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 demonstrated 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, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Joo 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 relationship that poetry has with other artistic manifestations, such as videos and installations. Por que a poesia tem de se confinar s paredes de dentro da vulva do poema? Waly Salomo, Lbia

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 define. 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 Clver discusses in some of his seminal works, this controversial notion can still be used for present-day cultural objects wrapped

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up under the label of art1. 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 difficulty and gather a significant number of statements, I have decided to turn to a comparatively recent collection which I consider particularly representative, Artes Ofcios da Poesia (Arts and Professions of Poetry), organized by the poet and critic Augusto Massi2. The anthology grew out of a conference on the theme sponsored by the Cultural Department of the City of So Paulo in 1990. The cycle proved enormously successful, and the Association of Art Critics of So 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 Tenrio da Motta, head of the Ncleo de Projetos Literrios do Centro Cultural de So Paulo (Nucleus of Literary Projects of So Paulos 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 Mallarms quip that poetry is made of words all very pertinent goals for anyone interested in the poetic output of our times.

For discussion of this and the related concept of intermediality, see Clver 2000 and 1997. 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.

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2. Forerunners of Present-Day Brazilian Poetry The reference to the paideuma could hardly be more auspicious. As other contemporary Brazilian poets, Carlos Felipe Moiss shares T. S. Eliots conviction about the importance of poets knowledge of their literary tradition for the development of their individual talents (see Moiss 1991, Eliot 1971). The poets in Massis 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 Villaa, placing himself in a problematic, agonistic, and critical tradition3, affirms that the Brazilian masters of this trend are still Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Joo 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 poetry4, made up by Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Murilo Mendes, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Joo Cabral de Melo Neto, and Augusto de Campos. 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 Machado and Villaa show up in virtually all the pronouncements about precursors. In the words of Armando Freitas Filho, they are the three musketeers of the Brazilian poetic adventure: Bandeira a fascinating mixture of tradition and rupture [], the Vademecum of Brazilian poetry Drummond, the gauche, and Joo Cabral, who has a surgeons controlled passion5. In fact, Bandeira, Drummond, and Cabral recur in all pronouncements. Their names are also mentioned by Antonio 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 obligatory citation, which would sanction their creation and bestow legiti3 4

Linguagem problema, agnica e crtica (Villaa 1991: 33).

Conjunto extraordinrio, sem paralelo em qualquer perodo de nossa poesia (Machado 1991: 116). Mistura fascinante de tradio e ruptura [] o Vademecum da poesia no Brasil Drummond, o gauche. [] Joo Cabral [] com a paixo controlada de um cirurgio (Freitas Filho 1991: 7476).

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macy on their poetry (cf. 1991: 63). But it certainly did register diverse elective affinities ranging from an almost ubiquitous Fernando Pessoa to Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to the Surrealists, the American 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 Nietzsches influence and that of a strain of great international poetry including that of Blake, Hlderlin, 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 precursors], worked through inquiry, which lies at the basis of modern poetry, and which appeared first in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarm. In Drummonds gauche, besides the poets most particular temperament, there is a great deal of Baudelairean displacement, also found, from another tone and angle, in the affective flneur characteristic of Bandeira. That this is a persistent trait is proved by Chico Alvims 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 Cacasos and Dalton Trevizans 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.

[No sculo XX] a poesia brasileira trabalhou, embora defasada, com interrogaes que esto na base da poesia moderna, e se apresentam primeiramente nas obras de Baudelaire, Rimbaud e Mallarm. Que no gauche de Drummond, alm do temperamento particularssimo do poeta, h muito de um deslocamento baudelairiano; como tambm, o h, sob outro tom e outro ngulo, no flneur afetivo que Bandeira. E que o trao persistente o comprova o ltimo livro de Chico Alvim, O Corpo Fora, lanado em 1988. Esse livro, composto quase todo a partir de fragmentos de falas, e que, segundo o prprio autor, procura apreender algo de uma lngua nacional (esforo que teria afinidades com projetos de Cacaso e Dalton Trevizan), traz uma epgrafe de Baudelaire. Assim posso pensar que foi o fato de trabalharem com um duplo registro; refazendo interrogaes implcitas nesses poetas franceses, e, ao mesmo tempo, atentos ao prprio tempo de cultura brasileira, lacunar e em formao, que conferiu a

