Roberto Piva has all his poetry collected in a single volume

By Carlos F. B. Martin

Perhaps it is no accident that Roberto Piva’s poetry is returning, still marked by conservative forces that unabashedly asserted themselves in Brazil in recent years.

At the request of Companhia das Letras publisher, critic and professor Alcir Pécora gathered the author’s poems again.

He had previously organized Roberto Piva’s work.

In addition to assembling the poems, he rewrote the introductory text, included poems never before published in the book, and invited Eliane Robert Moraes, Davi Arrigucci Júnior, and Claudio Willer to participate again with critical texts about the body of work.

The reader will also find a chronology and suggestions for reading and films.

As can be seen, in ‘Morda Meu Coração na Esquina’, the organization work was careful, perhaps following the author’s example, whose own books were no less zealous.

It is inviting to think about the irony of fate: the work was developed mainly during the years of dictatorship, between 1964 and 1985, and its re-edition occurs under the effervescence, still, of the setbacks, we went through between 2016 and 2022.

In this sense, the re-edition can be a gesture of preservation, attracting new and old readers, and a gesture of resistance.

More than once, Alcir Pécora, in his introduction, refers us to the idea of combat, to the sign of confrontation in the poetic making, which stands out for the “potency resistant to the institutionalization of life.”

When we read the titles ‘Um Estrangeiro na Legião’, ‘Mala Na Mão e Asas Pretas’, and ‘Estranhos Sinais de Saturno’, don’t we a priori have news of such resistance?

The least eloquent would be the last, called Poetic Fragments.

These are the titles of the parts of the book.

In them, except the last one, there would be a point outside the curve, a contradiction in action that does not accept commonplace, common sense, common life.

If the keyword is transgression, it is necessary to understand it.

Transgression does not always mean rupture, although the idea that a bond has been broken is put in the discourse.

Sometimes it turns out to be partially true.

And there were not few fireworks in Brazilian poetry between 1960 and 1980, particularly in the 1970s.

Thinking about the dynamic between language and reality, Roberto Piva does not hide amid words as if they were a facade, leaving the preservation of criticized habits and customs in the foreground.

In other words, the relationship between the self and the world is attacked at the nerve of contradictions, accumulating in the author’s anti-conventional way to tense the status quo to the maximum.

In him, who walked against the grain, transgression was not a gesture lost in the air as soon as the historical winds changed direction.

The dialogue with other voices, whether from the literary or the non-literary world, making the possibilities of articulation of one’s voice lodged in the page, mediated by language, sediments the text’s openness to the other.

The exchange in ‘Ode to Fernando Pessoa’, traveling both the paths of the Pessoa universe and those of the city where one lives, signals a movement of exchange beforehand, at the beginning of the work.

“Ah, let’s spin through the city; no matter what you do or who you are, I embrace you; let’s go!”.

In tandem with the interaction, the aversion to all coddling of life is not diminished.

“Don’t limit me, merchants!”.

Don’t limit me, bourgeois; he would also say.

It is impossible not to feel dislocated by the images in the poems.

Many indeed require the reader to have some prior knowledge, some literary background, to minimally decode, between the verses, the references at play.

But it is certain that not knowing all the references, and there are many in each poem, should not be read as an impediment to contact.

Not at all.

If it forces us to be cautious, the displacement makes us move forward.

It awakens curiosity.

It produces the opposite effect of the damping down of daily life, ruled by laws and demands: [free translation]

THE TIME-KILLING MACHINE

Here we invest against the immortal soul of the offices.

We look for friends who are not serious: the macumbeiros,

mad confidants, banished emperors, deaf nuns,

 pimps with hemorrhoids, and all those who detest

the colorless dreams of the poetry of the Arcades.

We know very well that tiny lace tenderness is a

protozoan luxury.

Be violent like gastritis.

Off with the golden butterflies.

Behold the scintillating contents of the latrines.

We are forced to leave commonplace, where habits rest.

Like poetry that is not afraid to say its name, Piva’s poetry advances over everyday life and presents it from a different angle.

What, looking from afar, seems to contain surrealist traits because it would not present any idea in its place, looking closely, could not be more grounded in the reality through which the reading makes us walk.

Even if it transports us to other instances of contact, other links with reality, and we are transported by it; we don’t lose sight of our contact with it.

It is precisely the absurd that is real.

It is precisely the finger on the absurd, like the finger on the wound, that makes certain institutionalizations, like certain naturalizations, appear as they are.

Sometimes you don’t have to be literal.

“Life always explodes in the beyond.”

• ‘Todo Meu Coração an Esquina’ [All My Heart On The Corner] by Roberto Piva
• Org.: Alcir Pécora
• Companhia Das Letras
• 504 Pages
• R$100 (US$18.81)

With information from Estadão