Proposal
The
twentieth century appears to have bestowed on us a legacy of constant
and seemingly irreparable disaster. It left us with the aporia that
poetry, as the synthesis of intellectual and creative activity, has
become incapable of dealing with stupidity and barbarism. This is
evident in the Nazi and Fascist crimes as well as in the
institutionalization of economic violence in a world that is becoming
both global and disorganized at the same rate, with catastrophic
consequences in the form of local, ethnic conflicts moved by hate,
sectarianisms, and private tragedies. What remains of the nationalist
projects has become a strategy to strengthen corporate interests; at the
same time, internationalism, rather than opening up to pluralistic and
democratic human experiences, has boiled down to a strategy of
exploitation — economic, touristic and for the sake of legitimizing
racial and social prejudices.
In
the beginning of this century, a new form of such violence has begun to
emerge, one derived precisely from its continued existence: it is the
muffling, the dampening down of the scene of destruction. An impotent
creation — trailing behind technology, the market and a voracious media
and communications industry, lacking any political impact or liberating
aesthetic —, it survives by shrinking of poetic goals or the audience
for poetry. Skepticism vis-à-vis
revolutionary transformation, the consistency of the
avant-gardes or
ideological dogmatism has not resulted in actions that are freer, as we
would like to think, but, instead, has given us more garrulous
production in increasingly homogeneous environments. Joint property of
peers, corporate genre practices — all these fragment and render poetic
production banal. Parochial activity takes offence at criticism and
deabate. Condescendence, pusillanimity, a pact of peers, mutual
forgiveness make evident the lack of seriousness accorded to
poetry, as well as the disbelief in its transformative power. But what
type of real production could relinquish the power to
transform?
An
impressive consequence of that legacy of catastrophic continuities
(which precisely dampens down and absorbs disaster as a normal
occurrence) is the conformity poetry displays with an average
production. In that environment, writing becomes an inconsequential
habit, a "hobby" — i.e., a childhood or juvenile
activity one abandons once one reaches adulthood, or is continued merely
as a weekend activity--, or instead, a professional occupation, as any
other, a modest way to earn a living alongside other editorial or
university-teaching activities. In such times, there is no more reason
to expel the poets from the Republic — as Plato would have it — which
does not mean a lack of spiritual progress: apparently, no poet is
perceived as dangerous anymore, as incongruous or rapturous, to the
point of affecting the disorderly order of contemporary uncivil
life.
How
to respond to such a lack of vision and of urgency peculiar to poetry, a
realm that by definition is hostile to mediocrity? How to resist that
barbarian shrinking of horizons, proportional to the redundant
proliferation of garrulous writing? Or, at least, how to denaturalize
disaster and reconquer the pain emerging from it? Can poetry still be
more than an affirmation of frivolity, arrivisme, and intellectual
affectation or — on the opposite end of the spectrum — of loutish
modesty and a hopeless remainder? If we don't already have plans for the
future, it's important to say that the present also does not belong to
us: the dampening down of expectations produces indifference, alienation
and routine, not the enjoyment of a pleasant life. What can poetry do
against this state of things which seems to have no end? And if it can
do nothing, can it be more than frivolity?
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CPFL
Poetry in a Time of War and
Banality
International
Meeting
May-June, 2006
Espaço
Cultural CPFL
Campinas,
São Paulo, Brasil
CONTACT
Curatorship
CPFL - Sala
de Imprensa | Press Room
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