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 poet- ics, 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 in- stallations.

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 dif- ferent 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

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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, how- ever, 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 intro- duction 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 influ- ence. 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 con- temporary 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 nowa- days (cf. 1991: 275). Carlos Felipe Moisés adds: ‘to do and redo, to read, write, rewrite. Every poem is an exercise in exercises. Every po- et is an army of poets.’7 Pronouncements made long after the publication of Massi’s 1991 anthology continue to trace the presence of the great forerunners of contemporary poetry. Maurício Salles Vasconcelos considers the con- crete poets still to be the hegemonic branch in Brazil, a branch that younger poets who made their appearance in the 1960s and 1970s ended up confirming; to these belong, for instance, Leminski, Bon- vicino, Alice Ruiz, and Antônio Risério. Others, including Josely Vianna, Nelson Ascher, and Frederico Barbosa, made a clean break in the 1980s (cf. 1999: 19f.). In 1999 Vera Casanova, a poet and literary critic, talked about the modernist heritage: ‘Mário, Oswald de Andrade, Rosário Fusco, Drummond, Murilo Mendes, Ávila, and so many others’, and declared the impossibility of remaining impervious to contemporary poetics, in which ‘authors are devoured and devour one another’8. Nelson Ascher articulated the same opinion in an interview for the newspaper Estado de Minas in 2005: ‘For all intents and purposes, we still live in the same poetic universe created by people like Mário and Oswald, Drum- mond and Murilo, the concrete poets, and Ferreira Gullar’9. To the presence of these great names in the literary imagination and the shadow they project on the Brazilian poetic tradition, Ascher attributes the difficulty of dealing with themes already amply explored by the elder poets, such as love or politics: ‘whoever wishes to treat them is in direct competition with Drummond in A Rosa do Povo (‘The Rose

esses poetas uma complexidade capaz de captar toda uma prática social, e suas carências, através da linguagem.” (Martins 1991: 24f.) 7 “Fazer e refazer: ler, reescrever; escrever e reescrever. Todo poema é um exercí- cio de exercícios. Todo poeta é um exército de poetas.” (Moisés 1991: 94f.) 8 “Autores são devorados e se devoram” (Casanova 1999: 13). 9 “Para todos os efeitos, vivemos, bem ou mal, no mesmo universo poético criado por gente como Mário e Oswald, Drummond e Murilo, os concretistas e Ferreiro Gullar.” (Ascher 2005) 264 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

of the People’) or with some of Vinicius de Moraes’s best poems. The excellence of the past sets obstacles for future generations’10. On the other hand, there is no denying that the mere reading of the tradition does not suffice to create great poetry. A critic of those he calls ‘bad diluters’ of Oswald, Cabral, Murilo Mendes, Bandeira, or the concrete poets, Lopes remarks that good poets filter the tradition: ‘they imitate it, without letting it alter them’ (cf. 1991: 276). Along the same line of thought, Carlos Felipe Moisés quotes Umberto Eco, for whom ‘modern artists can no longer move forward, they must go back, revisit the tradition, but with irony’11. Lopes especially praises those who refuse to be just ‘one more diction’12. They create their own solutions, become their own references. In this group, which he calls ‘caogenous’, Lopes places Duda Machado, Sebastião Uchoa Leite, Alice Ruiz, Paulo Henriques Britto, Arnaldo Antunes, and Paulo Le- minski (cf. 1991: 277)13. Several of these poets know other languages, translate poetry, and have a special relationship with music and the other arts.

3. The Plural Character of Contemporary Brazilian Poetry

Not only the group listed by Lopes is ‘caogenous’. In present-day po- etry hardly any common denominators can be found which might en- able the critic to outline a general, clear-cut contour. The authors themselves are aware of this. For a long time, Alberto Alexandre Martins has drawn attention to the absence of comprehensive artistic movements which could formulate a common poetics. It is as if each work were born in isolation, without integrating a group (cf. 1991: 26). Another poet interested in the plural character of contemporary Brazilian poetry is Cláudio Willer. He considers it irreducible to a few parameters, to a single doctrine, a theory, or to categories like form- al/informal, local/universal, free/rhymed verse, colloquial/solemn (cf.

