Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas

Preface and Acknowledgments

PrefaceandAcknowledgments This book has taken shape over the last ten to twelve years and, given its temporal focus and themes, contemporary and current, the research and writing could easily continue to grow for another decade. Yet here it is now, hic et nunc, aqui e agora. Looking back, I can situate early incentives to commence this enterprise in an invited presentation at the Segunda Bienal Internacional de Poesia de Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais, Brazil, November 1998) and in conversations that ensued. Early in 1999, while working on a collection of essays about popular music and globalization, I received an inspiring inquiry regarding an initiative in the study of poetries of the Americas. A first working title for my projected participation was something like “An Island Called Brazil: Outreach and Isolation in New World Lyric.” As ideas evolved and the undertaking grew in scope and depth, a longer name for the project emerged—“Interfaces: Insularity, Invention, Brazilian Lyric in/and the Americas”—in complement to the title of my previous monograph on twentieth-century lyric, Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry since Modernism (1996). In this twenty-first century, the “In-” words in the extended working title ended up being used for the introduction to the present volume and remained as guiding tropes of the study. The pivotal word interfaces comprises as well a crystallization of the transamerican poetics developed since the 1990s and applied here. In a nutshell, this book is about how recent Brazilian lyric (since about 1985) has engaged with counterparts and other heritages in the Americas, essentially the United States and so-inclined countries of Spanish America. It is informed, as a friend has observed, by a “generous assumption” that studying poetry in comparative perspective can help to answer concerns about the inequalities of globalization and to imagine a utopian hemispheric solidarity. The introduction will broach those issues, set forth the concepts of interface and the other guiding tropes, and explain the purpose of each chapter. x Preface and Acknowledgments The book is distinctive both in what it covers and in how it does so. This is the only full-length English-language study of Brazilian poetry since the 1980s; it applies, moreover, hemispheric principles throughout. While decidedly not a survey of trends and tendencies in the genre, these reflections do employ poetry to contemplate aspects of the Brazil of the late second millennium, both artistic scenes and experiential situations. The present study addresses several gaps in literary scholarship. As compared to fiction or other discursive genres, lyric has been the subject of much less critical explication with geocultural positioning in mind. Related interest has certainly grown in the past twenty years, and tracking that concern in the case of Brazil is one of the prime burdens here. Within Luso-Brazilian and inter-American studies at large, poetic discourse remains rather understudied and merits scrutiny from a number of angles. While the approach here cannot pretend to be exhaustive, I have attempted to document and demonstrate extensively. In bringing this project to fruition, I was fortunate to be able to count on the assistance of numerous people. Personal thanks in a book of this extent could cover pages, and the names of many who helped out appear in the notes and bibliography. In Rio de Janeiro, I was privileged to enjoy the cooperation of poet-professors Adriano Espínola, Paulo Henriques Britto, Antonio Carlos Secchin, and Suzana Vargas, as well as the courtesy of the publisher 7Letras (formerly Sette Letras). In São Paulo, Editora Iluminuras provided me with all pertinent works from its catalogue, and the magnificent arts institution Casa das Rosas, which houses the Espaço Haroldo de Campos de Poesia e Literatura, received me in exceptional fashion. Longtime director Frederico Barbosa and 2008 director Claudio Daniel are paragons of poetic diplomacy. Horácio Costa and Moacir Amâncio have lived and shared transamerican poetics for decades. At the intersection of visual and verbal arts, I recognize the genius and generosity of Arnaldo Antunes and Augusto de Campos. Expressions of gratitude are also due to colleagues in other cities, such as Ricardo Corona (Curitiba), Maria Ester Maciel (Belo Horizonte), and Amador Ribeiro Neto (João Pessoa). In North America, the project was improved by the suggestions of colleagues who read portions of the manuscript, Leopoldo Bernucci and Alicia Genovese, and gracious judges who examined the whole, Severino Albuquerque, Luiza Franco Moreira, and William Calin who contributed beyond the call of duty. Odile Cisneros, Luiz Fernando Valente, and...