Poemics -Poems + Comics Amir BRITO CADOR In the mid-1960s, comic art went through a reassessment and had a scrupulous semiotic investigation, getting attention from theorists such as Umberto Eco and others. Brazilian Poema/Processo movement, since the beginning, kept a close contact to the comics, which appear in different ways in their poems and books. The idea was to use mass culture images as a way to produce content that could be easier to circulate, even among people with a lower formal education. In their 1967 manifesto, poets claim the Poema/Processo as “a poem to be seen and without words”. In an interview with João Felício dos Santos, the poet Wlademir Dias-Pino states: “the true role of the poet is to transform the poem into mass culture. This is the actual enrichment of people’s media”. 1 The title of this article is a reference to the work of Álvaro de Sá, who published a book with this same name in the 1990s, combining the words poem and comics. But he was not the only one in the movement to make this combination of poems and comics, as I will show forward here, taking examples from some artist’s books that took part in the I Exposição Nacional de Livros de Artista [First National Exhibition of Artist’s Books], held in Recife / PE in Figure 1. Álvaro de Sá, 12 × 9, 1967, Coleção Livro de Artista/UFMG. 1983 curated by Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago. The preference for comics, among other mass media (photonovel, poster, cinema), is explained by its framed image that “offers a cutout of a drawn object with implications that are 2 identically verbal and nonverbal”. Besides the Poema/Processo’s best known artists/ poets, such as Falves Silva and Alvaro de Sá (1935–2001), others, like Hugo Mund Junior, Dailor Varela and Walter Carvalho, less often studied but having not a least impor- 3 tance will be presented here. References to comics include balloons and onomatopoeias, sequential images, and page arrangement in frames. The dialogue balloons are the most common element 1 DIAS-PINO, Wlademir. Processo: 4 DIAS-PINO, Wlademir. Poemaof the comic books in the Poema/Processo works. A book linguagem e comunicação. 2. ed. processo. In: TELES, Gilberto named 12 × 9, published in 1967 by Álvaro de Sá (fig. 1), has Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1973. Mendonça. Vanguarda européia 9 frames on each one of the 12 pages, as indicates the title. 2 CIRNE, Moacy. Para ler os e modernismo brasileiro: quadrinhos: da narrativa apresentação dos principais The comic balloons appear on the twelve short stories, one cinematográfica a narrativa poemas, manifestos, prefácios for each page that is composed by a grid of three by three quadrinizada. Petropolis: Vozes, e conferências vanguardistas, squares, making a total of nine. 1972, p. 35. de 1857 a 1972. 10. ed. Petrópolis 3 This article is part of a major (RJ): Vozes, 1987, p. 424. The page structure is often the same: there’s a research about the history of dialogue between the shapes, an element appearing in artist’s books in Brazil and had a balloon becomes a character in the next frame, “several the support of Fapemig. Most of the books mentioned here elements affect each other, that is, one element is affected are part of the Artist’s Books by the previous and will affect the next one”. The stories 4 Collection (Coleção Livro de seek equivalence between words, mathematical symbols Artista) at the Federal University and geometric figures that interact with the balloons, but of Minas Gerais (UFMG). 284 CATHERINE ANYANGO GRÜNEWALD POEMICS 285 Figure 2. Álvaro de Sá, Poemics, 1991, Coleção Livro de Artista/UFMG. Figure 3. Regina Coeli’s preface to Álvaro de Sá, Poemics, 1991. Figure 7. Neide Dias de Sá, Onomatopeia, 1969. Figure 8. Dailor Varela, não ao não [no to no], 1968. Figure 4. Álvaro de Sá, Poemics, 1991. Figure 5. Álvaro de Sá, Poemics, 1991. Figure 6. Álvaro de Sá, Poemics, 1991. 5 CIRNE, Moacy. Para ler os quadrinhos: da narrativa cinematográfica a narrativa quadrinizada. Petropolis: Vozes, 1972, p. 32. 6 CIRNE, Moacy. Para ler os quadrinhos: da narrativa cinematográfica a narrativa quadrinizada. Petropolis: Vozes, 1972, p. 33. 7 MARGUTTI, Mario. Do poema visual ao objeto-poema: a trajetória de Neide Sá. Rio de Janeiro: Lacre, 2014. 8 According to Naumin Aizen, the use of graphic onomatopoeia, outside of dialogue balloons, became more common from 1927 onwards, with the arrival of sound cinema. Onomatopoeia gained new impetus with the popularization of TV in 1946, becoming part of everyday speech. According to Luis Gasca, quoted by Aizen, graphic onomatopoeias met ”the need to reduce texts as much as possible”. AIZEN, Naumin. Onomatopéias nas histórias em quadrinhos. In: MOYA, Alvaro de. Shazam!. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1977, p. 269–306. The idea of visualisation of sounds in the silent cinema is used by ECO, Umberto, Apocalípticos e integrados. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1970. 286 AMIR BRITO CADOR POEMICS on no page do words appear in the balloons, demonstrating an appreciation for nonverbal communication. On the last page, squared dialogue balloons replace the sequential frames. The traditional order of the page reading has changed, the last frame of the first line refers to the last frame of the second line, which points to the middle frame and so on, forming a zigzag movement from left to right, then right to left, and finally left to right again. Balloons are a kind of paradigm to the Poema/ Processo, as they are part of both verbal and visual language. In a study on comics, Moacy Cirne points out that “the balloon—like the onomatopoeia—is a concrete, physical, visual component, capable of taking on the most diverse forms—including metalanguage—enclosing spoken or thought discourses, they are true significant units of the image”. 