Augusto de Campos’s Anti-Literature

Passages Between Languages and Media

Abstract

This essay examines the scholarly reception, trajectory, philosophy, and aesthetic dimensions of renowned Brazilian writer Augusto de Campos’s poetics from the 1950s to the present.  Against the grain of scholarly accounts that reduce Campos to concretism, I show how his poetry is better framed by its commitment to the permanent radicalization of language.  This is what I call Campos’s “post-concrete” opening to other arts, poets, and to the mass media. I illustrate how since the 1960s Campos’s work is characterized by the following motifs: its emphasis on poetry’s liminal, anti-literary status and non-conciliation with the literary field; its construction of novel poetic prototypes; its endeavor to lead poetry to an in-between, interdisciplinary space, fusing the verbal with the nonverbal; its fidelity to concretism’s graphic, non-discursive, analogical, and isomorphic syntax; and its endeavor to recuperate and reinvent experimental poetic and artistic practices of the past, from Arnaut Daniel to Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, Oswald de Andrade, Vladimir Mayakovsky, James Joyce, E.E. Cummings, Anton Webern, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Emily Dickinson.  I consider four fundamental tensions at stake in Campos: between poetics and politics, concretism and the other arts, translation and creation, and Campos’s commitment to facing poetry’s “risk”, that is, its venture into the nonpoetic spaces of the digital, technological age.  I conclude with an assessment of Campos’s understanding of the poem as a polyphonic assemblage that combines diverse systems of signs––from propaganda, pop, and YouTube to avant-garde music, poetry, and painting. Through the anti-literary appropriation of media, the poem new-mints speech, language, and art proper so as to make humanity more aware of the total sensory and political environment into which it is immersed.