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Poetry and Technique - Concrete Poetry PDF
Poetry and Technique - Concrete Poetry PDF
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
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
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
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
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
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.
was held as part of the 400th city anniversary celebrations, promoted by the Committee of
At the section dedicated to poetry Aderbal Jurema reviewed that literary moment
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 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
“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
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
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
according to him were the radio, the movies and the comic books. And so he went on:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
composition new concept - a science of archetypes and structures for a new concept
such as beginning, middle, end, syllogism tend to disappear before the poetic-
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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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
This issue was resumed by João Cabral de Melo Neto at the 1954 Congress. As far
fundamentals and emphasis. The first difference is the verse refusal – that is, a refusal of all
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
10
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
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
change of perspective, in which poetry would integrate into daily life and would conquer
the public:
(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
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
relationship is the answer to the disturbing question of how to make the cultivated vanguard
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.
elements of those ties to build “the probable content structure related to the structure-
times” and the hope in future because, though not fully understood by the general public, it
However, adequacy to time is still the ground for of the idea that Concrete 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
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
Due to this need for distinction, which implies the reinforcement of the independent
“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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
computer versions of concrete poems. The slow rhythm gives these exercises a strange
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.
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. Teoria da poesia concreta. (Theory of concrete poetry) São Paulo: Duas
Cidades, 1975.
CAMPOS, Augusto. Expoemas (Expoems) (1980-85), serigrafias de Omar Guedes (serygraphies by Omar
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
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
Footnotes:
1
See: “Olavo Bilac e a unidade do Brasil republicano”. In Earle, T.F (org) Actas do V Congresso da
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
Diário de São Paulo, on 5 July 1955; reprinted in Augusto de Campos et alii, Teoria da poesia
8
Ibidem, pp. 27-8.
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“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 ).
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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
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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Haroldo de Campos, “Poesia concreta – linguagem – comunicação” (Concrete Poetry – language
of his early works, but also an excellent set of examples of his experiments on computerized
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
(1979); Expoemas (Expoems) (1985); Despoesia (Dispoetry) (1994); Não (No) (2003); and also his