Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Los Angeles Review of Books- Brazilian Poetry Today

Brazilian Poetry Today by Paulo Henriques Britto

A complete look at poetry in Brazil, then and today.

November 24th, 2013 reset - +

The following article is presented in both English and Portugese. The Portugese edition can be found below the English translation.

IF YOU HAVE LIVED most of your life during a “period of exception” — to translate quite literally a loose Portuguese euphemism that covers everything from a bumpy patch in a country’s political history to a long interregnum of outright dictatorship — the arrival of normalcy can be perplexing. Over the past few decades, a number of promising new poets have appeared on the Brazilian literary scene, each pursuing his or her own approach to the craft, starting with little magazines (or weblogs), graduating to chapbooks and then, finally, full published collections. As in most literary scenes, some of these poets get prizes and grants, perhaps teach creative literature classes, and autograph their works at book launches. They tend to assume that their major goal as poets is not to reinvent poetic language, or determine the course of the evolution of poetic discourse for the next 100 years, or to help bring about the ultimate destruction of capitalism and imperialism — but simply to write good poetry. They actually want their work to be read and discussed by the reading public (which, in the case of poetry, consists mostly of critics, academics, and other poets). And some of them write — in addition to the free verse that has become the lingua franca of contemporary poetry — metrical verse, not excluding sonnets. All quite unexceptional, right?

Well, not to a number of critics and academics who formed their taste and forged their ideological axes back in the 1960s. To them, it’s an outrage: these younger poets are all sellouts. According to them, the business of any Brazilian poet worth his or her salt should be to find a poetic language that will express the contradictions of capitalism in the third world, or to advance the achievements of one particular avant-garde poetic movement of 50 or 60 years ago — or maybe a combination of the two. And so there is a growing rift between the body of poetry being written over the past decades in Brazil and an important sector of the academic discourse on poetry.

In a sense, the history of Brazilian literature has been mostly a “period of exception.” Since its beginnings, writers themselves and critics in general have felt that the real business of literature is not literature, but rather the construction and assertion of a Brazilian identity. This sense of urgency, of living in heady times that call for constructive action on the part of writers, can already be detected in the poetry of the colonial period, but it becomes more evident after 1822, with the coming of independence and, soon later, of the Romantic movement. Brazilian artists and intellectuals felt they had a moral obligation to affirm the existence of a Brazilian nation that was more than just an outgrowth of Portugal; in order to affirm such a nation, they would first have to create it.

The quality of the art produced in the country was always evaluated in function of whether, and how, it contributed to the ever-unfinished project of building Brazil. So it was that native Brazilians were elevated to the position of symbols of “Brazilianness,” the elusive quality that set us apart from Portugal and from Spanish America. Indianismo, as practiced by such poets as Gonçalves Dias and novelists as José de Alencar, featured Indians who behaved with natural bravery and observed strict protocols of chivalrousness, knights-errant somehow born on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

No matter that this idealized vision of Indians came originally from Chateaubriand: all Brazilian intellectual fashions were French imports. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Realism, Symbolism, Parnassianism, and Naturalism all had followers, and literary quarrels (particularly between the Parnassian establishment and the Symbolist underground) were frequent. In this Frenchified atmosphere, however, a handful of writers were able to create works of literature that had genuine merit and were also unmistakably Brazilian, such as the poetry of Cruz e Sousa, by far our best Symbolist, and the fiction of the greatest writer in our canon, Machado de Assis. (Incidentally, Gonçalves Dias and Machado de Assis were partly black, and Cruz e Sousa had 100-percent African blood. Contrary to the official discourse, Brazil is and has always been a racist country, but certainly not where our literary canon is concerned.)