10 “Quem quer que queira tratá-los está competindo diretamente com o que Drummond escreveu em A Rosa do Povo ou com alguns dos melhores poemas de Vinicius. A excelência do passado impôs obstáculos às gerações futuras.” (Ibid.) 11 “O artista moderno não tem mais onde avançar, deve voltar atrás, revisitar a tradição, mas com ironia.” (Moisés 1991: 98) 12 […] mais uma dicção” (Lopes 1991: 277). 13 ‘Caogenous’ is my translation for “caógeno”, a neologism in Portuguese. Brazilian Arts 265

1991: 102–105). Resorting to a similar discourse, Lopes considers present-day poetic output ‘unterritorialized, free from chains or fash- ions and from the weight of tradition’14. ‘We live in an age of recycl- ing, re-creation, and repetition, […] all styles live side by side, in the same place in space-time.’15 Or as Carlos Felipe Moisés will have it: ‘For a long time we have been living in an eternal present, a vortex which engulfs, dilutes, and again and again chews the past and the fu- ture’16.

4. General Features of Contemporary Brazilian Poetry

4.1. Emphasis on Verbal Craftsmanship Owing to the impossibility of mapping such a complex topography, there remains the alternative of trying to outline a few – very few in- deed – general traits of contemporary Brazilian poetry, which future literary historians should take into account. Here I would like to in- clude metalinguistic features: the concern with poetic creation itself, radical experimentalism, the tendency to hermeticism, the problemati- zation of the subject, the absence of themes and forms conventionally accepted as poetic, as well as an anti-lyricism that does not quite man- age to stifle occasional bouts of personal effusion. Vital for the argu- ment developed in this essay is the longing to transcend verbal lan- guage, which may lead to the migration of poetry to other semiotic systems and to the dispersion of the poetic among different artistic manifestations. Some of these traits are laid down by the poets in Augusto Massi’s collection. One such trait is virtually unanimously noted: the emphasis on verbal craftsmanship, a constant search for formal renovation which has survived the twilight of the vanguards. This is the aspect which has been privileged in another anthology, Na Virada do Século (‘At the Turn of the Century’), edited by Claudio Daniel and Frederico

14 “[…] desterritorializada, livre de marras e modismos e do peso da tradição.” (Lopes 1991: 277) 15 “Vivemos numa era de reciclagens, recriações e repetições, […] todos os estilos convivem num mesmo lugar no espaço-tempo.” (Ibid.: 275) 16 “Vivemos há muito um eterno presente, vórtice e vértice que engole, deglute, mastiga e remastiga passado e futuro.” (Moisés 1991: 98) 266 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

Barbosa. As the preface anticipates, the collection privileges ‘the craft of words plus the investigation of new symbolic and cultural reperto- ries […] an ars poetica already dubbed post-concrete, which starts with Mallarmé’s crisis of the verse but searches for constructive solu- tions diverse from those of the Noigandres’17. Through the 1980s and 1990s this poetry (post-concrete poetry) has encouraged ‘the rereading of “obscure” or “hermetic” authors belonging to an anti-tradition, such as Lezanma Lima, Paul Celan, Francis Ponge, and Robert Creeley’18. The preoccupation with form, emphasized by the poets of Na Vira- da do Século, also proves constant in Augusto Massi’s anthology. One of the poets included in the anthology, Fernando Paixão, focuses on the idea of the poet as craftsman, a worker with words, “o azulegista”, that is, one who uses words as carefully as a craftsman working with his tiles, ‘somebody who contemplates the face of days, attentive to the breath of forms’19. In the same anthology, Carlos Ávila likewise insists that poetry is ‘work, the labor of art, like music, painting, cine- ma, a minus which is a plus, the invention of a new language’20. In the same tone, José Paulo Paes reiterates that verse can no longer be seen as a regular succession of syllables or feet nor by a cut imposed by rhythmic euphony, it is foremost the fracture in which the tension between the semantics of form and the semantics of content is resolved. A tension which, since it varies from poem to poem, does not admit previous codifications21. This concern for form recalls the self-referential aspect of writing, the obsessive interest in the construction of the text which also marks con-

