Paraty (RJ)
Three poets fascinated the audience this Saturday afternoon, the 25th, at the Flip in a meeting that was a mix of class and declaration of love to the work of Augusto de Campos, main author of this edition of the literary event.
André Vallias, Ricardo Aleixo and Simone Homem de Mello organized a typical Flip meeting, with an indepth conversation that was still accessible to a wide audience and at the same time served as an introduction to the work of the specific poet.
The sober mediation of Marina Wisnik, who acted as moderator for the trio’s performance, contributed to the flow of the debate. And the audience in the authors’ tent responded at times with enthusiastic applause.
The authors spoke both about Campos’ poetry itself and its influence on their work, with the works shown on the big screen after all, in concrete poetry the verbal, visual and acoustic aspects are important.
There were emotional testimonies. Aleixo, for example, pointed out the irony of having lost sight in one eye when he was hit in the face by a ball in his youth, while also discovering visual poetry.
“I see poetry as not just another way of dealing with life, but as the only way,” he said, criticizing the idea by some that one can only understand concrete poetry by reading the theory about it which is the theory more interesting. “Those who say that are idiots.”
The author defended poetry not only as a source of aesthetic pleasure, but also as a way of life.
“The world needs that strange and rare form of breathing that is poetry. In my travels around the world, I don’t know anyone who has supported the discourse in favor of this way of life more radically than Augusto de Campos.”
Simone Homem de Mello, on the other hand, claimed that concrete was “the last standout” of the artistic avantgarde of the 20th century and even those who do not know it are influenced by it.
“Without these guys, there is no Brazilian literature.” [os concretos]. “Augusto’s ethics as an artist is a revolutionary utopia,” he explained. “A utopia committed to aesthetic and ethical concerns, with absolute independence from artistic and theoretical fads, from academic alliances that reproduce fads and foment aversion to reading, from journalistic lobbying and editorials.”
Vallias, who provided the most detailed visual account of the three, also used the meeting to refute the sometimes repeated notion that concrete poetry is a kind of art for art’s sake, politically alienated.
“One of the most fascinating political poems I know is ‘Greve’ by Augusto from 1962,” he said. “The work he did to save names like Sousândrade and Pagu itself is also political.”
Campos is one of those responsible for disseminating the writer’s work, with the book “Pagu: VidaObra”, an anthology of the modernist’s work, being dispersed little was known when the edition first came out in 1982 About the author.
“Pagu suffered not only from being a woman, but also from being avantgarde. The avantgardists of the 1920s were buried in the 1930s by political questions and the patrol over what language should look like. And today we have the same questioning.” Poetry of experimentation.