Even given this background, the half century between the 1920s and the late 1960s, for both Brazil’s poetry and the country itself, must be seen as a period of exception. Though there had been stirrings of modernity in the previous generation, it all began — according to the standard history learned by schoolchildren throughout the country — with the mythical Modern Art Week of 1922, the Brazilian equivalent of the Armory Show. The event took place not in Rio, then the nation’s capital, but in São Paulo, where the big money was (and still is): with the support of rich patrons, a number of poets, fictionists, painters, sculptors and musicians presented to the public a selection of revolutionary new works. Some of the participants were Cariocas — the composer Villa-Lobos and the painter Di Cavalcanti — but most were Paulistas, as were the two writers who would eventually become the most influential intellectuals of Brazilian Modernism: Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. The Modern Art Week marked the beginning of a half-century characterized by various isms, movements, defections and counter-movements. During this revolutionary period, literary prizes and official recognition were often shunned, scathing reviews from established critics were flaunted like battle scars, and a disproportional share of the best poetry in Brazilian literary history got written.

Most of our canonical poets — Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (three entirely separate Andrade families, by the way), Cecília Meireles, Murilo Mendes, Jorge de Lima, Vinicius de Moraes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Augusto de Campos, and Ferreira Gullar — to name just the best and/or most influential of them — wrote and published their most enduring verse between Mário de Andrade’s Paulicéia desvairada in 1922 (not his best work, but the book that started it all) and João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Poesias completas (1940-1965) in 1968. The mood of much of the great poetry of the period was frankly contrarian. To be a poet often implied being against a number of things. Above all, Modernists were against the mainstream poetry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its stilted syntax, its precious vocabulary, its orotund rhetoric — but also against the sociopolitical situation of the early decades of the Republic, the abject poverty in which the vast majority of the population lived, the venality of politicians, the insensibility of the ruling classes (alas — some things haven’t changed much since then). Somehow there seemed to be a parallel between the polished surface of the rigidly metrified Alexandrine sonnets of the Parnassian school that dominated the literary establishment, and the elite’s callous obliviousness of the country’s dire social woes. In this context, the free verse that Mário de Andrade pioneered in Paulicéia desvairada was more than a formal innovation: its rejection of meter and rhyme seemed an act of Republican virtue, a commitment to the real Brazil, for which the city of São Paulo stood as a living, teeming metonym. The first line of “Inspiration,” the opening poem of Paulicéia desvairada, is: “São Paulo! my life’s commotion…” The line is repeated at the end of the poem:

São Paulo! my life’s commotion…
A Gallicism crying out in the wilds of America!

The movements that arose in the ’20s and ’30s — Pau-Brasil (“Brazilwood”) and Antropofagia (“Cannibalism”), among others — each proposed a specific view of the nation-building project that seemed the real point of literature. There was a lull of sorts midcentury, including a backlash against Modernism — the so-called Generation of ’45, which called for a return to elevated diction and sublimity — followed by an anti-anti-Modernist surge, the “neo-avant-garde” movements of the ’50s and ’60s, foremost among them Concretismo, launched (again, in São Paulo) by the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. The Concretist poets did more than abolish meter and rhyme: they summarily decreed a morte do verso, the death of the line of verse as the unit of poetic discourse; henceforward poetry was to be a fundamentally visual affair, picking up where Mallarmé and Ezra Pound — the heroes of the movement, seen as Concretists avant la lettre — had left off.

Concrete poetry was all about form-follows-function, about writing today the poetry of the future. The Concretists were fiercely attacked by a number of enemies: the diehard defenders of traditional pre-Modernist poetry, for sure, but also by more than one rival tribe of avant-gardists, who believed that poetry should be revolutionary both in form and in ideological content. Mário Chamie’s Poesia-Práxis movement managed to give a Marxist slant to Concretist strategies, venting far more ire on the Concretists than on the capitalist enemy, in the true Marxist tradition. What Concretists and Praxists had in common was a rather dour, almost puritanical poetics, which saw subjectivism as the unforgivable sin: true poetry should be objectivist, cold, cerebral, and goal-oriented.

