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QUESTIONNAIRE OF THE YALE SYMPOSIUM ON EXPERIMENTAL, VISUAL AND CONCRETE POETRY

SINCE THE 1960'S (April 5-7, 1995)

(Questions formulated by K.David Jackson, Eric Vos & Johanna Drucker. Replies by Augusto de

Campos, translated by K.David Jackson)

1. What dimensions of contemporary poetics are directly engaged with concretism?

A. I see Concrete poetry as directly engaged with the practices of vanguard, experimental or - as it

should probably more adequately be called - inventive poetry. I think that the task of Concrete

poetry, after it appeared in the 50s, was to reestablish contact with the poetry of the vanguards of

the beginning of the century (Futurism, Cubofuturism, Dada et alia), which the inlervention of two

great wars and the proscription of Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships had condemned to

marginalization. A similar movement occurred in the 50s in music, with the recuperation of the

work of the Vienna Group (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg), the rediscovery of the great indnidual

experimentalists (Ives, Varese, etc.), and the intervention of new vanguard composers, from

Boulez to Stockhausen to Cage. In terms of the poets whom Pound termed "masters," "diluters,"

etc., the practitioners of Concrete poetry situate themselves, or hope to be situated,

programmatically, in the category of the "inventors," that is, those who are engaged in the pursuit

of new forms.

2. How do you see the historical precedents of your own Concrete work? If you are not discussingyour own work, please select a specific text on which to base your comments.

A. For me, the dividing line for inventive poetic language in modern times is Mallarme's work Un

coup de ds (1897), a poem conceivod intersemiotically as a fragmentary structure ("subdivisions

prismatiques de l'Ide"), conjoining visual mural and musical score. With the acceptance of that

work, it became possible to revisit the experiences of the vanguards of the beginning of the

century and conceive of new elaborations. "Sans presumer de l'avenir qui sortira d'ici, rien ou

presque un art," the last Mallarme - from Un coup de ds to Le Livre catalyzes and spreads the

principal future alternatives of poetic language. In his final period and in the subsequent

developments of the historical vanguards, which will be recycled and radicalized by Concrete

poetry, one encounters the formal presuppositions of the poetry of the Technological Era, which

greatly expands throughout the second half of the century. Besides Mallarm and the historical

vanguards, I would place as direct precedents Ezra Pound (the ideogrammatic method, the collage

and metalanguage of the Cantos), James Joyce (the vocabulistic kaleidoscope of Finnegans Wake

and its textual polyreadings), Cummings (the atomization and syntactical dislocation of his most

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experimental poems), and, on a second level, more idiosyncratic and less rigorous, the

experimental, minimalist, and molecular prose of Gertrude Stein. In the special case of Brazilian

poetry, the Sousandrade of O inferno de Wall Street (The Wall Street Hell) with its precollage

epigrammatic mosaics, Oswald de Andrade and the "anthropophagic" instantpoem, the

constructivist engineering of Joo Cabral [de Melo Neto]. In a transdisciplinary mode, I would

mention the transformations of musical language from Webern to Cage and of the visual from

Malevich/Mondrian to Duchamp.

3. What are the theorectical underpinnings which distinguish your works from that of historical

precedentes or contemporaries?

A. In view of the specific historical context in which it occurred, Concrete poetry obviously did not

participate either in the ideology of Symbolism, which still underlies Mallarme's poetics, or in themecanopolitical Futurist utopias, or in Dadaist nihilism. Concrete poetry took a position as a

poetics of objectivity, attempting simply to place its premises at the roots of language, with the

intention of creating new operational conditions for the elaboration of a poem in the sphere of

technological revolution. Technically, Concrete poets can be distinguished from their antecedents

by the radicalization and condensation ofthe means of structuring a poem, on the horizon of the

means of communication of the second half of the century.That implies, among other

characteristics, the following: greater constructive rigor in relation to the graphic experiences of

Futurists and Dadaists; greater concentration of vocabulary; emphasis on the nondiscursive

character of poetry, suppression or relativization of syntactic links; making explicit the materiality

of language in its visual and sonorous dimensions; free passage between verbal and nonverballevels.

