BIOGRAPHY

Augusto de Campos was born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1931. He is poet, translator, literary and music critic. In 1951 he published his first book of poems, O REI MENOS O REINO (The King Minus the Kingdom). In 1952, with his brother Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari, he launched the literary magazine "Noigandres". This magazine was the origin of the Noigandres Group which initiated the international movement of concrete poetry.

As a translator of poetry, Augusto specialized in rendering the work of avant garde authors like Pound ("Mauberley", "The Cantos"), Joyce ("Finnegans Wake"), Gertrude Stein and Cummings, or the Russian Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov. He also translated some of the great "inventors" of the past: Arnaut Daniel and the troubadours, Donne and the metaphysical poets, Mallarmé and the French Symbolists. A first anthology of his work, expanded in several monographies, is VERSO REVERSO CONTROVERSO (1978), RIMBAUD LIVRE (Free Rimbaud Book) (1992), HOPKINS: A BELEZA DIFÍCIL (Hopkins: The Difficult Beauty) (1997), COISAS E ANJOS DE RILKE (Things and Angels of Rilke), (2001).

From 1980 on, intensified his experiments with the new media, presenting his poems on electric billboard, videotext, neon, hologram and laser, computer graphics, and multimedia events, involving sound and music, as the plurivocal reading of CIDADECITYCITÉ (with Cid Campos), 1987/1991. Four of his holographic poems (in cooperation with Moyses Baumstein) were included in the exhibitions TRILUZ (1986) and IDEHOLOGIA (1987). A videoclip poem, PULSAR, with music by Caetano Veloso, was produced in 1984 in an Intergraph high resolution computer station. BOMB POEM and SOS, with music by his son, Cid Campos, were animated in a Silicon Graphic Computer Station of the University of São Paulo, 1992-3. His cooperation with Cid, begun in 1987 resulted in POESIA É RISCO (Poetry is Risk), a CD launched by PolyGram in 1995 and developed in a multimedia performance with the same title, a "verbivocovisual" show of poetry/music/image, which gained video-editing by Walter Silveira, and has been presented in several cities in Brazil and abroad. An installation assembling his digital poetic animations - CLIP­POEMS - was shown in 1997 as part of the exhibition Arte Suporte Computador (The Computer as Support for Art), Casa das Rosas. Some of his visual and sound poems can also be seen and heard at www.ubu.com

Poetry Works

1. O REI MENOS O REINO, São Paulo, author's edition, 1951.
2. POETAMENOS (1953), 1st edition in the magazine "Noigandres" n. 2, 1955, São Paulo, authors' edition (2nd. edition, São Paulo, Edições Invenção, 1973).
3. ANTOLOGIA NOIGANDRES (with Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Ronaldo Azeredo e José Lino Grünewald), São Paulo, authors' edition, 1962.
4. LINGUAVIAGEM (cubepoem), limited edition of 100 copies, designed by Philip Steadman, Brighton, England, 1967, and in the original version, authors' edition, São Paulo, 1970.
5. EQUIVOCÁBULOS, São Paulo, Edições Invenção, 1970.
6. COLIDOUESCAPO, São Paulo, Edições Invenção, 1971.
7. POEMÓBILES (1968-1974),object poems, in collaboration with Julio Plaza, São Paulo, authors' edition, 1974; 2^nd edition São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1985.
8. CAIXA PRETA, poems and object poems in collaboration with Julio Plaza, São Paulo, authors' edition, 1975.
9. VIVA VAIA (Poetry 1949-1979), São Paulo, Duas Cidades, 1979; 3^rd edition, reviewed and expanded, Ateliê Editorial, 2001.
10. EXPOEMAS (1980-1985), silkscreens by Omar Guedes, São Paulo, Entretempo, 1985.
11. NãO, xerox poems, authors' edition, 1990.
12. POEMAS, bilingual anthology, organized by Gonzalo M. Aguilar, Buenos Aires, Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 1994.
13. DESPOESIA (1979-1993), São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1994.
14. POESIA é RISCO (CD-livro), poetic-musical anthology, from O Rei Menos o Reino to Despoemas, in collaboration with Cid Campos, Rio de Janeiro, Polygram, 1995.
15. CLIP-POEMAS, 16 digital animated poems - exhibit "Computer-support-Art", São Paulo, Casa das Rosas, 1997.
16. ANTHOLOGIE - DESPOESIA, preface and translation by Jacques Donguy. Romaville, France, Al Dante, 2002.
17. NãO, with CD-Rom CLIP-POEMAS, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2003.

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