Already in our century these tendencies are affirmed at two levels. First is the literary level with the work of Apollinaire, creator of "calligrams;" the Chilean poet Huidobro; Ezra Pound, who included Oriental signs in his poems; James Joyce, creator of "portmanteau words," reunion of radicals; the poems without words of Man Ray; Kurt Schwitters' "noise" poems; the creation of "zaum" language by the Russian poets Klebnikov, Kruchonik, and Iliazd; the letter poems of the Italian Futurists or those of Raoul Hausmann and Hugo Ball; Cummings' syllabic poetry; the French lettrism of Isidore Isou, Lemaitre, Heidsiek, etc. Then there is the visual level with the early work of the Cubists, it being common to add letters or words as well in the works of the Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist painters, although it was at the level of abstract geometric tendencies at which the structural element prevailed, that is to say, the syntactic re-sizing of the visual expressive unities, such as, for example, the point, the line, the plane, etc., becoming considered the determinant elements of expression, above all after Max Bill's School of Ulm in Switzerland.
It is thus as a consequence of this new consideration of signs, whether visual or literary, that literary concretism emerges. Around 1951 on the occasion of Max Bill's triumph at the First Biennial of Sao Paulo these tendencies were consolidated to the point that in 1955 a young Sao Paulo poet, Augusto de Campos, conceived that "in synchronization with the terminology adopted by the visual arts and, to a certain point, by avant-garde music (concretism or concrete music) one would say that there is a concrete poetry," conceptualizing the poetic experiences that innumerable poets were already realizing, not only in Brazil, but in other corners of the world. We mention, for example, the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer who since 1953 had been one of the originators of concretism with his book Constellations and later with the manifesto "Towards Constellation."
On December 4, 1956, the National Exhibition of Concrete Art was opened in Sao Paulo in the Museum of Modern Art; this show would then be opened on February 4, 1957, in the entrance hall of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro. Thus was born this new poetic current that has influenced the art even of our own time, so rich have been its propositions.
Noigandres: Structural Rigor
Three different currents can be discerned, whose differences are sought in the emphasis placed on one or another formal element. The best known tendency, that of the Noigandres group of Sao Paulo, brought together by Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, places the accent on construction, on the structural element, taking into account the optical-acoustic organization of words in graphic space. The poem is generated in the midst of tensions that create similarities or the proximity of expressive verbal unities. Its platform is contained in the manifesto "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry," which appeared in the group's magazine Noigandres, IV (1958), and was republished in Theory of Concrete Poetry (1975). Its central argument states, "Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms, closing of the historic period of verse (rhythmic-formal unity), concrete poetry begins by taking into account graphic space as a structural agent, qualified space; spatio-temporal space, in place of merely temporal-lineal development; thence the importance of the idea of the ideogram, from its specific sense (Fenollosa-Pound) of methodic composition based on direct-analogical, not logico-discursive, juxtaposition of elements. Our intelligence must accustom itself to syntactico-ideographic comprehension in place of analytico-discursive (Apollinaire)." This phenomenon was clearly expressed by N. N. Argañaraz in his note "Noigandres," in O Dos, #1 (December, 1982):
Flower-Pot
ashtray chair
cigar glass table
box book
fruit watch
and in addition to reading, we are seeing the words as if
they were concrete things. This tendency generated the poetic current "Praxis Poetry," developed above all by the poet Mario Chamie, in the post-face to his book Lavra Lavra (Sao Paulo, 1962), which proposes a turn to linear verse insisting on the expressive possibilities of proximity and similarities of words, for example, "MIRALUE, Lua sobre lua/Lua sob lua/Anular/Lunar/Lu ar/lualua." ("Palavra," 1963, RJ). This tendency, moreover, gives way to a multiplicity of developments in the estimation of Pierre Garnier in Spatialism and Concrete Poetry (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), in which we are told that this current of concrete poetry gave rise to spatial poetry, proposed by the same Garnier; visual poetry in which the semantic sense of words is definitely downplayed; the "poesia visiva" of Italian origin that includes images next to letters and words; multidimensional poetry in which other languages are privileged; sound poetry; the radical development of Schwitters' "Ursonatas" which take advantage of recent advances in the sound recording industry; semantic poetry; megapoetry; etc., although others are of the opinion that many of these forms come directly from lettrism.
Neoconcretism: Symbolic-Metaphysic Language
Another tendency is that created by the poet Ferreira Gullar which emerged in reaction to the "Objectivism of the rationalist poets of the Noigandres group, which tried to imitate the machine," giving way to neoconcretism of a metaphysical-symbolic temper that attempted the formulation of a new syntax. Gullar's basic text, "Theory of the Non-Object," published in the Supplement of the Jornal of Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), then to historify the struggle of artists against naturalistic representation of the exterior world, predicts the death of painting, in favor of of "non-objects:" "it is not an anti-object, but a special object in which is attempted to realize a synthesis of sensory and mental experiences: a body transparent to phenomenological knowledge, integrally perceptible, which tends tends toward pure appearance. A pure appearance." Similarly, in an interview he affirms,
Another basic concept of neoconcretism: the preeminence of time which in its transpiring generated meanings in the spatial sphere: "It does not have to do with raising a metaphoric space in a well protected place in the world, and does have to do with realizing a work in real space and with giving to this space, by the appearance of the work--spatial object--a significance and a transcendence."
Thus, Ferreira Gullar constitutes himself as a precursor of the so-called action arts, the happening, performances, environments, or installations, etc., much before many of those who today are relevant figures as practitioners of these forms. The material aspect and the discipline in which it is realized are irrelevant to the non-object: what matters is the transcendental vitality before its discovery, and that occurs in the act, in duration. For the neoconcretist, the poem is a temporal entity: "it is in time and not in space that the word totally discovers its significative nature."
This formulation encountered a favorable echo, and its postulates can be found not only in the works of Ferreira Gullar, for example, the "Buried Poem," realized in the quinta of another neoconcrete artist, Helio Oiticica, but also in the work of numerous artists such as Ligia Clark, with her manipulable objects "Os Bochos," or the same Oiticica and Ligia Pape with their famous environments. Likewise, the movements of the "New Objectivity" in Brazil and the "Non-object Poetry" of Clemente Padin (1971, Uruguay) recognize their influence. According to the critic Alvaro de Sá, the most important contributions of neoconcretism are:
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