Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900-2015 (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. __Radical Poetry__ examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how Jose Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padin (Uruguay), Fernando Millan (Spain), Decio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana Maria Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens. Contents 6 List of Figures 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: An Overview 12 1. The Historical Avant-Gardes: Futurist Metaphors 30 Introduction: Text and Image before the Digital 30 Josep Maria Junoy’s Visual Poetry and Futurist Haikus 35 Synthesis and Fragmentation in the Poetry of José Juan Tablada (Mexico) 43 2. The Sixties Neo-Avant-Gardes: A Political Turn 64 Clemente Padín’s “New Poetry”: From Sense to Non-Sense 69 Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Corporeal Poetry: Unearthing Memories of Dictatorship 83 3. Digital Poetry and Metaphor’s Reprise: An Introduction to Digital Poetry 92 The Palpability of Signs: Science and Disability Metaphors in Jordi Pope’s Digital Poetry 94 Metaphors and Metamorphoses in Olga Delgado’s Digital Love Poems 108 Digital Poetry and the Recovery of Metaphor 116 4. Modernisms on the Move: Mechanic, Kinetic, Cinematic 120 Introduction: A Poetics of Motion 120 “Moving” Poetry: Affect, Mimesis, Metaphor, and the Avant-gardes 122 Illusions and Perceptions: Early Kinetic Metaphors 130 A Poetry of Attractions: Joan Salvat-Papasseit’s Futurist “Wedding March” 137 5. Letters and Lettrism: Deconstructing the New Vanguards 158 Silence and Fragmentation in Joan Brossa’s Letter Poetry 158 Two Sides of the Same Coin? Julio Campal’s and Fernando Millán’s Poetry of Erasure 167 6. Latin American Digital Poetry: Animated Embodiment 182 Ana María Uribe’s Kinetic Poems: Mythical Monsters and Tyrannical Letters 182 María Mencía: Digital Graffiti and the Mapping of the Postmodern City 193 Incorporating the Digital; Digitizing the Corporeal 203 7. Modernismo: Cannibalistic Appropriation and Advertisement 208 Setting the Stage: The Luso-Brazilian Avant-gardes in the Age of Dynamism 208 (Fast) Moving Times: Modernismo Brasileiro and the Modern Art Week (1922) 215 Klaxon: Modern(ist) Locomotion in Poetic Advertisement 221 8. Concrete Aesthetics: Abstraction, Mass Media, and Ideology 234 Concrete Art and its Antecedents: Suprematism and Neoplasticism 234 Concrete Art and Poetry in Brazil’s Postwar Years 240 In Defense of Concrete Poetry: An Aesthetics and Politics of Commitment? 256 9. Luso-Brazilian E-Poetry and Performance 262 The Arrival of the Digital in Brazilian Poetry 262 Performative Digital Poetry: Arnaldo Antunes and the Body of the Text 270 Eduardo Kac’s Neo-Concrete Digital Poetry 278 Technology, Bodies, and Digital Vanguards 289 Conclusion: Toward a Radical Aesthetics of the Digital? 292 Notes 300 Works Cited 320 Index 342 With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ldesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the'literary'means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects'come alive'by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the word "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens. -- Adapted from the cover. From the publisher