De Poesia Research Articles

Tropeçar no morto — Mário de Sá-Carneiro visto por Eduardo Lourenço

This article revisits the central elements of Eduardo Lourenço’s thought on the poet of Indícios de Oiro. To do so, I consider particularly two essays by Lourenço, namely “Suicidária Modernidade” (1990) and “A Poesia de Orpheu” (2015). If in “Suicidária Modernidade” Lourenço reflects on how Sá-Carneiro’s suicide came to be inscribed in the ​​Portuguese literary Modernity, in “A Poesia de Orpheu” Lourenço revisits the idea of ​​Sá-Carneiro as modern essentially due to a clownish self-representation. In the latter essay, Lourenço describes the poet as having a late romantic personality and departing from a symbolist language, and as someone who dramatizes a gap between a desire to achieve a somewhat diffuse Beyond and a real life in which this desire never materializes. In his analysis, Lourenço highlights the relevance of Sá-Carneiro’s last poems in the subversion of some of his imagined roles, from that of the King to that of the Jester. Still, as I demonstrate, Lourenço gives little value to some aspects of the most innovative language of Sá-Carneiro, namely his use of the immediate elements of the modern society as metaphors for the self, which leads him not to recognize the way Sá-Carneiro’s language, very directly, helped Fernando Pessoa become more modern himself.

Devagar, a Poesia by Rosa Maria Martelo (review)

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...

Down Deep

Down Deep Luís Miguel Nava (bio) Translated by Alexis Levitin (bio) and Ricardo Vasconcelos (bio) Keywords Luis Miguel, Nava, Alexis, Levitin, Ricardo Vasconcelos, poetry, translation, Portuguese poetry, memory A nail in one’s gum,down deep, so deep one mightthink that nothing but soul was there, that’s how trees grow withinour memory, where their rootsmake them burst forth, that’s how the leaves that serveas skin at timesstir within our spirit, where skin sinks as on a screen,skin, behaving like a tree witha mirror tangled in its roots, skin that bound shut our eyes, that served usas blindfold and as memory,the whiteness of the sheet struggling against the dark, sister of that rootclinging to the screen, of that gumforgetting that it once was in your mouth, now tied onlyto the soul, over whichit seems to lean, to bend. [End Page 330] Luís Miguel Nava luís miguel nava’s Poesia came out in 2020, twenty-five years after the young poet’s shocking death. Nava’s poetry relies on a fearless visceral depiction of the body, accompanying surging seas of memory and desire. His work, well known in Portugal. has also appeared in French and Spanish. Poems drawn from his forthcoming collection in English have been accepted by Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Hollins Critic, Metaforologia, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, Osiris, and Puerto del Sol. Alexis Levitin alexis levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent translations from Portugal include Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil, and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Ricardo Vasconcelos ricardo vasconcelos is a 2020–2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar and Professor of Portuguese at San Diego State University. His scholarly work on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature, including Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, among other authors, has been published in several countries. He is the author of Campo de Relâmpagos—Leituras do Excesso na Poesia de Luís Miguel Nava [Lightning Field—Readings in Excess in the Poetry of Luís Miguel Nava], and in 2020 he published a critical edition of Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc

“En el principio era el verbo”: la escritura de Resistencia e identidad en las producciones de la Casa de los Estudiantes del Imperio

In the heart of the metropolis, between 1944 and 1965, the House of the Students of the Empire was responsible for the formation of a part of the African intellectuality that fought against Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Personalities such as Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto among others would become fundamental characters in this fight against oppression. The aim of this article is to analyze some poems produced by members of the House which are compiled in the Antologias de Poesia da Casa dos Estudantes do Império, highlighting Angolan writers. Moreover, for a better understanding it is necessary a historical contextualization of the House and its role in the formation of an anticolonial and identity consciousness for these members, which would echo in the future in their countries of origin.