17 “O artesanato de palavras mais a investigação de novos repertórios simbólicos e culturais […] uma ars poetica já chamada de pós-concreta, que parte da crise do verso de Mallarmé, mas procura soluções construtivas diversas de Noigandres.” (Daniel/ Barbosa, eds. 2002: 23–27) 18 “A releitura de autores ‘obscuros’ ou ‘herméticos’ de uma anti-tradição, como Lezanma Lima, Paul Celan, Francis Ponge e Robert Creeley.” (Daniel/Barbosa, eds. 2002: 23) 19 “O azulegista […] alguém que olha a superfície dos dias, atento ao sopro das formas.” (Paixão 1991: 147) 20 “Poesia é trabalho, trabalho de arte como música, pintura, cinema, um menos que é mais, invenção de uma nova língua.” (Ávila 1991: 84) 21 “O verso não pode mais ser visto como uma sucessão regular de sílabas ou pés nem como um corte imposto pela eufonia rítmica; será antes, o fraturamento em que se resolve a tensão entre a semântica da forma e a semântica do conteúdo. Tensão que, por variar de poema a poema, não admite codificações prévias.” (Paes 1991: 191) Brazilian Arts 267

temporary poetry. In a typical remark, Marcos Bagno, going over his trajectory, talks about a self-obsessed poetry, ‘a snail turned inward, a cylindered, frameless mirror reflecting itself’22. Likewise commenting on the learning of his craft during his search for a personal voice, João Paulo Paes recalls expressive devices that moved from puns to allusions, from visual montage to loose words, from semantic fracture to false etymology everything meant to cri- ticize consumer society’s fury for possession in its perverted post-64 Brazilian version23.

4.2. The Reaction Against Mere Verbal Play In Paes’s understanding, which the above remark makes clear, experi- mentalism is not a value in itself. In the introduction to her book De- sertos, the poet Vera Casanova agrees: ‘I do not want mere language exercises’24, suggesting that, without falling into the pamphletarian, poetry should be at the service of some kind of message. For Fernando Paixão, poetry likewise has a function, which is ‘to humanize the real, to recreate inhabited space […]. The poet sees the world and gathers a feeling of urgency’25. One should reconsider the belief that poetry is made of words, for it also demands lived experience, real or imagi- nary, which will find its form in great poetry. Alcides Villaça warns that, if accepted unreservedly, Mallarmé’s quip ‘may point to a closed circle of signs […], the final victory of the fetish-word’26. Other voi- ces are raised against a poetics that favors sound over meaning, which courts syntactic disarticulation and semantic hybridism in an autistic verbal play alienated from communication. Alexei Bueno seems to have this in mind as he condemns ‘the poetry of contingency most

22 “Poesia ensimesmada, caracol para dentro de si virado, espelho cilíndrico e sem moldura para si mesmo mirado.” (Bagno 1991: 246) 23 “Recursos de expressão que iam do trocadilho à alusão, da montagem visual à palavra em liberdade, da fratura semântica à falsa etimologia – tudo em prol de uma crítica à fúria de posse da sociedade de consumo na sua pervertida versão brasileira pós-64” (Paes 1991: 190). 24 “[…] não quero exercícios linguajeiros” (Casanova 2004: 17). 25 “A função do poeta é humanizar o real, recriar o espaço vivido […]. Ele vê o mundo e recolhe um sentimento de urgência.” (Paixão 1991: 147) 26 “Pode apontar para um círculo fechado de signos […], vitória final da palavra- fetiche” (Villaça 1991: 35). 268 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

miserably private, […] an unstructured self-complacent object made up of facile nothings, of words thrown to the winds’27. Paulo Henri- ques Britto also excludes from his poetic sensibility ‘any poetry con- sisting of the mere exploration of the formal possibilities of the lan- guage and of the poetic code, the use of words as (close to) empty sig- nifiers, connotation void of denotation’. And he adds, ‘I can only con- ceive of poetry as the frontier between clear reference and verbal play’28.

