Agruras da lata d'água

Abstract

Jessier Quirino, like a good son of an exact sciences who has a finger in the humanities, works meticulously on his poems. We can classify them as orality and, why not, a great appeal to the Northeastern roots with their repentistas and cordelistas. Auguras is a book that should be read slowly and thoughtfully, a blend of prose and poetry with Jessier's mastery. It is not just the sung show with the same name, it is the most genuine vision of us Northeasterners. There are poems that, as João Cabral would say, ask to be said “out loud”. All of Jessier Quirino's poetry is like this, it is not content with silent reading and overflows with a compulsory orality. As I read “Agruras da Lata D’água” in the small room of the Museum of Image and Sound, where I work, I felt the desire for others to hear what I was reading, to share the reading with my coworkers, and I ended up reading aloud to two of them some fragments of the poems that I considered most creative. It is a poetry that, by its very nature, wants to be shown, it demands a stage and a large audience. In this, its consanguinity with the ancestral production of the repentista violeiros of the Northeast. Most of the so-called erudite poetry, book poetry, of modernity, seems to be made to be read in seclusion; it demands reflection and silence, like a whisper of the spirit. But, after the poet Bruno Tolentino read some of my poems in blank verse, giving them a tone that was both colloquial and solemn, I came to the conclusion that this poetry, instead of being low, that wants to be whispered, can also be said out loud, but it requires, for that, a specific orality, far from the pathetic theatricality of Rede Globo when, due to some technical failure, it decides to broadcast a poem. Jessier's poetry requires the orality of a cadenced speech, more viola-like and, therefore, more aggressive and bold, since he even uses and abuses neologisms, as in this fragment of ‘Sóbrio’: “If fireflies in the night, I will firefly myself, If you drink rum-with-coke, I will also drink rum-cocacarei, And if you have coffee-with-milk, I will have coffee-confectionery”. Jessier's poetry clearly favors humor, something rare in modern poetry, since the joke-poem of the modernists of 1922 had almost no followers. However, the repentista violeiros, who have nothing to do with those rich poets who laugh for no reason, never abandoned humor, especially in fights, where the pairs pretend to be fighting. Jessier has this kinship with our Northeastern Simonides. Almost all modern erudite poetry is too serious and sadder than the majority of our people. I don't know if it's because, already foreseeing a profound transformation in the rural world, due to the homogenizing force of the media and new technologies, Jessier Quirino, since his first book, has been creating a kind of poetic enthography of the values, habits, tools, and language of the Northeastern backlands and hinterlands. It is a survey made in great detail, the result of his extraordinary capacity for observation, as a participant observer. I have no doubt that his work, in addition to its increasingly proven aesthetic value, will in the future serve as a document and testimony of a world already swallowed up by the technological vortex. The little that I don't like about his work – the "country" spelling and the foul language – is due to the idiosyncrasies necessary for there to be a plurality of expressive tendencies, without which we poets would be boringly similar to one another. After all, art can be communist, but not so much. Recife, August 23, 1998.