Poetry in the time of fires in the sky -

Poetry in the time of fires in the sky

04/10/2024

Culture • Literature

By GUILHERME RODRIGUES*

Considerations on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade

“Each of us has our own piece of Cauê peak.”^[I]

This is the first verse of the poem “Itabira”, part of “Lanterna mágico”, a collection of poems from Drummond’s first book, some poetry, published almost a hundred years ago. This book, as we know, would become a classic, and without a doubt one of the most remarkable works in the Portuguese language, remembered for poems such as “No meio do caminho”, “Poema de sete faces” and “Poema da purificação”. But we cannot forget the rest of his work, the poems that present, for example, the “small town” from which the poet came.

Life in the interior of Minas Gerais and the landscape of the small town is something that runs through the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, some poetry a boitempo, and shaped a certain vision of this writer, who, in truth, lived a good part of his life in capital cities: Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. In any case, his poetry intertwines biographical and sociological data that come from life in the small town with the poetic creation that is so interested, deep down, in the history of Brazil. This verse from “Lanterna mágico” seems ghostly in this sense now.

If any interested party were to visit the small town near Belo Horizonte to find out, after all, what their piece of Cauê peak is, they would be surprised to find that the peak no longer exists — it is now a hole in the ground, completely mined. To begin with, it would be good for the interested party to remember the rest of the poem:

“In the city all made of iron
the horseshoes ring like bells.
The boys go to school.
The men look at the ground.
The English buy the mine.

Alone, at the door of the store, Tutu Caramujo ponders the incomparable defeat.”^[ii]

Itabira is a city made entirely of iron, or rather, as Carlos Drummond de Andrade himself would reformulate it about ten years later in feeling of the world, “ninety percent iron in the sidewalks. / Eighty percent iron in the souls.”^[iii] The small town, as he repeatedly states, had a double history (which, in the end, is the story of the poet himself): once, it was a place of large farms and crops, then sold to the English to extract iron from the heart of the ground.

It was Carlos Drummond de Andrade himself who wrote that “I had gold, I had cattle, I had farms. / Today I am a civil servant.”^[iv]; her childhood is that of a farm, where her father rides horses and her mother stays at home sewing^[v]; a family formed by

“Three boys and two girls
one of which is still in her lap.
The black cook, the mulatto waitress,
the parrot, the cat, the dog,
the fat chickens in the garden
and the woman who takes care of everything.”^[vi]

In other words, a family with a patriarchal structure that originated from a slave system. This is because the poet is always crossed by this past that does not allow for country idylls or bucolic narratives, when confronted with the materiality of exploitation and the horror of slavery – the memory that appears so well in “Canto negro” by clear riddle.^[vii] The man on the farm is, after all, from a slave-owning tradition, something that this writer's poetry never ceased to say, with notable poeticity in “Os bens e o sangue”, also by clear riddle, published after the Second World War, more than twenty years after the poet's first book: “and the boy will grow up somber, and the ancestors in the cemetery / will laugh, they will laugh because the dead do not cry.”^[viii] This little town, therefore, has its history of “mills that dry sand into the finest gold”^[ix]; however, it itself was sold to the English, who dug the city with its iron roots. The defeat of Tutu Caramujo is complete there in clear riddle, when poetry uses the image of dry iron hills covering the sinister valley in the procession of the last slaves.

We could then remember, with the help of Aílton Krenak, that this is yet another stage in the exploitation of the land and the destruction that is being processed by what is called “agriculture”, because “everything has become agriculture. Mining is agriculture, robbery is agriculture, theft from the planet is agriculture, and everything is pop. This calamity that we are experiencing on the planet today can present its bill for agriculture”.^[X]

What seems effective in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry is how these marks of the modern destruction of civilization affect not only the soil, the trees and the immediate conditions of human life; but it has an imperative that must function at the price of its continuity: the formation of a way of understanding the world that must remove from its horizon any possibility of empathy or life together with the same world; in which sensitivity is desensitized towards a narrow-minded and immediate hyper-individualism.

In the public promenade presented in its “Social Note”, in some poetry, the tree already appears only as an “improvement”, but it is only “a prisoner / of colorful advertisements”^[xi], and the cicada that sings a hymn that is not heard by anyone recalls the same condition of the poet who passes through the crowd in fury in modernity. It is the same dilemma that remains in clear riddle, in which it is once again stated that Orpheus is lost in the modern world – poetry, which previously had the power of enchantment that Octavio Paz talks about so much^[xii] has lost its inherent capacity to be revolutionary and to change worlds; and for Carlos Drummond de Andrade it is a chimera that causes him so much uneasiness, as Antonio Candido so aptly pointed out in an essay about the author.^[xiii]

This finished world is the same one in which the lyrical self encounters the mystical greatness of the Machine of the World, like a Dante walking through hell, close to having the poetic revelation of Octavio Paz, but he simply lowers his eyes, “incurious, weary / disdaining to gather the thing offered / that was freely open to my ingenuity.”^[xiv] The world, in the poet's eyes, has gone through this process of desensitization: faced with the most indescribable levels of violence, exploitation and destruction, only a pedagogy of absolute indifference can sustain it, because “if the eyes relearned to cry it would be a second flood.”^[xv]

It is in this sense that Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry reminds us that only a person who is incapable of, upon hearing the sound of a piano, distinguishing what is being played – “they told me it was Chopin” – and, furthermore, being moved by it, can live passing through the world, listening to the piano and only remembering in a depressing way the “bills that needed to be paid”.^[xvi].

The sinister similarity comes to us as we are desensitized even to this poetry, which, instrumentalized, reaches young people only as a way to get past the authority of the school; and the older ones are forgotten about the poetic word, who must, every day, wake up to work and consume the lowest products of the cultural industry while the sky is on fire, the air is unbreathable, water is undrinkable, the rain burns our skin and the spectacle of war kills children in the Gaza Strip. In the new “Orphic Song” of Air Farmer, the eyes are, finally, “unlearned to see”.^[xvii]

Yet there is something that Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry reminds us of – that it still exists, ironically, in a world that tries with all its might to abolish it. This seems to be the request that the lyrical self makes on the afternoon of May, in clear riddle: like those who carry the jaws of the dead, the poet carries the May afternoon, a moment in which another flame appears before the land devastated by fire. The May afternoon asks poetry to continue, and to consume itself “to the point of becoming a sign of beauty on the face of someone / who, precisely, turns his face, and passes by…”^[xviii].

This is the moment, the poet writes, of death; but it is also when one can be reborn in a fictitious spring, created by poetry itself, in a place where love itself has forgotten itself and “hides, like hunted animals”, so that all that remains – a way of better preserving itself – is “a particular sadness, imprinting its seal on the clouds”.

* Guilherme Rodrigues He holds a PhD in Literary Theory from Unicamp's IEL.

Notes

^[I] Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. Complete poetry and prose. 3rd ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Aguilar Publishing Company, 1973, p. 58.

^[ii] id. loc. cit.

^[iii] id. ibid. P. 101.

^[iv] id, ibid. p. 103.

^[v] id. ibid. pp. 53-4.

^[vi] id. ibid. P. 69.

^[vii] id. ibid. P. 258.

^[viii] id. ibid. P. 262.

^[ix] id. ibid. P. 259.

^[X] Aílton Krenak. “You don’t eat money”. in: life is not useful. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2020, p.