Augusto Luís Browne de Campos (b. 1931, São Paulo, Brazil), is a poet, visual artist, translator, and critic. In 1952, with his brother Haroldo and Décio Pignatari, he launched the literary magazine Noigandres, the origin of the Noigandres Group which introduced the international movement of concrete poetry. The six dactylograms of his color poems “Poetamenos” (1953) were first printed in the magazine Noigandres nº 2 (1955) and were presented as “concrete poetry” by the group Ars Nova, on the auditorium Teatro de Arena, São Paulo the same year. In 1956 he participated in the First National Exhibition of Concrete Art in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. His work has since been included in many international exhibitions and world-renowned anthologies. Most of his poems were assembled in Viva Vaia (1949-1979), Despoesia (Unpoetry) (1993), and Não (No) (2003), and Outro (2015). Among his other works are Poemobiles (1974), collections of object-poems in collaboration with the graphic artist Julio Plaza in Caixa Preta (Black Box) (1975), and poems serigraphed by Omar Guedes in Expoemas (1985).
As a translator, Augusto has worked on the poetry of avant-garde authors, among them Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vielimir Khlebnikov, Marina Tsvetaeva. He has also devoted his work to the translation of innovators of the past such as Arnaut Daniel and John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and others.
Since 1990, he has intensified his experiments with new media, presenting his poems in different vehicles such as electric billboard, videotext, neon, hologram and laser, computer graphics, and in multimedia events. With musician Cid Campos he released a CD titled Poesia é Risco (1995), developed on the CDR Clip-Poems (1997) appended to the book Não (2003), and presented since then at multimedia events known as “Poetry is Risk” with the participation of the video artist Walter Silveira.
Augusto has received multiple international prizes; among them are the Pablo Neruda Ibero-american Poetry Award (2015), and the Grand Prize of Poetry Janus Pannonius (2017).
More information about his work:
http://www.augustodecampos.com.br/poemas.htm
http://www.poesiaconcreta.com.br/