Genres

Antecedents

Remote idealizations and achievements; pioneers; aesthetic and material antecedents of experimental poetry. Included in this category are the visual texts of the 17th and 18th centuries – Labyrinths, Acrostics, Anagrams; but also some texts of Futurism and Dadaism that tended towards visuality.


Electrography and Copy Art

Intersemiotic form based on the creative exploration of the photocopier, problematizing the processuality and performativity of the instruments, machine and materials thus promoting a synthesis between the literary and visual arts that extends to the field of technology in its reflection on medial inscription, appropriation and reproduction.


Experimental Fiction

Form of narrative, prose, or fictional structure based in a non-linear organization of the signifiers, promoting the fragmentation of traditional narrative diegesis, as well as the use of unexpected relationships between writing, sound, and image – as well as its relationship at the level of meaning.


Performance Poetry

Form of poetry based on multidisciplinary live action, thereby extending the poetic field to the expressiveness of the body and to the social and spatial context of the performed action. (Also known as: Perfopoetry; Poetry-performance; Performance; Poetic action).


Concrete Poetry

Form of poetry based on the spatial organization and constellation of signifiers, leading to the abandonment of lines and stanzas as major rhythmic-formal units which are replaced by homologies and iconic relations between writing, sound, image and meaning.


Digital Poetry

Form of poetry that uses the computer as a creative machine, thereby promoting a symbiosis between artist and machine based on the exploration of combinatorial, random, multimodal and interactive algorithms. (Also known as: Cybernetic poetry; Electronic poetry; Cyberliterature).


Spatial Poetry

Form of poetry based on intersemiotic processes in which various sign systems (visual, audible, verbal, kinetic, performative) and materialities (three dimensional, objectual, media) are invoked and used in an expressive way.


Sound Poetry

Form of poetry based on the expressiveness of the phonetic aspects of language, as well as the vocal processes involved in sound emission, thereby extending the concept of poem to that of musical composition, usually associated with performative manifestations and live actions, but also produced either by audio recordings or by the visual representation of the score. (Also known as: Phonetic poetry).


Visual Poetry

Form of poetry based on the dissolution of the boundaries between visual and literary genres, in which the poem becomes a hybrid and intermedia entity, thereby overcoming the exclusive use of verbal and typographic elements, which are placed in dynamic interaction with visual elements.


Videopoetry

Form of poetry based on the grammatical and communicative possibilities of the language of video, where the sign is iconized in a spatio-temporal action, articulating expressive elements such as the autonomous movement of shapes and colors, the integration of sound, and the interrelation space/time.


PO.EX

EXperimental POetry – Term proposed by  E. M. de Melo e Castro to contextualize the activities of Portuguese authors connected to visual, sound and concrete poetry from the 1960s to the 1980s.