4.3. The Search for Communication and for a Personal Voice In an essay symptomatically entitled “Além da Felicidade Formal” (‘Beyond Formal Felicity’), Ruy Espinheira Filho equally denounces what he calls poetry made by hammer strokes […], alliterations and blows […], puns, stammer- ing crises and serious bouts of aphasia […] or of tearful colloquialism and shallow joking, a kind of cold unsavory brew. […] Poetry is more, much more than games, tricks, juggling29. In the wake of Marianne Moore, he affirms that art is a human need, ‘no mere parlor game or puzzle-solving for solemn gentlemen with heavy, private jargon’30. With Jack Gilbert, he muses: ‘in poetry there must be a voice beyond technique, meaningfully singing the life of man’31. Consistent with this statement, Carlos Ávila voices his faith in ‘the word as a form and means of communication […] in the search

27 “A poesia de contingência mais miseravelmente pessoal […] da desestruturação satisfeita de nadas facílimos, de palavras jogadas ao deus-dará […]” (Bueno 1991: 43). 28 “Toda poesia que constitua uma simples exploração das possibilidades formais do idioma e da linguagem poética, uma utilização da palavra como significante (quase) vazio, como conotador livre de denotações. […] Não consigo conceber a poesia senão como a área fronteiriça entre a referência clara e o ludismo verbal.” (Britto 1991: 264–267) 29 “Poesia feita de ´pancadas de martelo […], de aliterações e topadas […], troca- dilhos, crises de gagueira e graves acessos de afasia […] ou de coloquialismo piegas e piadismo rasteiro, espécie de caldo frio e insosso […]. A poesia é mais, muito mais, do que jogo, do que truque, do que prestidigitação.” (Espinheira Filho 1991: 298) 30 “A arte é uma necessidade humana, não mero jogo de salão ou quebra-cabeças para senhores sisudos e de pesado jargão cenacular.” (Ibid.: 299f.) 31 “Deve haver uma voz acima da técnica, na poesia, cantando significativamente a vida do homem.” (Ibid.: 297) Brazilian Arts 269

for a rational and sensitive poetry […] suited to contemporary man’32. Similar remarks recur in other pronouncements. Rodrigo Garcia Lopes longs for ‘a poetry that, as Leminski wanted, could be a recuperation of the care, the craft of the arts and its cunningness, without thus losing expressive and – indeed – subjective potential’33. As one might expect, not all poems attain the ideal of a conciliation of expressiveness and verbal craftsmanship. In this vein, Ruy Espin- heira Filho mentions the artist’s dilemma, the double need for com- munication and for personal expression (cf. 1991: 296f.). ‘Mutatis mu- tandis’, Alcides Villaça talks about the same dilemma. He recalls the struggle for a voice of his own, ‘not wholly losing the dimension of his person, without neglecting the need for another person to share the tense, contradictory human reality imitated by poetry’34. Alberto Alex- andre Martins sums up the matter: ‘a poet has to remain alert to both these sides: the pressure of the present and the reader’s questioning presence’35.

5. Poetry and Contemporary Culture

The enunciation of this precept proves easier than its observance. Al- exandre Martins points to the obstacles faced by the poet in complying with the pact of communication with the reader while simultaneously preserving the estrangement of poetic language. He attributes this dif- ficulty to the cultural atmosphere of the day, when widely shared ex- perience proves scarce: In a shattered society like ours no door is left open to common experience. So that anything entering the circuit is interpreted through the sign of estrangement rather than by that of empathy, by what it leaves undone rather than by what it actually

32 “A palavra enquanto forma e meio de comunicação […] uma poesia racional e sensível […], adequada ao homem de hoje” (Ávila 1991: 90). 33 “Uma poesia que, como desejava Leminski, voltasse a ser uma recuperação do capricho, do ‘craft’ das artes & manhas do ofício, sem que isso impeça suas possibili- dades expressivas e – sim – subjetivas” (Lopes 1991: 274). 34 “[…] ter voz […] não perder por completo a dimensão da pessoa […] expressar a necessidade do outro […] que participe da realidade tensa, contraditória e humana que a poesia imita” (Villaça 1991: 35f.). 35 “Um poeta tem que estar atento a essas duas quinas: à pressão do presente e à pre- sença interrogante do leitor.” (Martins 1991: 26) 270 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

does. […] Lyrical space itself […] has been drastically altered, always towards greater fragmentation and isolation, whereas cultural surroundings, besides being institutionalized, have come to suffer the pressure of the mass market. Hence the fact that this is not a time when the conditions of poetic creation and reception are a given, neither is it a time that demands rupture with an obsolete tradition, everything being already so ruptured around us36.

