Nobody Reads You: An Anonymous Poem by Augusto de Campos

Abstract

Aiming to remove from ostracism a poem that has not yet been read as a poem by anyone in Brazilian criticism, this essay seeks to provide some reflections around oútis, the opening poem in Augusto de Campos’ book Não. Starting from the only exception of Gonzalo Aguilar, who dedicates two valuable paragraphs to this poem, this paper puts forward the hypothesis that the excessively long date range appearing under the poem’s title leads us to read it as a synthesis of the author’s poetics. In a preliminary study of the relationship between poetry and photography, in dialogue with formulations by Benjamin, Eisenstein and Fenollosa on the cinematographic montage and the ideogram technique, we highlight the complexity involved in this “one-word poem” superimposed on the image of shadows on the grass, whose syntax assumes an intricate network of connections between the visible and the readable, Portuguese and Greek, poetry, visual arts and other poems throughout history, with which it enters in a synchronic constellation.

Keywords
Visual poetry; Photography; Montage; Ideogram; Act of writing