| Born in São Paulo
(Brazil) in 1931, poet, translator, literary and music critic. In 1951 he published his
first book of poems, O REI MENOS O REINO (The King Minus the Kingdom). In 1952, with his
brother Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari, he launched the literary magazine
"Noigandres", the origin of the Noigandres Group which initiated the
international movement of concrete poetry in Brazil. The second issue of that magazine
(1955) contained his series of colorpoems POETAMENOS (Minuspoet), written in 1953, and
considered the first consistent examples of concrete poetry in Brazil. Verse and
conventional syntax are abandoned and the words are rearranged in graphic patterns.
sometimes printed in six different colors, under inspiration of Webern's
Klangfarbenmelodie. In 1956 he participated in the organization of the First National
Exhibition of Concrete Art (Painting and Poetry) in the Museum of Modern Art in São
Paulo. His work has since been included in many international exhibitions, as well in
worldknown anthologies like "Concrete Poetry: an International Anthology",
edited by Stephen Bann (London, 1967), "Concrete Poetry: a World View", edited
by Mary Ellen Solt (University of Bloomington, Indiana, 1968)," Anthology of Concrete
Poetry", edited by Emmet Williams (NY, 1968). Most of his poems were assembled in
VIVA VAIA,1979. Other important works are POEMOBILES (1974), CAIXA PRETA (Black Box),
1975, collections of objectpoems in collaboration with the graphic artist Julio Plaza,
and DESPOESIA, 1994. As a
translator of poetry, Augusto specialized in rendering the work of avantgarde authors
like Pound ("Mauberley", "The Cantos"), Joyce ("Finnegans
Wake"), Gertrude Stein and cummings, or the Russian Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, He
also translated some of the great "inventors" of the past: Arnaut Daniel and the
troubadours, Donne and the metaphysical poets, Mallarmé and the French Symbolists. A
first anthology of his work, expanded in several monographies, is VERSO REVERSO
CONTROVERSO (1978). Some of his last publications in this field: RIMBAUD LIVRE (Free
Rimbaud Book)(1992), RILKE:POESIACOISA (Rilke: Thing-Poetry)(1994), HOPKINS: A BELEZA
DIFÍCIL (Hopkins: The Difficult Beauty) (1997).
As an essayist he is the coauthor of TEORIA DA POESIA CONCRETA (Theory of Concrete
Poetry) with Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari, 1965, and the author of other books
dealing with avantgarde and inventive poetry, like POESIA ANTIPOESIA ANTROPOFAGIA
(Poetry AntiPoetry Anthropophagy), 1978, O ANTICRÍTICO (The Anticritic),1986,
LINGUAVIAGEM (Languavoyage),1987, À MARGEM DA MARGEM (At the edge of the edge), 1989.
With Haroldo and Pignatari he fought for the revaluation of the work of Oswald de Andrade,
the leader of Brazilian "Modernistas", and also rediscovered the neglected work
of the Brazilian Romantic poet, Sousândrade (1832-1902), a forerunner of modern poetry
with his "Wall Street's Hell" (1877) in REVISÃO DE SOUSÂNDRADE (Re-vision of
Sousandrade) (1964). BALANÇO DA BOSSA (E OUTRAS BOSSAS) (1968-1974) gathered his pioneer
studies on Tropicalism and Brazilian Pop Music as well as some of his interventions in the
field of contemporary music dealing with Charles Ives, Webern, Schnberg and the Brazilian
composers of "Musica Nova". Further essays were collected in MÚSICA DE
INVENÇÃO (Music of Invention), 1998, focusing the music and poetry of Cage and the
radical works of Varèse, Antheil, Cowell, Nancarrow, Scelsi, Nono, Ustvolskaya and
others.
From 1980 on, intensified his experiments with the
new media, presenting his poems on electric billboard, videotext, neon, hologram and
laser, computer graphics, and multimedia events, involving sound and music, as the
plurivocal reading of CIDADECITYCITÉ (with Cid Campos), 1987/1991. Four of his
holographic poems (in cooperation with Moyses Baumstein) were included in the exhibitions
TRILUZ (1986) and IDEHOLOGIA (1987). A videoclippoem, PULSAR, with music by Caetano
Veloso, was produced in 1984 in an Intergraph high resolution computer station. BOMB POEM
and SOS, with music by his son, Cid Campos, were animated in a Silicon Graphic Computer
Station of the University of São Paulo, 1992-3. His cooperation with Cid, begun in 1987
resulted in POESIA É RISCO (Poetry is Risk), a CD was launched by PolyGram in 1995 and
developed in a multimidia performance with the same title, a "verbivocovisual"
show of poetry/music/image, which gained video-editing by Walter Silveira, and has been
presented in several cities in Brazil and abroad. An installation assembling his digital
poetic animations - CLIPPOEMS - was shown in 1997 as part of the exhibition Arte
Suporte Computador (The Computer as Support for Art), Casa das Rosas. Some of his visual and
sound poems can be seen at www.ubu.com. |
