Paulo Leminski’s Haiku and the Disavowed Orientalism of the Poesia Concreta Project

Abstract

In an interview given in 1997 and revised in 2002, a year before his death, the Paulista concrete poet Haroldo de Campos addresses his long-standing interest in Japanese language and poetry. This interest in Japan was foundational to the theoretical and aesthetic project of the avant-garde poesia concreta movement that he, along with fellow poets Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, spearheaded in Brazil. It runs like a connecting thread through concrete poetry’s various iterations, from its orthodox phase during the 1950s to later linguistic and technological experimentations of the 1970s and beyond. Despite Haroldo’s reluctance to discuss a specifically Latin American mode of orientalism (a counterpart to what his interviewer Maria Esther Maciel describes as the region’s “ocidentalidade oblíqua” [“oblique Occidentalism”]), he positions his own work in relation to a number of writers from the Americas with an interest in “the Orient.” Haroldo views this interest as evidence of the “vocação universal, universalista” [“universal, universalizing vocation”] of the region’s literatures which are often and, he emphasizes, erroneously described as “marginal or peripheral.”¹ He goes on to contrast his own interest in the ideogrammatic languages of China and Japan with the Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s interest in India.