A Vanguard Projected in Motion: Early Kinetic Poetry in Portuguese

This essay serves to promote a broader awareness of the pioneering efforts in videographic poetry produced in Portuguese in the decades leading up to the formation of the WWW. At present, documentation of such works in books and journal articles in English is particularly weak; the only title that even partially introduces such works is a now out-of-print issue of Visible Language that focused on New Media Poetry (Vol. 30.2). Thus, these historical predecessors to contemporary animated poetry are barely known in the United States. Prior to the 1990s only a few poets used video; much of what occurred transpired outside the realm of English (and some even outside the realm of language, as illustrated in the essay).