6. The Crisis of the Subject

In such a context, the expression of a sensitive subject, implicit in a lyrical voice, proves ever more problematic. Contemporary poets of- ten seem to shy away from personal statements. Felipe Fortuna con- firms some of his fellow poets’ embarrassment at lyricism when he confesses his resistance to publishing love poems, tending to privilege irony and scepticism and his own literary experience (cf. 1991: 126). This is implied in the verses of his poem “Ou Vice-Versa”: Não é verso, é anti-, é versus / (‘This is not a verse, it is anti-, it is versus’) Como o sim dentro do não. / (‘Like a yes inside a no.’) (Ibid.: 127) Fernando Paixão adds that ‘once the epic dream of classical totality is dead, a subject is born that not only knows itself as vulnerable and precarious, but is also no longer the central light illuminating events’37. Not all poets resign themselves to this scenario. There are those who will fight for their right to a personal voice, to lyricism. Placing himself among these, Alcides Villaça realizes the paradoxical character of his endeavor: ‘to bear witness to a subject’s expressive presence through the movements of its death’, to adopt ‘a minimum

36 “Numa sociedade estilhaçada não há porta aberta à experiência comum. O que faz com que qualquer coisa que entre no circuito seja lida antes pelo signo do estranha- mento do que da empatia, antes pelo que ela deixa de fazer do que pelo que ela faz de fato. […] O próprio espaço lírico […] se alterou profundamente, sempre no sentido de maior fragmentação e isolamento, enquanto o meio cultural, além de institucionaliza- do, passou a sofrer as pressões de um mercado de massas. Daí que este não é um tem- po em que as condições do fazer e da recepção poética estejam dadas, tampouco é um tempo que pede ruptura com uma tradição obsoleta, já tudo tão rompido à nossa vol- ta.” (Martins 1991: 25) 37 “Morto o sonho épico da totalidade clássica, desponta um sujeito que não apenas se descobre vulnerável e precário, mas também que deixou de ser o centro iluminador dos acontecimentos.” (Paixão 1991: 148) Brazilian Arts 271

foundation of realism, from which the living image of a precarious subject will emerge, the precarious image of a living subject’38.

7. Poetry and Other Semiotic Systems

7.1. Poetry and Music With the difficulties repeatedly pointed out by the poets themselves, poetry does not always manage to make its presence effective in the cultural scene. As Antonio Fernando de Franceschi admits (cf. 1991: 66), poetry frequently surrenders to forms of intervention mediated by languages with a more immediate impact, especially music, both scenic and electronic. Poetry changes, looks for fresh solutions. What it misses in centrality, or going inside the poet’s private self, it seems to make up for by the extension of its reach, the multiplication of resources it incorporates. So Marcos Bagno, who, although alert to the supremacy of the verbal element, confesses that he ‘extracts his poetry from other sources’, among which he mentions music, ‘a hollow, asemantic sign’ and ‘therefore more than perfect’39. The untranslatable heptasyllables in his poem “Vaganau”, which create a markedly ternary rhythm, stress the affinity with music, especially with popular songs40.

38 “Atestar a presença expressiva de um sujeito através dos traços de sua morte, [adotar] uma base mínima de realismo, de onde saltam as imagens vivas do sujeito precário, as imagens precárias do sujeito vivo” (Villaça 1991: 32f.). 39 “Signo oco, assemânticó e, por isso, mais que perfeita” (Bagno 1991: 247). 40 Poesia, nau, divaga devagar e sem timão, pela vida, mar sem alga, pelo mar, que é vida em vão. Leva horizontal adaga cravada no coração, aço que lhe aviva a chaga de não ser nem deus nem chão Poesia que naufraga às frias costas do não recife que tudo draga, praia do se, do senão soledade solitude solidão. (Ibid.: 248) 272 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

