Haroldo de Campos 1929-2003

The great Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos died last week.

I wish I could write an informative elegy about his life and career, but I admit to knowing very little about him except for the writings in the early concrete manifestos and the concrete poetry that appears in such books as the Mary Ellen Solt anthology of concrete poetry, all of which was really important to me at some point. You can now find all of this material on ubu.com, of course!

Marjorie Perloff wrote a somewhat disappointing essay about one his post-concrete works which can be found at her EPC homepage, "Concrete Prose": Haroldo de Campos's Galáxias and After" -- disappointing because, after a few rather abstract observations about his work that could have been applied to any number of other writers -- she doesn't read Portuguese, of course -- it just tails off into a discussion of Rosmarie Waldrop! At least that's my memory of it; I haven't reread it.

Other than that I've not seen a whole lot about him, though Northwestern (I believe) is putting out a collection of his writing in the near future -- that is very much something to look forward to, as he was one of the leading theorists (along with Pignitari, who I did meet and see read) of the bunch, and I think some of his ideas are more interesting than the work they produced (which nonetheless is still quite fascinating to me, even if I've leaned more on the Lettrists of late).

I have a few gorgeous, if gaudy, books by his younger brother Augusto de Campos, but like a dumbass, I lost his email address and haven't even been able to thank him for sending them to me!

But I did find one great essay in a Richard Kostelanetz anthology -- where else! -- that I wrote about in the long essays in Fashionable Noise about the computer poem, herewith called the "CP." The essay is composed entirely of paragraph long footnotes, which makes it a bit tough to read. Here's the entire one on the de Campos essay.

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The CP, with its alien, fragmented but nonetheless consistent rhetorical strategies, requires new, somewhat clinical and analytical methods of reading, and probably the most important group of writers prior to the Language poets to systematically describe such methods from the viewpoint of artists were the Brazilian concrete poets, most importantly Haroldo de Campos. In “The Informational Temperature of the Text,” de Campos addresses the issue, raised by several critics of Concrete poetry, that the movement he help found was “impoverishing language”; his method for doing so is to take the term “impoverish” literally, and to determine where exactly the riches of a text might lie. His description of “informational temperature,” based on the writing of Max Bense, is as follows:

If we take 1 as the highest limit of a text’s informational temperature, that temperature, in a given text, will be higher the nearer it is to 1. In such cases, for Mandelbrot “the available words are ‘well employed,’ even rare words being utilized with appreciable frequencies. Low temperature, on the other hand, means that words are ‘badly employed,’ rare words being extremely rare.” Of the first case, Mandelbrot… gives James Joyce, whose vocabulary is “quite varied,” as the example; of the second, the language of children. (pp. 177-178)

De Campos then warns that a higher “informational temperature” (a concept which is directly related to “documentary,” “semantic and “factual” information) does not determine a higher degree of aesthetic information. What de Campos calls the “linguistic-statistical” component of a text – how many words are used, where they come from, all the factors that a parsing of the text might provide – only increases in informational temperature when they are allied to a high degree of craftsmanship, which is to say “aesthetic information” (he also calls this “textual structure”) or how the text operates in relation to the meanings presented in it. He then goes on to figure Concrete poetry outside of even this advanced version of Mandelbrot’s paradigm, stating that Concrete poetry eschews all notions of “craft” in favor of industrial techniques of production, and that their goals are for a language “easily and quickly communicated,” and hence necessarily utilizing a quite simple vocabulary:

That is why it rejects the airs and graces of crafsmanship – in spite of the seriousness with which it considers the artisan’s contribution to the stockpile of extant forms – from the art of verse to the elaborate diversificaiton of vocabulary in pose. It ahs recoure in its turn to factors of promximity and likeness on the grahpic-gestaltic plane, to elements of recurrence and reduncancy on the semantic and rhythmic plane, to a visual-ideogrammic syntax (when not merely “combinatory”) for controlling th flux of signs and rationalizing the sensible materials of a coposition. This is how it limits entropy (the tendency to dispersion, to disorder, to the –maximum informational potential of a system), fixing the informational temperature at the minimum necessary to obtain the aesthetic achievement of each poem undertaken. (179-180)

While concrete poetry and the CP are not very closely related, except insofar as a “concrete” poem can be found on a micro level (as the Concretists found several useful poems in Finnegans Wake, such as “silvamoonlake”), the implications for the CP in this passage are still several. First, de Campos recognizes that an alternative to the production of “crafted” verse can lie in the industrial, and that, as a corallary, one can negotiate aesthetic values in a somewhat dispassionate way, an attitude that would be attractive to the cyberpoet who will instinctually seek out verbal alchemy by fine-tuning a program rather than tweaking an original source text (or who would choose to tweak punctuation rather than word choice). Second is that he (in a more naïve, but direct way than McCaffery) looks at language as having physical properties like energy and matter, and that structures constituted by language are always being threatened with increased entropy. As I state in an earlier footnote, the CP cannot be hostile to the resonances of the lyric (or any conventional verse form, such as the terza rima) precisely for this reason: that the CP’s primary vector will be from a state of total chaos toward a state of wholeness, and it would be in the CPs better interest to gravitate toward the trappings of the lyric (closure, identity with a “self” and a “signature,” even “craft”) so as not to bounce back into the primordial slime of its origins. Third is that elements of repetition, of return, of redundancy, all play into the aesthetic dimension of any number of literary works (such as Stein in de Campos’ example), but in the CP (in which repetition is evinced not so much in words reappearing as rhetorical events that point to a repetition in the program) this repetition is one of the keys to the aesthetic value of the work; one determines the success and failure of a CP by observing how its repetitions stand-up over the course of the time it takes to read the poem. Lastly, going back to the first excerpt regarding informational temperature, a reader’s primary activity in a CP is partly composed of parsing the information available, and of discovering how effectively that information is being presented given the presentation. In this way, the words and tactics of a CP cannot be totally atomized since there would be no discernable way, for the human reader, to engage in the language; nonetheless, all CPs are atomized to some degree, and therefore the reader is always being asked to parse the grammar anddetermine the informational temperature of the text when reading. It is simply the first thing a CP asks of the reader, and the reader’s intial impression is augmented as the reading continues; this is how a poem, constructed with the flick ofa button, operates through time.

Posted by Brian Stefans at August 23, 2003 01:53 PM | TrackBack