<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#f9f9fa">
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.theartstory.org/movement/concrete-poetry/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.theartstory.org/movement/concrete-poetry/</a></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="artwork-year">1957</div>
<h3 class="artwork-title">Sem Um Numero</h3>
<p class="artwork-author">Artist: Augusto de Campos</p>
<p class="artwork-description">Augusto de Campos's poem "Sem Um
Numero" ("Without a Number" in Portuguese) consists of a twisting
shape formed from several permutations of the title phrase,
spelled out in sans serif, International Style type. The phrase
gradually contracts as the lines shift down and inwards. On the
fourth line, the only remaining word, "numero", is replaced with
"zero", which is recreated as a numerical symbol, <i>0</i>, at
the center of the page. Beyond this point the lines start to
expand, but into a different phrase, "Um Sem Numero"
("numberless"). As with much of the Noigandres poets' early work,
one phrase evolves into another which, though grammatically and
phonetically similar, has a very different meaning, with the zero
symbol at the center of the page standing by implication both for
absence and for the idea of infinity as numberlessness. <br>
<br>
Augusto de Campos was one of the three founding members of the
Noigandres poetry group established in São Paulo in 1952, along
with his brother Haroldo de Campos and their friend Décio
Pignatari. The Noigandres very earliest Concrete Poems were
similar in import to Gomringer's, focusing on linguistic reduction
and elementary visual arrangement, but from an early stage they
were more concerned than Gomringer with incorporating wordplay and
double meanings into their poetry. By the late 1950s this had
developed into an interest in tackling political, social, and
cultural themes, often using minute shifts in grammatical form to
exact radical shifts in meaning which relayed polemical messages.
<br>
<br>
In this case, as the critic Willard Bohn has pointed out, the
phrase "Without a Number" is not simply an evocation of an
abstract quality of unknowability, but a reference to the social
and cultural exclusion of much of Brazil's rural, peasant
population from national society. In particular, they had been
left out of a recent government census and were thus excluded from
welfare programs. In this context, the phrase "Numberless" comes
to refer to the size of this dispossessed population. Over the
coming years, the Noigandres' work would become more and more
politically engaged and responsive to pop culture, culminating in
Augusto's case with his "Popcrete" poems of the early 1960s.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>ChatGPT:</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.sn0qlkDn.k64haDv9@gmail.com" alt="concretepoetry"
width="695" height="1043"></p>
</body>
</html>