Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) remains one of most visionary artists to emerge from Rio de Janeiro’s Neoconcretismo movement, along with prominent artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, and poet Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica’s art has been described as a “radical and compelling rethinking of mid-century Modernism,” and he is known as a painter, installation artist, and sculptor. He eventually moved to New York in 1970 partly because of the state-sanctioned censorship in the arts by the then-militaristic authoritarian regime in Brazil.
Less widely recognized is Oiticica’s contribution as a poet. More than four decades after his death, Soberscove in Chicago and Winter Editions in New York jointly published Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics (2023), a collection of his handwritten poems from 1964 to 1966, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese. Dr. Rebecca Kosick’s translation of this visual poetry collection demonstrates that Oiticica’s poetry is, as she has argued elsewhere, “a lyric that stills the sensible for the “reader” to perceive.” Dr. Kosick, herself a poet and scholar whose studies revolve around the question of how language and media intersect in contemporary pan-American poetry (Anne Carson, Augusto de Campos, Lygia Pape, Juan Luis Martínez), has previously debunked the idea of Latin American visual art (and visual poetry) as “a passive recipient of inherited European forms.”
In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Kosick about the enduring legacy of Hélio Oiticica and the Neoconcretismo movement of mid-twentieth century Brazil, as well as her own body of work as a theorist and practitioner of poetry.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The art historian Claire Bishop describes the work of Hélio Oiticica as “social and political in inclination, engaging with the architecture of the favelas and the communities that lived there.” Bishop also makes the case for Hélio’s focus on viewer perception, interactivity, and lived experience (vivências) as pivotal to the history of installation art. Could you tell us about Oiticica’s socioaesthetic and ethnopolitical roots and beliefs as a visual artist?
Rebecca Kosick (RK): In a 1966 interview for the magazine A Cigarra, the interviewer, Marisa Alvarez de Lima, asks Oiticica: “Are you an anarchist?” and he replies, “in body and soul.” Oiticica’s grandfather had been a prominent anarchist and was publisher of the newspaper Ação Direta (Direct Action), so these were ideas that Oiticica grew up with. What anarchism meant for Oiticica can sometimes be a little hard to pin down, and he wasn’t as directly involved in organized political activity as, say, his poet-collaborator Ferreira Gullar, who led the Communist Party in the state of Rio de Janeiro for a time. But it’s clear that elements of anarchism were central to Oiticica’s framework for being in the world, and for being with other people. In later interviews, he talks about certain values he picked up from his grandfather that stayed with him for his entire life—for instance, his grandfather, when being summoned to take part in a jury (which was compulsory), talked about how he would agree to show up but would say right away: No matter the crime, I will never vote to convict. Oiticica talks about this as an extremely important lesson and says that sending someone to prison is the worst crime of all.
I think you can see an anti-state, anti-carceral orientation in this story, and what might be, on the other side, considered a pro-person position — and that intersects with Oiticica’s aesthetic practice. Across his body of work, Oiticica invested a profound amount of confidence, and trust, in other, regular people. You can see this in his collaborations, for instance with the Mangueira Samba School, and throughout his participatory works which open up opportunities for the viewer/participant to not only interact with the art object, but to determine its possibilities, limits, form, use, and so on. Some of his art is about politics, including being about police violence, like works featuring Alcir Figueira da Silva or Cara de Cavalo. And as you mention, scholars have pointed out the relationship between the informal structures that make up Oiticica’s “penetrables” series and the informal architecture of Brazil’s favelas and the “marginal” communities living in these built environments (including Oiticica’s collaborators in Mangueira).
But at the same time, a lot of his work doesn’t have an overt political character. This is the case with Secret Poetics, which has surprised many people since the book came out. He began writing the poems in this collection just after the military dictatorship was installed in 1964, but the poems are not in any obvious way about politics. They are mostly about sensations, memories, love, etc. Still, I think that this notion of trusting, of wanting always to be on the side of other people—an anarchist ethic if you like—is something that animates all of Oiticica’s work and aesthetic exploration. In that way, there is a political core to it.
