Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry

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Digital poetry always involves mathematical concepts. Fusing together textual elements is an additive process, at very least. Combining files and presenting them via computer screens multiplies possibilities for poetry, and the sum, or sums, of the artistic equation are often worthy of the effort involved. Thus, what we factor into the equation, and how it is factored in, is important. Considering some of the successful works of digital poetry that appeared in the hypermedia journal Alire in France, and in other historical and contemporary works, I see a trait that emerges despite overt aesthetic differences and variant approaches in works produced that I wish to associate with a liberating and useful poetical concept that emerged in South America nearly a century ago.

When Pero Afonso de Sardinha arrived on the shores of Brazil from Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century to be Bishop of Bahia, natives in the Aimorés tribe (pagans) ritualistically ate him. This historical event, a spontaneous response to colonial oppression, has been a source of identification for Brazilian artists since the modern era, and has been used as a foundation for the cultivation of heterogeneous expressive forms. Use of this transgressive context has expanded, and has significance and application in today’s media environment. Anthropophagy (or cannibalism), the name assigned to this unusual and iconoclastic creative philosophy, was initially announced by, and exemplified in, Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagy Manifesto” (1928), which proclaims “I am only interested in that which is not my own” (65). External texts and idioms become grist for the anthropophagist’s mill, a trait reflected in Oswald’s short poems “Biblioteca Nacional” (partially composed of juxtaposed document titles, e.g., “Brazilian Code of Civil Law/How to Win the Lottery/Public Speaking for Everyone/The Pole in Flames) and “Advertisement” (which adopts the language of advertising copy, e.g., “All women—deal with Mr. Fagundes/sole distributor/in the United States of Brazil”) (Bishop 11, 13). In another historical example of anthropophagy in poetry, Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato, the brutal hierarchy of the elements in a rain forest is established in a serial poem involving continuous encounters between these elements (e.g., a snake, trees, a river, and birds). Bopp, favoring process rather than destination, engages, emulates, and reprocesses natural, conversational sounds, stitching the language of the creatures of the forest in which the poem is set into the poem (e.g., “Tiúg… Tiúg Tiúg…/Twi. Twi-twi” (16). More importantly, Bopp borrows the story of Cobra Norato from native mythology, and re-inscribes it in “very colloquial and popular language;” it is primarily anthropophagic in terms of its “ethos and thinking structures” (Salgado n. pag.).

Numerous poets and artists in Brazil were subsequently motivated by anthropophagy. Today, useful connections can be made between anthropophagy and digital poetry that divulge significant operative characteristic and artistic opportunities in a genre known for its synthesis of fragments. The relationship between concrete poetry and digital poetry is often discussed, and exploring the ties between one of the concetist’s major influences and digital poetry is a worthy pursuit.

Augusto de Campos explains in a 2005 interview, “Oswald made a distinction between anthropophagy and pure cannibalism—by hunger or by greed—from ritual anthropophagy. Ritual anthropophagy is a branch of anthropophagy in which the cannibal eats his enemy not for greed or for anger but to inherit the qualities of his enemy. The metaphorical, and also in certain aspects philosophical, idea of cultural anthropophagy Oswald promoted was the idea of cannibalizing the high culture from Europe, with the results that one could acquire, or could have from this devouration, and could then construct something really new out of this development” (Interview 2005). Transformative expression appropriates given data then warps or reconfigures it to new ends. Such a method certainly corresponds, or perhaps responds, to Dadaist techniques of appropriation, and also corresponds to the type of cannibalism seen in examples of digital poetry. An anthropophagic text, in which the author or authors engage with multiple languages or idioms, devours other texts, icons, and is free to remix discrepant methods and philosophical approaches. Discovery and re-discovery of meaning is reached through the cannibalization of texts, which may then establish alternative perspectives on cultural or personal subjects taken up by authors in textual composition, re-composition, and composting. Through anthropophagy, artists are free to reshape external influences. This open acknowledgment of plurality is what makes the concept still relevant today, as an active principle for the creation of "difference."

(Source: Author's introduction)

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Scott Rettberg