Luciano Duarte

Winter is a literary creation… Thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Sleep is an impossibility, as is thinking in serenity when matter spills discomfort. Several of the benefits of low temperature for the arts of the spirit are said. And it could be added: high temperatures repel thought; being in essence great agitation, they represent precisely the opposite of calm that encourages the mind to reflect. Waking up in fatigue, discouragement due to a bad night’s sleep. One interrupts reasoning by thinking about physical discomfort. Worse: to perceive clothes, shoes, everything contributing to an intolerable sensation. The environment naturally muffled, the forehead wet. And nothing wins, nothing interrupts the sensation of inhabiting a gigantic oven that is impossible to turn off…

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Read more:

• The “Motivational Therapy”
• ABC of Reading, by Ezra Pound
• When I Open a Book, I Do Not Sign a Contract
• The Human Being Does Not Change His Essence

A musician, obligatorily, needs to understand rhythm to compose good music. For that, he must know, even instinctively, what beat and tempo are. Only then he will be able to differentiate the countless possible frequencies and the effects he can achieve with each one of them in his composition. Some say there is poetry without rhythm. There are, without a doubt, verses of terrible quality. And even if the poet wants to dispense the most important element to differentiate a poetic composition from prose or spoken language, I believe it is impossible to deny how much knowledge of rhythm would add to his arsenal of expressive effects. Well… To understand rhythm, in poetry, the poet must understand metrics and, consequently, the counting of poetic syllables. There is no other way: the poet who does not understand the syllable counting will never be able to understand what quantity is and what relationship the tonic syllables maintain with the non-accentuated ones at regular intervals. Thus, he will never know what rhythm is and will end up composing verses that do not please the ear. I ask: is the poetry that the ear repels good?

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Read more:

• The Rhythm of the Letters
• The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan Poe
• Patience Is Necessary to Compose a Poem
• Short Clauses and Pace

The traditional melodic and rhythmic elements of poetry, when used with skill, give a beauty to verses that hardly allow them to be matched by free verses. In a few decades, it will be possible to compare them with the necessary distance, and there is no doubt that the enchantment produced by the double rhythm and melody will, on average, be far superior to the new effects achieved by modern poetry. It will also be possible to wisely judge the diligence of the technique, and then it will become evident that transplanting music to letters is a very difficult art whose essence is directly linked to traditional poetry.

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Read more:

• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy
• The Illusion of Poetic Freedom
• The Burrow, by Franz Kafka

Knowing the corrosive character of praises when directed to the living artist, I notice that they apply more often to a pose than to a work—when not in search of reciprocity… oh, gross!…—And, exactly for this reason, they corrode the work becoming a fundamental element of the pose, seen miserably as the artist’s element of distinction. In short: the artist finds himself dependent on applause, cutting in the work what repels them, that is, he ends up making the work also part of the pose, becoming anything but sincere. And how numerous they are! Humiliating? deplorable? What can be said of this nation of slaves of praise? I lack words…

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Read more:

• The Human Being Does Not Change His Essence
• The War Against Falsehood
• What Is Called “Society” Requires the Representation of a Role
• The Burrow, by Franz Kafka