What really matters in Décio Pignatari

Abstract

What we intend with this essay is to highlight some aspects of Décio Pignatari's poetics that, to a large extent, singularize his textual path when confronted with a supposed serious-aesthetic style that would mark the production of concrete poets. The mixture of codes seen in his verbal and non-verbal poems, such as the necessarily erudite humor without varnish – since his interest in pop culture is notorious –, the priapeia imagery, the semiotic appetite almost pornographic, the unceremonious deal with the tradition, etc., give Pignatari's poetics a disposition for transactions with other sign forms. And it is from this perspective that we try to relate his language designer inventions with Jean-Luc Godard's anti-cinema whose filmography dissipates while disturbing the narrative faculty attributed to the seventh art. Both the poet and the filmmaker are creators of non-linearity, or as Pignatari might prefer to say, creators in search of the signovo.