An Introduction to Modern Poetry in Brazil
INTRODUCTION
Modern poetry in Brazil is no less peculiar than the country itself. Brazil is a Latin American nation, but this does not tell the whole truth. It might be more accurate to say that Brazil is actually the other face of the South American subcontinent, not so much hidden as it is unknown. The same might be said of the country's literature in general and of poetry in particular.
The Iberian Baroque, Italian Arcadianism, French Romanticism, Parnassianism and Symbolism: all have held sway in Brazil at one time, each manifesting itself in a highly original way. Our history, however, begins around 1922, during the centennial celebrations of Brazil's independence from Portugal. That year, an eclectic group of young writers, poets, artists and musicians, most of them from São Paulo state's coffee-growing high bourgeoisie, came together to promote a Modern Art Week at the São Paulo Municipal Theater -- a fairly faithful copy of the Paris Opéra. French influence prevailed -- Apollinaire and Cendrars along with Cubism, with a few touches of Italian Futurism.
The event left two important legacies: an ineradicable nonconformism in the face of provincial complacency, which took as its main aim to disprove any necessary link between social-political-economic underdevelopment and the status of the arts; and an increasingly fruitful relationship between the various branches of the arts. This contact was symbolically confirmed by the marriage of Oswald de Andrade, poet, writer, pamphleteer, playwright, critic and theoretician of Brazilian Modernism (not to be confused with the distinct movement of Hispanic Modernism) to the painter Tarsila do Amaral.
In the 20's, Andrade wrote minimalist, anti-poetic poems and avant-garde novels, starting the Anthropophagic movement, whose aim was to swallow up foreign cultural influence and digest them Brazilian style. He also wrote a "Poesia Pau-Brasil" [Brazil-wood Poetry], a residual epic which, by mingling excerpts from historical chronicles and flashes of historical and geographical perception, redraws Brazilian history as an anti-epic, less by what is said than by what is insinuated between the lines. Andrade's concept of "anthropophagy" would be taken up in an original manner by the pop music of the 60's. However, let us not get ahead of history.
The initial movement of Modernism in the 20's introduced into Brazilian poetry a global attitude, incorporating broad cultural interests, irreverence, humor, and free verse. In addition to Oswald de Andrade, some pioneers included Mario de Andrade, Raul Bopp and Luis Aranha. Modernism's great corpus, and arguably Brazilian poetry's finest hour, came in the 30's, with the second wave of Modernists. The poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Vinícius de Moraes and Manuel Bandeira, both individually and as a group, was equal to the principal currents of Western Modernism. The high quality of these poets is matched only by their sheer bad luck in having been confined to a readership, not only in their own tongue, but also in their own country, since they are exceedingly little known even in Portugal, a country whose poetic sensibility has taken paths substantially different from our own.
The poetry of the 40's, today almost entirely forgotten, was a response to Modernist principles. One poet originating from that decade, however, proved durable: João Cabral de Melo Neto. In addition to refining poetic techniques, he provided a synthesis of the novel's most representative trends and concerns. Using a poetic art mostly inherited from Drummond, Melo Neto incorporated traces of Northeastern themes common to many novelists of the period, particularly Graciliano Ramos. Of course, his poetry was not limited to these concerns, and Melo Neto applied his method to a variety of issues, not least to a consideration of poetry itself.
During the following decade, Vinícius de Moraes, who had started his career as a poet nurturing rather vague metaphysical speculations interspersed with an interest in less universal, more concrete themes, began to mingle his interests with those of a new generation of popular music composers. Together they started a movement which would radically change the profile of pop music: the Bossa Nova. This movement, a confluence of Modernist diction with the urbanization and gentrification of rhythms, promoted a cooperation between so-called elite art (pero no mucho) and pop art (ma non troppo). This cooperation would last for a good quarter of a century, reaching its peak in the musical movement of the 60's, Tropicalismo.
In a country where poetry is neither widely read nor taught, the status of Brazilian pop music is very sound, since every poet born since the 1950's not only stemmed from its roots but also, consciously or not, felt its influence. Any poet under the age of 45 who alleges otherwise is lying. That said, it should also be noted that, during this period, Brazilian pop music not only played a different role than pop music did in the English speaking countries or in Hispanic America, but also constituted a substantial and diverse entity of its own, whose more lasting influence would not be circumscribed by political or sentimental manifestations, but would seek through its lyrics a continuity with the tradition of poetry as such. More recently, Brazilian pop music has lost its creative drive, and no longer exercises a meaningful influence over poets.