5 Almost 25 years later, Álvaro de Sá resumed his work and published on his own the book Poemics (1991), photocopying the inside pages and printing the cover in offset (fig. 2). This time, the volume is much larger than the first booklet, fully included at the beginning of the book, which even has a curious, completely nonverbal 16-page preface by Regina Coeli Nascimento Pinto—this is the only one of this kind I know among artist’s books (fig. 3). Regina Coeli uses the color red to create a dialogue with the black balloons drawn by Sá, but she only uses empty balloons, actually producing a comment about the poems, with the same graphic elements used in the poems—an example of graphic reading, as proposed by the Poema/Processo, in which the reader also becomes an author. In the back cover text, the author presents his proposal, in which ”the specific signs of the language of comics are the object of a performance, shaping values and signifiers and empty of referents”. Throughout the book, the author draws various types of balloons, as if taking an inventory of the graphic possibilities, featuring some of the 72 species of balloons recorded by researcher Robert Benayoun: censored, personalized, mute, atomic, sleepy, glacial, aggressive, onomatopoeic, pop, translator, interrogative, childish, exhibitionist, sterile, 6 etc. The book even has a giant balloon, made up of a combination of nine frames, each with a different type of writing, using a different letterform. Another very common feature in comics, ono matopoeias often appear in poems and books by artists linked to the Poema/Processo. The artist Neide Dias de Sá published in 1969 her first artist’s book entitled Onomatopeia, composed by sounds that represent screams of pain, ”working as metaphors of human suffer7 ing”. The images were made with transfer letters (letraset) on acetate or transparent film, then copied on photographic paper, producing pages with dark background with the letters in white (fig. 7). Dailor Varela’s “No to No” poem was published in 1968 as the first volume of the envelope magazine Projeto, and later it was included in the book Babel (1975). The poem is a critique to the Brazilian military dictatorship’s repression and a call to action, composed of five single leaves (fig. 8), forming a short narrative, three of them having one word: ”harassed?”, ”violent ”, “action”. The two remaining pages show a b&w photograph of a young student about to throw a Molotov cocktail, and finally a blast drawing containing the onomatopoeia “BUM” [BOOM]. Graphic onomatopoeia is an invention of the silent cinema, which had to find visual equivalents for all types 8 of noise. There are several processes of visualization of sounds adopted, by metaphor or similarity. When spoken cinema emerged, the silent film conventions were adopted by the comic art. Therefore, it is natural to make approximations between cinema and comics, as indicated in the subtitle of the book by Moacy Cirne, another member of 287 the group, “To read comics: from cinematic narrative to framed narrative” (1972). The Poema/Processo has brought graphic narratives to the forefront, with no other textual resources than occasional titles, using cartographic conventions (diagrams and explanatory captions) or comic book resources to assemble elements on the same page. But there is another kind of graphic narrative that uses cinematic procedures to represent movement. In this case, the poem is a nonverbal sequence that can occupy a single page or a set of pages, including the reading time as another element of the poem. Sequences can be made as a displacement of shapes or signs in space, but they can also be created by metamorphosis, a type of transformation from one sign to another that includes enlargement or reduction of the figure that produces the cinematic effect of zoom in and zoom out. A book by Walter Carvalho showing a metamorphosed sequence, Unir (sd), is made up of just six leaves, each having a set of five horizontal figures, all derived from a rectangle. The figures form a visual sequence on the page; in all of them the last image is a black rectangle that occupies the entire width of the print area in the page (fig. 9). In one of the sequences, at the top of the page we see five black squares crossed by a line joining them all, then the squares are replaced by rectangles, and the space between them becomes gradually smaller until all are assembled in order to form a large rectangle. In another sequence, two medium-sized rectangles that are misaligned gradually approach until they meet and form again a large rectangle. The book presents five variations of this idea. The repetition of the structure makes evident that ”the matrix is the immovable structure and the process is the combination 9 of the series”. Sequence is important because “it is the movement or the participation that drives structure (matrix) into a condition of process.” On the back cover of the book 10 Gráficos [Graphics], poet Hugo Mund Junior (1968) wrote a presentation for his “series of chained images, one leading to another, in a sequence that can be said to be