VISUAL POETRY - WEEK FOUR

What does it leave us? Look to how a visual poem can be read. That act—those transactions between/within reader, word, and image—instructs us on how to gather meaning from the intensifying syntactic flashes of our internal and external world." – Crag Hill, The Last Vispo ​

Coda

Reading a visual poem takes a minimum of three steps:

1) Read the entire page/space at once. The visual poem is designed to first be read whole (unlike most poems on the page chained to left to right, top to bottom regimens).

2) Read the parts of the whole. Consider their position on the page/in space, their relationships to other parts. Much that happens in a visual poem happens here.

3) Read the full poem again at the same time reading its elements as they combine and re-combine to create the whole.

-Crag Hill, The Last Vispo

Ovonovelo

The spatial organization of Ovonovelo, by Augusto de Campos, was still dictated by iconic resemblance to the actual object in question (in Augusto de Campos’s case, to both an egg (ovo) and a ball of yarn (novelo), alongside connotation of meaning being continuously spun in a dialectic of new (novo) and old (veiho), which Décio Pignatari termed “a movement that imitates the real” (movimento imitative do real)

The geometric-isomorphic poem, on the other hand, would be arranged more like an ideogram, so as to achieve “simultaneity in space” and discard any reside of “syntactical ordering.”

Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 By Sérgio B. Martins

What was once an exercise in matching sound to sense, the visual poet is charged with matching sight to sense. It does not preclude text rather it embraces text in a variety of alternative ways that the normal practice of linear mode of reading -Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

READINGS

Augusto de Campos

Augusto de Campos
Born 1931 in São Paulo, Augusto de Campos is, with his brother Haroldo, one of the founders of the concrete poetry movement in Brazil. He is also a translator, music critic and visual artist. From 1980 Augusto de Campos has worked intensively with new media and has presented his poems in the form of video-texts, neon lights, electrical panels, holograms, laser lights, infographics and multimedia elements.

Augusto de Campos

Augusto de Campos

Décio Pignatari

“He was 85 and lived in Sao Paulo. With [brothers] Augusto and Haroldo de Campos he edited the magazne Noigandres e Invenção and they together wrote Teoria da Poesia Concreta (1965).” That’s him up top, center, circa 1950.

There are films/visual poems and other resources up at UBUWEB, including a paper by Mary Ellen Solt on the Brazilian concrete poets. A bit of history:

In 1952, the year Gomringer wrote his first finished constellation “avenidas,” three poets in São Paulo, Brazil–Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari–formed a group for which they took the name Noigandres from Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In Canto XX, coming upon the word in the works of Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour, old Levy exclaimed: “Noigandres, eh, noigandres / Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!” This puzzling word suited the purposes of the three Brazilian poets very well; for they were working to define a new formal concept. The name noigandres was both related to the world heritage of poems and impossible for the literary experts to define. They began publishing a magazine of the same name, and within the year had begun correspondence with Pound and had established contact with concrete painters and sculptors in São Paulo and with musicians of the avant-garde.

Décio Pignatari

Décio Pignatari

boba coca cola

In “boba coca cola” ( “drink coca cola”) Decio Pignatari makes an anti-advertisement from an American advertising slogan, condemning both the culture that makes and exports coca cola and the culture that drinks it. The word “coca,’ in South American countries, refers to a number of shrubs, but especially to the E. coca, whose leaves resemble tea. Coca leaves are chewed to impart endurance. Pharmaceutically the dried leaves of the E. coca yield cocaine. By simply exchanging the position of the vowels in “coca” the poet gets “caco” (“shard”). With this most economical method he is able to bring into the poem a most provocative question: What will the archaeologist of the future be able to say about our civilization if the shards we leave are fragments of coca cola bottles? The final, damning word of the poem “cloaca” (“filthy place,” “cesspool”) also takes its letters from “coca cola.” - by Mary Ellen Solt

Silencio (1954) by Eugen Gomringer

Silencio (1954) by Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Gomringer

Augusto de Campos

Augusto de Campos

Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Grominger

Eugen Grominger
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