Rodrigo Garcia Lopes
26
Aphorisms on Poetry
and
New Selected Poems
26
Aphorisms on Poetry
1.
It
remains a mystery that we live in a permanent state of language. Poetry is the ideal
instrument for capturing this mystery.
2.
Mu Ga is not to stop
thought: it is to perceive thought.
3.
More
and more the persistence of the idea of radical poetry understood in its
etymological sense, from the Latin radix,
root, base, foundation. A poetry that investigates its own occurrence,
ramifications, vis-à-vis its encounter with the world, getting at the root of
the problem: for the poem, this root is the word.
4.
Abstraction
is the nature of the mind, not the mind a reflection of consciousness.
5.
The
challenge is not to fall into a cheap metalanguage. Or solipsism ("there
is nothing outside my mind"). On the contrary, the poem is an encounter in
our common territory, our habitat.
6.
A
poet is the one who provokes music with words. And it keeps aphasia away. A
certain aversion to the idea spread by common sense of life (and poetry) as
something continuous. Poems are unsteady beings, like animals, ORGANISMS, and
seem to be always wanting to incorporate the fragmentary and material character
of experience. Therefore, they often seem "incomplete."
7.
If
"poetry is the promise of a language" (Hölderlin), then the poem is a
non-place, a utopia. Its meaning is its movement.
8.
The
poem is an outrage (ultraschnelle), a countertext.
9.
With
eyes closed: the universe is red. Poetry is a kind of
foreign language. Poetry is prose at the point of no return.
10.
You
say
that
there's nothing new
under
the sun.
This
may be true for the sun,
but
not for us.
11.
An
"I" that is one eye, the eye that is another, the other that is one.
The consciousness of consciousness. A
test of solitude.
12.
To
be able to think, like Paul Cézanne, that words think themselves through me.
13.
Nature
deconstructs us without our noticing, and the night restores the memory of the
perceptions that we will use the next day to reconstruct nature and ourselves.
14.
It
speaks to us, it mediates us, it inhabits us. It is always on the way. There is
no escape. In them we are inside our only home, or outside, or we are alone.
15.
All
poetic approaches (whether through illuminations, personas, objective
correlatives, collage, simultaneism, pastiche, ostranenie, ideogram, non-sequitur)
lead, through different operations, to the great question: the space inhabited
by poetry as mental matter, between word and world. Between being wordless and
being a world.
16.
The
name of the ventriloquist was Lyric-I. ("My name is Ither: the interval
between word and world).
17.
The poem is born while we look for it.
18.
As
in a detective story, the poem, today, is an enigma. Its crime already begins
in the first words. The poem is nothing more than a section of correlates of
meaning suspended between false clues, fragments of profiles, frustrations of
expectations, which point unequivocally to its own appearance &
disappearance. The name of this invisible struggle is meaning.
Whodunit?
19.
Roots
burst the belly of the earth: wild thought.
20.
Prose
seems to translate into transparent glass, while poetry reveals hand spots on
the glass, cracks, dust, the imperfections of the surface.
21.
Perhaps
poems should be more than simply writing about experiences, but rather the
experiences themselves. (CB?)
22.
Product
and process, in a poem, have to be considered together. What and how are Siamese
twins. Excessive diligence distorts the palace of wisdom.
23.
This
has been the challenge: to investigate how the process of transference from the
"real" world to the "poetic" world takes place. I am
interested in this unique moment that occurs in perception: in the clash
between the "inside" and the "outside" (How did that become
this?). And the poem would be precisely the simultaneous translation of this
perception into words, energy, a power plant, poetry. And the poem emerges as
the result of this friction between consciousness and the world, the fruit of
this tension and, before I forget, of this pleasure.
24.
The
moment when the poem closes is the moment when it opens to the reader.
25.
The
traditional idea of prose, for me, is that the text seems to stick us in a
temporality, an absorbing state, with words almost seeming to pass
transparently from the page to the mind, ("a camera filming all
this", without continuity errors), while poetry acts more often in jumps,
cuts, surprises, syntactic deconstructions, frustrations of expectations,
associations, connections, disconnections.
24.
Maybe
poetry is an aesthetic necessity of consciousness.
(Apud Macedonio Fernandez)
(from
Extraordinary Experiences, 2015)
Savagery
In the end, the judge was the boss of a murderous
militia
And the fire in the favela celebrated with uzis and
horns.
More corpses found in the mud of the dam
And the torturer colonel gets another tribute.
Two thousand soccer fields of devastated forest a day
in the Amazon
A crowd of young black men slaughtered without
ceremony.
The TV host is a member of a neo-fascist group.
And the Chancellor believes that Flat Earth
exists.
A horde of mouthpieces begging for blood, distilling
hatred,
Freddy Krueger, Chucky and The Thing fighting the
podium.
The Supreme Minister keeps slaves on his farms
And the owner of the big paper says the truth is a
legend.
The gang of businessmen celebrates their evil in
Paris
And the general who says that human rights are for right humans.
The famous pastor who rapes little girls every Friday
And the minister who kidnaps Indians and sees the
Devil in the guava tree.
The Chief of Staff is into forced confinement and
necrophilia.
The great national hero was a CIA agent.
The bishop with suitcases full of money at the temple
heliport
And the gay killer congressman greeted as an example.
A former astrologer turned philosopher fuckhead
wannabe genius, sucker,
And the Businessman of the Year cheers with one more
tragedy: whatever comes is profit.
A gang of scoundrels, ignorant and psychopaths in
power
And the cynical judge smiles at the innocent she just
fucked.
Legions of zombies and unemployed on corners and in
parks
In the overcrowded prison, heads roll in another
massacre.
Six billionaires hold the same wealth as 100 million
people.
And the terrifying silence in the streets of the night
resonates.
Miserable in dumps in scenes of pure despair
The genocidal governor who shoots poor people by
helicopter.
A president who sets fire to the circus and exalts torture
And the surprise and disgust of a people with their
own creature.
It would be a horror film, for real,
If it weren’t just Brazil.
Oniros
Somewhere north of
Medusia,
where there is no
music, exiled innocence
in the solid
landscape that the vision
hypnotizes under
the bridge: the farce
of our future. With
watering eyes,
thunders bite the
sky of our affections,
trembles the
cathedral of senses. A cut.
We were hired for
an unfathomable
job: to install
these electric fences.
Now we talk
between devices
in some resort in
Borneo or Normandy
with the password
Alberta on the shoulder strap.
The strange
veteran stops
in front of the
window display
of a diamond
beach.
There is a ship in
the sky.
Echoes of
explosions in the Steinway Gallery,
Aroma of red and
toxic algae,
monitoring cameras,
sabotage.
Macabre puppets
smile as they sink
in the quicksand
days.
There is a dream
franchise open 24/7
and a single
chance to touch and grope
the Earth forever
promised,
before the
landscape shatters
and turn into a
hotel made of nothing but ruins
and inhabited only
by angels.
Milky
Way
Insular
March night.
Wet
gusts
of
light.
The
figures of the white
boats
oscillate:
little
archipelago.
Old
south wind
delays
the
church clock
and
someone thinks
while
fishing
in
the mystery that there is
in
silence.
Pieces
of plaster from the moon
plummet
and resound in the sea.
Native
dogs dream
under
capsized canoes, they remind
the
slow avalanche
of
twilight.
Lagoons
in the dunes now:
lit
eyes.
The
heart, a quiet
neighborhood.
Here
the waves
break
backwards,
severe,
suave,
and
between them three dark islands
under
the shell-mond of stars.
Simultaneities
Right
now someone's listening to Wagner on the last volume, the Alps ahead.
Right
now an earthquake shakes Tokyo, and this line trembles.
Right
now an alien picks up a conch on a South Sea beach.
Right
now an Islamic radical says goodbye to his reflection in a window display in
Paris.
Right
now a couple of scientists are having wild sex in an observatory in Atacama.
Right
now giant speakers with patriotic anthems awaken the population of Pyongyang.
Right
now the smiling and attentive Russian officer pours plutonium into the spy's
drink.
