Re: [-empyre-] coretext

[Lucio Agra <agra@node1.com.br>]

Dear Jim



At 04:16 16/03/04 -0800, you wrote:
> 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?

Almost none

>  Publishers here publish books of verse
> and it seems difficult for them, for some reason, to depart from that
> formula.

Not only it is the same here. There is a kind of neo-conservative poetry 
going on in Brazil and it has guaranteed lots of new publications - and 
editors - that still think and act like this.

> 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.

Same as here

> 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?

It had more in the past. For instance, the impact that new conceptions of 
lay out has made in brazilian press was first absorbed in some indistinct 
form, from decoration magazines to Oil company house organs. Then it 
gradually migrated to publicity, then to design and cinema. A good part of 
the participants of the Concrete painting exhibition went to propaganda and 
design, pioneering new and exciting forms that still wait to be discovered
.

> 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?

It is still. But I think we have two great motivations to understand Pound 
even as undergraduate students:
a) Pound was presented to us - when we were still a periphery country - 
back in the 50's .
b) We live this reality in the day to day life
and
most of all
c) it is in the core of popular brasilian music.


> 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.


Electronica is in the edge regardless to the edges of electrosphere
Best
Lucio BR

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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