Welcome to Portuguese poetry - April 2006

18 januari 2006 Times have changed, and the Portuguese, at least in the cultural sphere, have been gaining self-confidence. This is particularly noticeable in poetry. A number of poets who emerged in the 1990s have turned out to be astute literary critics, and no sooner had the decade closed than they began to speak about the 1990s generation of Portuguese poets as a phenomenon to be contended with. This newfound pride and self-respect is refreshing, but what exactly is this phenomenon? What distinguishes these news poets and makes them worth our attention?

In 2002 one of these younger poet-critics, Manuel de Freitas, published an anthology of work by nine emerging poets polemically titled Poetas sem Qualidades (Poets without Qualities). This doesn’t exactly sound promising. Reading the preface, we discover that what the editor objects to are traditionally “poetic” qualities such as timelessness, a cultivated melancholy, an elevated diction, an aura. He favors poetry that breaks with all that, being completely rooted in the time when it’s written. This raises several questions: 1) Would this sort of poetry have any interest other than historical once the time it’s connected to passes? 2) How interesting can it be even during its own time? 3) If it has no specifically poetic qualities, then what makes it poetry?

The work of Ana Paula Inácio (b. 1966), one of the poets featured in Poetas sem Qualidades, “bursts forth [ . . . ] at the antipodes of perfection (whatever that is),” writes the anthology’s editor, who appreciates her “banalizing discourse” that eschews sentimentality and rhetorical ploys. Of the three Portuguese poets presented this time around, she is the one whose work might strike certain readers as ‘slight’, in the sense of unambitious, thematically restricted, formally plain and simple. Others, on the contrary, will welcome her poetry’s complete lack of pretension and be attracted to a certain strangeness, a mystery, which doesn’t waft in sublime heights projected by her verses but is rooted in their earthy directness.

Rui Coias, also born in 1966, may be accused of having traditional poetic qualities, including some that have fallen out of fashion. These days poems written in Portugal – even when rhetorical, sentimental and lyrically rapturous – generally consist of a rather limited number of short verses written in straightforward language. Coias is not afraid of longer poems (in fact the ones presented here are among his shorter ones) with lengthy verses and a relatively complex syntax. His poems are lyrical and employ rhetorical devices, but not in a facile manner. They avoid the merely pretty and scorn the notion of poetry as a set of well-rounded verses, as proven by verses ending in words such as ‘the’ or ‘that’.

Luís Quintais, born in 1968, would also not make it into the “poets without qualities” club. His poems have an often suspiciously timeless quality, and go so far as to directly exhort the reader. Much of his work is a meditation on the nature and possibilities of poetry, or of language itself, and the big ideas – life and death, being and not-being, meaning, the nature of time – are prominent. Of the three poets in the present offering from Portugal, Quintais is the one most obviously situated in a tradition that conceives of art as artifice – as the construction of an alternate reality with value and validity in its own right. {id="4638" title="Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?"}