AMMD: Could you tell me what the visual poetry scene was like during the heyday of the Neoconcretismo movement in mid-century Brazil? What were they championing and what were they up against?
RK: Secret Poetics comes at the end of neoconcretism. Some scholars would say the movement really only lasted a couple of years. The Neoconcrete Manifesto was published in 1959 and the group dispersed not long after. That said, the manifesto came about as a result of things that were already happening before ‘59, and I think there’s an argument to be made that certain energies arising under the auspices of neoconcretism—especially related to participation—continued to infuse the work of its members after the group itself had splintered. But officially, it was short-lived. Gullar, for instance, takes off for Brasília just after he and Oiticica had collaborated on the “Buried Poem,” which was an underground room-poem they built in the garden at Oiticica’s family home in 1959, the same year the manifesto was published.
But visual poetry—or what I prefer to call “material poetry” because it can be an umbrella term including visual poetry but also poetry that deploys more than visual signs—was extremely important during this era in Brazil. Of course, many people will be familiar with the founders of concrete poetry, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, also known as the noigandres group. It’s hard to overstate how huge this movement was for Brazil. A lot of the Neoconcrete Manifesto is dedicated to positioning itself against concrete poetry, for what the neoconcretists saw as concrete poetry’s over-emphasis on rationality. I don’t really think this was a fair characterization, or that neoconcrete poetry was, in practice, that different from concrete poetry. I mean, they put concrete right there in the name! But what I do think you can see in the neoconcretists’ heavy-handed distancing is that concrete poetry had fundamentally shifted the center of poetry in Brazil.
Concrete was poetry. So, anything coming after had to show its difference from concrete poetry. You see this not just with neoconcretism but also with another post-concrete movement known as poema/processo (poem/process or process poetry) which criticizes concrete poetry for being overly concerned with structure (as they see it), at the expense of process. I’ve written about the fact that there are actually many continuities between these two movements. But my point here is that, anytime you see multiple poetic movements positioning themselves against another, you’ve got a canon forming, because a movement must be pretty big for newcomers to bother arguing that they are not that. Even now, if you talk to Brazilian poets who were writing in the twentieth-century, they express a certain sense that the noigandres group cast a long shadow, that it almost felt hard to write other kinds of poetry, because concretism so thoroughly infused Brazil.
The dictatorship came after both concretism and neoconcretism were established, and the artists and poets associated with these movements, who were generally left-oriented, responded in different ways, including through poetry. Throughout twentieth-century Brazil, arts and letters were conceptually linked with political and economic development. On the poetry side, for instance, prior to modernismo, parnassianism had reigned in Brazil. This was originally a French poetic movement that also involved, as the name suggests, references to ancient Greece and European antiquity. Brazilian modernism critically targeted the importation of European artforms and influence, which was understood as a kind of cultural dependence comparable to political-economic dependence. Instead, they sought to create major cultural innovation from Brazil, that was Brazilian in nature, though without artificially cleaving off European or any other influences. This is where Oswald de Andrade’s metaphor of the cannibal comes in—as a figure that would devour and digest influences from everywhere, including Europe, the neocolonial USA, and indigenous Brazil, in order to make something new. The concrete poets, and later the neoconcretists, revisit the critique of mindless “imitation” of Europe and make related arguments about how cultural production from Brazil can challenge hegemonic configurations globally. This is relevant for Oiticica, but some others associated with neoconcretism were more vocal, particularly Gullar who, in his essay Avant-Garde and Underdevelopment, is highly critical of Brazil adopting vanguard tactics from Europe. Instead, he writes that “the real artistic vanguard in an underdeveloped country is that which, in seeking the new, seeks human liberation.”