7.2. Poetry and the Visual Arts In fact, alliances with music (except for the works of a few poet-com- posers like Chico Buarque de Hollanda or for the inevitable acoustic element of the poem) seem less frequent than those with the visual arts. Felipe Fortuna attributes this fact to the visual hegemony of our times. According to him, more developed societies addicted to digital culture (like Tokyo, for instance), reduce almost all information to a luminous, non-verbal sign (cf. 1991: 127). A cartoonist’s son, he con- fesses he turned to writing only because he could not draw. Fortuna considers essential the influences he received from all Brazilian hu- mor, from Chass Addams’s melancholic cartoons to the most diverse draftsmen, such as André François and Quino. Fortuna, who avows his fascination for Paul Klee, stresses important references to the visu- al arts in interviews with other writers. Antonio Massi’s anthology supports the veracity of this remark. Carlos Ávila, one of the poets in this collection, informs the reader that his 1981 book Aqui & Agora (‘Here and Now’) is the result of ten years of poetic experiences bringing together the verbal and the visual – ‘lyrical microforms which bear a strong relationship to music and concrete poetry and po- ems resembling verbal ready-mades, synthesized in brief forms on the white surface of the page’41. Duda Machado emphasizes the presence of visual compositions in his first book, Zil, together with the abolition of verse for the sake of spatial configuration: words are organized in discontinuous planes, according to sound affinities. The poem be- comes an object, ‘a mixture of words and design’ (cf. 1991: 115). It would be tiresome to multiply similar pronouncements, but I would still like to recall one more: Lúcio Autran affirms that the starting point for his book Um Nome (‘A Name’) was Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness” (1475–1478) and that his poem “Uma baleia vista em São Paulo” (‘A Whale Seen in São Paulo’) is an allusion to three paintings by Frank Stella on display in the 1989 Biennial Exhibition in São Paulo (cf. 1991: 219, 223). Rodrigo Garcia Lopes’s words, quoted below, seem meant to sum up the conclusion implicit in all those pronouncements:

41 “Microformas líricas que guardam forte relação com a música e a poesia concreta e poemas com o caráter de ‘ready-mades’ verbais, sintetizados em formas breves sobre o branco da página” (Ávila 1991: 86). Brazilian Arts 273

The very meaning of the word poetry has expanded – poetry has burst and is now dispersed and branched out in numberless forms, like a chameleon. You may find it in the most unusual sites: in the Hebrew transcriptions of someone like Haroldo de Campos, or in Mauro & Quitéria’s Babelic raps. In the images of a Wim Wen- ders film or in Itamar Assumpção’s music. In the lyrics of Cazuza’s or Quintana’s songs. Some of it in records, in clips, videos, slogans, layouts, holographs, and even books. Where, after all?42 Lopes’s question is of course rhetorical, as it contains its own answer, and not a new one at that. Poetry has always sought alliances with the other arts. At the dawn of modernism, the alliance had already been made, for example, by Mallarmé, who still haunts our poets. Between 1893 and his death in 1898, Mallarmé played with an experimental poetics, saturated with the then emerging cinematic technology. “Un Coup de Dés”, a visual poem, could be called cinepoetic, whereas le Livre, an unfulfilled project, was planned as a poetic performance which would include electric lighting and the projection of images. In fact, experimentation with cinepoetics permeated the French van- guard, something important for the understanding of the bond between present-day poetry and the media (see Wall-Romana 2005). Contem- porary poetry frequently resorts to this alliance, strategically, perhaps, in tacit recognition of the difficulty to compete with so many new forms of expression. The literary text becomes a mediator of other se- miotic systems, and vice versa. Poetry breaks its bond with verse and thus almost does without words, which frequently appear only in the titles of a work even though words are indispensable to elicit an imagi- native response from the public. A new aesthetics of the look is inau- gurated, establishing a singular hybridism, a continuous tension be- tween the legible and the visible. One is reminded of the poem as a physical entity, made denser by multiple relations – W. K. Wimsatt’s verbal icon. As aesthetics has often admitted, the poetic can extrapo- late the limits of the verbal; the organicity of the poem as object has always inspired analogies with non-verbal artifacts – vases, sculptures,

