Haroldo de Campos — Noigandres — Brazilian concrete poetry founding

1958

Artists: Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari · Year: 1958 · Medium: Concrete poetry — text as visual and phonetic material · Substrate: Printed magazines Noigandres 1-4 (1952-1962); typographic experimentation treating text as visual material · Place: São Paulo, Brazil · Institution: Noigandres group (self-organized) The Noigandres group formed in São Paulo in 1952 around Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Its name was lifted from a line in Ezra Pound's Canto XX — a word no scholar had been able to gloss, and which Pound had adopted as a private sign for the untranslatable. The group's 1958 "Plano-piloto para poesia concreta" was a manifesto but also, more usefully, a specification. It laid down the operational rules of what they called concrete poetry: the poem as an object, not a line; typography as syntax; the visual arrangement of words on a page treated as part of the signal, not decoration of it. This matters to a computational archive because the Plano-piloto described, years before any of its authors saw a computer, the same decomposition of language that would be required to make a machine read or write poetry. A word was no longer a unit of meaning alone; it was a unit of meaning, shape, sound, and position. Each of those could be varied independently. Each could be operated on. "Poetic function" became, in their formulation, the layered result of a set of transformations applied to a substrate — a description indistinguishable from what a program does. When Augusto de Campos began, years later, to work with computer-generated layouts, animated typography, and holography, he was not adopting a new tool. He was finding machines that could finally execute the specification Noigandres had written out by hand. The group anticipated, in the specific sense that engineers mean the word, the formal preconditions of algorithmic writing. The 1958 manifesto is in this archive because concrete poetry is the most consequential pre-computational instance of work that treats language as a computational substrate. Its lineage runs straight into the sound poetry experiments of the 1960s, the text-machines of Alison Knowles, and every subsequent generation of programmers who have tried to make a computer write. Lore Haroldo de Campos translated the Iliad, Pound's Cantos, Mallarmé, Joyce, classical Chinese, and Hebrew scripture into Portuguese, and treated each translation as a formal experiment — a way of exposing the machinery of the source. He and Augusto were as much engineers of reading as they were poets of writing. The brothers collaborated for decades without ever writing a joint poem. The Plano-piloto was laid out in the magazine Noigandres 4 (1958) in grids of enumerated paragraphs, like a technical datasheet rather than a manifesto. The São Paulo art world called it a provocation. The engineers — and, eventually, the programmers — read it as a specification. Sources • de Campos, Haroldo; de Campos, Augusto; Pignatari, Décio — "Plano-piloto para poesia concreta" (Noigandres 4, 1958). • Bessa, Antonio Sergio; Cisneros, Odile (eds.) — Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos (Northwestern, 2007). • Solt, Mary Ellen — Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana, 1968).