AMMD: Oiticica famously refused to be labeled a poet, yet his poetry, especially in Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics, appears deeply influenced by, to quote from Bishop, the ‘tactile and sensory environments’ he inhabited as a visual artist, working across painting, sculpture, installation art, and film. Could you explore the interplay between his visual art and poetry? How do these mediums inform and shape one another in his body of work?
RK: It’s interesting, Secret Poetics strikes a lot of people as being maybe out of sync with other, better-known aspects of Oiticica’s body of work. As opposed to his plastic artwork, which was very formally innovative, the poems in Secret Poetics are fairly traditional. They are largely about things that are more or less the typical stuff of lyric poetry—feelings, longing, love. And they aren’t particularly novel in terms of form, at least not if you compare them with some of the poetry that his colleagues in the neoconcrete movement had been making, including Oiticica himself!
During the 1960s—so around the same time that Secret Poetics was written—Oiticica had been making various kinds of three-dimensional poems that saw him putting language onto/into boxes, wooden structures, and so on. And there was interesting stuff going on with poetry all throughout neoconcretism. For instance, Lygia Pape’s Neoconcrete Ballet is a dance-based intermedia translation of Reynaldo Jardim’s poem “Olho/Alvo” (Eye/Target). The poem itself consists of only those two words, rotating around each other across five pages of text. The Ballet, actually there are two of them, involves dancers concealed inside geometric objects, moving around the stage. Personally, I consider both of these to be poetry (though that doesn’t exclude their also being other kinds of media), and the boundaries between poetry and plastic arts were extremely porous for the artists involved with neoconcretism. Now, by the mid-‘60s, the neoconcretists had all kind of taken different paths, and other poets, like Gullar, had also returned to writing poetry in verse. But it’s still striking to see Oiticica writing poems that don’t seem to share the formal boundary-pushing character that is still very present in his plastic art from the era.
But as I point out in the book, there are lots of overlaps between the poems and his artwork. The poems all date to between 1964 and 1966, which was the era in which sensory participation, as an ethic and aesthetic, really consolidated for Oiticica. And the poems are also intensely devoted to sensation, and particularly, the sensations of others. Though the poems are definitely consonant with lyric, one thing that differentiates them is a very minimal presence of a lyrical “I”—there’s some, but very, very little, first person in the poems. Often, they kind of refer to sensations as something that is almost free-floating. The first poem, for example, begins:
O cheiro,
tato novo,
recomeçar dos sentidos(The smell,
new touch,
restarting of the senses)
I think you can see here that dedication to other people—he’s not saying, these are some smells I smelled, or this was my experience of touch. He’s just signaling that this is the place in the poem for smell, for touch. He leaves it to us to fill in, to smell right now, or remember a smell we smelled once, and give our experience of that sensation to the poem. I see this as opening up a potentially infinite space within the poem for what is effectively everybody else’s input. He does this with plastic art as well—he sets up opportunities for participants’ sensations to join in. But it’s potentially a more radical gesture in his poems, because there are no parameters for what we might smell or touch. He’s not giving us a piece of cloth, or a bucket of shells, or a bag of coffee beans. What we sense is up to us.
There are also, as I point out in the book, some really obvious overlaps with his artwork, like poems that effectively describe artworks he later made. So, I also think that these poems—like some other notes of his and some of his prose writing—were a way to develop or work his way toward future artworks that were yet to be created. I think he used poetry to work out ideas, to plan, to imagine.
AMMD: In your book Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950-2010 (2020), you studied the pan-American poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Anne Carson, Juan Luís Martínez, Ronald Johnson, Hélio Oiticica, Ferreira Gullar, and Lygia Pape. Many of them engage deeply with visual materials or write about visual art. Do you find that some of them share Oiticica’s perspective that, as you noted, “poetry would join with the art object to sustain the relational experience of the senses”? Could you elaborate on how this idea manifests across their practices?
