ISSUE 17 Poesía Concreta July, 2007
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ISSUE 17 Poesía Concreta July, 2007 La primera sección de este número ha estado a cargo de Susana Haydu ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 TABLE OF CONTENTS Sección especial: poesía concreta • K. David Jackson and Irene Small Introduction: POEM/ART Brazilian Concrete Poetry/Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry • Antonio Sergio Bessa The "image of voice" in Augusto de Campos’ Poetamenos • Willard Bohn Exploring the concrete labyrinth • Claus Clüver The Noigandres Poets and Concrete Art • Chris Funkhouser Augusto de Campos, Digital Poetry, and the Anthropophagic Imperative • K. David Jackson Traveling in Haroldo de Campos's Galáxias: A Guide and Notes for the Reader • Marjorie Perloff Writing as Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrière-Garde Ensayos/Essays • Cristina Guiñazú Ironía y parodia en "La pesquisa" de Paul Groussac • Josefina Ludmer Literaturas postautónomas • Diana Palaversich El pánico lesbiano en Réquiem por una muñeca rota (cuentos para asustar al lobo) • Jungwon Park Sujeto Popular entre el Bien y el Mal:Imágenes Dialécticas de "Jesús Malverde" • Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky The Thrill of the Kill: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience in the Prose of Eduardo Antonio Parra • Kate Risse Strategy of a Provincial Nun: Sor María de Jesús de Agreda’s Response 2 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 • Carolina Rocha Resisting Hollywood-style Globalization in the Argentine Chaco • Karina Elizabeth Vázquez Turbio fondeadero: Política e ideología en la poética neobarrosa de Osvaldo Lamborghini y Néstor Perlongher Notas/Notes • M. Ana Diz Escribir con luz, desde la luz: Desde esta cámara oscura • Ann González Transgressing Limits: Belli’s El taller de las mariposas • Angélica Huízar Guillermo Gómez-Peña's "Tekno Poética" Web Verse, Lost and Found in a Webspora Reseñas/Reviews • María E. Mayer Correa-Díaz, Luis. Cervantes y América / Cervantes en las Américas. Mapa de campo y ensayo de bibliografía razonada. • Fermín Rodríguez Martín Kohan, Museo de la revolución. • Marcos Wasem Hugo Achugar. Planetas sin boca. Entrevistas/Interviews • Susana Haydu Política y literatura: conversando con Jorge Santiago Perednik 3 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 Sección especial: poesía concreta Introduction: POEM/ART Brazilian Concrete Poetry K. David Jackson Yale University POEM/ART Brazilian Concrete Poetry, the title of an international conference at Yale University (November, 2006) commemorates 50 years of the First National Exhibition of Concrete Art in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in December, 1956. Representing a moment of intense creativity and experimentation in poetry and the arts in Brazil, following the first international art exhibit at the Bienal of São Paulo in 1951, the 1956 exhibit imprinted powerful images on the public imagination and projected the combined forces of Brazilian Concrete poetry and plastic arts as the vanguard of an international aesthetic movement. Augusto de Campos contributed the original design for the conference poster, reproducing the Chinese ideogram for “sun” found in Décio Pignatari’s celebrated poem LIFE, with the words “poem” and “art” spelled in vertical columns to the left and right, 4 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 and in alternating red and black colors. The Yale conference was the third dedicated to Brazilian Concrete Poets Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, after the 1995 Symphosophia (Experimental, Visual, Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996) and the 1999 joint Oxford/Yale conferences in honor of Haroldo de Campos’s 70th year (Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. Oxford, 2005). POEM/ART featured a major exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library, with materials from the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library, under the title “Verbivocovisual,” curated by art historian Irene Small. The special exhibit included rare folios, pop-up books, manifestos, fold-outs, and games, described in the accompanying brochure. 