From Deleuze and Guattari’s essay on “Minor Literature” to Alfred Arteaga’s work on Chicanx poetics, theorists have studied the relationship between power and language, describing how creative writers find inventive ways to interrogate monolingual and nationalist logics.[1] Often, personal as well as historical conditions shape an author’s linguistic choices. My interest here lies in how poets use citation and translation as craft techniques in forging poetic languages that challenge powerful configurations and histories.
Décio Pignatari (1927-2012)
The poet, associated with the Brazillian concrete poetry movement, died today. He was 85 and lived in Sao Paulo. With Augusto and Haroldo de Campos he edited the magazne Noigandres e Invenção and they together wrote Teoria da Poesia Concreta (1965).
Perhaps his most famcous concrete poem is this one, from 1957:
