Article
Welcome to Portuguese poetry - October 2005
January 18, 2006
There was no poetic program uniting the Poesia 61 poets, let alone that group with Ruy Belo and Herberto Helder, and mere coincidence may be responsible for so many important voices having emerged around the same time. What arguably does unite (loosely) all these poets may be precisely those two circumstances: the lack of a poetic ideology and their emergence at that particular, critical juncture in Portuguese literary history. As explained in the January 2005 {id="4633" title="editorial"}, Neo-Realism was the politically correct response to the oppressive regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (who became a de facto dictator in 1932). Neo-Realism, with its incessant focus on social injustice presented in quasi-pamphleteering fashion (the best writers of the school, such as Carlos de Oliveira in his novels, had a more complex vision), became tediously redundant and was especially disastrous in poetry, which by its nature is apt to shrivel when submitted to a program, political or otherwise. Cinema, situated at a far artistic remove from poetry, is the medium where Neo-Realism (in Italy) was perhaps most successful.
One of the reactions to Portuguese Neo-Realism was {id="4635" title="Surrealism"}, which we took up last quarter. Several of the 1961 poets – Luiza Neto Jorge to a certain extent, and especially Herberto Helder – were clearly influenced by the Surrealists, but on the whole their poetry was a return to, well, poetry. The Surrealists, and chief among them {id="4653" title="Mário Cesariny"}, wanted to get beyond literature. They had a guiding ideal, which was liberation from all restraints, including those imposed by governments and social convention but also those inherent to human thought itself. They privileged automatic processes of creation to gain, if possible, direct access to the unconscious, but the making of poetry – whatever the method – was only a means to their ultimate goal: absolute freedom. The 1961 poets, however diverse among themselves, were concerned about poetry for its own sake, such that the poetic text was no longer a pretext for communicating a message (Neo-Realism) nor a stepping stone on the way to a utopian world of total freedom.
Following somewhat in the steps of {id="4645" title="Carlos de Oliveira"} (a Neo-Realist in much of his prose but a ‘micro-realist’ in his poetry), the 1961 poets tended to fracture, fragment and rearrange text, in order to make words mean something other than what they signify in their usual syntactical formulations. This is especially evident in Luiza Neto Jorge’s poetry. The same cannot be said of Ruy Belo’s work, though he does try to extract surplus meaning from the phonic properties of words (‘A Way to Say Farewell’), and his poems are likewise conceived as verbal objects. But whereas he immortalizes his experiences (which are often the ‘experience’ of remembering past experiences) by converting them into the verbal constructs that are his poems, a Luiza Neto Jorge poem is itself the experience, or the two things become inextricably linked, and what lives on is the poem-experience, not a pre-existing experience of the poet that her poem has heightened and memorialized. To put it another way: a Ruy Belo poem can be paraphrased, though it would cease to be a poem; a Luiza Neto Jorge poem cannot take any other shape. {id="4638" title="Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?"}
Ruy Belo (1933-1978) and Luiza Neto Jorge (1939-1989), two of the leading figures of the 1961 Generation of Portuguese poets, seem to have little in common besides the fact they lived in the same period and died relatively young. The first of the two is sometimes called a religious poet, which is misleading though true insofar as he seeks transcendence. The second is correctly considered an erotic poet, although there’s nothing sexually arousing about her poetry, which isn’t visually but verbally sexual, informed by the language of the body and the ‘logic’ of erotic behavior (in fact an antilogic, obeying desire and instinct rather than the laws of reason).
As different as these two poetries are, we may wonder, in the first place, if it makes sense to put them in the same basket, namely the ‘1961 Generation’, a term that many critics would object to. No one doubts that 1961 was a crucial year for Portuguese poetry in terms of production. It was the year Ruy Belo and {id="4650" title="Herberto Helder"} – the two greatest poets to emerge in that decade – published their first full-fledged books. And it was the year that saw the publication of Poesia 61, a series of five chapbooks by five young poets in Lisbon: Maria Teresa Horta (1937), {id="4648" title="Fiama Hasse Brandão"} (1938), Casimiro de Brito (1938), Luiza Neto Jorge and Gastão Cruz (1941). Most of the five had one or another previous publication, but it was this joint venture that put them on the literary map. The question is: do these seven poets make a ‘generation’ in any other sense than chronological?There was no poetic program uniting the Poesia 61 poets, let alone that group with Ruy Belo and Herberto Helder, and mere coincidence may be responsible for so many important voices having emerged around the same time. What arguably does unite (loosely) all these poets may be precisely those two circumstances: the lack of a poetic ideology and their emergence at that particular, critical juncture in Portuguese literary history. As explained in the January 2005 {id="4633" title="editorial"}, Neo-Realism was the politically correct response to the oppressive regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (who became a de facto dictator in 1932). Neo-Realism, with its incessant focus on social injustice presented in quasi-pamphleteering fashion (the best writers of the school, such as Carlos de Oliveira in his novels, had a more complex vision), became tediously redundant and was especially disastrous in poetry, which by its nature is apt to shrivel when submitted to a program, political or otherwise. Cinema, situated at a far artistic remove from poetry, is the medium where Neo-Realism (in Italy) was perhaps most successful.
One of the reactions to Portuguese Neo-Realism was {id="4635" title="Surrealism"}, which we took up last quarter. Several of the 1961 poets – Luiza Neto Jorge to a certain extent, and especially Herberto Helder – were clearly influenced by the Surrealists, but on the whole their poetry was a return to, well, poetry. The Surrealists, and chief among them {id="4653" title="Mário Cesariny"}, wanted to get beyond literature. They had a guiding ideal, which was liberation from all restraints, including those imposed by governments and social convention but also those inherent to human thought itself. They privileged automatic processes of creation to gain, if possible, direct access to the unconscious, but the making of poetry – whatever the method – was only a means to their ultimate goal: absolute freedom. The 1961 poets, however diverse among themselves, were concerned about poetry for its own sake, such that the poetic text was no longer a pretext for communicating a message (Neo-Realism) nor a stepping stone on the way to a utopian world of total freedom.
Following somewhat in the steps of {id="4645" title="Carlos de Oliveira"} (a Neo-Realist in much of his prose but a ‘micro-realist’ in his poetry), the 1961 poets tended to fracture, fragment and rearrange text, in order to make words mean something other than what they signify in their usual syntactical formulations. This is especially evident in Luiza Neto Jorge’s poetry. The same cannot be said of Ruy Belo’s work, though he does try to extract surplus meaning from the phonic properties of words (‘A Way to Say Farewell’), and his poems are likewise conceived as verbal objects. But whereas he immortalizes his experiences (which are often the ‘experience’ of remembering past experiences) by converting them into the verbal constructs that are his poems, a Luiza Neto Jorge poem is itself the experience, or the two things become inextricably linked, and what lives on is the poem-experience, not a pre-existing experience of the poet that her poem has heightened and memorialized. To put it another way: a Ruy Belo poem can be paraphrased, though it would cease to be a poem; a Luiza Neto Jorge poem cannot take any other shape. {id="4638" title="Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?"}
© Richard Zenith
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