The 50's saw another movement which might be considered the third Modernist moment: Concretism. Led by Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, its major drive may have been its placing of the intuitive program of '22 on clearer grounds hence the importance placed by Concretists on critical and theoretical debate; on filling in any of Modernism's lacunas, including the restoration of published works, not least those of Oswald de Andrade; and on updating and fine-tuning the continuing international effects of Modernism.
From the following decade on, Concrete poets trod more individual paths. Haroldo de Campos turned to poetic prose and to the so-called neo-Baroque. Décio Pignatari moved between Oswaldian prose and poetry, both visual and verse, while Augusto de Campos stayed faithful to the movement's origins, developing and expanding its visual trends, Ferreira Gullar broke with these poets to launch neo-Concretism, later to embark on the project of poetry engagée which he soon abandoned. Among the independent poets, one might mention Sebastião Uchoa Leite, who, without affiliating himself with Concretism or later on, to Marginal poetry, left a significant body of poems. These poems, almost all of them metalinguistic in nature, combined the erudition of a Paul Valérie with comic strips and American B movies, shot through with a nihilist critique of reality, specifically Brazilian reality. We read: "they say/that life must be defended/that's their message/but death/is so metaphorical/and sexy/it's a surefire hard-on." Uchoa maintained an extended correspondence with Régis Bonvicino. He engaged in dialogue with Leminski, whom he admired, and with Duda Machado, one of the poets anthologized here, who considers him one of the foremost living Brazilian poets. In a certain sense, Ana Cristina César's work owes something to him, as does that of Carlos Ávila.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MODERNIST OR IMMATERIAL
This, then, is the background and environment against which the poets discussed in this text began their work. It is worth noting at this point that the Concrete poets enriched the language with translations not only of modern poets (Pound, cummings, Mallarmé‚Laforgue, Corbière and the Russians) but of earlier poetry (Provençal, dolce stil nuovo, the English Metaphysicals, and Chinese and Japanese classics). At least among poets, these influences ranked second only to those of Brazilian pop music. Through the work of these authors, the translation of poetry reached maturity and entered into a direct dialogue with living poets.
Contemporary Brazilian poetry stems from these precursors without being circumscribed by them. Apart from the distinct combination of influences that is inevitable for poets, individual personality and talent also play an integral part in their poetry.
Needless to say, during the three modernist "moments" we have mentioned, and even afterwards, much poetry was written which bore no resemblance to what we have just described. The issue was not an exclusive or exclusivist lineage, but simply whatever seems to have survived the test of time. Re-reading poets who did not join the mainstream is as melancholy as contemplating an outdated wardrobe. One example is the Marginal poetry of the 70's, which, if it left us any legacy, did so in the work of Ana Cristina César and of Francisco Alvim, whose trademark informality combines with a consistent reading of more refined poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Murilo Mendes, and Manuel Bandeira. Alvim, for example, practices a colloquial poetry which, at times, enters into a dialogue with the engaged poetry of Carlos Drummond, like "Revolution", which thematizes the presence of the military dictatorship in Brazilian life.
Indeed, one of the characteristics of Brazilian poetry of this century is the extent to which the success of individual talents has depended on their adhesion -- dazzled or critical, playful or unwilling -- to a minimal list of Modernist proposals. In fact, from '22 on, Brazilian poetry has fallen into one of two categories: Modernist or immaterial. It is hard to say now whether this division was fate or mere contingency: it is simply an empirical reality, verifiable by literary criticism's essentially rational criteria. This is an issue which neither theory nor the history of poetry has yet begun to examine.