If one had to single out a year to mark the end of this 50-year-long “period of exception,” 1968 would perhaps be the best choice. And not just because it was the year when Cabral’s first volume of collected poetry came out: it was also the year of the worldwide student rebellions, which Octavio Paz saw as heralding a new age in the history of the Western world, the end of the age of the utopias.
In Brazil, this was also the year of Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), the “coup inside the coup” that transformed the relatively moderate military dictatorship that had taken over in 1964 into a brutal regime that routinely resorted to kidnaping, exile, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder.
Finally, it was the year of Tropicália, which may be conveniently seen as either the last of the great Modernist isms or the harbinger of the new post-ism age, or maybe both. And the fact that the centerpiece of Tropicália was pop music rather than poetry, visual art, film or theater — though all these arts were involved — was surely not its least relevant characteristic. The leaders of the movement, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were songwriters and singers; the name “Tropicália” came from an installation by the artist Hélio Oiticica, which had impressed Caetano. Another major aesthetically formative experience for him had been the staging of O Rei da Vela, a play written by Oswald de Andrade decades before, produced for the first time in the ’60s by Grupo Oficina, an experimental group led by José Celso Martinez Correia. Crucially important was the innovative sort of rock music pioneered by The Beatles, as well as Bob Dylan’s lyrics; “serious” popular musicians until then were prone to treat rock ’n’ roll as commercial trash at best, and a US ploy to demobilize Brazilian youth at worst. What this wealth of influences amounts to is that, unlike all earlier movements, Tropicália was notable not for what it was opposed to, but for its inclusiveness. It held that Brazilian art, like Whitman’s poetic persona, should not be afraid of contradicting itself; it ought to be large and contain multitudes: the cool rationality of Cabral and Concretism and the sentimentality of pre-1922 verse; politically conscious opposition to military rule and the naïve celebration of Brazil’s tropical splendor; João Gilberto’s cool sensibility and Carmen Miranda’s campiness; Rio’s relaxed hedonism and São Paulo’s hectic industrialism; the traditional folk music of the Brazilian Northeast and the sophisticated pop of Sergeant Pepper and Blonde on Blonde; and — perhaps most importantly for poetry — formal elaboration and unashamed subjectivism.

In “Tropicália,” one of Caetano Veloso’s manifesto-songs of the period, Brazil is both modernistic Brasília and the shantytowns where infant mortality was outrageously high:

The monument has no door
The entrance is a narrow
Crooked old street
And on someone’s knee a smiling ugly
Dead child offers his hand

This lively cultural scene was destroyed by AI-5. A large number of political leaders were imprisoned; some were tortured and killed; many were exiled, notably among them the poet Ferreira Gullar, a Concretist turned Neo-Concretist who then broke with the avant-garde camp to write agitprop poetry; Tropicalists Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the leaders of Tropicália; and Chico Buarque de Holanda, the major political songwriter of the time, to name just a few. It was the end of Tropicália, and of all explicitly political art as well. So began the worst period of the dictatorship, the “years of lead,” as they were retrospectively labeled; a period of exception inside the period of exception.

A few years after AI-5, a number of young poets in Rio began to hand out or sell their work in mimeographed copies, in sidewalk cafés or to people standing in line outside cinemathèques, theaters, and concert halls; some of them belonged to groups, little magazines or art collectives, while others were striking out on their own. The phenomenon soon spread to other cities. When, in 1976, the critic Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda (not related to Chico) put together an anthology of their work called 26 poetas hoje (“26 Poets Today”), these poets began to be seen as making up a sort of movement, sometimes known as “marginal poetry” or “the mimeograph generation,” but in fact they were a motley bunch: some, like Chacal and Charles Peixoto, came close to the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky hippy; others, like Ana Cristina Cesar and Cacaso, were sophisticated students of literature; yet others, like Torquato Neto and Capinan, also wrote song lyrics (both were associated with Tropicália); and two, Chico Alvim and Zuca Sardan, were career diplomats. What they mostly had in common was the fact that their poetry was in direct opposition to the dogmas of Concretism and other formalist movements: it was jokey, colloquial, unpretentious; it spoke of love affairs, partying, fear of the police, the joys and miseries of being young in a military dictatorship (though this, of course, usually had to be expressed in figurative language). In its most lighthearted moments, it showed a countercultural streak reminiscent of North American flower power, but the prevailing oppressive political climate left deep marks on it. Also, the Marginals, unlike the Concretists and the Praxists, were not trying to create the poetry of the future; their focus was on the here and now. Their poetry was about surviving the “years of lead,” about turning one’s private experience into a small world, somehow protected, if only barely, from the violence and repression surrounding it. Wrote Francisco Alvim:

My cokehead girlfriend
seeks me out in the wee hours
to say she loves me
I gaze at the dark rings under her eyes
(as dark as the night out there)

There was another characteristic common to the Marginals that set them in sharp contrast to the poets of the ’50s and ’60s: they were very much heterogeneous as to style and form. They did not believe there was a single formula for poetry to the exclusion of all others. In this they were clearly indebted to the Tropicalists’ pluralist view of Brazil; and on the whole this is the attitude that has prevailed ever since. From the Marginal period up to now, poets have been experimenting with a wide array of poetic devices; none is taboo, none is obligatory. The choppy, highly enjambed free verse pioneered in English by William Carlos Williams is the form favored by most younger poets, but there is no longer any sense that free verse is de rigueur, that traditional metrical and stanzaic forms (often used in creative, nonstandard ways) necessarily imply a reactionary rejection of modernity. This much became evident when, in the late 1980s, Augusto Massi, a young poet and editor from São Paulo, launched Claro Enigma, a poetry collection consisting of 13 volumes by 13 contemporary poets. (Full disclosure: I was one of the 13.) Some of these poets had been active since the ’60s, the increasingly remote age of the neo-avant-garde, and one was a member of the Marginal generation; others had been publishing only since the beginning of the ’80s. The diversity in the collection was much greater than anything to be found in the 26 poetas hoje anthology: the concise, epigrammatic pieces in José Paulo Paes’s volume, reminiscent of Oswald de Andrade’s “joke poems” of the 1920s, were worlds apart from Orides Fontela’s solemn, dignified lyrics; the jagged lines in Age de Carvalho’s volume had little in common with the mostly metered and rhymed poems by Maria Lúcia Alvim (sister of Francico Alvim). While Sebastião Uchoa Leite was obviously indebted to the Concretists’ strictures, Francisco Alvim was just as obviously not. And in some of the volumes, such as the one by Rubens Rodrigues Torres Filho, high and low diction, free verse and sonnets, philosophical musings and scatological humor, appeared side by side. Some sense of the diversity may perhaps be given by two brief examples. Here’s the first, by Paes:

ODE TO DILUTERS

invention
co-invention
convention

Contrast this with the first stanza of a sonnet by Maria Lúcia Alvim:

Let these last few remaining years of life
Be impervious to dreaminess and haste —
The body is for pleasure, not for strife,
And cold and rigid is the soul’s own face.

It certainly didn’t look like business as usual in the Brazilian poetic scene. And this state of affairs was downright alarming to those who saw poetry in terms of such categories as progress, modernity, and evolution of forms, as well as to those who still believed that the chief task of Brazilian poets was to criticize capitalism and its attendant ills. Some of the poets and critics associated with Concretism gave the new poetry short shrift, dismissing it with the dirtiest word in their vocabulary: “eclecticism.” To people like Décio Pignatari there was only one true path to the poetry of the future, and anyone who strayed from it was not to be taken seriously; besides, hadn’t it been demonstrated, in the Concretist manifestoes of the 1950s, that the line of verse had been killed, once and for all? (“The historical cycle of verse has come to an end,” affirmed the Concretist “Pilot-Plan.”) Meanwhile, those critics who saw art mostly or exclusively from a sociopolitical angle began to attack the new poetry in long, vehement articles. Iumna Maria Simon and Vinicius Dantas have been the most aggressive critics of nearly all the poetry produced in Brazil in recent decades. Their take on Marginal poetry is rather simple: from a country such as Brazil, which has failed to create a new society and is cravenly joining the global imperialist and capitalist systems, nothing better could be expected than the sort of half-literate babbling coming from those mimeographs in Rio; the title of their famous (or infamous) 1985 article says it all: “Bad poetry, worse than bad society.” The following year, Dantas criticized a number of poets — some of whom were to be included in the Claro Enigma collection a few years later — for writing with the intent to win literary prizes. More recently, a 2011 piece by Simon ends on a hopeful note:

Right now there are signs that the cultural complex of neoliberalism has been shaken in its hegemony, that the exclusiveness of a form of thinking has lost its authority to impose on us an inevitable model of society, although relevant alternatives to capitalism are not to be seen, even after such a systemic crisis, whose magnitude has not yet been fully disclosed, as the one we have been going through since 2008. In Brazil, it is true that reactions to this situation that are truly artistic, in the sphere of poetry, have been few so far. But they do exist, and they will be based on dissatisfaction with the retraditionalizing paradigm, which, as we have seen, is no more than parasitism upon the canon.

In other words, the failure of international neoliberalism (the infrastructure) will have a positive impact on poetry (part of the superstructure), even though “alternatives to capitalism are not to be seen.” (And to think that Elizabeth Bishop once said Brazilians could not grasp the meaning of “understatement”!) However, what is most striking in Simon’s and Dantas’s attacks is not their predictably mechanistic Marxist arguments, but their tone: vitriolic, brimming with disgust and righteous wrath. If you don’t think “parasitism” is bad enough, elsewhere Simon refers to critics and students of poetry who write approvingly of contemporary poets as “gangs and lobbies which infest both the university and the media.” Parasitism, infestations: this is the sort of verbal abuse one directs not at inadequate writers, but at ideological enemies or — even worse — traitors to a sacred cause. As long as Brazil remains part of the wicked capitalist world order, it seems, Brazilian poets are bound to be bad, in every conceivable sense of the word “bad,” unless they forge a language that amounts to an explicit rejection of the status quo.

But not all critics have been hostile. Most surprisingly, Haroldo de Campos, one of the founding fathers of Concretism, published an important article as early as 1984 in which, taking a cue from Octavio Paz, he conceded that times had changed, and that the Modernism of the ’50s and ’60s was no longer a driving force: “Without a utopian perspective, the avant-garde no longer has any significance.” Naturally, younger critics, such as Celia Pedrosa and Marcos Siscar, are even more attuned to the new zeitgeist, even though they might not approve all they see. One of them, Italo Moriconi, a literature professor and poet, in a 1997 paper detected in some of the recent poetry a “return to the sublime”; however, though he himself favored the Modernist tradition of colloquial diction and quotidian reality, he could not fail to see the merit of a poet such as Carlito Azevedo, for all his supposedly fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In this same text, Moriconi coined an apt phrase to describe the new period in Brazilian poetry: “post-avant-garde normalization” of what he called “poetic circuits” — that is, the academic, economic and social contexts in which works of literature circulate. In other words, the present state of Brazilian poetry, as shocking as it might seem to older sensibilities, is really what should be seen as the normal state of affairs; the five revolutionary decades from Modernism to Tropicália, which had come to seem natural to all, were really a period of exception, now irreversibly gone.

To Moriconi’s analysis I would add one observation: the end of the age of the avant-garde is closely related to the more or less generalized perception that the task of building Brazilian culture has finally been accomplished. Of course, every culture is a work in progress, not a static construct; in that sense Brazilian culture still is, and will always be, an ongoing process. What I mean is that there comes a time in the history of a nation when its artists and intellectuals no longer feel a need to assert at all times that it really is a nation, with a culture of its own. For long-established European nations such as Portugal or Britain, this is a sort of concern that simply does not occur to anyone (though Germans experienced similar insecurities throughout much of the 19th century); but in the New World the problem has been particularly acute — even, during the Romantic period, in the US: think of the affirmations of Americanness in Whitman and Emerson.

