poetical narratives / narrativas poéticas

Realizamos em 20/10/2024, na Feira do Livro de Belgrado, o lançamento do livro Himne Sveta (Hinário do Mundo) e o debate "Narrativas poéticas", com Daria Lednova apresentando a arte da capa, e com duas grandes poetas sérvias, Milica Spadjer e Mirjana Frau Gardinovacki. Compartilho o texto da minha intervenção e agradeço a todos pela presença. O debate continua no dia 8 de novembro, 18h, no KC Dordol!

On October 20, 2024, we have launched, during the Belgrade Book Fair, the book Himne Sveta (Hymnal of the World) and we have hold a debate on "Poetic Narratives", with Daria Lednova presenting the cover art, and two great Serbian poets, Milica Spadjer and Mirjana Frau Gardinovacki. I am sharing the text of my intervention and I thank everyone for attending. The debate will continue on November 8, at 6 pm, at KC Dordol!

The Book of Travels -  Poetical narratives (Part I)

Belgrade Book Fair – 20th October

With Milica Spadjer and Mirjana Gardinovacki

“I say goodbye to the blind men in the castle and I go

on foot until I find a path, a place, for what I am.”

Nando Reis, Titãs

Good afternoon to all readers, and writers, and poets, and those who are passionate about literature, poetry, and books. I’m very much honoured to present you this new book, Himne Sveta, Hymnary of the World, a Book of Travels. I’m very much thankful to Neva Saravjia, from Cigoja, and to Lijljana Soskic, of the Book Fair, for the opportunity of presenting my first  book in Serbian. Thanks to all of you attending this event. This is a book about being on the road, and for this debate I have had the pleasure to invite to this short debate Milica Spadjer, the most sensitive and pure-hearted poetess I have met in Belgrade, and Mirjana Gardinovacki, from Novi Sad, whose poetry has a special place for sensuality, something that we are missing nowadays, in the vortex of a productive routine in our lives.

I understand that talking about writing is a risky business, as we might fall a grave sin, the attempt of trying to find theories, and explanation for poetry. Very often those attemps empty an artistical construction, bringing down its multiple significances and feelings that depend on the experience of each reader, closing our mind to a new meaning that may be unexpected. Susan Sontag once said that “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”. And she goes further: “Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world”…

So, I guess I’m safe enough to propose my colleagues that we should not analyse the content of this new book, but rather have it as a starting point and excuse to dream our new landscapes, and visions about poetry.

How could I relate with Serbian writers? I have heard of the works of Jelena Dimitrijević, also a traveller and writer, although I still expect to access her writings when I advance with my Serbian language knowledge. But I cannot stop thinking that Jelena Dimitrijević’s approach to writing while travelling produced more interesting knowledge for the purpose of register, by other means. Concerning utopic places, I analysed the poem “Sumatra”, of Crnjanski, before writing Itaobi, a place where I would recover; and Milica suggested me to include Lalic’s poem as a foreword.  This poem would deserve a debate just for itself, because it is the lost ark keeping the sacred relationship between place and memory. It keeps the things that make a place exist in our mind, things forgotten that we take for granted, but somehow have built this window different from another window, a wall different from another wall... Lalic’s Mesta Koja Volimo is such a treasure! Maybe Milica wants to share with us what she found more interesting in Lalic’s verses.

Now: I tried to describe these villages and places where I have been, but by no means I would have expected to exhaust the experience of travelling by limiting what I found in them. That would have been an inglorious waste of time, being a tourist guide repeating the events that sounded more relevant, or an ethnographic scholar discoveries about repeating patterns in different societies… But of course, at some point I bring in these writings what made me think more familiar as belonging to those cities, and to the people to and fro, passing by. Do we think correctly when we consider that the poetical narrative is too subjective to be taken as a report of different places, different times, and different peoples? Or can poetry find out venues all those places have deep in?

I shall explain to your that this Book of Travels was made a bit in a hurry to attend ProseFest – I was perusing my writings, and I could only find poetry, no prose, a requisite for participation in ProseFest. Mirjana wanted Paulo Coelho, but he could not attend our invitation to ProseFest, as he is not travelling anymore. And since we did not find resources to bring a Brazilian writer before next year, I offered her this book: I have promised Mirjana that I would not let her down. And then I found Neva, definitely a fairy bookmaker: she published it in less than a week.