42 “O próprio significado da palavra poesia se ampliou – se estilhaçou e ela agora está dispersa e travestida de inúmeras formas, camaleônica. Pode estar no lugar mais inusitado: nas transcrições do hebraico de um Haroldo de Campos, ou nos raps babé- licos de Mauro & Quitéria. Nas imagens de um filme de Wim Wenders ou na música de Itamar Assumpção. Nas letras de Cazuza ou Quintana. Um pouco nos discos, nos clips, vídeos, slogans, layouts, holografias e até nos livros. Onde, afinal?” (Lopes: 1991: 274) 274 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

melodies – recalling Archibald MacLeish’s celebrated lines, “the po- em should not mean / But be” (qtd. in Partington, ed. 1996: 439). In the kind of creation contemplated here, visual images comple- ment words and in some cases almost replace them altogether. The po- etic becomes a vestige, gets projected into image-thoughts, the reading of which requires the reader’s particularly intense participation. Some- thing similar, it is worth remembering, also happens in traditional art. Suffice it to recall the nineteenth-century poetic landscape, such as in William Taverner’s (1703–1772) paintings. With their long tradition in European art, paintings like Taverner’s reached their climax in nineteenth-century Romantic landscapes. In their purest form, they presented imaginary sites, incorporating elements of myth and fantasy. The underlying ideas, developed by eighteenth-century critics, go back to the Aristotelian idea of the superiority of the general or the idealized over the real, the particular. Poetic landscapes, however, de- manded technical skills not required of visual creations in the so-cal- led postmodern period.

7.3. The Poetic in Videos and Installations In the interface between the verbal and the visual, new perceptions of forms, meanings, and metaphors emerge, as is the case in the alliance between contemporary creations and the poetic – a cluster of indefin- able, supraverbal qualities, including conciseness, sensuous impact, richness of allusion, and imaginative power, all of which invite the viewer’s creative participation. As an example, I would like to men- tion a 2001 video by Sam Taylor-Wood. In 2004 it was exhibited in London at the Tate Modern together with other works grouped under the title “Memento Mori”. The Latin phrase, a key element in the reading of the video, looks back to the still life, the painterly genre particularly associated with seventeenth-century Dutch painting. In canvases representing game, seafood, flowers, and fruits, this type of painting has always served the theme of the precariousness of life and beauty. In the twentieth century, artists like Francis Picabia, Patrick Caulfield, and Keith Edmier brought forth instigating forms for the re- juvenation of the genre. The video on display in the Tate Modern illustrates this renewal. It uses modern technology to make the paint- er’s ancient dream come true – the possibility of representing the changes brought about by the passage of time. Brazilian Arts 275

Taylor-Wood’s video is the outcome of filming the process of de- composition of fruit in a bowl. After appreciating the freshness and the bright coloring of the initial images, the viewer watches the gradu- al deterioration of the fruits. Little by little, they lose their freshness and color, until they crumble into a shapeless gray mass, corroded by worms – a reminder of the fate allotted to all living beings, including humans. The meditative exercise triggered by the succession of im- ages – genuine visual metaphors – recalls a topos of poetry in all ages, summed up in the phrase ‘memento mori’. A similar construction can be detected in “Forms without Life”, another still life exhibited at the Tate Modern. A 1991 installation by Damien Hirst, well-known for his use of carcasses of animals, “Forms without Life” consists of shells and other seaside objects. Chosen for their shape and translu- cent sheen and displayed in a glass case, they suggest the ephemeral character of all life and beauty: now empty, the pretty objects once sheltered living creatures which had to die before we could admire the shells’ involucres. The concretization of such aesthetic objects de- pends on similar reflections, in consonance with the tenet of concept- ual art: it emphasizes the construction of meaning rather than the ob- ject suggesting it. More than ever, the processing of the text, often in- strumentalized by information about the history of the arts, falls back on the spectator – not a very surprising requirement considering that the appreciation of aesthetic objects has always been conditioned by different kinds of knowledge embedded in the cultural consciousness.

