Poesia concreta (, concrete poetry) was an avant-garde movement that came on the 1950s in Brazil and Switzerland, initially in music, but later in poetry and plastic arts. The concretism defended rationality and rejected expressionism, perhaps, lyric abstraction and randomness. In their texts there is no intimism or worry about the subject, the obligation is to end up with the distinction between body and concept and create a new language.
During the 1960s members of the movement began experimenting with social themes, usually not involving them with their texts, being a personal connection instead. They began caring more about innovation in language.The concreteness, first, it was a European movement of the visual arts in the 1930s, and music, in the forties. It was said "concrete" as opposed to the idea of "abstract".The formal launching of concrete poetry takes place in 1956 with the National Exhibition of Concrete Art at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, with the participation of poets and painters of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. However, already had been setting up since the beginning of the decade and even earlier, appearing as part of a movement or trend, often spontaneously, in Brazil and several European countries.In Italy, in 1943, coming of the long-futurism.However, the first texts that cater strictly to the precepts set to concrete poetry in its first manifesto (Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, published in São Paulo, 1958, and signed by Augusto de Campos, for his brother Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari group meeting since 1952 under the name Noigandres) were a series of poems called "Poetamenos" and the first book of the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer, Konstellationen (Constellations), both published in 1953. In the same year, was published in Sweden, the Swedish-Brazilian poet Öyvind Fahlström, is a manifesto called Manifest konkret poesie (Manifesto of concrete poetry), presenting many points of contact with the proposals of concrete poetry Paulo, emphasizing, however, importance of rhythm, which in any case, could lead us to think of poetry as a "cola drink" (Pignatari Decius, 1957) or the letter of the musical composition "What" (Arnaldo Antunes, 1986).
Concrete poetry takes Vladimir Mayakovsky as a large exponent. The Russian poet used to say that "there's no revolutionary art without revolutionary form." In the "Pilot Plan", it is considered as their precursors, the order of reference in the manifest, Ezra Pound, Apollinaire, Eisenstein, Mallarmé, James Joyce, ee Cummings, futurists, Dadaists, Oswald de Andrade, João Cabral de Mello Neto, Webern and his followers, Mondrian, Max Bill and concrete art in general.There is no place in concrete poetry, according to its manifesto for "expression, subjectivity and hedonism." The poems must be a "poem-product" that will follow the formula of the original poetry of Mayakovsky, transforming the poem into the equation or "create exact problems and solve them in terms of language sensitive."