But Mirjana, did I cheat, by offering you a book of prose made of poetical lines? You see, there’s a linear and continuous flow of sentences, sometimes making use of the rhyme, but are those aspects enough for making a book of prose? And then we were surprised that this year’s Prosefest gave a lot of attention for debating the large gray area among different genres of writing. It’s inevitable that in an interesting book of prose we may find some pearls made of poetry. But I must confess to you that I tried to make poetry fit a prose structure.  Then, I sold to you as a prose book… But you might notice that some of those short texts about cities could actually be poems full of rhymes, if displayed line by line, with pauses.

In this context, Thomas Howard (1935-2020), Professor Emeritus of English at St. John’s Seminary and PhD in Literature by NYU, in the lecture titled “A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, from the Gordon College YouTube channel, said that T. S. Eliot’s that poetry should be difficult. He explains T. S. Eliot felt that by the time we get to the 20th Century, poets have been deprived of the luxury of writing rhymed and rhythmic poetry. The rhymes producing that feeling that it would lull us into a torpor. (…) So his technique is blunt, it’s stark, it’s flat, it’s prosaic, it’s like reading prose, except it is a prose brought to its almost sublime purity”.

I tend to share with T. S. Eliot the sense that rhyme is a luxury sometimes a poet might need, for bringing the reader to this state of mind where you can harvest beauty in the chest. Torpor from using, let’s say, art glasses. Not only rhyme, though. Melody in words is necessary for seeing the world bearing the poet’s feelings. Pablo Neruda, maybe our greatest poet in South America, once said his sonnets were made of wood, they had hollow cracks. He regretted he could not achieve the delicate crystal sound, the material of sonnets made with rhyming ends. This book I wrote also bearing in mind that rhyme is desirable, although you may find that inner places I visited have another melody, without rhyme. Also one text about Brasilia, as you know, capital of Brazil, starts with rhymes, trying to achieve this purity we find in T. S. Eliot, but then on purpose I change along the way, as the city grows on the inside. As we walk the path of those cities, we may find the sound of crystal buildings, and as turn to our inner world and spaces, we find meat, organic substance, something structured with fluid and more natural writing, disappointment, inertia, resignation. I intended in my dreams that those inner places that grown and recoil to have walls and buildings made of flesh. Some of the places I visited are actually lost altars, the dialogues of Plato, and a book attributed to King Solomon: from those philosophical mountains I addressed someone I loved.

And from that another point I would like to bring for discussion for my colleagues poets, beyond the value of the rhyme, and beyond the questioning of a format that might be fitting a genre either of prose or of poetry, or if the short verse and pauses build poetry with a different melody. Is it something else that makes a text poetical, is it the content?

You might say that prose depends on narration. And a narration needs that something might already have happened, or that something is expected to happen, to be disclosed by a storyteller, first or third person. In narration, someone knows something that you don’t as a reader, something that keeps you interested and moving forward in the reading.

But poetry seems to me much more the direct transposition of the event, of a feeling, of a promenade, of a place, into the poetical writing of the author, without the instrument of an order of beginning, middle, and end, without a climax, or catharsis in a tragedy, without the many traditional or innovating structures that might make a story interesting. Sometimes, there seems to be no gap of knowledge between the poet and the reader – does poetry makes us equals?

But then how do we reach in poetry revelation? Does poetry envisages the future, bringing to present time all times?

I had this impression when I first listened to a Serbian playing the gusle. The Serbian gusle player sang directly from his heart. There was no barrier between his heart and ours, his singing reached us directly. I thought it really impressive, as an enchantment. All your eyes were fixed upon his singing, as you were under a kind of magical binding… Also, I had this same impression when I had first read the poems of Milica and Mirijana translated from Serbian. And then, well, thinking about what makes poetry sounding in our ears, it seems to me that even if words are simple and rhymes are improvised, or even absent, that doesn’t matter. What makes a poem sound distinct to us is the passion and feeling delivered freshly from the soul of the writer. Poetry then is a fresh material, something we read from the poet’s heart in the first hand, the brute, rough feeling or event or landscape delivered as it is born in the poet’s chest. While on the other hand, the prose narrative takes its time to develop, to unfold, and might have been calculated many times by the writer, with time to include subterfuges to finally dazzle the reader, or leave him at another place away from where he began to read.

I do not mean with that, of course, that poetry would not be a polished result as well, made of many attempts and errors, and re-writings… But I have the impression that the poetical narrative is one that happens while it is being declaimed, it happens in this misterious meeting between the reader and the poet.

