[-empyre-] aLe --> Jorge Luiz Antonio

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Thanks, aLe, for the interesting mix of poetics, SWF,
auto-plowing-translations from Portuguese, and explorations of "what is
close and what is near". This object may appear closer viewed between email
client and browser. That's one of the interesting things about the poetics
of web.art, isn't it: the work and dialog about the work can co-relate and
be experienced by most of the 'readership' of both, so that the work and the
poetics are woven together in ways that are unusual to the geographically
dispersed nature of the interactive forum. I hope people have enjoyed the
range of urls together with the discussion in almost necessarily
unanticipated ways.

As I mentioned at the start of the month, in March on -empyre- three people
are featured: aLe, Jorge Luiz Antonio, and Regina Célia Pinto. Jorge is
featured for the next nine days, and then Regina.

Jorge Luiz Antonio, a poet, writer, researcher, and teacher, is currently
studying electronic poetry in his PhD degree in the Communication and
Semiotics Program at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. He
has written Almeida Júnior através dos tempos (Almeida Junior throughout
time, 1983) and Cores, forma, luz, movimento: a poesia de Cesário Verde
(Colours, form, light, and movement: Cesario Verde's poetry, 2002). He has
published many articles in printed and electronic magazines such as Galáxia:
Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunicação, Semiótica, Cultura and Karenina.it
(from Italy). Some of his researches are linked from Brazilian Digital Art
and Poetry on the Web (http://www.vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm)
and he made some digital poems with Fatima Lasay from the Philippines:
E-m[ag]inero at http://www.digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/gegenort/. He
also collaborated with Regina Celia Pinto on Lago Mar Algo Barco Chuva at
http://www.ociocriativo.com.br/lagoalgo/. Email:  jlantonio@uol.com.br

Jorge will provide us with a look into poetics and digital poetry. Jorge
says:

"Poetic language has the skillfulness of dialoguing with other languages
and, even being verbal, points to other languages (visual, sound, animated,
etc.). This is what Roland Barthes says is the utopic function of
literature: though literature is unidimensional (language) it has the
necessity of being pluridimensional, that is, tries to be reality itself."

Jorge has spent quite a bit of time putting links together to notable work
in Brazilian Digital Poetry and, more generally, amid a larger South
American digital/literary perspective. The work he links to is often
inventively at home with the Brazilian concrete influence. This influence
goes back at least to the fifties with the de Campos brothers work appearing
in many of the international anthologies that treated concrete. Concrete
poetry was not solely Brazilian, by any means, but it happened in Brazil
with originary force. I wonder if the English sense of concrete language is
less comfortable in its capacity to say it visually? Can it be a heritage of
concrete poetry that certain cultures acquire a sense of concrete language
tinged with the pluridimensionality concerning language that Jorge mentions?
Carlos Estevez has said of  Paralengua, a partly pre-web Argentine
sound/visual poetry scene that it "has a proteinic and tentacular nature
which doesn't lack festivity, intellectualism, sensitivity and, most
important, a passion that possesses all the dimensions of language." Now
that sounds like strong poetics to me. All those particular dimensions of
language. Which would suit it for the web and for the digital more
generally, as language does indeed get concretized as processable info-hunk
in the digital stew. Also, poetry slips from the info-hunk to the page quite
easily in Brazilian poetics and Argentine poetics, it seems. There is less
tension between the notion of the page as concrete literary space and the
usual suspects in the usual types of orders. Or am I merely wishing it is
true for you, as it is generally not here? Yet we see digital poetics, the
phenomenology of the Web, in particular, with its strong visual aspect and
relatively weak textual aspect, playing to the concrete in language just by
its very nature everywhere it goes. So, in a sense, digital poetry is the
near-posthumous acknowledgement of concrete's international concern with all
the dimensions of language.

Concrete wasn't just about visual language. What Jorge says, above, reminds
me that concrete was also about looking at language as multi-dimensioned or
"pluridimensional," as Jorge says. And if that's so, you can see how a
strong literary/cultural sense of concrete is a sense that is adaptive
through all the dimensions of language.

So, welcome, Jorge. Thanks for joining us! I have been reading your work and
surfing some of the links you are publishing in your introduction. I look
forward to discussing digital poetry and poetics with you and others on the
list.

ja!