[-empyre-] coretext

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

Concrete, Neoconcrete...both of these apparently inform the poetics of
Brazil rather influentially.

The extent of this influence in Brazilian letters is something I'm curious
about.

For instance, how many publishers do you have who would touch a book of
poetry that wasn't a book of verse? Publishers here publish books of verse
and it seems difficult for them, for some reason, to depart from that
formula. You know, they get their printing done by x and x can do a and b
and that's it, or whatever, god forbid you should present them with a
challenge. So that publishing here is somewhat dull--and this dullness in
the publishers of course impacts on the art in that mostly what is published
is verse or, in any case, the usual suspects, rather than there being much
effort to transform the book. Of course economics play a part in this, too,
ie, generally the more the book departs from the standard in its form, the
more expensive it will be to produce it, and publishers have big economic
problems these days.

One would hope that part of the heritage of neo/concrete would be an impact
on the publishing industry whereby the form and nature of the book is
energetically and continually re-thought. Is that ongoing and vital in
Brazilian publishing? If so, is this part of the heritage of neo/concrete?

Lucio says:

"In the digital times we are living in, it is almost impossible to conceive
that someone would think that he or she has the ultimate word about
technology. And, I believe, it is also hard to conceive this, when we talk
about poetry. Poetry has always been, in itself, something experimental.
Talk about digital poetry ? or, better, electronic poetry ? is to talk about
something that defies the boundaries of the well-known literary procedures.
If Ezra Pound sometime insisted that poetry had to do more with music and
plastic arts, instead of literature, from now on, these predictions are
confirmed by the facts."

I remember when I was an undergraduate and read the remark Lucio quotes from
Pound. It was incomprehensible to me that poetry could have much to do with
the plastic arts, never mind have more to do with them than literature. I
wonder if Pound's statement would make more sense to an undergraduate in
Brazil at the moment than it did to me twenty years ago here in Canada, ie,
I wonder if the heritage of neo/concrete and other experimental poetries has
infiltrated to the core of the intellectual culture of Brazil, or whether it
is still very much on the periphery of letters in Brazil?

Happily, of course, publishing work electronically does not pose the
economic obstacles that print publishing does when it comes to using unusual
materials, so that one can experiment more easily with electronic works than
print works and be able to get the work out there. And this is as true in
Brazil as here, so we see electronica, for this and other reasons, as the
site of more edgy work, generally, than what is merely economically viable
in print.

ja