Now when I listen that poetry is this, or that, I confess to you I feel a bit embarrassed. Describing is limiting the world we might discover. But Catherine Pickstock recently delivered a lecture at Westminster Abbey, titled “The Poetics of life: life as Poetry” that looked very much interesting to me. She said “Poetry is directly situated in the context of real life. It throws us right into the storm. It is the very reverse of the escapist, because it is always a matter of real, lived, apostrophe, address, confrontation with the real (…) Even if it addresses no one in particular, it is a disclosure of the living reality of the poem and of the poet. And seeks its ideal audience, the reader who can resonate with the poet’s experience in a kind of a shared subjectivity. Poetry, as so many poets have insisted, has the task of purifying the language of the tribe”. She concludes that poetry’s task is “renewing language gone stale, unconcealing its methaphoric and expressive basis, overlain by mercantile usage, restoring words as icons and gods, (…) rather than cogs, coins, or mathesis.” 

Thus, is that the purpose of the registration of landscapes and feelings, of this living reality? I have no answer for the purpose of writing and registration by means of a poetical narrative, so I leave the question for my colleagues, as I suspect that no poet thinks first about purifying language, or about his and her most high mission of saving the language of the tribe, when he or she is writing. It might be a result, I agree, of a good poetry, the selection of the purest sounds, the achievement of erudition, the discoveries of treasures in the language. But isn’t a certain search for the truth, for something beyond ourselves, or in ourselves, and beyond our language, the impetus that drives us into poetics, into finding out and building new a poetical world? I thought first of places I would like to invite those I loved.    

Then if I understand, I have written addressing someone: my favourite muse – how do you say muse, when it’s a man you admire? Maybe Adonis? The one who wakes up the love in Aphrodite and Persephone, the woman in her utmost and in her hell, respectively? Sometimes I was addressing my children. Sometimes addressing you, my friends, especially those written in Serbia, trying to reason with you in spirit what I found more interesting.  Sometimes I draw in the lines the aspects of the people I love: I would have enjoyed immortalizing them. Maybe I was afraid of losing sight of them, and I needed to certify that they could be forever alive and at my reach, although just in the soul of a poem. Some of these poems are an attempt of immortalizing the people I love, describing them as cities where I was strolling when thinking about them.

And perhaps walking on a place one could find a hidden word, or idea, some illumination for the day, some new perspective? And as certain places keep trees, and flowers, and ancient buildings, couldn’t they keep verses and words someone left there in their landscapes? After so many people and centuries leaved an impression on them…Isn’t the poet always a traveller, an explorer? I’d love to listen to Milica and her travelling to the monasteries in the Kosovo, what she found there. And to Mirjana, as she delights into the path of love, if love can be a place full of intricacies as well.

Unfortunately, we have not had enough time to include all cities, places, and people I wrote about, and maybe for a next volume. I have heard from you that Jovan Tatic made a good achievement, when translating my manuscripts in Portuguese. And I would certainly add a praise for him and for Jasmina, the translators, those heroes who are the correct recipients for the compliments.

But does a poetical text have a soul, and can it keep a soul, or at least a part of it? To sum up. What’s the final purpose of poetry, the singularity it keeps, even when it’s written to fit the format of prose, then? Does the poet write because he needs someone to resonate and share his subjectivity? But can’t this attempt of reaching out someone be present in any writing, as a diary, an autobiography, or a novel? Is it poetry all about having at our reach and in our hands the good feelings some place or someone inspired on us? Is it about finding out purpose itself, when writing? As I do not have an answer, I leave it to Milica and Mirjana, to whom I am so grateful for attending this invitation. I enjoy the idea to use this book as an excuse to find out more about how you write your poetry and for sharing our experiences.

Both Milica and Mirjana took a part in me when I was writing this book, on the inside you were animating me to finish it...  And I would very much appreciate your criticism – as we might see, you both prepared kind words to react to this first book for the Serbian public, in the back cover. But now, as we are in the next stage of digestion, I would love you to introduce also some critics, as a necessary feedback for building my next book. Tell me, Milica, Mirjana, do you think at some point I have left the reader lost somewhere in the places I wandered? Thank you again for your friendship, and the floor is with you.

I seize the opportunity also to invite your for a second part of this debate, with Professors Ana Kuzmanic and  Marijana Jelisavcic Karanovic, in KC Dorcol, on the November 8th, 6 o’clock. There we are going to move further into Travellers and Poets, talking about the “homo viator” in the works of other Brazilian authors. Thank you very much!