Robinson, Rachel Elizabeth. Visual and Plastic Poetics: From Brazilian Concretism to the Chilean Neo-Avant-Garde

Abstract

This book focuses on three relatively unknown members of the Chilean neo-avant-garde and their debt to Brazilian concrete poetry: Juan Luis Martínez, Rodrigo Lira and Cecilia Vicuña. Even though they do not appear to have been directly influenced by the Brazilians, as the author freely admits (p. 10), there were other ways they could have learned about this fascinating movement. Indeed, although the Brazilians wrote in Portuguese rather than Spanish, they were famous throughout South America. Via a series of detailed analyses, Robinson convincingly demonstrates that the Chilean poets employ a number of concrete principles such as lexical isolation, spatial distancing and syntactical dislocation. Reflecting life in an oppressive society, she concludes, their poetry deserves to be much better known. Concrete poetry itself, to be sure, is an offshoot of the current worldwide interest in visual poetry, which can be traced back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard (1898). Thirty-six years ago, unaware that visual poetry would soon encompass exciting new versions, I ventured to describe it as ‘poetry that is meant to be seen’ (The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928 (1986), p. 2). Robinson proposes a modified version of this definition: visual poetry is ‘poetry that is made to be seen’ (p. 16). This reformulation nicely captures the concretist aesthetic, which she examines at considerable length. Since concrete poets treat the word on the page (or elsewhere) as an isolated construct with no history or origin, they force the reader/viewer to consider the written word solely as an object. Thus, as Robinson skilfully demonstrates, the three Chilean poets ‘emphasize the materiality of language, dismantle linear narrative, confuse traditional verbal and pictorial conventions, and engage in a meta-discourse on art’ (p. 13). Exactly how they implement this ambitious program is the subject of the book. Ignoring the concretist credo that critical analysis should originate in a vacuum, Robinson provides numerous biographical details that expand our understanding of the poetry.