Poems such as "terra" by Dcio Pignatari or "cristal" by Haroldo de Campos, from the 50s, or my

"cidadecitycite" or "olho por olho" from the 60s typify these characteristics.

Concrete poets may be differentiated from other experiences (zaum, lettrisme, phonetic poetry)

for not rejecting semantic values but rather placing them on equal footing with other material,

visual, and sonorous parameters of the poem. They differentiate themselves from the "chance

poetry" of Cage and others for not abdicating control of the structure of the poem, although

allowing for chance interventions.

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4. To what extent is the work you are discussing different from the work of the concrete poets of

the 1950s and 1960s? How?

A. Now four decades since the first experiences of Concrete poetry, I would say that the 50s and

60s were the period of greatest orthodoxy of the movement, something like the serialization of all

musical parameters proposed by European postWebernian musicians. In the later decades there

occurred a greater flexibility of poetic language in the sense of recuperation of phrasic structures

(in relation to the elementarism of the first phase, with poems made up of only one word or of a

few spatialized substantives) and of the inclusion of chance (with the interventions of Cage), but

that flexibility always observed a compositional rigor and the principle of functionality or of the

formal necessity of the poem. Such an opening became inevitable in view of the redundancy of

process and of its degradation, brought about by the ineffectiveness of many realizations,

especially in the area of visual poetry, characterized by a semantic insignificance analogous to

many baroque graphic "labyrinths," which, with the superficiality of repeated graphic emblems,

did not amount to more than the vacuity of epithalamian or funerial elegies. Such an opening

should not be confused either with with the apparent complexity of the simply chaotic surrealist

texts that used graphic space without any satisfactory formal basis. Works of the 80s and 90s are,

on the one hand, freer in relation to the orthodoxy of the first years and, on the other, more

intensely participatory in the challenge of new technologies, which have produced digitalized

poems, graphic and sound animation, and multimedia and intermedia processes. In this way, the

"wishful thinking" of the 50s came about with computers, an ideal space for "verbivocovisual"

adventures.

5. Is there a poetics of concretism or is concrete poetry a formal device rather than a conceptual

premise?

A. As I see it, Concrete poetry did not come about as a formal specialization in the field of modern

poetry, as one could speak of carmenfiguratum in antiquity, but rather as a proposed

radicalization of poetic language in which the visual aspects constitute just one of the relevant

parameters. What Concrete poetry sought was to recuperate the specificity of poetic language

itself, the materiality of the poem and its autonomy, beginning with a revision and radicalization of

the methods of modern poetry and of the elaboration of a new creative project in the context of

new media.

6. Thesis: "Concretism, one of the most radical avantgarde trends of this century engaged in a

critical reevaluation of the artistic object and its place in society, had a new way of looking at and

reading tradition. It was a forerunner of later neobaroque and postmodern trends." Please give

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your evaluation or judgment of this artist's perspective from an artist's participant's point of view,

as it relates to your own work or poetics, or to your critical judgment of concretist

experimentation.

A. I don't think that either of the expressions - "neobaroque" or "postmodern" - are sufficiently

adequate to characterize the actual moment in its possible relations with Concrete poetry. The

term "neobaroque" is too charged with historicity and could lead to confusions, if one considers

that it usually takes in practices of Hispanic and Latin American poetry not connected to the

poetics of concretism. As to "postmodern," it is a concept of indefinite contours, hardly defensible,

to the degree that the presuppositions of "modern" are still in effect; it seems rather to be a label

that serves as a pretext for ecleticisms of a conservative nature, actually pre or antimodernist. I

would stop at the first phrase of the thesis, adding in place of "It was a forerunner, etc." that

Concrete poetry once again took up speculations of an experimental lineage in contemporary

poetry, forming relevant presuppositions for the development of poetry in the context of new

media that are growing in the technological phase of modernity. It constituted, at the least, an

important movement for keeping alive the revolutionary ideology of permanent and autonomous

experimentation and redefining vanguard action in the second half of the century, assuming this

position under the category of "poetry of invention" (in contrast to the more palatable "expressive

poetry") as a means of resistance against the massification and the banalization of literature

imposed by the new means of communication and the stagnation of conventional literature.