Tag: literature

I can honestly say that the aesthetic pleasure I experience when reading Augusto dos Anjos’ verses is comparable to what I feel when reading Camões, Dante, or any other poetic greatness. The funny thing is that, technically, Augusto’s poetry breaks all the conventions: syneresis in every verse, words of very difficult pronunciation, and so on. But the vivid and brilliant images that are revealed in each stanza, the explosive expression, the surprise in seeing unexpected and original relationships between apparently disconnected themes, all this seems to generate a more powerful and determining effect than the aesthetic conventions. In Augusto there is a despair, an exacerbated pessimism that borders on the ridiculous but materializes, however, a peerless brilliance.

I review my notes and smile at my irritations. The truth is that I consider myself, modesty aside, the ideal reader. When I open a book, the last thing I want is to get irritated with the author. I give him total freedom to say whatever he wants, to create from the absurd to the ridiculous, to break all moral barriers and more as he feels he must do in order to express what he wants. What I do not have—and I am proud of this—is a guidebook for demanding it from whoever I read. I consciously choose readings that appear contrary to what I seem to think. And yet, even with this almost limitless openness, I always end up finding someone who gets on my nerves…

I read pages and pages of Tolstoy and my mind seems to wonder, “Why so much time spent elsewhere?” The feeling is that, in Tolstoy, there is no vain page, we are always before characters who confront the essential. They confront, that is, they reason, see and judge the circumstances around them; sometimes they let themselves act unthinkingly, then they bitterly regret the psychological consequences, mulling over the past. The past! always an object of torture, an inexhaustible source of regrets… But what seems to impress most in these constructions so vivid, so full of verve and sincerity, is the meticulous insertion of details that endow them with realism, making them more than convincing. And to think of the mind that produced these thousands of golden pages… is to bow the head and take off the hat.

Poetry is a musical construction in which the melody of the letters is interwoven into the rhythm of the verses. Without rhythm, there is no poetry. Take away the rhyme, build in irregular verses, invent whatever you want—but without rhythm, there is no poetry. “If that’s so, what is so-called concrete poetry?” Anything but poetry. How can one call an unreadable, unpronounceable construction a poem? If they wanted to invent, let them also invent a name for the creation—”concrem”? From this, of course, it does not follow that this so-called concrete poetry is not art; in fact it is, but it is a visual art, an art to be contemplated, not to be read or recited. Let the stones be cast! I admit to being thrilled to come across a concrem in which the word “love” is genially arranged in the shape of a heart; but I will continue to judge the concretist as a visual artist, and not as a poet.