For this reason, there is no common program for the poets mentioned in this text, no explicit consensus behind their writing. In fact, as opposed to the previous generation, these poets have shown little inclination to the idea of belonging to a movement or school. Torquato Neto, for example, participated in Tropicalism, but soon afterwards abandoned it. In a very short span of time, Paulo Leminski moved from the geometric poem, which he was never to resume, to the exuberant prose of Catatau. The poets do have in common a set of concerns and poetic devices, however: there is the mainstream of an accepted tradition, as well as aims which, to a greater or lesser degree, all of them share.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PARADOXES
Paradoxically, poets from Brazilian Modernism on are unknown, owing less to their failure than to their success. Not only have they created many individual sets of poems (though that is surely true): they have created a literary universe of their own. Each one of them is, of course, connected with other universes, including those of French, German, Russian and Anglo-American poetry, but preferably acting through the whole.
There can be no Weltliteratur if a whole set of concerns and debates are not universalized. Thus, we are left in the odd position of having to define Brazilian poetry by what it is not.
Leminski has one exemplary poem. In the beginning, a seemingly banal statement: that every poet starting his career thinks he will be the greatest, but by the end comes to little. So far, so good. But the key to the poem is embedded in questions of address more subtle than those of vousvoyer and tutoyer. In the first, optimistic half of the poem, the subject is "we", indicated only by the verb, apparently the common first-person plural, but in fact the royal "we", symbol of the high rhetoric affected by the provincial elite. The poets Leminski invokes, as arguable as their sequence may be, only serve to illustrate the difference between "one" [a gente] and "we"[nós]. In short, "one" is a kind of "yo el supremo" in a revolutionary state, whereas "we" would be the same figure in exile, after the military coup.
In contrast with the exuberance of his prose and his personality, Leminski's poetry is notably concise. This concision is associated with voice and with the instantaneous register of existence. This kind of concision, as seen in the Concrete poems of the 50's, had turned toward radical definitions of language, giving little place to a more explicitly subjective register. Concision in the poetry of Leminski and Torquato, as well as in the poetry of many poets anthologized here (Horácio Costa is one exception) emerges as both a linguistic fact and as the possibility for a subjectivity. If Oswald de Andrade was the inventor of the so-called minute-poem, we might go so far as to say that Leminski has created the instant-poem, mingling Oswaldian concretism with the anarchic-colloquial diction of pop singer Caetano Veloso and the Tropicalism of Torquato Neto. Concision. Exposing ideas in few words. Haiku. If in Leminski concision is conveyed as brevity, originating from the pressures of existence, in another poet of his generation, Duda Machado, concision is present as accuracy, as precision. Machado and Leminski tread similar, but inverted, paths, the former departing from Tropicália and song lyrics towards a poetry of his own, completely different from that of Brazilian pop music. Leminski, on the other hand, a scholar after his fashion, continued to alternate between questions of high culture and non-systematic incursions into the world of pop music. Concision. The coincidence of three early deaths: Torquato, Ana Cristina César and Leminski. Three suicides, the first two explicit, Leminski's implicit in his daily consumption of alcohol and drugs. Three journeys begun during or after the war, three poets who produced their main body of work during the military dictatorship, which only ended in 1985, when all three were dead or dying.
Concision within extension. After all, there are haikus where words abound, where three verses are three too many, as well as epic poems from which no word can be subtracted without harm. The poem between prose and poetry: this is the case of Josely Vianna Baptista, translator of Lezama Lima's Paradiso, whose style could be considered Brazilian Baroque: exuberant rhythms and images, fashioned by the "feeling for the measure", in the words of William Carlos Williams.
Horácio Costa seems to be an exception to this scenario, following more openly the Hispanic discursive tradition, mediated through the American Beat generation. It is not surprising that Costa has lived in the United States and currently lives in Mexico.
Arnaldo Antunes operates in Torquato's and Veloso's paradigm, highly privileging orality and visuality, as can be seen in his video-poem Nome (1994), which mingles pop music, electronic music, poetry and video. In this anthology, he presents texts which resume the instinctive-primitivist aspect of early Modernism.
Júlio Costañon Guimarães also writes concise poetry in the Minas Gerais style: lean, based on concrete facts and objects, often rough. This kind of roughness can be felt in the poetry of another poet from Minas Gerais, Carlos Ávila. Minas was the home state of Carlos Drummond and Murilo Mendes: mountains, silence and iron ore. Age de Carvalho is the one, among all the poets here, who practices a poetry of a more abstract nature. People and places are referred to fragmentarily; his imagination is often quite rhetorical, although his writings are short and sharp.