RK: Actually, I think of Oiticica as something of an outlier in that book. Initially, I hadn’t planned to include him. One thing that I saw as uniting all these diverse figures (aside from Oiticica) was a sense of the verbal and material elements of poetry working together, in the mode of fusion, to accomplish whatever it was that the poetry was up to. This meant collapsing the differentiation between what was considered “support” material—for instance the page, or the shape of a letter—and what was considered semantic material—words, but also other nonverbal signs that carry a message of some kind. Putting Oiticica into that panorama, I saw him as doing something a bit different, something that maintains a separation between the verbal and the material, or at least assigns them different roles, even when he is combining poetry with other material elements.
In Material Poetics, for instance, I compare Oiticica’s object poems to Gullar’s. In Oiticica’s case, his Box Poem 1 consists of a small box with a kind of door that the viewer can open, inside of which is a plastic sack filled with blue pigment. On the plastic are the words “do meu sangue/do meu suor/este amor viverá” (from my blood, from my sweat, this love will live on). For me, I see the words of the poem and the box’s other elements as doing different things. The words are signaling some kind of experience beyond the one the viewer/participant is having as they touch the box. The box, on the other hand, is initiating an experience that is occurring inside the viewer’s immediate engagement with the poem that has more to do with touch and access to the raw materials of art. In Gullar’s object poems, there is a much tighter isomorphism (to borrow an expression from the noigandres group) of form and content. For instance, he has one with a stop-sign-red center with the word “não” in the middle that the viewer can cover up with a black square, sort of allowing the poem to stop or go, say yes or say no. Both the verbal and the material elements are expressing the same kind of message and facilitating the same kind of in-the-now experience for the viewer.
Now, I think there is a spectrum if you look at Oiticica’s use of poetry throughout his work. Sometimes you see more of this form-content isomorphism and sometimes more of what we might call a mixed media approach, where plastic art and poetry are there together but sort of up to different things. This is also what interests me about Secret Poetics, because I see it as really highlighting this idea that language has a distinct role to play for Oiticica, by comparison with the non-verbal, plastic elements of his work. They complement each other by resolving a problem that each “half” of his practice confronts: if, for Oiticica, participatory art entailed the actual, physical participation of the viewer/participant, the problem here is that the work of art is over if the participant steps away, stops handling the box poem. On the other hand, he associates language with memory, and the idea that sensory experiences can live on through memory. So, in poetry’s case, the verbal element allows an experience to endure, maybe endlessly, by providing a kind of anchor for that experience, which is language. But of course, language can’t instantiate an experience of, say, touch in the same way that actually touching something can, which is language’s limitation. I think this is one of the reasons Oiticica works in both domains concurrently. They each give him something distinct.
AMMD: Your own poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books, 2020) has a visual quality to it. Would you say that the intermediality of the writers and artists you study as a scholar has influenced your own creative practice?
RK: Labor Day isn’t as visually emphatic as most of the poetry I study, but yes, you’re right that it is visual, and also deeply engaged with sound. This collection and Material Poetics came out the same year, so they perhaps give the impression that they were written together, but the truth is that I wrote Labor Day over a period of about fifteen years and had mostly completed it before I began studying concrete and neoconcrete poetry during my PhD.
I came to poetry as a poet first, and that influenced the kinds of things I later became interested in as a scholar. I think, because I was a poet first, my scholarly questions essentially all boil down to: what can poetry do? What is it capable of? This is one of the reasons that I ended up studying poetic forms that push the limits of, or indeed fall outside of, the lyric tradition. I want to see how far poetry can go. After working so closely with more material poetry, I have done some new work that is interested in concentrating some of my poetic preoccupations, like homophony, which is all throughout Labor Day too, but is more spread out there. A new series of homophone poems I’ve been working on—OWD—distills that activity down to word level. It consists of a series of homophone pairs spelled a third way. I’m interested in trying to find a way of visually representing the experience of hearing two things at once, which is usually out of bounds for written language. When you write you have to differentiate “ode” or “owed,” whereas in spoken language you can let the confusion ride (if you want to). I would say I learned to do this kind of thing from studying concrete poetry especially, and from thinking through the verbivocovisuality of language, as the noigandres group describes it. But I’m also writing other poetry that is more dialogic and draws inspiration from other wells. I have my throughlines of course, like we all do, but I’m always interested in what else, what new thing, language can do.