Right
now a priest is whispering into his Scottish lover’s ear.
Right
now in a hotel window in Leblon a man falls in love with a dove.
Right
now on the coast of Somalia pirates attack a cargo ship and are driven off by
heavy artillery.
Right
now a photo fallen from a book moves the Swedish surgeon to tears.
Right
now a Boeing with 330 people on board disappears over the Indian Ocean.
Right
now it's a place that never ages.
Right
now a Panamanian executive makes a billion-dollar transfer via the Deep Web.
Right
now a lonely woman accesses the images of the International Space Station as it
rotates the Earth in real time and downs the second bottle of wine.
Right
now a Swiss geologist celebrates his birthday in the crater of an active volcano.
Right
now a Libyan refugee realizes that no one on that boat will make it to Naples.
Right
now a gymnast posts a deadly selfie in a building in Hong Kong.
Right
now the cold front slowly moves to the exact point where we are on the map: the
speech.
Right
now a president resigns and commits suicide live on a social network.
Right
now an asteroid heads for Earth at 72 kilometers per second.
Right
now in Colorado half a dozen Santa Clauses with ski gear on their shoulders are
running down the main street of Aspen.
Right
now the hacker wakes up and finds himself transformed into a Nordic forest, the
double of Hamlet, a Turkish pack of cards, an abandoned amusement park.
Right
now in a bar in Manhattan Beauty says to Terror, "When I'm done, you
start’.
Right
now an old lioness is dying surrounded by hyenas in an African savannah.
Right
now the almost autumnal sun bathes a white page.
Right
now a kilometric crack breaks out and pops in Antarctica.
Right
now a Greek poet invents a machine to produce eternity.
Right
now in a packed theatre in Moscow Anna Fedorova plays the last chord of
Rachmaninoff's Concert No. 2.
Idyl
A
cart passes by
heavy
with acacias.
The
sea and its cloak
of
white wounds.
Cold
hands shipwreck
in
the lipless morning.
Bristly
trees. Ancient light.
Mist
splinters.
A
flight of black birds.
Shadows
in raw flesh.
Towards
the stars
they
dance in the immensity
eyes
to eyes
the
two tied only by
the
space suit´s
umbilical
cord
they
know
they
have no certainties
they
no longer wait for anyone
far
away now
far
away forever
from
the tiny blue marble
planets
dance
all
over the place
in
their apparent
immobility
zero
gravity
far
far away from the Earth
the
words they exchange
also
float in space
or
stay stuck
in
the dome of the suits
but
they don't become opaque
fragments
of them occupy
the
space
celestial
bodies
"to desire is to fall from the stars"
"son,
let me go"
they
float
they
don't fight anymore
just
float
the
very concept of home
gets
lost in the Ether
"no
one responds to our signals"
they
don't know where they're going
towards
the stars
they
float
in
another time
under
the blue light
emanating
from themselves
the
son then releases the father
they
know
the
journey without
is
the journey within
they
know --
to
be able to find yourself
you
need first
to
get lost
around
and
everywhere
where
the eyes can penetrate
infinite
peace
.
.
.
Darkness
and silence
Guarujá Salem
lynched because of a rumor
on a Saturday
afternoon
a barbaric-world
Fabiane
still lifts her head
for one last look
at the multitude of
aggressors
filming with tablets
and smartphones
The future sends
greetings
The day, old
gypsy, is over,
taking his gold to
China.
The night is cool
on the retina.
Who will inherit
our misery?
Life is a comedy,
only serious:
Such empty
beaches, such pale pages
of so much
mystery, so much being read.
Who will inherit
our misery?
Distant friends,
these airlines,
Instants that were
this, nothing, foam,
glimpses, dawn,
some moon.
Who will inherit
our misery?
My pain lives
where others take their vacations.
The past is a
river that does not return
and the present,
this false promise:
Who will inherit
our misery?
A syllable in the
air is still reverberating,
Silent dunes,
black back of mountains,
the sky, slate
headstone on this almost morning.
Who will inherit
our misery?
