In this text, Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos presents the aims of Concrete poetry and explains how it transcends the historical parameters of the poetry tradition. Noigandres—the group that de Campos represents—envisions “the word” as an integral object that must be grasped in relation to its verbal, visual, and sound components. For Concrete poetry, poetry is not a linear succession of verses, but instead is a system of relationships between all the elements of the poem, including the (blank) space on the page and the graphic and phonetic characteristics of the words. Augusto—who is the youngest of the de Campos brothers—cites the experiences of the historical avant-gardes, such as the Futurists (both Russian and Italian) and the Dadaists, as well as specific authors, among them are French writers Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire, Irish writer James Joyce, and North American writers Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings, as crucial precedents of Concrete poetry and its “paideuma.”

In Brazil, the Concrete movement included a wide range of artistic expressions, including literature, experimental music, the visual arts, and industrial design. This text by poet Augusto de Campos (b. 1931) was published in a 1956 issue of the magazine A & D (Arquitetura e Decoração) that featured the work of the participants in the Iª Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta. De Campo’s work discusses the agenda and the vision voiced in texts by Concrete poets and theorists—figures such as Haroldo de Campos (1929−2003) and Décio Pignatari (1927−2012)—and the artistic points of reference and conceptual basis of the movement that emerged in São Paulo in 1952. For further information, see de Campos’s “Plano-pilôto para poesia concreta” (1958) [doc. no. 1090135]. The Concrete artists who were members of the Noigandres group were closely tied to the intellectuals, painters, and sculptors who formed the Ruptura group in São Paulo in 1952, which happens to be the same year the Noigandres group was founded (see the “Manifesto Ruptura” published in O Estado de S. Paulo [doc. no. 1085337]). Both groups adhered to the thinking of Waldemar Cordeiro, head of the group of Concrete painters, in relation to the autonomy of language, open rejection of subjective expression, and the vision of the poem (or the painting ) as product (or object). Cordeiro’s seminal text, entitled “O objeto” [doc. no. 1086891], was also published in A&D (no. 20, November–December, 1956). In keeping with the thinking of the Noigandres group, Cordeiro’s text posits that “the work is not a form of expression but a product whose contents are the visual elements intrinsic to it.”