It is well worth mentioning that nearly all the poets discussed here worked as publishers or collaborators for alternative journals in the 70's and 80's, the major ones being Navilouca ( Torquato Neto), Pólen (Duda Machado), Qorpo Estranho (Régis Bonvicino), I (Carlos Ávila), and Almanak 80 (Arnaldo Antunes). These journals, along with Código, published in Bahia, acted as a laboratory where the impacts of Concrete poetry and Tropicalism were re-examined. At the same time, these publications served as a shelter for work with no prospect for commercial publication at the time. Another common feature to all the poets in this book: nearly all of them are translators. Leminski has translated, among others, Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Walt Whitman; Castañon, Francis Ponge and Michel Butor; Duda Machado, Gustave Flaubert; Horácio Costa, Elizabeth Bishop. These translations speak to a need to enrich a poetry which, strangely enough, has nothing in common with the poetry from Portugal or Hispanic America. The latter, discursive and deeply marked by Surrealism, never quite established its grip on Brazilian writers.
Once again, Elizabeth Bishop must be mentioned. She was to organize one of two Brazilian poetry anthologies for the Anglo-American world: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry with Emanuel Brasil, published in 1972 by Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Connecticut). It included Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Cecília Meireles, Jorge de Lima, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Vinícius de Moraes and Ferreira Gullar. Soon afterwards, the same Emanuel Brasil oversaw the publishing of Brazilian Poety: l950 --1980, also by Wesleyan, translating poets linked to Concretism, such as Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, as well as some independent writers, including Mário Faustino and Ferreira Gullar, the latter a leader of the neo-Concretist movement.
Anthologies always run the risk of excessive partiality or sperficiality. We hope to have kept these evils at a distance. However, it should be clear that other seletions can and must be made. Among the young poets, there are many other promising names not included in this book, among them Beatriz Azevedo, Heitor Ferraz, Guilherme Mansur, Antonio Moura and Mércia Pessoa.
This is only our reading of what is most significant and representative in modern Brazilian poetry. Nothing the sun could not explain!
INTRODUCTION
Modern poetry in Brazil is no less peculiar than the country itself. Brazil is a Latin American nation, but this does not tell the whole truth. It might be more accurate to say that Brazil is actually the other face of the South American subcontinent, not so much hidden as it is unknown. The same might be said of the country's literature in general and of poetry in particular.
The Iberian Baroque, Italian Arcadianism, French Romanticism, Parnassianism and Symbolism: all have held sway in Brazil at one time, each manifesting itself in a highly original way. Our history, however, begins around 1922, during the centennial celebrations of Brazil's independence from Portugal. That year, an eclectic group of young writers, poets, artists and musicians, most of them from São Paulo state's coffee-growing high bourgeoisie, came together to promote a Modern Art Week at the São Paulo Municipal Theater -- a fairly faithful copy of the Paris Opéra. French influence prevailed -- Apollinaire and Cendrars along with Cubism, with a few touches of Italian Futurism.
The event left two important legacies: an ineradicable nonconformism in the face of provincial complacency, which took as its main aim to disprove any necessary link between social-political-economic underdevelopment and the status of the arts; and an increasingly fruitful relationship between the various branches of the arts. This contact was symbolically confirmed by the marriage of Oswald de Andrade, poet, writer, pamphleteer, playwright, critic and theoretician of Brazilian Modernism (not to be confused with the distinct movement of Hispanic Modernism) to the painter Tarsila do Amaral.
In the 20's, Andrade wrote minimalist, anti-poetic poems and avant-garde novels, starting the Anthropophagic movement, whose aim was to swallow up foreign cultural influence and digest them Brazilian style. He also wrote a "Poesia Pau-Brasil" [Brazil-wood Poetry], a residual epic which, by mingling excerpts from historical chronicles and flashes of historical and geographical perception, redraws Brazilian history as an anti-epic, less by what is said than by what is insinuated between the lines. Andrade's concept of "anthropophagy" would be taken up in an original manner by the pop music of the 60's. However, let us not get ahead of history.
