Settling the Visual Score: Augusto de Campos and the Eye Music Tradition

• In Event: Latin American Mixed-Media Poetry After World War II

Abstract

This paper is a backup in case of emergency and absence of another member of the panel. If all four other members of the panel are present, this paper will not be presented.

Augusto de Campos' Poetamenos (1953) was a seminal work of early Brazilian Concrete poetry. With its variegated text, it is as much a painting of words as a poem in colors, and its critics have long pointed to the ways in which the work rejects lyric poetic tradition in favor of the advertising and graphic design that dominate late modern visual culture. However, I argue that the poem also engages two traditions that date back to the early modern period: the synaesthetic poem and the visual score, or "eye music." Campos himself cites the influence of Anton Webern's concept of klangfarbenmelodie, which translates to "tone-color-melody," but Poetamenos also finds strong precedent in visual scores by composers like Baude Cordier (1380-1440) or, much later, Campos' friend and correspondent, John Cage.
In its attempted fusion of the visual, textual, aural, and even tactile, Poetamenos aims to transform concrete poetry's "verbivocovisual" nature into an entire synaeasthetic experience. I argue that the uneven success of this utopian attempt sheds light on Augusto's equally utopian efforts to unite Brazilian artists across disciplines into a unified art scene without boundaries between media. Ultimately, I argue, Augusto settles on a relational understanding of the arts as inter-dependent and non-identical in their ability to express and respond to contemporary Brazilian experience.

Author

• Vaughn Anderson, Rutgers University