quinta-feira, abril 10, 2008

Three Poems by Francisco Alvim

Three Poems
by Francisco Alvim
Issue 102 Winter 2008, WEB EXTRAS
Antonio Sergio Bessa Did the search for a new subjectivity lead you to the “other”? You mentioned your readings of Eliot and Pound, and as you know, a major part of their poetry is a kind of collage of other poems and voices. Is that what attracted you to their work?
Francisco Alvim No doubt. What I found in Eliot and Pound was a voice coming from a new, crushed subjectivity, which had already emerged, splendidly and movingly, in Baudelaire. My feeling is that, in our time, this subjectivity became manifest in poetry in two ways: via material things, of the thing-thing and the word-thing, and via man. “Via” here is meant as channel, as in voice, or speech, and of course writing. Via man, it became pluralistic and fragmented, because today man is a being without individuality, and the world, a reality imploded into a thousand fragments. Thus the shrapnel of voice, voice which is also, above all, a desperate attempt—inexorably failed—to hear itself and the other’s voice.

— from BOMB’s interview of
Francisco Alvim by Antonio Sergio Bessa,
AMERICAS: Brazil Now! Winter 2008 issue

Three poems by poet and diplomat Francisco Alvim from Elefante, translated by interviewer Antonio Sergio Bessa.

Open
for Cacaso

Sometimes the gaze follows
the network of light
without any curiosity
any illusion
It goes on in search of time
and time, as always,
emptied of everything
is not far
is here, now
The gaze with no memory
without destiny
arrested
in the air of air
in the light of light—site?
Poem
for Carlos Drummond de Andrade

There are many shadows in the world
They blow in the clouds
and in the air they
glitter solitary like topazes—
drops of dimmed light

The stars blow wind

Shadows are the wind of stars

At the bottom of waters trapped

in ponds and dams
there is a wind of waters—
shadows

In the sea

they refract submersed
transient
amidst forests of algae—
shadows of emerged shadows

They are made—the shadows—of dark

air
They remember all and nil

The flight of shadows

spins around a sonorous
column, the poem—
light from inside

Out

No Plot

Still

In the platform above

Between the legs

on the floor

the groceries in a plastic bag

Far from verse, almost prose

No guts

for the always venturesome—

while they last—

flights of passion

Far so far

from humor from irony

from the polymorph voices

sibylline

tattered in the tongue’

sear

Where ground is ground

legs, legs

things, thingsand the word, none

There, only the refraction

of an idea

of a thought exhausted

of movement

Between two roads

two harbors

(two lagoons)

two illnesses

Sublime virtues of chance

why not take me

from inside

and protect me from the cold outside

from the incessant, unbearable flight of plot?

from choosing?

Read Francisco Alvim by Antonio Sergio Bessa in BOMB’s Winter 2008 Brazil issue, on newsstands now.

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