5 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry Irene Small Yale University Verbivocovisual traces the development of Brazilian concrete poetry from its emergence and theorization in the mid 1950s through its polemicization, rupture, and continued experimentation in the 1960s and 70s. Drawn from Book II Episode 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the pormanteau word “verbivocovisual” was used by the Brazilian poets to evoke the synesthetic character of their work. As in Augusto de Campos’s tensão (tension), of 1956, in which the poles of sound (“com som”/”with sound”) and silence (“sem som”/”without sound”) are anchored by the graphic tension of the poem’s structure on the page, the dynamism of Brazilian concrete poetry lies in its attention to the materiality of language. In the current exhibition, this materiality is explored in works and documentation that range from folios and pamphlets to pop-up books, manifestos, fold-outs, and games. Verbivocovisual presents Brazilian concrete poetry as a distinct literary movement and a wider field of formal experimentation – in short, a pluridimensional art. Concrete poetry emerged independently in Brazil, Switzerland, and Sweden in 1953, when Augusto de Campos completed poetamenos in São Paulo, a collection of poems for multiple voices based on Anton Webern’s idea of “Klangfarbenmelodie”, the Swiss- Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer published his spatial Konstellationen poems in Ulm, and the Brazilian-born Swedish poet Öyvind Fahlström wrote his Manifesto for 6 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 Concrete Poetry in Stockholm. One year earlier, Augusto de Campos, together with his brother Haroldo and Décio Pignatari, had formed the Noigandres group in São Paulo and published their first magazine. With Noigandres, the young poets established a formal precedent in the poetry of Ezra Pound, specifically, the ideogrammatic method of the Cantos. The poets soon expanded this conceptual universe to include Ernest Fenollosa, Sergei Eisenstein, e.e. cummings, Guillaume Apollinaire, João Cabral de Melo Neto, James Joyce, Oswald de Andrade, and most importantly, Stéphane Mallarmé, whose 1897 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard established the typographic character of words and the white space of the page as active, structural elements of composition. By 1955, the Campos brothers and Pignatari had established the central principles of concrete poetry in a series of works and theoretical texts published in Brazilian newspapers, and in Noigandres 2, where poetamenos was published for the first time. The concrete poem, according to Augusto de Campos, was “the tension of word-things in space-time.” It did not unfold linearly, according to the discursive, syntactic conventions of verse, but presented itself instantly, as a “relational field of functions”. The concrete poem was analogous to the rapidity of modern communication, its structure as economical as a billboard, a poster, or an advertising slogan. The concrete poets saw a direct link between their work and the modernization of Brazil’s post-war industrial boom, which brought with it the country’s first institutions of modern art, the São Paulo Bienal, Latin America’s first school of industrial and communication design, and the euphoric “JK” years and their promise of “fifty years of progress in five.” 7 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 The poets’ interest in the efficiency and rationality of communication led them to make contact with visual artists such as Waldemar Cordeiro and his Ruptura group as early as 1952. Cordeiro, who became spokesperson for the Concrete artists of São Paulo, had been influenced by Italian and Argentine concrete art as well as the Swiss Concretist Max Bill, who had exhibited in São Paulo in 1950. Cordeiro called for a “productive” art free of expression and subjectivity. Following Theo van Doesburg’s 1930 distinction between abstract and concrete art, he insisted that the work of art has its own, objective reality, a description close in keeping with the concrete poets’ formulation of their own work. Conversations between the groups led to the planning of a national exhibition which would place works of art and poetry side by side – both “products” of the new, modern world. With the 1956 National Exhibition of Concrete Art, concrete poetry entered, in the words of Pignatari, its “polemic phase.” The exhibition was inaugurated at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in December of 1956, and traveled to Rio de Janeiro in February 1957, where it was installed in the Ministry of Education and Culture. The concrete poets now counted among their adherents poets such as Ronaldo Azeredo, José Lino Grünewald, Théon Spanudis, and the Rio-based art critic Ferreira Gullar, whose 1954 publication A Luta Corporal enacted the atomization and deconstruction of language. A conference in Rio de Janeiro on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening erupted in controversy, resulting in national coverage of the movement in popular magazines such as O Cruzeiro. In an article published shortly thereafter, titled “Concrete Poetry and the Brazilian Poetic Moment”, the respected critic Mário Faustino recognized the Concretists as the most innovative poets in Brazilian literature yet. 8 ISSUE 17 Poesía concreta (July 2007) ISSN: 1523-1720 As theoretical positions became more polemic, however, internal fissures began to appear among the artists and