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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. 1991: 275). Carlos Felipe Moiss adds: to do and redo, to read, write, rewrite. Every poem is an exercise in exercises. Every poet is an army of poets.7 Pronouncements made long after the publication of Massis 1991 anthology continue to trace the presence of the great forerunners of contemporary poetry. Maurcio Salles Vasconcelos considers the concrete 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, Bonvicino, Alice Ruiz, and Antnio Risrio. 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: Mrio, Oswald de Andrade, Rosrio Fusco, Drummond, Murilo Mendes, vila, and so many others, and declared the impossibility of remaining impervious to contemporary poetics, in which authors are devoured and devour one another8. 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 Mrio and Oswald, Drummond and Murilo, the concrete poets, and Ferreira Gullar9. 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 prtica social, e suas carncias, atravs da linguagem. (Martins 1991: 24f.)
7

Fazer e refazer: ler, reescrever; escrever e reescrever. Todo poema um exerccio de exerccios. Todo poeta um exrcito de poetas. (Moiss 1991: 94f.) Autores so devorados e se devoram (Casanova 1999: 13). Para todos os efeitos, vivemos, bem ou mal, no mesmo universo potico criado por gente como Mrio e Oswald, Drummond e Murilo, os concretistas e Ferreiro Gullar. (Ascher 2005)

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of the People) or with some of Vinicius de Moraess best poems. The excellence of the past sets obstacles for future generations10. 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 Moiss quotes Umberto Eco, for whom modern artists can no longer move forward, they must go back, revisit the tradition, but with irony11. Lopes especially praises those who refuse to be just one more diction12. They create their own solutions, become their own references. In this group, which he calls caogenous, Lopes places Duda Machado, Sebastio Uchoa Leite, Alice Ruiz, Paulo Henriques Britto, Arnaldo Antunes, and Paulo Leminski (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 poetry hardly any common denominators can be found which might enable 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 Cludio Willer. He considers it irreducible to a few parameters, to a single doctrine, a theory, or to categories like formal/informal, local/universal, free/rhymed verse, colloquial/solemn (cf.
Quem quer que queira trat-los est competindo diretamente com o que Drummond escreveu em A Rosa do Povo ou com alguns dos melhores poemas de Vinicius. A excelncia do passado imps obstculos s geraes futuras. (Ibid.) O artista moderno no tem mais onde avanar, deve voltar atrs, revisitar a tradio, mas com ironia. (Moiss 1991: 98)
12 13 11 10

[] mais uma dico (Lopes 1991: 277). Caogenous is my translation for cageno, a neologism in Portuguese.

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1991: 102105). Resorting to a similar discourse, Lopes considers present-day poetic output unterritorialized, free from chains or fashions and from the weight of tradition14. We live in an age of recycling, re-creation, and repetition, [] all styles live side by side, in the same place in space-time.15 Or as Carlos Felipe Moiss 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 future16. 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 indeed general traits of contemporary Brazilian poetry, which future literary historians should take into account. Here I would like to include metalinguistic features: the concern with poetic creation itself, radical experimentalism, the tendency to hermeticism, the problematization of the subject, the absence of themes and forms conventionally accepted as poetic, as well as an anti-lyricism that does not quite manage to stifle occasional bouts of personal effusion. Vital for the argument developed in this essay is the longing to transcend verbal language, 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 Massis 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 Sculo (At the Turn of the Century), edited by Claudio Daniel and Frederico
[] desterritorializada, livre de marras e modismos e do peso da tradio. (Lopes 1991: 277)
15 14

Vivemos numa era de reciclagens, recriaes e repeties, [] todos os estilos convivem num mesmo lugar no espao-tempo. (Ibid.: 275)

Vivemos h muito um eterno presente, vrtice e vrtice que engole, deglute, mastiga e remastiga passado e futuro. (Moiss 1991: 98)

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Barbosa. As the preface anticipates, the collection privileges the craft of words plus the investigation of new symbolic and cultural repertories [] an ars poetica already dubbed post-concrete, which starts with Mallarms crisis of the verse but searches for constructive solutions diverse from those of the Noigandres17. 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 Creeley18. The preoccupation with form, emphasized by the poets of Na Virada do Sculo, also proves constant in Augusto Massis anthology. One of the poets included in the anthology, Fernando Paixo, 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 forms19. In the same anthology, Carlos vila likewise insists that poetry is work, the labor of art, like music, painting, cinema, a minus which is a plus, the invention of a new language20. In the same tone, Jos 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-