AMMD: Many, like Craig Saper and Patrick Greaney, have argued that alternative poetic traditions, including visual and concrete poetry, are often marginalised in the study of poetry in the United States. What are your thoughts on this?
RK: My impression of US poetry and poetics—as a field of study—is that its priorities are warped by the centrality of lyric to the US poetic tradition. Many US-based scholars take the lyric to be effectively synonymous with poetry itself. I do not agree with this, and would argue, in fact, that if you look at Hemispheric America, you will find that it’s the US that is the outlier. Across Latin America and in Canada, there are robust traditions of what in the US would be termed “experimental” poetry. As I said earlier, in Brazil, concrete poetry was canonical; in Chile, you also see a distinguished tradition of poetic practice outside of the lyric—visual poetry, but also sound poetry, for instance. That doesn’t mean that lyrical poetry doesn’t circulate in these spaces, it does. But it’s not all there is. I think the US could learn a few things by looking outside its own borders.
AMMD: I understand you have two more books you are working on: a book on the Detroit-based Alternative Press (1969-1999) from Wayne State University Press (forthcoming this June) and another on the languages of contemporary poetry. Could you share more about these projects? What inspired them, and how do they contribute to your ongoing engagement with the intersections of poetry, art, and media?
RK: That’s right. Actually, my book on the Alternative Press was born, in many ways, from the problem I was just describing. Because the US has been focused on lyric forms, other practices in material poetics—which do exist there, too!—have been overlooked, or relegated to the margins of US poetry. I’m interested in bringing some of these practices into the light. The Alternative Press was, in large part, a postal poetry operation. It was founded in 1969 by the painter Ann Mikolowski and her husband, the poet Ken Mikolowski, in Detroit, Michigan. They operated for thirty years, publishing postcard poetry, bumper sticker poetry, and other short forms that they sent out to subscribers through the mail. They published some of the best-known names in twentieth-century poetry, and most of these poets combined visual and verbal elements in their work with the Alternative Press (even if they weren’t known to do this in other venues). But this press has received almost no scholarly attention. The book hopes to demonstrate the degree to which US poets were engaged with material poetics, and also to raise the profile of the Alternative Press itself, which was an incredibly important and innovative publisher that I hope more people will study. Detroit’s Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage should be out later this year.
I’ve also been working for a number of years on a book reevaluating the question of poetic language, which is sort of an old-fashioned question now. It was last big during poststructuralism, but has fallen away in the years since. I want to reopen it, based on the commitments I’ve been articulating to material poetics, but also based on another interest of mine, which is translingualism. In this book, I explore how the dominant lens for theorizing poetic language has been the binary of the ordinary v. the poetic. Most theorists actually dispute, or complicate, the boundaries of this binary, but it’s still often the framework used to think about poetic language. What I’m interested in is how that binary itself presumes verbal language, and monolingualism, as its substructure. In this book, I’m trying to unpick that substructure, and to show that poets are constantly working with many kinds and combinations of languages, including translingual forms of human verbal expression, but also visual languages, mathematical languages, material languages, etc. As with a lot of my scholarship, here I’m working from the ground up. Poets are way ahead of the theorists on this front—they use all kinds of languages, and in doing so, have already transformed what poetic language can be, and how it can be understood. I’m doing what I can to catch us up from a theoretical point of view.
AMMD: When discussing the scholarship surrounding intermedia poetry—from visual poetry to sound poetry, object poetry to video poetry—who are the scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers whose works have shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writings, and ethos? How have their ideas and practices influenced your approach as both a theorist and a practitioner?
