By MARCOS SISCAR*
In honor of the poet who passed away yesterday, we are republishing the review of his book “Home,”
There are those who think of the poetry tradition as a race in which the offspring are always lagging behind; others prefer to seek in it models for an austere demand for creative value, supposedly in disuse. In an age when the future is felt to be blocking, it is understandable that poetry is always measured against data that has already been cast.
It is difficult to read the poetry of Armando Freitas Filho without asking this question. After all, the book Home, It demands tradition and describes it – not without irony – as perfect marble, against which the imperfection or sterile dissonance of the present is debated. The book disappoints the horse race and the qualitative comparison. This is because disappointment is its material, its formulation, its art.
The obsession with the past lack, by the verse lack, the drama of the difficulty of giving form, is what discredits form and at the same time constitutes it, instructing the reader in the experience of its rules. Home, asks to be read under the sign of disharmony, homeless loneliness.
If the book is explicitly a book of memory, a book of experience that presents itself as autobiographical, the autobiographical in itself is a false question. Although the poems, more specifically those in the first part, do not fail to organize a chronological path, from the family universe to the school, the very poverty of the “facts” suggests that what is at stake is not a mere biographical narrative, but the simultaneously situated and displaced experience of a subject.
The relationship with parents, religion, sex, but also metalanguage and negotiation with the idea of finitude, are occasions in which the noise of memory and the dirt of intimacy are exposed. What is interesting in biographical facts is not so much the contents of the past as the “groaning of the wood” that holds old papers. If there is a confession here, it is first and foremost a confession of the body.
The lack of possible interiority, suggested by the comma attached to the word “home” in the title, points to a theme already known in Armando Freitas Filho’s poetry: the dramatization of the surface of the body (of senses such as smell, taste, touch, explored to exhaustion), or rather, the “rubbing” of bodies, which removes them from immanence and places them in relation, or in friction. This must be taken into account, in view of the proximity that Armando Freitas Filho takes to Carlos Drummond or João Cabral, but also of the criticism he directs at them: the former, for its symbolism, its assumption of interiority, even if dissonant; the latter, for the “cleanliness” of the poetic situation.
There is no opposition to the kind of solution that the modernist totem poles carried out, but to the requirement of the solution itself; “killing the father in the secret / of the body”, poetry reaffirms its singularity, but does not relaunch it as it was predicted. The “secret of the body” is not exactly the space (allusive, ironic, or postmodern) where a hygienic sacrifice is carried out, but has an almost adverbial function, of a “by-means-of-what” which contains its own embarrassment, its damage, its sinister.
An honest paraphrase of Home, would lead us to something like a poetics of disappointment, not only because the body is never beyond its secret, but because the rubbing of bodies is not joyful either. The body creaks, more than it shivers. The body teaches us to read disappointment as a function of the verse, which stumbles, which overflows, which spills out in conjunction with the dramatic imminence of prose; which negotiates with the randomness of the cut, prescribing a discourse on verse as interruption.
To interrupt is to expand the meaning of a word, of a phrase, lost in the flow of the world's prose. If this expansion may seem to some readers to be devoid of reason and effect, and precisely for that reason, it is nonetheless a faithful portrait of the historical disappointment that characterizes its time.
The art of desolation, as practiced by Armando Freitas Filho, has coherence and perspective. It teaches us how it should be read, but it needs time to show its requirements. To such an extent that it ends up involving a certain didacticism, which is never separated from the act of teaching, and which in Armando Freitas Filho's poetry boils over in the insistence on the weakness of repetition, the compulsion to write that never ends, the reiteration of the failure of the “repeater”, of the settling of accounts with his ghosts.
Learning to read is learning to deal with repeated disappointment, rewriting, correction, the postponement of oneself contained in the voice recording – this is what the book seems to tell us on each page. Home, (“I rewrite, I correct, making / pressure with the blunt pencil / to mark my dissent”).
Throughout the texts, the loss, the rust, the mismatch, the unfinished, the corroded, the piled up, the whole logic of damage contained in the left-hand (“sinister”) that rubs against the left drummondiano, are indexes of a poetics that is commented on, that expands its metalanguage. The drama expands, assuming the risk of referring “non-stop”, compulsively, to its own unfinished state, to its situated “punishment”. The poem teaches the sinister so abundantly that it makes it its own scourge.
But what seems to be excessive in Armando's poetry it is still the answer to what is required of it, of poetry in general: a coherence, an attitude, a function – always contradicted or disappointed by the voracity of the very demand that requests them. The epic of our time is so often one of disappointment, of the mismatch between what is sought in poetry and what it offers, even if we don't know exactly what. The “guilt” expressed by the poem is not without parallel with this other, which is to prolong such embarrassment, because we do not know or do not want to recognize it.
What the poetics of disappointment in Home, ends up suggesting is a shared responsibility in the face of the sinister: that of demanding the right of form and granting it, for example, to poetry.
* Marcos Siscar He is a professor at the Department of Literary Theory at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Poetry and crisis (Unicamp Publisher).
Originally published on Journal of Reviews no. 6, October 2009.
Reference
Armando Freitas Filho. Home,. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2009, 136 pages. [https://amzn.to/3MZTQOi]
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