7.4. Brazilian Videos and Installations The Brazilian artistic production contains many examples of the mi- gration of the poetic to the visual arts. As an example, I would like to describe an installation by the young artist Ananda Sette Câmara dis- played in the Cultural Center of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2004, on the occasion of the graduation of students of the Escola de Belas Artes (‘School of Fine Arts’). The installation can be read as an erotic fantasy, with representations of the phallic and of the feminine (see Illustration 1). The phallic was suggested by silk-screen color prints shaped like rockets with sharp noses, similar to arrows, which seemed about to penetrate pink gas balloons. The latter’s color and rounded form clearly evoked the feminine. The whole installation seemed to float, moving slightly, creating the illusion of imminent flight. The verbal element was present in the title, “Leve-me!”, and in 276 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

a few words charged with erotic innuendo, attached to pink soap bars and to the balloons. For Brazilian viewers, speakers of Portuguese, the installation combined a visual and a verbal pun. In Portuguese, ‘Leve- me!’ is an imperative phrase, meaning ‘Take me!’. However, ‘leve’ can also be an adjective, meaning ‘light’, an allusion to the weight- lessness of the balloons. (The artist’s husband suggested ‘Light me up!’ as an attempt at translating the pun into English.) The installation invited viewers to fly away, ‘taken’ (or ‘lit up’) by the rockets and bal- loons in a dream-like trip through erotic memories and fantasies.

Illustration 1. Ananda Sette Câmara, “Leve-me!” (2004), installation: serigraph on gas balloons, satin ribbons, soap bars. Courtesy of the Artist. Another Brazilian example of the alliance between the poetic and the visual is the series “Carta Faminta” (2000) by Rivane Neuensche- wander, a minimalist and conceptual artist (see Illustration 2). Her creations, usually videos and installations, convey a marked interest in organic substances: dry flowers, desiccated insects and fruits. She also favors themes and materials evocative of sensuous experience, includ- ing taste and smell. The series “Carta Faminta”, was integrated into Brazilian Arts 277

the artist’s individual exhibit at the Minneapolis Walker Art Center from August 18 through November 10, 2002.

Illustration 2. Rivane Neuenschwander, “Carta Faminta” (2000), rice paper eaten by slugs. Courtesy of the Artist. The exhibition catalogue rightly emphasized the eloquent verse and the meeting of the poetic and the philosophic in her works (cf. Rivane Neuenschwander 2002: s. p.). As the still lifes shown at the London Tate Modern, “Carta Faminta” inspires a kind of inner monologue, a poetic comment on the ephemerality of life. The installation calls up an allusion to the alimentary process, which frequently surfaces in the artist’s works. To this end, she counted on a curious collaboration, that of starving slugs, which were left to move freely on rice paper. Aware of the fact that slugs prefer to eat in the dark, Neuenschwander pro- jected shadows on the paper to guide their movements. This resulted in eaten-up tracks and delicately corroded borders, suggesting old maps damaged by time. Together with the voracity of the worms, these fictitious topographies, imaginary geographies of hunger, ex- plain the title “Carta Faminta”, which might be translated into English as ‘Starving Letter’. The ambiguity of the title (in Portuguese ‘carta’ may mean both ‘letter’ and ‘charter’ or ‘map’) hints both at the double idea of communication with the viewer and at parts of the globe where people are starving. Besides looking like ‘charters’, the work is also a kind of ‘letter’. An urgent missive to the world, it tries to sensitize people to the to- pography of hunger, which threatens a significant part of the world population. The verbal elements, though restricted to the title, none- 278 Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira

theless prove essential. Combined with the visual elements, their ex- pressiveness and richness of allusion evoke the intense, compact language typical of poetry. This granted, I return to Rodrigo Garcia Lopes’s question, ‘Where is [poetry] now?’. There is no evading the answer. Poetry, or, if you like, the poetic, has been disseminated among different kinds of creations, whose fron- tier, languages, and manifestations it would be vain to try to demar- cate. The poetic hovers among the multiplicity of media available to the contemporary artist. In fact, postmodern texts seem to favor the realm of intermedial, transmedial, and multimedial relations. The vid- eos and installations I have mentioned are clearly intermedial texts, drawing on different sign systems in such a way that the visual, kinet- ic, and verbal aspects of their signs prove inseparable. Diversified and expanded, such creations can only be enjoyed, entangled in the proli- feration of the media.

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