O artesanato de palavras mais a investigao de novos repertrios simblicos e culturais [] uma ars poetica j chamada de ps-concreta, que parte da crise do verso de Mallarm, mas procura solues construtivas diversas de Noigandres. (Daniel/ Barbosa, eds. 2002: 2327) A releitura de autores obscuros ou hermticos de uma anti-tradio, como Lezanma Lima, Paul Celan, Francis Ponge e Robert Creeley. (Daniel/Barbosa, eds. 2002: 23) O azulegista [] algum que olha a superfcie dos dias, atento ao sopro das formas. (Paixo 1991: 147) Poesia trabalho, trabalho de arte como msica, pintura, cinema, um menos que mais, inveno de uma nova lngua. (vila 1991: 84) O verso no pode mais ser visto como uma sucesso regular de slabas ou ps nem como um corte imposto pela eufonia rtmica; ser antes, o fraturamento em que se resolve a tenso entre a semntica da forma e a semntica do contedo. Tenso que, por variar de poema a poema, no admite codificaes prvias. (Paes 1991: 191)
21 20 19 18

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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 itself22. Likewise commenting on the learning of his craft during his search for a personal voice, Joo 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 criticize consumer societys fury for possession in its perverted post-64 Brazilian version23.

4.2. The Reaction Against Mere Verbal Play In Paess understanding, which the above remark makes clear, experimentalism is not a value in itself. In the introduction to her book Desertos, the poet Vera Casanova agrees: I do not want mere language exercises24, suggesting that, without falling into the pamphletarian, poetry should be at the service of some kind of message. For Fernando Paixo, 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 urgency25. One should reconsider the belief that poetry is made of words, for it also demands lived experience, real or imaginary, which will find its form in great poetry. Alcides Villaa warns that, if accepted unreservedly, Mallarms quip may point to a closed circle of signs [], the final victory of the fetish-word26. Other voices 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 cilndrico e sem moldura para si mesmo mirado. (Bagno 1991: 246) Recursos de expresso que iam do trocadilho aluso, da montagem visual palavra em liberdade, da fratura semntica falsa etimologia tudo em prol de uma crtica fria de posse da sociedade de consumo na sua pervertida verso brasileira ps-64 (Paes 1991: 190).
24 25 23

[] no quero exerccios linguajeiros (Casanova 2004: 17).

A funo do poeta humanizar o real, recriar o espao vivido []. Ele v o mundo e recolhe um sentimento de urgncia. (Paixo 1991: 147) Pode apontar para um crculo fechado de signos [], vitria final da palavrafetiche (Villaa 1991: 35).
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miserably private, [] an unstructured self-complacent object made up of facile nothings, of words thrown to the winds27. Paulo Henriques Britto also excludes from his poetic sensibility any poetry consisting of the mere exploration of the formal possibilities of the language and of the poetic code, the use of words as (close to) empty signifiers, connotation void of denotation. And he adds, I can only conceive of poetry as the frontier between clear reference and verbal play28. 4.3. The Search for Communication and for a Personal Voice In an essay symptomatically entitled Alm da Felicidade Formal (Beyond Formal Felicity), Ruy Espinheira Filho equally denounces what he calls
poetry made by hammer strokes [], alliterations and blows [], puns, stammering 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 jargon30. With Jack Gilbert, he muses: in poetry there must be a voice beyond technique, meaningfully singing the life of man31. Consistent with this statement, Carlos vila voices his faith in the word as a form and means of communication [] in the search
27 A poesia de contingncia mais miseravelmente pessoal [] da desestruturao satisfeita de nadas faclimos, de palavras jogadas ao deus-dar [] (Bueno 1991: 43). 28 Toda poesia que constitua uma simples explorao das possibilidades formais do idioma e da linguagem potica, uma utilizao da palavra como significante (quase) vazio, como conotador livre de denotaes. [] No consigo conceber a poesia seno como a rea fronteiria entre a referncia clara e o ludismo verbal. (Britto 1991: 264267) 29 Poesia feita de pancadas de martelo [], de aliteraes e topadas [], trocadilhos, crises de gagueira e graves acessos de afasia [] ou de coloquialismo piegas e piadismo rasteiro, espcie de caldo frio e insosso []. A poesia mais, muito mais, do que jogo, do que truque, do que prestidigitao. (Espinheira Filho 1991: 298) 30 A arte uma necessidade humana, no mero jogo de salo ou quebra-cabeas para senhores sisudos e de pesado jargo cenacular. (Ibid.: 299f.) 31 Deve haver uma voz acima da tcnica, na poesia, cantando significativamente a vida do homem. (Ibid.: 297)