kinetic, suggesting to the viewer the possibility of composing a message. No words: only color and form express the total and circular organism, that is, the middle representing the one / the whole, the end leading to the beginning. Such is the intention: to give the viewer the elements to do the work himself, so that he will not only function as a receiver, but become a creator as well. Here the function of the book is proposed—it is now up to the inventive diversity of each one whether or not to approve its validity as a stand-alone 11 creative work”. This kind of wordless poem, a type of formal exercise that brings the poem closer to film language, was called by the artists ”animated poems”. Among the best known Poema/Processo poems of this kind, there are “Signo” by Dailor Varela; “Ego” by Hugo Mund Junior (fig. 10); “Work in Progress” by Sebastião Nunes; “A Coisa” by Cristina Filicio dos Santos and Walter Carvalho’s already mentioned Unir, all of them published in Process: Language and Communication, the most complete document on the movement, edited and designed by Wlademir Dias Pino. In contrast to the majority of the movement’s books, that used to have just a few pages, Hugo Mund Junior’s Germens (1977) brings together “images, graphics, texts, poems, projects” on over a hundred unnumbered pages. It is made up of diagrams of various types (fig. 11), in some cases one group of drawings occupies the same page, in others they form a sequence of pages. As with a comic book page, in the diagram the “logic is the relation of parts”. 12 Hugo Mund makes a true manual of the Poema/ Processo movement procedures: some works act as explanatory diagrams for other works that are in the same book, but not exactly on the immediate following pages. 288 Figure 9. Walter Carvalho, Unir, no date. Figure 10. Hugo Mund Junior, Ego Figure 11. Hugo Mund Junior, Germens, 1977 Coleção Livro de Artista/UFMG . Figure 12. José de Arimathéia, untitled Figure 13. Falves Silva. Thus, “links” is a graph with 12 identical squares, each containing two rows of three points, one at the bottom and another at the top, and one to three lines connecting the points, showing some combinatorial possibilities. A few pages later, ”matrix for a poem”, with 9 squares, each made up of 16 dots, shows on the back of the page some figures formed by connecting the dots. Later on, a third work resumes the dot matrix, this time in a radial arrangement, forming a “constellation” that gives the title to the work. Interestingly, the same design repeats itself below, allowing comparison, but this time all points were connected by line segments, making the underlying struc13 ture unrecognizable. As in Alvaro de Sá’s book 12 × 9, the most immediate feature of the framed narrative is the very organization of the page in pictures, which gives the Portuguese words ”quadrinhos”, used for “comics”. This resource was used by Anchieta Fernandes in the poem “Eye”, which has gained numerous versions, and by José de Arimathéia, in a wellknown untitled poem (fig. 12) that “shows how the illiterate (fingerprint) is becoming literacy (progressive movement 14 of writing, the letter a)”. Although a strong visual element, in the majority of Poema/Processo poems the frames use to be all the same size, squares placed side by side in a simple layout, usually based on symmetries (2/2/2, 3/2/3, 3/3/3 or 1/3/3/1). In this sense, the poems by Falves Silva stand out, because the composition is asymmetric (fig. 13), the edges of the frames are modified, the format may be an irregular geometric solid, so that a frame fits to the next frame, forming small units referring to the poem as a whole. The Poema/Processo, in its radicalness and inventiveness, also preceded a kind of artistic production that would only be well known about four decades later, the so-called abstract comics. Thus could be described the geometric poems by Falves Silva, but also the poem “A Coisa”, by Cristina Filicio dos Santos (fig. 14), included in an anthology of abstract comics published by the Russian 15 artist Andrei Molotiu in 2009. This text was devoted mainly to the artist’s books published by members of the Poema/Processo, but there are much more single poems of this kind, published in magazines edited by the group itself (Ponto, Vírgula and Processo, to name a few) and in other magazines with which the poets made exchange, such as the Uruguayan Ovum (edited by Clemente Padín) and the Argentine Diagonal Cero (made by Edgardo Antonio Vigo). Many of these works have circulated through the mail art system and have not yet reached museums and libraries, so much research remains to be done. ⓪ Figure 14. Cristina Filicio dos Santos, A Coisa, no date. 9 DIAS-PINO, Wlademir. Processo: linguagem e comunicação. 2ª ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1973. 10 DIAS-PINO, Wlademir. Processo: linguagem e comunicação. 2ª ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1973. 11 MUND JUNIOR, Hugo. Gráficos. Brasília: UnB, 1968. 12 DIAS-PINO, Wlademir. Processo: linguagem e comunicação. 2. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1973. 13 CADÔR, Amir Brito. O livro de artista e a enciclopédia visual. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2016. 14 TELES, Gilberto Mendonça. Estudos de Poesia brasileira. Coimbra: Livraria Almedina, 1985. (p. 67–69) 15 MOLOTIU, Andrei. Abstract comics: the anthology: 1967–2009. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2009. AMIR BRITO CADOR POEMICS 289