Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas

Introduction. Interfaces: Insularity, Invention, Brazilian Lyric in/and the Americas

Introduction Interfaces Insularity, Invention, Brazilian Lyric in/and the Americas Interfaces may connote any number of aspects of encounter, exchange, communication, and especially technology, all of which are relevant to the international inquiry that I have undertaken here. The word normally signifies a point of contact and conversation for two or more processes, between human or other physical entities. It denotes a shared boundary, a surface connecting two units, subsystems, or devices, often defined by specific attributes, whether functional, material, or related to signs and signals. If a dominant sense of interface concerns computation and e-devices, the meanings of the term also relate integrally to the making and dissemination of poetry in Brazil and neighbors in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Interface is a new word belonging to an old prefixal paradigm that includes such verbs as interact, interview, intersperse, and interfere, such nouns as interlocutor, interplay, interrogation, interpellation, and such adjectives as interlocking, intersecting , intervening, and just plain interesting. More to come as things progress toward the (in-)conclusion of this study. As for the “in-” terms in the subtitle of this introduction, they too may take multiple turns. The first component, insularity, refers to the literal and/ or literary state of being an island, real or imaginary, as well as to isolation or separateness of the cultural variety. What I present here is partially hypothesized as a response to such situations in Latin America’s largest yet only Portuguese-speaking nation. The notion of insularity encompasses a lot. It relates to medieval and Renaissance imaginaries and histories of expansion, and vestiges thereof. In the Americas, it is especially important in the Caribbean because of its geography. In the case of Brazil, there Introduction xiv is an associated folklore, and insularity has entailed to a greater degree separation in terms of culture. Cartographies and chronicles of navigation figure throughout, from start to finish. Today the second element, invention , is normally associated with its younger meaning, which is contrivance , the making of something new, in industry or art, as in innovative products or inventive poetry, clearly quite pertinent to Brazilian aesthetics since modernism. Equally important, invention has signified coming upon something already there, the act of finding, discovery, as in the years 1492, 1500, and beyond in the New World, the (West) Indies, Brazil, America. Invention and insularity can claim both deep historical roots and modern currency, as critical metaphors in hemispheric approaches and as tropes in actual poems, which may appear in any of the segments that follow. Various kinds of interfaces are explored in the successive chapters. Still within the subtitle of this introduction, the preposition in continues and harmonizes with the “In-” pattern of Invention, Insularity, and Interfaces, while the cofeaturing of the conjunction and is meant to suggest the existence of different vantages on Brazil, as a stand-alone entity, side by side with neighbor countries, and within the hemisphere as a whole. The plurality of Americas relates to overriding concerns with this nomenclature and interconnectedness between genres, languages, and nations. Lyric is intended in the broadest sense of genre and poetic composition, whether conventional strophic or free verse, visual or material poetry, or song. The guiding word interfaces is also a homage to a unique creative writer and prematurely departed cultural agitator, Waly Salomão (1943–2003), who bridged the counterculture of the early 1970s and the artistically polymorphous initial years of the new millennium. In one of the poems of his last (posthumous) book, entitled “Interfaces,” he links our classical heritage to the age of hypertext and Web portals, alliteratively designating himself as “o demiurgo / o domador / o designer / o diagramador” (Pescados vivos, 27) [the demiurge / tamer-trainer / designer / layout artist]. The concluding three-item flourish of the book in which Salomão’s short lyric appears represents the hemispheric spirit underlying the present critical study. On facing pages (74–75) the Brazilian poet reproduces a marked-up paragraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and the most celebrated universal linguistic truth at the center of that piece: “Language is fossil poetry.” The second item is a translation from the Spanish of a celestial-toned text by Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro, which ends in “silence.” The third item, on the final page (79) of Salomão’s last book, is a transla- Introduction xv tion of Walt Whitman...