Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

them at their signi¤cance, their contents. Concrete Poetry is ¤rst of all a re-
volt against this transparency of the word.”^5
Take, for example, Haroldo de Campos’s well-known Concrete poem “fala /
prata / cala / ouro” (“speech / silver / silence / gold”),^6 which plays with the
hackneyed proverb “Silence is golden” as well as the classical epithet “silver-
tongued”:

fala

prata

cala

ouro

cara

prata

coroa

ouro

fala

cala

para

prata ouro

cala fala

clara

Of the constellation’s sixteen words, four—fala, prata, cala, and ouro
(“speech,” “silver,” “silence,” “gold”) appear three times each: fala (“speech”)
is ¤rst prata (“silver”), and its rhyming partner cala (“silence”) is ouro
(“gold”). But the application of epithets seems to be no more than a matter
of chance—“heads” (cara) or “tails” (coroa)—and so the ¤fth pair—fala /
cala—joins the two contraries (“speech / “silence”) and is followed by a stop
(para) that disrupts the poem’s staircase structure. Accordingly (below stairs,
so to speak), a double reversal sets in: “silver” (prata), in a reversal of noun
and adjective, is now “silent” (cala) and it is gold (ouro) that speaks (fala).
Indeed, what is clara (the poem’s ¤nal word, used for the ¤rst time here, com-
bines cala and cara both visually and phonically) is that ouro is the dominant,
the one word that doesn’t match any of the others, containing as it does the
only u in the poem and being the only word that doesn’t end in a and has no
rhyming partner. Silence, Haroldo implies, may be golden, but, at least in our
culture, it is gold that speaks!^7
The poem is a good example of the reduction Waldrop speaks of: it has
only eight different words (the count is [4 × 3] + 4 = 16), and its syntax is
minimal, there being no connectives relating paired nouns and adjectives.

176 Chapter 9