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Foreword to the book "Não", by Augusto de Campos
Arnaldo Antunes
"Não", by Augusto de Campos, ed. Perspectiva: 24/10/2003
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who appears on this book untranslated in om / e.e.wittgenstein), dedicated all his work to the reflection about the limits of the speech. He finishes his Tratactus Logico-Philosophicus with a very well known statement: "That, which cannot be said, should be kept silent".
At the utmost end of this (im)possibility to where common day-to-day philosophy points out – without ever accomplishing it – Augusto de Campos’ speech-object emerges.
Between speaking and keeping silent, his poems seem to speak the unspeakable, even where he doesn’t attempt to speak them but rather perform them through speech.
From this frontier condition comes the signs of denial which have been distinguishing his poems for so many years – "poetamenos", "expoemas", "despoesia", "o afazer da afasia", "o vácuo o vazio o branco", "o oco", "a canção sem voz", "poesia sem placebo", "semsaída", "nãopoemas", "não".
Such negative (less) signs get affirmative as far as the poems become effective: ore subtracted from the refusal to any excess and/or compliance.
What is left after so much subtraction? What inner-self, essence, medullar bone/bones? Augusto does not reply – he shows. As in "não", which is the title of this volume, a poem made by saying what is not poetry, in a sequence of small white squares on black pages which, little by little, lose the black columns of the text to the vertebral limit of the single line "oesia".
The same applies to "semsaída", printed on the back cover, which takes the concrete poetry antagonists’ most repeated motto ("it would have led poetry to a blind alley"- an expression which was also quoted on "desplacebo"), ascertaining its meaning, stating the power of the challenge in face of the impossible.
"semsaída" reminds "tudoestádito"(1974) for what it says as well as for the deciphering form it proposes in order to fully apprehend its meaning. And also for the free display of the sentences, which can be read in different manners. In "tudoestádito", this playful aspect appeared especially in the version of "Caixa-Preta", by Julio Plaza and Augusto (1975), where the poem was printed on six exchangeable pages. "semsaída" is an invitation to the game, which mixes sentences as in a labyrinth and in which you can enter from different directions.
Such repercussions are usual in Augusto’s work – poems that seem to comment on, or complete one another, made with some years of intermission. We can remember the verses of "Despoesia"(1994):"a flor flore/a aranha tece/ o poeta poeta" [the flower flourishes, the spider weaves, the poet makes poems] as we read "a cor / cora / a flor / flora / o ir / vai / rói / o amor / mói / o céu / cai / a dor / dói "in "ferida"(2001) where obvious becomes surprise. Or associate "não" (1990) to "poesia" (1998) - "nãoéphila / telianãoé / philantro / pianãoéph / ilosophia / nãoéegoph / iliaésome / ntepoesia", where the word "some"stands out semantically and which ends the last but one line. And "espelho"(1993) to "desespelho"(2000 which turns around the middle letter "o" ("o espelho dentro e fora do "olho"") [the mirror inside and outside of the eye], as well as "ruído" (1993) that alludes to "omesmosom" (1989/1992).
The very square shape of "NÃO" dialogues with "Despoesia", as well as with its structure, divided into two sections of poems, one of "profilogramas" and another of "non-translations".
If, on one side, such recurrences indicate a trajectory of consistence and fidelity to an aesthetic project, on the other hand, Augusto de Campos’ poetry is marked by the perpetual search of new formal solutions – in different possibilities of speech fragmentation; by establishing reading systems where the linear opens up to the prismatic, by using signs inside other signs, where different alternatives fight for the same syntactic space through cuttings or assemblies. ("sub/ir" in "subir"- a one-word paradox -, "pulsa" in "ex-pulsa", "ruído" in "dest/ruído", "alenta" in "rapid/alenta/mente", etc.); by the constant exploration of graphic procedures (the ever-more refined use of color, display and selection of types, which isomorphically relate to the meaning of the poems and, at the same time, presents reading obstacles, which are incorporated to its reception), used in a structural and not a decorative way.
As if each accomplished step inspired the search for a further step, restlessly ("fujo de mim / e assisto a minha fuga", as he puts it in "rapidalentamente"), each formal disclosure inviting to the risk of finding our new processes, new limits, new sensibility.
It is therefore natural that Augusto pursues within the digital resources repertoire these new media, so rarely and consistently incorporated into the poetic creation.
If the results of this struggle broaden the graphic possibilities of the book itself, we can still better enjoy the suppleness of its results in the accompanying CD-rom. We there find sound and animated versions which give new dimension to already-existent poems like "Caracol, "cidadecitycité", "rever", among others, and new poems especially made for these new resources, like the "morfogramas", the "interpoemas" and others like "criptocardiograma" and "semsaída", which, besides presenting a wonderful insertion of movement into the written word, added to its sound occurrence and still include the interaction possibility with the spectator.
If the concrete poetry, with its verbivocovisual dimension already showed how speech experiments were far too advanced for its time (this movement was subtly shown, for example, on the typological composition of poems like "velocidade", by Ronaldo Azeredo, or "infin", by Augusto, or by his graphic sequence of several pages in "cicatristeza"or "oeilfeujeu", as well as in "organismo", by Décio Pignatari; "the interactive aspect was already guessed in object-poems such as "linguaviagem" and "tudoestádito", in "Caixa Preta"), the digital resources seem now ideally adjusted into Augusto’s innovative mind.
By exploring his virtualities in these clip-poems, Augusto de Campos indicates that he goes on taming new speech territories, with a very acute unrest, fifty years after the founding of the "Noigandres Group".
From less to "ex", from "ex" to "des", from "des" to "não", Augusto de Campos’ poetry renews his assertive position.
In "Não", by Augusto de Campos, ed. Perspectiva, São Paulo, 2003.
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