Children of omolokun

children of omolokun Eliane Marques (bio) Translator's note: The interjection ianso is a call to the goddess of the tempest, Iansã. Omiosun and Sokoto are both rivers in Nigeria that represent orixás. Omolokun is a son of the sea. children of omolokun dozens at the ready for the beheadingthe boots nailed to the narrative of the knivesheld right against the face so the possession of the ground for the seashells do you see?here the firstborn with an elastic neck and snails in the mouthinsistence that—it scissors off the hair under the light of the buffalo on the savannahand has my eyelashes in the shadowwhen the wax in your ears up to the remote dam omi osun sokoto I'll call you afolabe but here the firstborn with gum in the throaton the third rank of the embankment (top-heavy)the beheading growing ever whiter the sword sharpened with its rings as if the goose feet do you see?the beheader (in plainclothes)—hanging from the voice with the bluntest command—is jubilee, but not tiresias it was reported that a barber like that kristallnacht tachac tachac tachac well, it's tolerated that little (not less than a meter and a half and not shylock either)but the knife always will be flame [End Page 30] a howl at the cottony restraints and at the buttons of your bootsthe secret will make it possible for the blade to ready at six on the watch and no more than six sharpstill under the shininess of the fish scalesand something that someone mum-mumbled ianso [End Page 31] Eliane Marques Eliane Marques is a poet, essayist, editor, and director of the Poetry School in Santa Catarina and the Orísun Oro project, whose mission is disseminating to the world the poetic works of Black women from Latin America and Africa. Her books are O poço das Marianas (Escola de Poesia 2021), Relicário (Grupo Cero 2009) and e se alguém o pano (Escola de Poesia 2015), which won the 2016 Açorianos Prize for best poetry book. She is co-author of Arado de palavras (Grupo Cero 2008) and Blasfêmeas: mulheres de palavra (Casa Verde 2016). She translated from Spanish into Portuguese O Trágico em Psicanálise, by Marcela Villavella (Ediciones Psicolibros 2012) and Pregón de Marimorena, by Virginia Brindis de Salas, forthcoming from Figura de Linguagem. A specialist in Economy, Politics, and Human Rights with a Master's in Public Law, she works as an external auditor for the Rio Grande do Sul state auditor's office. Tiffany Higgins Tiffany Higgins is a 2022 Fulbright scholar to Brazil's Amazon, where she will explore Indigenous and traditional fisherfolk's political mobilization in response to a planned industrial waterway. Her recent work, centering on traditional peoples' narratives about their river homes, has been supported by the Pulitzer Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She was the 2020 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. She is the author of two collections of poems, And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet (The Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series 2009) and Apparition at Fort Bragg (Iron Horse 2016), and translator of Alice Sant'Anna's Tail of the Whale (Toad Press 2016). Her literary journalism, translations from Portuguese, and poetry appears in Granta, Guernica, Mongabay, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently translating the poetry of Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Kambeba people. She lives in Oakland, California. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press

La autotraducción al servicio de la visibilidad de discursos disidentes: el caso de la poeta y traductora cuir muxe’ Elvis Guerra.

El presente artículo aborda el papel que la práctica de la autotraducción puede entrañar como instrumento político de resistencia en la obra poética cuir de Elvis Guerra, artista mexicano muxe’ que trabaja la disidencia de género y la etnicidad desde la poesía. El eje principal del trabajo es el libro de poemas Ramonera (Círculo de Poesía, 2019; Letraversal, 2020) en el cual el autor propone una crítica no solo a la exclusión o la violencia ejercida sobre los cuerpos que se reconocen en identidades periféricas sino también a la mitificación de la que han sido objeto las muxe’.

Gilda e Candido: leituras sobre Manuel Bandeira na Revista Brasileira de Poesia e depois

Este artigo pretende confrontar o texto “Dois poetas”, de 1948, de Gilda de Mello e Souza, publicado na Revista Brasileira de Poesia, e a “Introdução” da Estrela da vida inteira, de 1965, escrita por Gilda de Mello e Souza e Antonio Candido. Com a leitura e análise, o objetivo é verificar aproximações de gesto para com a poesia bandeiriana atentando, conjuntamente, para os contextos de publicação dos ensaios inseridos na Revista Brasileira de Poesia e da “Introdução” que apresenta a última reunião por Bandeira de toda a sua obra poética.

La presencia de René Char en la poesía de Jorge Riechmann

Este artículo estudia la influencia que ejerce la poesía de René Char en la obra literaria de Jorge Riechmann. Este investigación argumenta que, más allá las numerosas citas y referencias de los poemas de Char que Riechmann utiliza en su obra, la poesía de René Char resulta imprescindible para comprender la función de la poesía que Riechmann defiende a través de los conceptos “poesía de la conciencia crítica” y “poesía del desconsuelo” bajo los que define se propuesta lírica. Para demostrar esta hipótesis, estudiaré la elaboración de la idea de acción poética, el uso de la dialéctica de contrarios y la función del erotismo en Fureur et mystèrede René Char y en Cántico de la erosióny Cuaderno de Berlínde Jorge Riechmann.

Osiris, Crossing, and: Where My Father Returns to Visit My Mother as a Crow

Osiris, Crossing, and: Where My Father Returns to Visit My Mother as a Crow Fabienne Josaphat (bio) Osiris, Crossing Climb in this bed with me—it is much cooler on this side of the river,My father says, as if the hospital bed he has lied onfor days is now a boat, as if we are crossing the Nileand he is Osiris. He and I both standin this boat, gliding on the surfaceto the mouth of the underworld.It's hot, he says. Aren't you?Climb in here with me. It's cooler.I use the open hospital gownand fan the flames off, but the heatis already in a place I cannot see,in his head, under the scalp,and yet I keep fanning until he says,ça va, c'est bon, until he has arrived,although I don't know it yet, into a gardenof wide mango trees and papaya,into the pooled water of rice paddiesand ceibas, where the ylang-ylangsheds fragrance off the hem of night's skirt,and he is already in the shade. Where My Father Returns to Visit My Mother as a Crow The nurse is disconnecting the pump from my mother's port.I lift my eyes to the window just in time to see my father on the sill,his feathers as black as his eyes, blue black. Behind him,the palm fronds flirt with a blue March sky.Look, I say. A raven. The nurse says oh, what?I say, a crow! And before we can debate the difference between ravensand crows, she brings up a woodpecker. My mother chews ginger candy.The bird considers what remains of her balding head, the hair fineand wispy, her skin a yellow parchment. Woodpeckers tap at the windowsometimes, the nurse says. But what do they have to do with anything,what with all their incessant drilling and tapping, their obsession with food?My mother spits out the ginger candy. I wrap it in paper, an offeringto no god. I know better, I think, and watch my father fly off outside,as quickly as he'd arrived, and land nearby, patiently waiting. [End Page 56] Fabienne Josaphat Fabienne Josaphat is the author of Dancing in the Baron's Shadow (Unnamed, 2016). Her essay, "Summer is an Empty House," received a Notable Essays mention in Best American Essays 2016. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been featured in The Master's Review, Grist Journal, The New Engagement, Hinchas de Poesia, Off the Coast Journal, and The Caribbean Writer, as well as in Eight Miami Poets, a Jai-Alai Books poetry anthology. Copyright © 2020 Fabienne Josaphat

Ana Luísa Amaral Marinela FreitasDo corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa

Reviews 292 known song (“Sedia-m’eu na ermida de Sam Simion”)’ (p. 169). In a recent text, published in the magazine A Virada — Literatura e Crítica , I discuss the annotation in poetry (cf. ‘O ar lisbonudo e a poesia’). I believe that Sofia de Sousa Silva wisely knew how to transform the exercise of annotating Adília Lopes into a final essay, and that her lesson can be followed by future editors and translators. Here’s my balance is, in short, an anthology that reveals a part of almost all the books of a great author and that elegantly illuminates her verses. Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas (eds), Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa (Porto: Assírio & Alvim, 2018). 344 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ana Filipa Prata (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa brings an entirely new perspective on Portuguese poetry of the twentieth century (and the first two decades of the twenty-first). Published by Assírio & Alvim, this anthology is organized and presented by Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas, who have selected more than one hundred poems, by more than forty authors, all about the representation of non-normative identities. It invites us therefore to consider new interpretations for well-known poems and to read recent compositions within this specific framework and in dialogue with the tradition. This book goes beyond the traditional reception of poetic topoi such as love and desire, and stands out for its commitment to subaltern identities and alternative gender performances, as Amaral and Freitas emphasize in their introduction. This is a very significant issue indeed, and it can be considered one of the virtues of the publication, but it is not totally new. This book appeared in 2018 in the wake of the censored editorial project Antologia de Poesia Portuguesa Erótica e Satírica, organized by Natália Correia and published in 1966. We are clearly dealing here with different temporal and critical scopes: notions of identity, love and eroticism have changed over time. However, it is very interesting to note that both anthologies share similar social, political and poetic concerns. If identifying deviant experiences of love or groundbreaking discourses on the representation of the self in literature was revolutionary in the 1960s, it is nowadays still urgent and mandatory. Do corpo: outras habitações opens with Mário de Sá Carneiro’s ‘Feminina’ and closes with Golgona Anghel’s ‘Vocês até podem não concordar com tudo isto’ [You may not even agree with all of this]. Time and space between both poems become the stage for poetical expressions that release identities and bodies from subservience and domination. The first poem, ‘Feminina’, introduces main topics such as gender role play, identity as performance, eroticism and the female body; these are enunciated by a male subject who desires to be a woman: ‘Eu queria ser mulher...’ [I wanted to be a woman...]. One century later, Anghel’s Reviews 293 poem testifies to a contemporary generation of women who, not without violence, subverted conventions and raised their voices intending to be treated as equals. Good stories are for sale where reality is insufficient. This anthology draws on the creation of a female poetic tradition and, at the same time, on the need to resist conventions. It creates a place for enunciation, while emphasizing the process and not necessarily the product, since subjects continuously strive to be subjects, as suggested in Ana Hatherly’s verses, quoted in the introduction: ‘A gente | só é dominada por essa gente | quando não sabe que é gente’ [We people, | we are only dominated by those people | when we don’t recognize ourselves as people]. There are also several male poets or male fictional voices who contribute to place ‘num plano justo | e claro | uma razão’ [this demand in a fair and clear disposition] (p. 33). António Botto, Pedro Homem de Melo, Mário Cesariny, Armando Silva Carvalho or even Boaventura Sousa Santos, among others, all defy conventional masculinity and/or sexuality. Nevertheless, we still can count (fortunately) many more women than men within...

