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.