“Lembras-te de quando era tudo diferente?”: Concrete Poetry and Revolution in Portugal in the 1960s and'70s

The article traces the politics of form and the forms of the political in Portuguese concrete and visual poetry from the 1960s and'70s. The Portuguese Experimental Poetry movement (PO.EX) maintained an active struggle against both the traditionalist literary establishment, and Salazar's dictatorship. During Salazar's rule, cultural production-including experimental poetry-was intrinsically linked to political action, to street graffiti, posters and other forms of political art and public protest. By focusing on works by three prominent poets (Alexandre O'Neill, E. M. de Melo e Castro, and Ana Hatherly), I argue that concrete poetry, and more broadly speaking experimental poetry, sought to combat the fascist Estado Novo and its censorship apparatus through veiled denunciation and aggressive formal techniques that destabilized established categories such as text and image, subjective and objective, or poetry and painting.