News of the death of the noted Brazilian poet Haraldo de Campos in mid-August 2003 did not come as a total surprise. He had been ill, so I was told on my second visit to São Paulo in 2000, when I had telephoned Haraldo. Even upon my first visit to that city, with Michael Palmer in 1997, our host, Régis Bonvicino had hinted that Haraldo was not in good health.

In truth our reason for being in that city—on the occasion of the publication of my Sun & Moon Press anthology of Brazilian Poetry, edited by Michael, Régis, and Nelson Ascher—might be said to have contributed to both Haraldo’s and his brother Augusto’s distress. For despite their major contributions of Brazilian poetry and their importance internationally, particularly in terms on Concrete Poetry, their work had not been included in our anthology, in part because Régis—a former friend of Haraldo’s for whom the elder had served as a mentor—wanted to represent the younger generation’s movement away from concretism, and to express his personal belief that Concretism as practiced by the brothers had brought contemporary poetry in Brazil to a kind of standstill. While certainly the de Campos brothers had connected their work and others to an international modernism, it had disconnected much the poetic community from younger international figures. Accordingly, what to my way of thinking these all seemed to be justifiable concerns, played differently in the hothouse environment that is contemporary Brazilian poetry—and may even have been perceived some as mean-spirited and unnecessarily exclusionary.

One must remember that the Sun & Moon Press anthology Nothing the Sun Could Explain was the first English-language anthology to be published since Elizabeth Bishop’s l972 anthology, Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry and Emanuel Brasil’s concretist anthology, Brasillian Poetry: 1950-1980. The American audience, particularly since the de Campos’s had championed American modernism, was one they highly courted. If in general the US had never truly come to appreciate the concrete poetry, the brothers all the more hoped that their poetry may be better represented in English; and even though they were both highly admired throughout South America and in European countries such as Italy, Germany, and been denied them. Régis and the de Campos’s, we were told, were no longer on speaking terms. Indeed, Michael and I never encountered Augusto.

Haraldo, however, graciously attended our reading and panel at Memorial, and upon the second night our stay invited Michael and me to a memorable meeting at his house. While his wife, Carmen served tea and cookies, Haraldo spoke of his relationship with various Brazilian modernists, from his rediscovery and reevaluation of the 19th century Brazilian poetry collagist Joaquim de Sousandrede—whom he insisted I should publish (and I wish to)—to the great Brazilian modernists such as Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Melo Neto, and others—authors who transformed not of only 20th century Brazilian literature but whose influence had been felt internationally. He brought out specially bound books, including his and Augusto’s translations of Pound, Joyce, the Russian Futurists and Cage.

It was a beautiful couple of hours—even if at times it appeared a bit like a sort of self-testament to his contributions, tinged with some regret for what he surely perceived to be the current trend of Régis and others toward a more romantically infused lyricism expressed in our collection.

In a sense that evening stood as a sort of personal history lesson from a major literary figure, an author whom Marjorie Perloff recently described—borrowing a term from William Marx and recent European critical theorists—as representing les arrière-gardes.

In military terms, the rearguard of the army’s the part that protects
and consolidates the troop movement in question; often the army’s best
generals are used for this purpose. When, in other words, an avant-
garde movement is no longer a novelty, it is the role of the arrière garde to
complete its mission, to insure its success. The term arrière garde, then, is
synonymous neither with reaction or with nostalgia for a lost and more
desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the “hidden face of modernity.”
(Perloff, “Writing as Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrière Garde”)

One might almost describe Haraldo’s behavior on that special evening with Michael and me as our being in audience with a general surveying the decades of battles he’d endured, explaining, reinterating, elucidating, and reexploring all the creative energy his and his brother and expended over their lives, work Haraldo understandably felt had meant something and should be kept alive.

Dublin, June 23, 2007