The empire of seconds
If I were to stop to find out
the taste of this instant
I would never realize
what duration is made of,
the flesh of every second,
minute from every sunset
this world is made of,
blood, sperm, dust,
I would never remember
the afternoon plot, museum
where ancient hours live,
nor the hard face of this other
autumn, matter, mystery,
nor the memory, that marble
in flux, roar in stereo
of an incessant waterfall.
Post-truth
Rainy morning, grumpy
as a Russian general.
Out of nowhere, it goes off
thinking:
metalanguage has replaced
(dangerously)
the solipsism of the
lyric-I. Why
not the sound of the garbage
truck
or the pitanga in the bird's
beak
against a slatey sky?
The mustard stain on your
blouse?
The shortest distance
between two points
it's not you, Ego, you fool.
God, what more useless fight
can you
have on a piece of
paper?
Why should you get stuck
with this overlap
of stupid words that lead
nowhere,
no Valhala, Alamut, no
Atlandida?
And the worst blind man, I insist, is the one
who said that life is not
worth a birdseed.
and that the day is fake
news and it doesn't exist.
Do the following, or don't:
Replace the arrogant art of
refusal
with the simple and grateful
acceptance of things.
On
the beach, June
To
have lived in a world
where
clouds were white sponges
diluting
a bizarrely blue sky
blue
crows on the branches of our balcony
and
the foams of intense moments
blown
furiously by a south wind
among
the cries of fishermen early in the morning
the
eyes bordering the distant islands
they
chewed the fog before
our
bodies satisfied and still warm
reading
the clues the night detectives didn't follow
the
footprints left behind
the
feeling of a life happening
clean
as sand after the wave.
Et in Arcadia Ego was his motto
He lived in isolation
for years in the wilderness,
Believing himself to
be his own myth.
Fat seagulls were his
shepherdesses, Egypt,
his living room.
Friends,
almost no one. His
lover,
writing.
Thermopylae, the walk
along the trail
to the beach of the
day.
For a while he
practiced the art
of invisibility.
Levitation.
Wave hypnosis.
Bibliomancy.
With nature he learned
to be mute.
He made poetry without
fear, out of everything.
From nature he learned
to have only fear.
Or an immense respect.
Et in Arcadia Ego was his motto.
Nobody remembers what
he wrote,
They burned
everything.
But his life became a
case study.
Qualia
May the morning be
beautiful,
long, for us
only,
May the second be
still
what the heart
foresees
under a January
shadow,
the way the wave
unravels,
always a fleeting
instant,
a prisoner of the
present.
Riddle
so immense
that if silent
I still hear it
So fragile
that if named
it will break
Soliloquy
Dear thought,
we´ve never been so much us
when we were alone
at the moment of your advent.
It was a bit, I remember,
your face, at a glance:
but how to be, in one piece,
and in two places
at the same time?
Simple.
We have always been alone.
Thinking is the name of this bone.
A body by your side, a warm touch on your neck,
but the mind, almost never here,
always somewhere in the past,
in Hokkaido, Almeria, Tierra del Fuego.
I travel beside you, standing still.
All sites are this.
Even eyes in the eyes
I'm blind to your thoughts
and you to mine.
Mutual exile.
I grope the world in a trance
unable to get out of my head.
I nurture a secret.
I'm on top of myself,
in a refuge, who knows.
Then, again, alone,
when you least expect it,
relieved, we get it:
others inhabit us.
Loneliness, solid and real,
and consciousness
the name of this experiment, this dementia,
the name of this conversation we have with us
all the time
The
visit
Open
petals
like
the skilled fingers or thighs
of
an ancient geisha.
Who
gave you,
summer
gardenia,
such
nobility?
White
petals
against
the dark green glow
of
transient leaves.
From
its waxy folds,
kimono
lady,
you
look at us:
The
button,
in
the middle,
is
a pearl.
Windows
to the world
The
word is a window onto reality.
Zbigniew Herbert
The
world passes through
the
window of the word
to
touch reality
but
reality
suddenly
closes
in
the image of a shell:
a
shell
is
a world where
a
word fits.
This
is enough for us:
we
close the words of windows
and
we open the windows of words.
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