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for a rational and sensitive poetry [] suited to contemporary man32. 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 potential33. As one might expect, not all poems attain the ideal of a conciliation of expressiveness and verbal craftsmanship. In this vein, Ruy Espinheira Filho mentions the artists dilemma, the double need for communication and for personal expression (cf. 1991: 296f.). Mutatis mutandis, Alcides Villaa 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 poetry34. Alberto Alexandre Martins sums up the matter: a poet has to remain alert to both these sides: the pressure of the present and the readers questioning presence35. 5. Poetry and Contemporary Culture The enunciation of this precept proves easier than its observance. Alexandre 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 difficulty to the cultural atmosphere of the day, when widely shared experience 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 comunicao [] uma poesia racional e sensvel [], adequada ao homem de hoje (vila 1991: 90).

Uma poesia que, como desejava Leminski, voltasse a ser uma recuperao do capricho, do craft das artes & manhas do ofcio, sem que isso impea suas possibilidades expressivas e sim subjetivas (Lopes 1991: 274). [] ter voz [] no perder por completo a dimenso da pessoa [] expressar a necessidade do outro [] que participe da realidade tensa, contraditria e humana que a poesia imita (Villaa 1991: 35f.). Um poeta tem que estar atento a essas duas quinas: presso do presente e presena interrogante do leitor. (Martins 1991: 26)
35 34

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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 often seem to shy away from personal statements. Felipe Fortuna confirms 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:
No verso, anti-, versus / (This is not a verse, it is anti-, it is versus) Como o sim dentro do no. / (Like a yes inside a no.) (Ibid.: 127)

Fernando Paixo 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 events37. 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 Villaa realizes the paradoxical character of his endeavor: to bear witness to a subjects expressive presence through the movements of its death, to adopt a minimum

36 Numa sociedade estilhaada no h porta aberta experincia comum. O que faz com que qualquer coisa que entre no circuito seja lida antes pelo signo do estranhamento do que da empatia, antes pelo que ela deixa de fazer do que pelo que ela faz de fato. [] O prprio espao lrico [] se alterou profundamente, sempre no sentido de maior fragmentao e isolamento, enquanto o meio cultural, alm de institucionalizado, passou a sofrer as presses de um mercado de massas. Da que este no um tempo em que as condies do fazer e da recepo potica estejam dadas, tampouco um tempo que pede ruptura com uma tradio obsoleta, j tudo to rompido nossa volta. (Martins 1991: 25)

Morto o sonho pico da totalidade clssica, desponta um sujeito que no apenas se descobre vulnervel e precrio, mas tambm que deixou de ser o centro iluminador dos acontecimentos. (Paixo 1991: 148)

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foundation of realism, from which the living image of a precarious subject will emerge, the precarious image of a living subject38. 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 poets 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 perfect39. 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 presena expressiva de um sujeito atravs dos traos de sua morte, [adotar] uma base mnima de realismo, de onde saltam as imagens vivas do sujeito precrio, as imagens precrias do sujeito vivo (Villaa 1991: 32f.). 39 40

Signo oco, assemntic e, por isso, mais que perfeita (Bagno 1991: 247). Poesia, nau, divaga devagar e sem timo, pela vida, mar sem alga, pelo mar, que vida em vo. Leva horizontal adaga cravada no corao, ao que lhe aviva a chaga de no ser nem deus nem cho Poesia que naufraga s frias costas do no recife que tudo draga, praia do se, do seno soledade solitude solido. (Ibid.: 248)

