Media Inter Media

Brazilian Arts The Migration of Poetry to Videos and Installations Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira Opening with statements made by representative poets of the last two decades, this essay discusses aspects of contemporary Brazilian poetic output. As demon- strated by the poets in question, Brazilian poetry still lives in the shadow of the great masters of the recent past, such as Fernando Pessoa, Manuel Bandeira, Carl- os Drummond de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, João Cabral de Mello Neto, and the concrete poets. Yet, there is no such thing as a general poetics, reducible to a set of parameters or to a common theoretical framework. This plural character of Brazilian poetry, however, does not exclude certain dominant traits, such as an emphasis on craftsmanship, rewriting, hermeticism, irony, and a problematic subject. Nonetheless, a few poets seem to refuse mere verbal play and insist on honoring the pact of communication with the reader. Discussing the qualities of ‘the poetic’, this essay culminates in a discussion of the special rela- tionship that poetry has with other artistic manifestations, such as videos and installations. Por que a poesia tem de se confinar Às paredes de dentro da vulva do poema? Waly Salomão, Lábia 1. Introduction Lovers of Brazilian literature may well wonder how Brazilian poetry is doing nowadays, and what, indeed, has been going on since the 1960s. It would perhaps be a good idea to hand this question on to the poets themselves, to try and hear from them whatever can be said about their art, which has become more impossible than ever to de- fine. A frequent answer will be that poetry has strayed in so many different directions that it often overflows into the other ‘arts’– if, as Claus Clüver discusses in some of his seminal works, this controver- sial notion can still be used for present-day cultural objects wrapped 260 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira up under the label of ‘art’1. Incorporating the resources of their day and age, contemporary poems do not always confine themselves to books, their traditional medium. They have spread to other spaces: the computer, television, cinema screen, even to museum galleries in paintings, performances, videos, and installations. The strategy to get poets themselves to discuss their work, however, is hindered by foreseeable obstacles. One of these is that even when it does not wander through different media, poetry, no less than its criticism, is hard to publish in book format. As a matter of fact, the literary supplements of our Sunday papers no longer carry sections wholly devoted to poetry, probably because there is less public – and thus little economic – interest in publishing it. To get around this dif- ficulty and gather a significant number of statements, I have decided to turn to a comparatively recent collection which I consider particu- larly representative, Artes Ofícios da Poesia (‘Arts and Professions of Poetry’), organized by the poet and critic Augusto Massi2. The anthol- ogy grew out of a conference on the theme sponsored by the Cultural Department of the City of São Paulo in 1990. The cycle proved enor- mously successful, and the Association of Art Critics of São Paulo considered it the literary event of the year. The resulting texts were hailed as a ‘panel of present-day Brazilian poetry’ (cf. Motta 1991: 9). They include selected poems and testimonies by twenty-nine poets, several of them also critics and publishers of poetry. In her introduction to the book, Leda Tenório da Motta, head of the Núcleo de Projetos Literários do Centro Cultural de São Paulo (Nucleus of Literary Projects of São Paulo’s Cultural Center) emphasizes that the event did not aim at traditional critical judgments. It rather sought another kind of criticism, one that ‘sets in crisis’, as Roland Barthes would have it (qtd. in ibid.). Among its other purposes, the event was meant to interrogate the ‘paideuma’ and challenge truisms such as Mallarmé’s quip that poetry is made of words – all very pertinent goals for anyone interested in the poetic output of our times. 1 For discussion of this and the related concept of intermediality, see Clüver 2000 and 1997. 2 The translation of this title and of all other quotations from the Portuguese in this paper are my own. The original Portuguese is given in the footnotes. Brazilian Arts 261 2. Forerunners of Present-Day Brazilian Poetry The reference to the ‘paideuma’ could hardly be more auspicious. As other contemporary Brazilian poets, Carlos Felipe Moisés shares T. S. Eliot’s conviction about the importance of poets’ knowledge of their literary tradition for the development of their individual talents (see Moisés 1991, Eliot 1971). The poets in Massi’s collection tirelessly refer to those they have chosen as their forerunners, with regard to whom they presumably had to nurse their respective anxieties of influence. Alcides Villaça, placing himself in a ‘problematic, agonistic, and critical tradition’3, affirms that the Brazilian masters of this trend are still Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and João Cabral de Melo Neto (cf. 1991: 33). Another