In the case of Brazil, it now seems as if Tropicália was the moment when a significant part of our intelligentsia finally realized that Brazilian culture had come into its own. It was no longer necessary to attack rock ’n’ roll in order to protect the “purity” of our music, supposedly threatened by the US entertainment industry in cahoots with the CIA. Brazilians now should feel secure enough to admit quite openly that there has never been anything pure about our music, or our culture, to begin with — indeed, that our strength comes precisely from the intermingling of a number of different strains: Native Brazilian lore, Portuguese language and literature, African music and sensibility, French intellectual fashions, the manifold contribution of Italian, German, Arab, and Jewish immigrants — so why not American popular culture as well? When I tell my literature students at the university where I teach that back in the ’60s there was a generalized perception that Brazilian culture had to be protected from Anglo-American rock and Hollywood movies, I can see that the notion strikes them as quite odd. To them, one can be Brazilian, enjoy American rock, French film, or any number of outside cultures’ art, and not feel guilty about it; being Brazilian is now just as unproblematic, as normal, as being French or Spanish. And the fact that we have failed to break with international capitalism is, however one might feel about it, also part of this normalcy; for this condition applies to just about every other country in the world.

Since the turn of the century, normalcy has by and large prevailed. These days, younger poets read and translate poetry voraciously, emulating various older contemporaries or canonized predecessors; established poets publish in established publishing companies, competing for literary prizes and even — horror of horrors! — for a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, something that would have been unthinkable for many self-respecting writers not so long ago, when that venerable institution, founded by none other than Machado de Assis, was seen as the very symbol of all that was wrong with Brazilian literature. In the new normalcy, poets no longer belong to mutually excommunicating literary sects. The aggressive rivalry between Concretists, Neo-Concretists, Praxists, and advocates of political poetry surfaces these days only when poets representing these long-defunct movements, now in their late seventies or eighties, are interviewed by literary supplements. Younger poets feel free to borrow from the technical repertoires of this or that historical movement: elements of Concretist practice are all over the place in the work of Ricardo Aleixo, clearly evident in Collapsus linguæ, Carlito Azevedo’s first book, and subtly present in one phase of another major poet debuting in the 1990s, Claudia Roquette-Pinto; but no one would say that any of them is in any sense a Concretist. Alexei Bueno might be safely labeled a traditionalist in diction, form and worldview — but how to classify Érico Nogueira, who translates Theocritus and writes original poetry experimenting with quantitative metrics, using a highly colloquial language sprinkled with vulgar expletives?
Nor do cultural-studies categories help much: “Afro-Brazilian poetry” would have to cover Salgado Maranhão, Waldo Motta, Ricardo Aleixo, and Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, but all they have in common is the fact that some of their poems have to do with being black. Similarly, “gay poetry” seems a most inappropriate category under which to place side by side the classical decorum and philosophical serenity of Antonio Cicero’s finely crafted lyrics, the cheerful, in-your-face grossness of Glauco Mattoso’s impeccably decasyllabic sonnets, and the gently nerdy, self-deprecating humor of Ismar Tirelli Neto’s free verse.

It is, of course, always difficult to make sense of a situation when you’re right in the middle of it. In 20 or 30 years’ time, much that seems bewildering to observers of the present Brazilian poetical scene will naturally coalesce into distinct trends and clearly discernible patterns. It may well be that the poets now living who later generations will canonize are not the ones presently seen as the best. All of this is true enough. But 30 years after the Modern Art Week there was a more or less general agreement, if not a real consensus, about the meaning of Brazilian Modernism and the relative importance of individual poets and works. Heloísa’s anthology turned 30 in 2006, and so far there is very little agreement among critics and academics as to the significance of the Marginal generation, let alone of the poetry being written since then. Perhaps this is a consequence of living in “normal” times, once the “period of exception” is over: to pigeonhole poets in a more or less mechanical fashion in terms of where they stand in relation to formal and ideological issues no longer passes as relevant literary criticism. The proliferation of distinct voices and poetics since the ’70s requires a more sophisticated and discriminating attitude; more than ever, the critic today must study individual poets and read individual poems in their own right, not as representatives of this or that “movement.” Any critic who thinks he or she can disqualify a poet or an entire generation of poets by branding them as mere epiphenomena of “neoliberalism” is simply living in the past. It is probably useless to attempt to argue with such people; all one can say to them is: like it or not, this is the 21st century. Well, I, for one, happen to like it.

Paulo Henriques Britto teaches translation, poetry and creative writing at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.