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7.2. Poetry and the Visual Arts In fact, alliances with music (except for the works of a few poet-composers 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 cartoonists son, he confesses he turned to writing only because he could not draw. Fortuna considers essential the influences he received from all Brazilian humor, from Chass Addamss melancholic cartoons to the most diverse draftsmen, such as Andr Franois and Quino. Fortuna, who avows his fascination for Paul Klee, stresses important references to the visual arts in interviews with other writers. Antonio Massis anthology supports the veracity of this remark. Carlos vila, 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 poems resembling verbal ready-mades, synthesized in brief forms on the white surface of the page41. 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 becomes 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: Lcio Autran affirms that the starting point for his book Um Nome (A Name) was Hieronymus Boschs painting The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (14751478) and that his poem Uma baleia vista em So Paulo (A Whale Seen in So Paulo) is an allusion to three paintings by Frank Stella on display in the 1989 Biennial Exhibition in So Paulo (cf. 1991: 219, 223). Rodrigo Garcia Lopess words, quoted below, seem meant to sum up the conclusion implicit in all those pronouncements:

Microformas lricas que guardam forte relao com a msica e a poesia concreta e poemas com o carter de ready-mades verbais, sintetizados em formas breves sobre o branco da pgina (vila 1991: 86).

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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 & Quitrias Babelic raps. In the images of a Wim Wenders film or in Itamar Assumpos music. In the lyrics of Cazuzas or Quintanas songs. Some of it in records, in clips, videos, slogans, layouts, holographs, and even books. Where, after all?42

Lopess 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 Mallarm, who still haunts our poets. Between 1893 and his death in 1898, Mallarm played with an experimental poetics, saturated with the then emerging cinematic technology. Un Coup de Ds, 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 vanguard, something important for the understanding of the bond between present-day poetry and the media (see Wall-Romana 2005). Contemporary 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 semiotic 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 imaginative response from the public. A new aesthetics of the look is inaugurated, establishing a singular hybridism, a continuous tension between the legible and the visible. One is reminded of the poem as a physical entity, made denser by multiple relations W. K. Wimsatts verbal icon. As aesthetics has often admitted, the poetic can extrapolate the limits of the verbal; the organicity of the poem as object has always inspired analogies with non-verbal artifacts vases, sculptures,

O prprio significado da palavra poesia se ampliou se estilhaou e ela agora est dispersa e travestida de inmeras formas, camalenica. Pode estar no lugar mais inusitado: nas transcries do hebraico de um Haroldo de Campos, ou nos raps bablicos de Mauro & Quitria. Nas imagens de um filme de Wim Wenders ou na msica de Itamar Assumpo. Nas letras de Cazuza ou Quintana. Um pouco nos discos, nos clips, vdeos, slogans, layouts, holografias e at nos livros. Onde, afinal? (Lopes: 1991: 274)

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melodies recalling Archibald MacLeishs celebrated lines, the poem should not mean / But be (qtd. in Partington, ed. 1996: 439). In the kind of creation contemplated here, visual images complement words and in some cases almost replace them altogether. The poetic becomes a vestige, gets projected into image-thoughts, the reading of which requires the readers particularly intense participation. Something similar, it is worth remembering, also happens in traditional art. Suffice it to recall the nineteenth-century poetic landscape, such as in William Taverners (17031772) paintings. With their long tradition in European art, paintings like Taverners 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, demanded technical skills not required of visual creations in the so-called 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 indefinable, supraverbal qualities, including conciseness, sensuous impact, richness of allusion, and imaginative power, all of which invite the viewers creative participation. As an example, I would like to mention 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 rejuvenation of the genre. The video on display in the Tate Modern illustrates this renewal. It uses modern technology to make the painters ancient dream come true the possibility of representing the changes brought about by the passage of time.

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Taylor-Woods video is the outcome of filming the process of decomposition of fruit in a bowl. After appreciating the freshness and the bright coloring of the initial images, the viewer watches the gradual 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 images 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 translucent 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 depends on similar reflections, in consonance with the tenet of conceptual art: it emphasizes the construction of meaning rather than the object suggesting it. More than ever, the processing of the text, often instrumentalized 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 migration of the poetic to the visual arts. As an example, I would like to describe an installation by the young artist Ananda Sette Cmara displayed 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 latters 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

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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, Leveme! is an imperative phrase, meaning Take me!. However, leve can also be an adjective, meaning light, an allusion to the weightlessness of the balloons. (The artists 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 balloons in a dream-like trip through erotic memories and fantasies.