Herberto Helder e Ernesto Cardenal, bons vizinhos e bons aliados

Apesar de Herberto Helder e Ernesto Cardenal poderem ser considerados dois poetas irreverentes dis­tintos, há, no entanto, algo que os une: o interesse pela poesia primitiva, de povos e tribos indígenas, de culturas ancestrais, e a concepção de tradução dessa mesma poesia. E isto é visível, essencialmente, quer nos Poemas Mudados para Português, de Herberto Helder, quer na Antología de Poesía Primitiva, de Ernesto Cardenal. Sendo assim, a partir de uma abordagem comparativa, pretende-se demonstrar que nestes dois poetas se conseguem encontrar afinidades peculiares que os tornam não só bons vizinhos, como também bons aliados.

“El nudo matrimonial que con vos, mi señora, me ha hecho uno”: el curioso carácter doméstico/conyugal de la poesía amorosa de Eugenio de Salazar

Este artículo se enfoca en la poesía amorosa de Eugenio de Salazar (1530-1602), toda la cual —a lo largo de los 180 folios de la primera parte de su Silva de poesía— está dedicada a su esposa, doña Catalina Carrillo. Se muestra que esto representa una desviación significativa del modelo petrarquista, en el que la musa/amada es, fundamentalmente, una figura inalcanzable, y se considera la manera en que el carácter doméstico/conyugal de su poesía le permite al autor introducir ingeniosas variaciones en el género amoroso-cortesano. Específicamente, se analizan dos series poéticas de la primera parte de la Silva con el fin de ejemplificar la gran originalidad que caracteriza el tratamiento por parte de Salazar de temas convencionales en la poesía amatoria de corte petrarquista.

Tradução de poesia e performance: “Still I Rise”, de Maya Angelou

Resumo: Neste artigo, realizo uma avaliacao de cinco traducoes para o portugues brasileiro do poema “Still I Rise” da escritora afro-americana Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Em seguida, e com base nessa critica, apresento e discuto o poema em minha traducao, cujo objetivo principal foi produzir um texto para performance, isto e, que funcionasse oralmente em portugues. Essa escolha foi motivada por dois fatores: 1) esse e um dos poemas mais conhecidos de Angelou e foi bastante declamado pela propria autora em diversas ocasioes, e 2) a poesia de Angelou e marcada pela tradicao afro-americana de literatura oral e, portanto, o poema adquire uma outra dimensao estetica quando performado. Tanto os meus comentarios criticos sobre as traducoes publicadas quanto a minha traducao filiam-se a proposta de Paulo Henriques Britto (2002) sobre uma avaliacao mais objetiva de traducao de poesia.

La poesía española e hispanoamericana en "Quaderns de poesia" (1935-1936): una revista catalana “antilocal, extrapatriótica, universal”

This article’s main aim is to catalogueand order the whole amount of collaborations of Spanish and Latin American poets who published their works in the Catalan magazine Quaderns de poesia. At the same time we analyze the magazine’s evolution and the links between its editors and all these poets. Through a close comparison, we intend to prove that the Spanish and Latin American poems from Quaderns written by Salinas, Garcia Lorca, Juan Ramon, Gabriela Mistral, Altolaguirre y Moreno Villa were firstly published in the magazine from Barcelona.

