Poesia para você: cheio de ser vazio de ser

Abstract

Writing poetry, as Carlos Drummond de Andrade would say, is a serious matter. Edgar Allan Poe (1845) and Erza Pound (1934) demonstrated the fallacy of the myth that poetry is the fruit of momentary inspiration that strikes poets. When exposed, one can see how much the creation of a poem is almost always slow and painful, in an endless process of revision. A lot of work is dedicated to polishing ideas, words and dreams. The poems in this book were no exception. Many of their first versions were written between 2000 and 2002. Since then, they have undergone countless reworkings, integrating themselves with other more recent creations. It was a long period of complementing and perfecting the initial inspiration. Then, the fruitful, pragmatic and methodical work gave life to what were once more impulses. According to Erza Pound, there are three types of poetry: Melopoeia, which is expressed through words imbued with sounds and rhythms; Phanopoeia, which uses words and symbols to generate effects in the visual imagination; and Logopoeia, which makes verbal intellectual manifestation overlap with musicality and visuality to enrich the language with meaning. (...) Words are used to launch a visual image in the reader's imagination or we saturate it with a sound or use groups of words to achieve this effect. It is reasonable to say that poetry that is born to be forever alive is composed of Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and Logopoeia. This relevant poetic practice is rigorous. Original concepts are sought, based on the critical reinvention of life and language. Each historical period of human society has its own unique specific aspects. Therein lies what is genuinely new in search of innovative poets. The poetic content of this work focuses on the precariousness of human life during the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. We were living at the height of modernity and the contradictions of social, economic, political, scientific-technological and cultural forces. Human beings became deeply distressed and suffering, alienated from an impersonal global context. Human society became globalized, forming a universal sociocultural world. Its scientific-technological base developed productive forces like never before. The possibilities in terms of supply of goods, services and well-being became fantastic. But this system imposed severe restrictions on people. Human alienation and subsumption went far beyond the social relations of production. Compromise reached the depths of subjectivity, standardizing the feelings of the soul and spirit. Poetry is seen as a means of expression for this postmodern human being. After all, art is the fine tuning that transforms the sensitivity of pain, joy and sadness into emotion and beauty that is pleasing to the spirit. It is the most efficient way of bringing to the surface the unspeakable that hurts or softens the depths of the soul without knowing where it comes from or why. The author's disenchantment and perplexity are at the basis of the conception of the hardships of this increasingly subjugated human being. His indignation becomes song and lament, in the face of a world that, without measure, expands its material horizons, but demands from each one of us a very high rate of dehumanization. The poetry of this human adventure and misfortune does not dispense with scientific-technological knowledge, which makes the world move in this way, nor with the philosophy that is critical of it. Hence a certain intellectualism, when conceiving reality poetically. Many feelings and poetic effects are extracted from simple, trivial and banal aspects of everyday life. But it is clear that, by doing so alone, one would not reach its deepest and most complex emanations. Content and form are the essential elements of poetry. Content is variable, in time and space, depending on the specificities that determine it. Something similar occurs with the form of versification and composition of the poem. In effect, free verse broke with the syllabic standardization, accentuation and melody of traditional verse. Concretism made poetry more ideogrammatic and visual than auditory, especially with the object-poem. The logical-historical and artistic coherence of the development of the form of the verse and the poem is indisputable. But there is no reason for the new forms to become straitjackets. After all, there is no formal advance that justifies poetry's lack of commitment to beauty and the expression of human existence artistically reinvented. This book's poetic content is very much in tune with its subtitle "Full of Being, Empty of Being". As for its form, it is eclectic and not nostalgic. Free verse was largely adopted, with no major commitment to Modernism. There is also a concrete tone oriented towards the search for poetry endowed with speed, economy and communicative objectivity. Some sonnets bring to the work a bit of classical forms, but with profound expressions of contemporary life. There is a new Brazilian poetry in formation. The understanding that poetry does not exist as something mere will certainly prevail. There is a new Brazilian poetry in the making. The understanding that poetry does not exist as something merely linguistic or directly distilled from real life will certainly prevail. In its timeless conception, however, poetry is a form of artistic expression of life and language. It is up to the poet to recreate them, with innovation and transcendence, in light of the emanations of reality, of his self and of his feelings about the world. Even the most rigorous critics recognize that there is a rich Brazilian poetic tradition in evolution since the 19th century. Many works have become classics, that is, they remain alive or revived, in true synergistic action with the current craft of writing poetry. This is a fact in relation to Parnassianism, Modernism, Concretism and Brazilian poetry of the last decades of the 20th century. The paths of Brazilian poetry have been and are being brilliantly constructed. In its most exalted form, by Gonçalves Dias, Olavo Bilac, Castro Alves, Augusto dos Anjos, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Mário de Andrade, Cecília Meireles, Vinícius de Moraes, Adélia Prado, Ferreira Gullar, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. More recently, by Frederico Barbosa, Alexei Bueno, Antonio Risério, Glauco Matoso, Cláudio Daniel, Geraldo Carneiro, Hilda Hilst, Francisco Alvim and Antonio Cícero, among others. For all these reasons, being a poet in this Brazil of the first decades of the 21st century has become something even more serious. After all, it is necessary to continue the vigorous historical process of creating good Brazilian poetry, in all its rigor and innovation. Moving forward requires a lot of dedication, in the search for a new organic and artistically composed poetics of real life and language.