poet, Duda Machado, somewhat amplifies the list of forerunners. In his opinion, present-day Brazilian poetry should be read in its relation to the ‘extraordinary bunch, without parallel at any other time in our poetry’4, made up by Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Murilo Mendes, Carlos Drum- mond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Augusto de Cam- pos. In them, Machado finds not only formal elaboration (which he considers already satisfactorily present in Parnassians like Olavo Bilac) but, above all, a creative commitment to the work and poetics of their own day (cf. 1991: 116). Three of the names cited by Macha- do and Villaça show up in virtually all the pronouncements about pre- cursors. In the words of Armando Freitas Filho, they are the ‘three musketeers’ of the Brazilian poetic adventure: Bandeira – ‘a fascinat- ing mixture of tradition and rupture […], the Vademecum of Brazilian poetry – Drummond, the gauche, and João Cabral, who has ‘a sur- geon’s controlled passion’5. In fact, Bandeira, Drummond, and Cabral recur in all pronouncements. Their names are also mentioned by Anto- nio Fernando Franceschi, Felipe Fortuna, and Rodrigo Garcia Lopes. Franceschi makes it clear that the frame of intellectual references to the 1960 generation did not make up a ‘paideuma’ in the sense of obli- gatory citation, which would sanction their creation and bestow legiti- 3 “Linguagem problema, agônica e crítica” (Villaça 1991: 33). 4 “Conjunto extraordinário, sem paralelo em qualquer período de nossa poesia” (Machado 1991: 116). 5 “Mistura fascinante de tradição e ruptura […] o Vademecum da poesia no Brasil – Drummond, o gauche. […] João Cabral […] com a paixão controlada de um cirurgião” (Freitas Filho 1991: 74–76). 262 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira macy on their poetry (cf. 1991: 63). But it certainly did register di- verse elective affinities ranging from an almost ubiquitous Fernando Pessoa to Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to the Surrealists, the Am- erican Beat Generation, Satanic poetry, the Symbolists, and the great nineteenth-century names, forming an eclecticism which included the Brazilian poets of the 1922 generation and the concrete poets. For some few contemporaries, Franceschi also notes Nietzsche’s influence and that of a strain of great international poetry including that of Blake, Hölderlin, and Novalis. Of course, individual references also come up. Among his own, Franceschi mentions Jorge de Lima and Murilo Mendes, as well as the mystics Meister Eckhart, San Juan de la Cruz, and Ruysbroeck (cf. ibid.: 64). Felipe Fortuna includes Brazilian marginal poetry of the 1970s (cf. 1991: 129). Alberto Alexandre Martins adds some variations on the ‘paideuma’: [In the twentieth century] Brazilian poetry, even though lagging behind [its pre- cursors], worked through inquiry, which lies at the basis of modern poetry, and which appeared first in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. In Drummond’s gauche, besides the poet’s most particular temperament, there is a great deal of Baudelairean displacement, also found, from another tone and angle, in the affect- ive flâneur characteristic of Bandeira. That this is a persistent trait is proved by Chico Alvim’s latest book, O Corpo Fora, published in 1988. This book, almost wholly made up of fragments of speech and which, according to the author, is an attempt to capture something of a national language (an effort related to Cacaso’s and Dalton Trevizan’s projects), bears an epigraph from Baudelaire. I therefore conclude that it was the fact that they worked in a double register, re-phrasing questions implicit in the works of these French poets, but also attentive to contemporary Brazilian culture (full of gaps and still in a process of formation), that gave those poets a complexity capable of capturing a whole social practice and its shortages through language6. 6 “[No século XX] a poesia brasileira trabalhou, embora defasada, com inter- rogações que estão na base da poesia moderna, e se apresentam primeiramente nas obras de Baudelaire, Rimbaud e Mallarmé. Que no gauche de Drummond, além do temperamento particularíssimo do poeta, há muito de um deslocamento baudelairiano; como também, o há, sob outro tom e outro ângulo, no flâneur afetivo que é Bandeira. E que o traço é persistente o comprova o último livro de Chico Alvim, O Corpo Fora, lançado em 1988. Esse livro, composto quase todo a partir de fragmentos de falas, e que, segundo o próprio autor, procura apreender algo de uma língua nacional (esforço que teria afinidades com projetos de Cacaso e Dalton Trevizan), traz uma epígrafe de Baudelaire. Assim posso pensar que foi o fato de trabalharem com um duplo registro; refazendo interrogações implícitas nesses poetas franceses, e, ao mesmo tempo, atentos ao próprio tempo de cultura brasileira, lacunar e em formação, que conferiu a Brazilian Arts 263 With his eyes fixed on their great forerunners as well, Rodrigo Garcia Lopes becomes a mouthpiece for many poets when he affirms that they realize that it is almost impossible to avoid repetition nowadays (cf.

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