The initial movement of Modernism in the 20's introduced into Brazilian poetry a global attitude, incorporating broad cultural interests, irreverence, humor, and free verse. In addition to Oswald de Andrade, some pioneers included Mario de Andrade, Raul Bopp and Luis Aranha. Modernism's great corpus, and arguably Brazilian poetry's finest hour, came in the 30's, with the second wave of Modernists. The poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Vinícius de Moraes and Manuel Bandeira, both individually and as a group, was equal to the principal currents of Western Modernism. The high quality of these poets is matched only by their sheer bad luck in having been confined to a readership, not only in their own tongue, but also in their own country, since they are exceedingly little known even in Portugal, a country whose poetic sensibility has taken paths substantially different from our own.
The poetry of the 40's, today almost entirely forgotten, was a response to Modernist principles. One poet originating from that decade, however, proved durable: João Cabral de Melo Neto. In addition to refining poetic techniques, he provided a synthesis of the novel's most representative trends and concerns. Using a poetic art mostly inherited from Drummond, Melo Neto incorporated traces of Northeastern themes common to many novelists of the period, particularly Graciliano Ramos. Of course, his poetry was not limited to these concerns, and Melo Neto applied his method to a variety of issues, not least to a consideration of poetry itself.
During the following decade, Vinícius de Moraes, who had started his career as a poet nurturing rather vague metaphysical speculations interspersed with an interest in less universal, more concrete themes, began to mingle his interests with those of a new generation of popular music composers. Together they started a movement which would radically change the profile of pop music: the Bossa Nova. This movement, a confluence of Modernist diction with the urbanization and gentrification of rhythms, promoted a cooperation between so-called elite art (pero no mucho) and pop art (ma non troppo). This cooperation would last for a good quarter of a century, reaching its peak in the musical movement of the 60's, Tropicalismo.
In a country where poetry is neither widely read nor taught, the status of Brazilian pop music is very sound, since every poet born since the 1950's not only stemmed from its roots but also, consciously or not, felt its influence. Any poet under the age of 45 who alleges otherwise is lying. That said, it should also be noted that, during this period, Brazilian pop music not only played a different role than pop music did in the English speaking countries or in Hispanic America, but also constituted a substantial and diverse entity of its own, whose more lasting influence would not be circumscribed by political or sentimental manifestations, but would seek through its lyrics a continuity with the tradition of poetry as such. More recently, Brazilian pop music has lost its creative drive, and no longer exercises a meaningful influence over poets.
The 50's saw another movement which might be considered the third Modernist moment: Concretism. Led by Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, its major drive may have been its placing of the intuitive program of '22 on clearer grounds hence the importance placed by Concretists on critical and theoretical debate; on filling in any of Modernism's lacunas, including the restoration of published works, not least those of Oswald de Andrade; and on updating and fine-tuning the continuing international effects of Modernism.
From the following decade on, Concrete poets trod more individual paths. Haroldo de Campos turned to poetic prose and to the so-called neo-Baroque. Décio Pignatari moved between Oswaldian prose and poetry, both visual and verse, while Augusto de Campos stayed faithful to the movement's origins, developing and expanding its visual trends, Ferreira Gullar broke with these poets to launch neo-Concretism, later to embark on the project of poetry engagée which he soon abandoned. Among the independent poets, one might mention Sebastião Uchoa Leite, who, without affiliating himself with Concretism or later on, to Marginal poetry, left a significant body of poems. These poems, almost all of them metalinguistic in nature, combined the erudition of a Paul Valérie with comic strips and American B movies, shot through with a nihilist critique of reality, specifically Brazilian reality. We read: "they say/that life must be defended/that's their message/but death/is so metaphorical/and sexy/it's a surefire hard-on." Uchoa maintained an extended correspondence with Régis Bonvicino. He engaged in dialogue with Leminski, whom he admired, and with Duda Machado, one of the poets anthologized here, who considers him one of the foremost living Brazilian poets. In a certain sense, Ana Cristina César's work owes something to him, as does that of Carlos Ávila.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MODERNIST OR IMMATERIAL
This, then, is the background and environment against which the poets discussed in this text began their work. It is worth noting at this point that the Concrete poets enriched the language with translations not only of modern poets (Pound, cummings, Mallarmé‚Laforgue, Corbière and the Russians) but of earlier poetry (Provençal, dolce stil nuovo, the English Metaphysicals, and Chinese and Japanese classics). At least among poets, these influences ranked second only to those of Brazilian pop music. Through the work of these authors, the translation of poetry reached maturity and entered into a direct dialogue with living poets.
