Devagar, a Poesia by Rosa Maria Martelo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Devagar, a Poesia by Rosa Maria Martelo Jerónimo Pizarro Rosa Maria Martelo, Devagar, a Poesia (Lisbon: Sistema Solar [Documenta], 2022). 223 pages. Print. Rosa Maria Martelo is a retired Full Professor at the University of Porto, who coordinated the Intermedialities Group of the Margarida Losa Comparative Literature Institute. Her research is dedicated to the intermedial and transmedial relationships of modern and contemporary poetry with visual arts and cinema. She has published some of her most significant and influential essays in books such as A Forma Informe: Leituras de Poesia (2010), O Cinema da Poesia (2012), and Os Nomes da Obra, Herberto Helder ou o Poema Contínuo (2016). Her most recent book, Devagar, a Poesia (2022), explores the expansive temporal experience generated by poetic discourse as a form of resistance. Martelo’s proposal is grounded in the idea that, in contrast to the vanguardist texts of the Orpheu poets (and others), contemporary poetry seeks not speed, but rather deceleration, as well as the valorization of difference and identity in response to massification. Martelo’s new book is a collection of essays written over the course of a decade, during a time when the acceleration of life, ecological imbalances and extractivism were all on the rise. The book draws on the works of many Portuguese poets, including Carlos de Oliveira, Luiza Neto Jorge, Herberto Helder, António Franco Alexandre, João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, Adília Lopes, Ana Luísa Amaral, Manuel de Freitas and José Miguel Silva. Martelo argues that poetic discourse offers a form of resistance to the dominant narratives of mass communication, ‘but without ever losing sight’ — as José Miguel Silva said in response to the question ‘Is poetry a form of resistance?’ — of the fact that, in an era of mass communication, the poet’s resistance is ‘unequal and ridiculous’, ‘like the battle of an angry sardine against a chemical tanker’. In this sense, the book is a unique contribution to the study of contemporary poetry and its relationship to broader social and cultural issues. Devagar, a Poesia takes its title from a talk Martelo gave in 2014. As part of a series of talks at the Culturgest titled ‘Aesthetics and Politics between the Arts’, she presented a paper in which she argued that ‘almost 100 years later, we may be in a position to say that, in contrast to the most avant-garde texts of the poets of Orpheu, now, in 2015 (or almost), poetry [...] will claim the possibility of experimenting with deceleration, slowness’. In the book now under review, Martelo adds: ‘But not only with slowness: also with singularization, with the valorization of difference, [...] of interruption’, and ‘with the rejection of unfocused hyperactivity’ (p. 24). I agree with Martelo’s general claim: going [End Page 89] slow where others had preferred to go fast may now be a possible and desirable path. Especially if we want to put up some resistance to the so-called ‘course of events’, and extend and broaden our empathy and our listening. According to Martelo, as the twentieth century advanced and certain social and professional dynamics based on speed were consolidated, there emerged pockets of resistance to the automation and mechanization of everyday life. In the 1960s and 1970s, in Portuguese poetry, a more dystopian view of speed emerged; this poetry, in contrast to modernism, moved from vertigo to contemplation, resisting through a series of strategies of subversion: ‘the valorization of image and metaphor as instruments of libertarian production of meaning and knowledge; the depolarization of identities; and above all, the autonomous condition of the aesthetic event’ (p. 80). These characteristics, together with metadiscursivity, and the questioning of poetry about its own condition, created, according to Martelo, new articulations of the notion of resistance in poetry with the notion of the resistance of poetry. Resistance is, in my view, the keyword to reading Devagar, a Poesia, along with, perhaps, other related words such as liberation, discovery and opposition. According to Martelo, poetry values doubt, desire, possibility (the ‘extension of the possible’, in the words of Michel Deguy; p. 124), with expectation, interruption, singularity, and temporalities different from a linear or historical time. Devagar, a...