Festival de Poesía y Música PM: New Ways of Making Silence

Translated by Jason WeissIf I were to write a press release, it would start more or less like this: “The third edition of the Festival de Poesia y Musica PM has just concluded with great success. I...

Modernismos alternativos: Joan Brossa e o conceito de “participação semântica” de Hélio Oiticica

Action and transit between languages can be thought in a different perspective from the hegemonic narrative of Western art history, considering the works of Brossa, especially the Suites de Poesia Visual (1959 - 1969), and the concept of semantic participation of Helio Oiticica, mainly seen in the work Tropicalia (1967). From the point of view of these two objects, this paper aims to analyze the unique ways in which word and image are related, both in the work of Brossa here focused and in the context of Brazilian art in the same period. These contexts of alternative modernism point to a particular situation where transgression is at the same time the tradition. This article also pursues the different approaches of the relation between word and image, which force a change in the axis of the hegemonic narrative.

Two Catalan Poems

POETRY Two Catalan Poems by Gemma Gorga La bona educació L’estiu que complia set anys li van regalar un estoig de fusta amb un llapis i una goma. El llapis, perquè en rosegués la mina fins a trobar el nervi vague de la paraula. La goma, per esborrar la paraula abans de dir-la. El Sentit del Creixement Flors i barrets i ungles i portes creixen enfora. Si mai creixen endins és perforant el túnel terrós del dolor. Un dolor que coneixen coves i arrels i orelles i dones, que han après a créixer endins. Good Manners The summer she turned seven they gave her a wooden pencil case with a pencil and eraser. The pencil, so she could gnaw the lead until she found the vagus nerve of the word. The eraser, to erase the word before she could say it. Editorial note: From Mur, copyright © 2015 by Gemma Gorga. From the manuscript Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga, English translation copyright © 2019 by Sharon Dolin. PHOTO: M. MAGGS/PIXABAY 22 WLT SUMMER 2019 Direction of Growth Flowers hats fingernails and doors grow outward. If they ever grew inward earth’s tunnel would be pierced with pain. A pain known by caves roots ears and women who have learned how to grow inward. Translations from the Catalan By Sharon Dolin Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968, where she is a professor of medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature. Author of six collections of poetry, her most recent volume is Mur (2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana. Sharon Dolin (sharondolin. com) is the author of six poetry collections. She received grants from PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull for her translation of Gorga’s prose poems, Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019). She lives in New York City and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona each June. SUMMER READS Daniel Simon’s Summer Reads Longing for some poets’ words—perhaps with an activist edge—to accompany him in the months ahead, Editor in Chief Daniel Simon envisions some quiet, sunny mornings with three recent books. Gabeba Baderoon The History of Intimacy: Poems Kwela Books In South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of poems, the predominance of English jostles against Afrikaans, Xhosa, Arabic , and such Cape Malay expressions as “Daai is doenya se goete” (these are only earthly things). This phrase, spoken by Baderoon’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated, appears in the poem “No Name,” which recounts the erasure—both legal and cultural—of the author’s Muslim family while growing up on the Cape in the apartheid era of the 1970s and ’80s. Whether looking at black-and-white family photos in “Focal Length” or recalling the “ordinary tragedy” of housing discrimination in “The Flats,” the speaker in Baderoon’s poems lingers on the often-jagged edge of intimacy, all the while insisting that she belongs “on this earth.” Billy Bragg The Three Dimensions of Freedom Faber Social From Faber’s description of the book: “In this short and vital polemic, Billy Bragg argues that to protect ourselves from encroaching tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom.” Liberty, equality . . . accountability? If anyone can diagnose “the crisis of accountability in Western democracies” in a novel and interesting way, it must be Billy Bragg. C. D. Wright Casting Deep Shade: An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co. Photographs by Denny Moers Copper Canyon In an email, Frank Paino described this book to me: “Though not overtly a book on climate change, Casting Deep Shade invokes the magnificence of beech trees as emblematic of all we stand to lose in our hell-bent lurch toward destruction. Her quirky, memorable poems beg us: Listen.” In hours of darkness, I often recall one of my favorite lines by the late C. D. Wright (1949– 2016): “draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on...