Contemporary Brazilian poetry stems from these precursors without being circumscribed by them. Apart from the distinct combination of influences that is inevitable for poets, individual personality and talent also play an integral part in their poetry.
Needless to say, during the three modernist "moments" we have mentioned, and even afterwards, much poetry was written which bore no resemblance to what we have just described. The issue was not an exclusive or exclusivist lineage, but simply whatever seems to have survived the test of time. Re-reading poets who did not join the mainstream is as melancholy as contemplating an outdated wardrobe. One example is the Marginal poetry of the 70's, which, if it left us any legacy, did so in the work of Ana Cristina César and of Francisco Alvim, whose trademark informality combines with a consistent reading of more refined poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Murilo Mendes, and Manuel Bandeira. Alvim, for example, practices a colloquial poetry which, at times, enters into a dialogue with the engaged poetry of Carlos Drummond, like "Revolution", which thematizes the presence of the military dictatorship in Brazilian life.
Indeed, one of the characteristics of Brazilian poetry of this century is the extent to which the success of individual talents has depended on their adhesion -- dazzled or critical, playful or unwilling -- to a minimal list of Modernist proposals. In fact, from '22 on, Brazilian poetry has fallen into one of two categories: Modernist or immaterial. It is hard to say now whether this division was fate or mere contingency: it is simply an empirical reality, verifiable by literary criticism's essentially rational criteria. This is an issue which neither theory nor the history of poetry has yet begun to examine.
For this reason, there is no common program for the poets mentioned in this text, no explicit consensus behind their writing. In fact, as opposed to the previous generation, these poets have shown little inclination to the idea of belonging to a movement or school. Torquato Neto, for example, participated in Tropicalism, but soon afterwards abandoned it. In a very short span of time, Paulo Leminski moved from the geometric poem, which he was never to resume, to the exuberant prose of Catatau. The poets do have in common a set of concerns and poetic devices, however: there is the mainstream of an accepted tradition, as well as aims which, to a greater or lesser degree, all of them share.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PARADOXES
Paradoxically, poets from Brazilian Modernism on are unknown, owing less to their failure than to their success. Not only have they created many individual sets of poems (though that is surely true): they have created a literary universe of their own. Each one of them is, of course, connected with other universes, including those of French, German, Russian and Anglo-American poetry, but preferably acting through the whole.
There can be no Weltliteratur if a whole set of concerns and debates are not universalized. Thus, we are left in the odd position of having to define Brazilian poetry by what it is not.
Leminski has one exemplary poem. In the beginning, a seemingly banal statement: that every poet starting his career thinks he will be the greatest, but by the end comes to little. So far, so good. But the key to the poem is embedded in questions of address more subtle than those of vousvoyer and tutoyer. In the first, optimistic half of the poem, the subject is "we", indicated only by the verb, apparently the common first-person plural, but in fact the royal "we", symbol of the high rhetoric affected by the provincial elite. The poets Leminski invokes, as arguable as their sequence may be, only serve to illustrate the difference between "one" [a gente] and "we"[nós]. In short, "one" is a kind of "yo el supremo" in a revolutionary state, whereas "we" would be the same figure in exile, after the military coup.
