on computerized

animation can be found on the author’s authorized site:www.2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/

There are a few poems by Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari on line and it is not possible to

reproduce them here. That is why I strongly recommend that the reader less familiarized with the

Brazilian Concrete Poetry visit the address above, so not only can they have a complete view of the

several movement phases, but also be able to acquire elements to better evaluate the reflection

presented in this article.

14
It is enough to observe the sequence of titles of the late books: Viva vaia (Hooray for boos)

(1979); Expoemas (Expoems) (1985); Despoesia (Dispoetry) (1994); Não (No) (2003); and also his

last anthology of translations: Poesia da recusa (The poetry of refusal) (2006).