“Non potest auctoritatem habere sermo qui non iuvatur exemplo”. Las fuentes del Examen del Antídoto de Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, abad de Rute

El presente artículo pasa revista a las fuentes del Examen del Antídoto o Apología por las Soledades de don Luis de Góngora contra el autor del Antídoto (1617), defensa erudita de las silvas del racionero compuesta por Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, al objeto de responder a los ataques del Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las Soledades (1615) de Juan de Jáuregui. Con el propósito de reconstruir la biblioteca del abad de Rute, identificando –siempre que resulte posible– las ediciones cotejadas por el mismo clérigo, presentaré primero su modus operandi y, para mantener cierto orden, dividiré el acervo librario del que se valió para la redacción del Examen en dos secciones principales, que reúnen, respectivamente, textos de la tradición grecolatina y obras de clásicos modernos.

Lucidez poética em Ave, Palavra, de Guimarães Rosa

O presente trabalho propõe uma leitura de composições poéticas de João Guimarães Rosa publicadas no livro híbrido Ave, Palavra (1970). Partimos da perspectiva de que os poemas rosianos filiam-se ao que Octavio Paz (1993) denominou de “poesia de convergência”, herança do diálogo entre dois extremos advindos da produção romântica, a analogia e a ironia. Atendo-nos à tendência nomeada como ironia, destacamos, dentre as produções do referido livro, quatro composições que promovem a sondagem da criação literária. Como método de análise, serão feitas aproximações dos poemas com outras obras do autor e com demais textos de Guimarães Rosa que sondam o fazer literário, como a entrevista dada pelo artista a Günter Lorenz (1973), as correspondências trocadas com seu tradutor italiano Edoardo Bizzarri (1980) e trechos de prefácios que compõem Tutameia (ROSA, 1976). A leitura, portanto, busca analisar como tais questões que inquietaram Rosa se realizam em suas composições em verso, ora a partir de narrativas embrionárias, alegóricas, ora valendo-se de composições de tom mais lírico, trazendo à tona imagens recorrentes em suas produções, evidenciando que suas poesias não são um mero acidente, mas compõem o projeto estético do autor.

El traje nuevo del emperador: endogamia, nepotismo, clientelismo, ídolos y mitos en la trastienda de la poesía española contemporánea

La poesía está desnuda, siempre lo estuvo, a pesar de su corte de aduladores que nos dicen que solo se engalana con los más absurdos ropajes de su conveniencia. La extensa red de silencios, complicidades y favores que recubren su visibilidad, convertida en producto cultural de las élites, ha hecho imposible la evidencia: la poesía está desnuda y su historia tiene más que ver con la exclusión y el sectarismo, que con el rigor crítico e histórico. Mientras siga en manos de las élites intelectuales, ellas mismas producto de un nepotismo y un clientelismo servil y endogámico, mientras siga disuelta entre los mitos que esa misma élite intelectual sostiene, y mientras siga presa de una investigación crítica perezosa, enrocada en el precedente, la cita y la reproducción de las tesis de los facultados para favorecer la promoción discipular y académica, nunca sabremos qué es lo que ha pasado en nuestras letras. La historia quedará escrita como hasta ahora en función de mandarinatos, redes clientelares muy disciplinadas que tejen auténticas tramas de control e influencia institucional, políticas editoriales y operaciones de promoción de determinados relatos en consonancia con el discurso dominante y, de paso, silencian o barren toda disidencia, toda oposición. Sobre esta contradicción fundamental, la desnudez de la poesía y el exceso de vestuario producido por los que han querido agostarla a su gusto, se ha construido la historia de la poesía española contemporánea. Juicios que defienden los intereses de la familia o la tendencia, constituyendo una especie de egoísmo gregario que sólo protege sus intereses de grupo; unido, paradójicamente, a un fuerte individualismo y egocentrismo a la hora de juzgar la realidad no como lo que es, sino como a uno le parece que es, en tanto guerra por el significado y el control de la palabra, de cara a establecer un discurso totalitario y hegemónico, y la ignorancia de la ideología como un serio obstáculo para interpretar la realidad en la medida que la ideología construye lo real. Sobre estos pilares se construye hoy la poesía española y se impide el conocimiento liberador, pero los mitos y los ídolos no son obstáculos insalvables, más si, a cambio, lo que proponemos es una solución reactiva a unas prácticas amorales y prepotentes.