In contrast with the exuberance of his prose and his personality, Leminski's poetry is notably concise. This concision is associated with voice and with the instantaneous register of existence. This kind of concision, as seen in the Concrete poems of the 50's, had turned toward radical definitions of language, giving little place to a more explicitly subjective register. Concision in the poetry of Leminski and Torquato, as well as in the poetry of many poets anthologized here (Horácio Costa is one exception) emerges as both a linguistic fact and as the possibility for a subjectivity. If Oswald de Andrade was the inventor of the so-called minute-poem, we might go so far as to say that Leminski has created the instant-poem, mingling Oswaldian concretism with the anarchic-colloquial diction of pop singer Caetano Veloso and the Tropicalism of Torquato Neto. Concision. Exposing ideas in few words. Haiku. If in Leminski concision is conveyed as brevity, originating from the pressures of existence, in another poet of his generation, Duda Machado, concision is present as accuracy, as precision. Machado and Leminski tread similar, but inverted, paths, the former departing from Tropicália and song lyrics towards a poetry of his own, completely different from that of Brazilian pop music. Leminski, on the other hand, a scholar after his fashion, continued to alternate between questions of high culture and non-systematic incursions into the world of pop music. Concision. The coincidence of three early deaths: Torquato, Ana Cristina César and Leminski. Three suicides, the first two explicit, Leminski's implicit in his daily consumption of alcohol and drugs. Three journeys begun during or after the war, three poets who produced their main body of work during the military dictatorship, which only ended in 1985, when all three were dead or dying.
Concision within extension. After all, there are haikus where words abound, where three verses are three too many, as well as epic poems from which no word can be subtracted without harm. The poem between prose and poetry: this is the case of Josely Vianna Baptista, translator of Lezama Lima's Paradiso, whose style could be considered Brazilian Baroque: exuberant rhythms and images, fashioned by the "feeling for the measure", in the words of William Carlos Williams.
Horácio Costa seems to be an exception to this scenario, following more openly the Hispanic discursive tradition, mediated through the American Beat generation. It is not surprising that Costa has lived in the United States and currently lives in Mexico.
Arnaldo Antunes operates in Torquato's and Veloso's paradigm, highly privileging orality and visuality, as can be seen in his video-poem Nome (1994), which mingles pop music, electronic music, poetry and video. In this anthology, he presents texts which resume the instinctive-primitivist aspect of early Modernism.
Júlio Costañon Guimarães also writes concise poetry in the Minas Gerais style: lean, based on concrete facts and objects, often rough. This kind of roughness can be felt in the poetry of another poet from Minas Gerais, Carlos Ávila. Minas was the home state of Carlos Drummond and Murilo Mendes: mountains, silence and iron ore. Age de Carvalho is the one, among all the poets here, who practices a poetry of a more abstract nature. People and places are referred to fragmentarily; his imagination is often quite rhetorical, although his writings are short and sharp.
It is well worth mentioning that nearly all the poets discussed here worked as publishers or collaborators for alternative journals in the 70's and 80's, the major ones being Navilouca ( Torquato Neto), Pólen (Duda Machado), Qorpo Estranho (Régis Bonvicino), I (Carlos Ávila), and Almanak 80 (Arnaldo Antunes). These journals, along with Código, published in Bahia, acted as a laboratory where the impacts of Concrete poetry and Tropicalism were re-examined. At the same time, these publications served as a shelter for work with no prospect for commercial publication at the time. Another common feature to all the poets in this book: nearly all of them are translators. Leminski has translated, among others, Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Walt Whitman; Castañon, Francis Ponge and Michel Butor; Duda Machado, Gustave Flaubert; Horácio Costa, Elizabeth Bishop. These translations speak to a need to enrich a poetry which, strangely enough, has nothing in common with the poetry from Portugal or Hispanic America. The latter, discursive and deeply marked by Surrealism, never quite established its grip on Brazilian writers.
Once again, Elizabeth Bishop must be mentioned. She was to organize one of two Brazilian poetry anthologies for the Anglo-American world: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry with Emanuel Brasil, published in 1972 by Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Connecticut). It included Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Cecília Meireles, Jorge de Lima, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Vinícius de Moraes and Ferreira Gullar. Soon afterwards, the same Emanuel Brasil oversaw the publishing of Brazilian Poety: l950 --1980, also by Wesleyan, translating poets linked to Concretism, such as Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, as well as some independent writers, including Mário Faustino and Ferreira Gullar, the latter a leader of the neo-Concretist movement.
Anthologies always run the risk of excessive partiality or sperficiality. We hope to have kept these evils at a distance. However, it should be clear that other seletions can and must be made. Among the young poets, there are many other promising names not included in this book, among them Beatriz Azevedo, Heitor Ferraz, Guilherme Mansur, Antonio Moura and Mércia Pessoa.
This is only our reading of what is most significant and representative in modern Brazilian poetry. Nothing the sun could not explain!
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