Illustration 1. Ananda Sette Cmara, 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 Neuenschewander, 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, including taste and smell. The series Carta Faminta, was integrated into

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the artists 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 artists 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 projected 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, explain 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 topography of hunger, which threatens a significant part of the world population. The verbal elements, though restricted to the title, none-

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theless prove essential. Combined with the visual elements, their expressiveness and richness of allusion evoke the intense, compact language typical of poetry. This granted, I return to Rodrigo Garcia Lopess 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 frontier, languages, and manifestations it would be vain to try to demarcate. 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 videos and installations I have mentioned are clearly intermedial texts, drawing on different sign systems in such a way that the visual, kinetic, and verbal aspects of their signs prove inseparable. Diversified and expanded, such creations can only be enjoyed, entangled in the proliferation of the media. References Ascher, Nelson (2005). Poesia do Dia a Dia. Jornal Estado de Minas, Suplemento Pensar. 7/5/2005: 6. Autran, Lcio (1991). Trajetria de uma Trilogia. Massi, ed. 216 224. vila, Carlos (1991). Uma Poesia e Dois Livros. Massi, ed. 8492. Bagno, Marcos (1991). Testemunho. Massi, ed. 241254. Britto, Paulo Henriques (1991). I, Too, Dislike It. Massi, ed. 264 269. Bueno, Alexei (1991). s Muitas Vozes do Tempo. Massi, ed. 42 53. Clver, Claus (1997). Estudos Interartes: conceitos, termos, objetivos. Literatura e Sociedade: revista de teoria literria e literatura comparada (Universidade de So Paulo, So Paulo) 2: 3755. (2000) Concrete Poetry and the New Performance Arts: Intersemiotic, Intermedia, Intercultural. Claire Sponsler, Xiaomei Chen, eds. East of West: Cross Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference. New York, NY: Palgrave. 3361. Casanova, Vera (1999). Errncias Poticas la Brasileira. Aletria. Revista de estudos de literatura, 6: poesia brasileira con-

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tempornea. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Centro de Estudos de Letras. 1317. (2004). Desertos. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. Daniel, Claudio, Frederico Barbosa, eds. (2002). Na Virada do Sculo: poesia de inveno no Brasil. So Paulo: Landy Livraria Editora e Distribuidora. Eliot, T. S. (1971). Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917). Adams Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York, NY/ Chicago, IL/San Francisco, CA/Atlanta, GA: Harcourt Brace Javonovich. 784787. Espinheira Filho, Ruy (1991). Alm da Felicidade Formal. Massi ed. 291301. Fortuna, Felipe (1991). Outro Primeiro Livro. Massi, ed. 126131. Franceschi, Antonio Fernando de (1991). Notas de um Percurso. Massi, ed. 6267. Freitas Filho, Armando (1991). Trs Mosqueteiros. Massi, ed. 74 77. Lopes, Rodrigo Garcia (1991). Poesia Hoje: um Check-Up. Massi, ed. 272277. Machado, Duda (1991). De uma Voz a Outra. Massi ed. 114117. Martins, Alberto Alexandre (1991). Tentativa de Pr Ordem na Casa. Massi, ed. 2427. Massi, Augusto, ed. (1991). Artes e Ofcios da Poesia. Porto Alegre: Artes e Ofcios Editora. Moiss, Carlos Felipe (1991). A Folha em Branco. Massi, ed. 94 98. Motta, Leda Tenrio de (1991). Introduo. Massi, ed. 711. Paes, Jos Paulo (1991). Um Poeta como Outro Qualquer. Massi, ed. 182196. Paixo, Fernando (1991). Das Mos do Eterno s Mos do Azulejista. Massi, ed. 146151. Partington, Angela, ed. (1996). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rivane Neuenschwander (2002). Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Unpaginated loose leaves in folder. Vasconcelos, Maurcio Salles (1999). Poesia Contempornea Nacional: reincidncias e passagens. Aletria. Revista de Estudos de Literatura 6: Poesia Brasileira Contempornea. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Centro de Estudos de Letras. 1825.

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Villaa, Alcides (1991). A Poesia Atual: a fala e a pessoa. Massi, ed. 3236. Wall-Romana, Christophe (2005). Mallarms Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinmatographe, 189398. PMLA 120/1: 128147. Willer, Cludio (1991). A Provocao Plural. Massi, ed. 102105.