RK: The poets I study will always be my most important theorists. Some of them have a body of theoretical writing in addition to their poetry. Others are just out there doing the work, and work is its own kind of theory. In terms of poets who also write theory, I would probably say that the Campos brothers and Ferreira Gullar had the most formative influence over my thinking as I developed as a young scholar—Haroldo and Augusto for their work with poetics and semiotics, and translation; and Gullar for his work on the politics of poetry and art in general. If you trace my influences, I think what you are likely to find is that it’s always poets who are teaching me how to think about poetry. I never work axiomatically from theory alone. I always start from the poetry and then figure out what else I need to do the thinking it asks of me. The scholars who I admire most also tend to be poets and translators, like Odile Cisneros, Clive Scott, Jèssica Pujol Duran, and Felipe Cussen. I would also add my colleague, the classicist Laura Jansen, who is such an adventurous scholar and indisciplinary thinker, and who encourages me to work into criticism by bringing all the energies of poetry itself.
When I teach classes on visual poetry, I include many of the poets I have mentioned already, along with others like Nicanor Parra, Vicente Huidobro, Mary Ellen Solt, giovanni singleton, Ulisses Carrión, Cecilia Vicuña, Lenora de Barros, Regina Silveira, and Paulo Bruscky. I just saw also that Augusto de Campos is releasing a new book of poetry by his late wife, Lygia de Azeredo Campos, which I am eager to read and share with students.
AMMD: What is the visual poetry scene like these days in the American continent? What about translators and publishers who champion this form?
RK: There has been so much exciting stuff going on there with visual and material poetry in the last decade or so. For instance, DABA recently rereleased Norman (NH) Pritchard’s EECCHHOOEESS and Ugly Duckling Presse/Primary Information rereleased his The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970. Pritchard, a Black American poet associated with the Umbra poets in NY, had gone severely overlooked for years, so it’s wonderful to see these rereleases igniting new interest in him. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros’s translation and editing of Haroldo de Campos’s selected writings—published in the book Novas (Northwestern University Press)—is probably responsible for much of the attention Brazilian concrete poetry has gotten in the Anglosphere since it came out in 2007. In 2024, Ugly Duckling also published a translation of Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias that Cisneros did with a group of other translators. Urayoán Noel is another wonderful poet and translator championing visual and concrete poetry, for instance by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. There are also lots of great small presses publishing visual and material poetry like Naranja Publicaciones in Chile, which is also putting out incredible rereleases and translations of now hard-to-find visual poetry, for instance from Guillermo Deisler. In terms of new poetry, End of the Line Press in Canada recently put out the remarkable visual-archival book A/An by the Chilean, US-based poet Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez. Throughout Latin America, there are also so many great contemporary publishers publishing cartoneras—cardboard-bound books—many of which also include visual poetry, like the terrific Oficina Perambulante.
Rebecca Kosick, PhD is co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute and founder of the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster at the University of Bristol where she is Associate Professor of Comparative Poetry and Poetics at the School of Modern Languages. She is the author of Labor Day (Golias Books, 2020), Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950-2010 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and two forthcoming academic books on the Detroit’s Alternative Press and the languages of contemporary poetry. She has contributed book chapters to The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Anne Carson/Antiquity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), and Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020). Her translations and original poetry appeared in, among others, The Iowa Review, The Recluse, Ecopoesia, and Fence. A recipient of a visiting fellowship at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies, she holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She was born on occupied Potawatomi lands in Michigan in the United States. Visit her website at https://rebeccakosick.com.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), their works have been published globally, from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish. Their writings have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they have been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- “lyreless poet oh unlyred one”: A Roundtable with Translators Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone on Translating Haroldo de Campos’s galáxias
- To The Beginning of Everything: Elton Uliana on Brazilian Lusophone Prose and Untranslatability
- Translation Tuesday: “Vultures” by Carla Bessa