From THE DISCIPLINES
Translation
from Portuguese by A.S. Bessa
THE
POEM: THEORY AND PRACTICE
I
Silver
birds, the Poem
draws
theory from its own flight.
Philomel
of metamorphosed blue,
measured
geometrician
the
Poem thinks itself
as
a circle thinks its center
as
the radii think the circle
crystalline
fulcrum of the movement.
II
A
bird imitates itself at each flight
zenith
of ivory where a ruffled
anxiety
is arbiter
over
the vectorial lines of the movement.
A
bird becomes itself in its flight
mirror
of the self, mature
orbit
timing
over Time.
III
Equanimous,
the Poem ignores itself.
Leopard
pondering itself in a leap,
what
becomes of the prey, plume of sound,
evasive
gazelle
of the senses?
The
Poem proposes itself: system
of
rancorous premises
evolution
of figures against the wind
star
chess. Salamander of arsons
that
provokes, unhurt endures,
Sun
set in its center.
IV
And
how is it done? What theory
rules
the spaces of its flight?
What
last retains it? What load
curves
the tension of its breath?
Sitar
of the tongue, how does one hear?
Cut
out of gold, as such we see it,
proportioned
to it—the Thought.
V
See:
broke in half
the
airy fuse of the movement
the
ballerina rests. Acrobat,
being
of easy flight,
plenilunium
princess of a kingdom
of
eolian veils: Air.
Wherefrom
the impulse that propels her,
proud,
to the fleeting commitment?
Unlike
the bird
according
to nature
but
as a god
contra
naturam flies.
VI
Such
is the poem. In the fields of eolian
equilibrium
that it aspires
sustained
by its dexterity.
Winged
agile athlete
aims
at the trapeze of the venture.
Birds
do not imagine themselves.
The
Poem pre-meditates.
They
run the cusp of infinite
astronomy
of which they are plumed Orions.
It,
arbiter and vindicator of itself,
Lusbel
leaps over the abyss,
liberated,
in
front of a greater king
a
king lesser great.
JE EST UN AUTRE: AD AUGUSTO
brother
in this re / verse of the ego
I see you
more plus than myself
plusquamfuture minuspoet
plus
and in the trobar clus
of this hour (ours)
poetry
incestuous sister
prima pura impura
in which
ourselves (Siamese-same)
uni-
sonoro-
us
other
LE DON DU POÈME
a poem begins
where
it ends:
the
margin of doubt
a
sudden incision of geraniums
commands
its destiny
and
yet it begins
(where
it ends) and the head
ashen
(white top or albino
cucurbit
laboring signs) curves it-
self
under lucifer’s gift —
dome
of signs: and the poem begins
quiet
cancerous madness
that
demands these lines from the white
(where
it ends)
THE OPEN WORK OF ART
Translation
from Portuguese by Jon Tolman
In order to bring
to focus a willfully "drastic selection" in the pragmatic-utilitarian
terms of Poundian theory, one could name the works of Mallarmé ("Un Coup
de Dés"), Joyce, Pound and Cummings as the radial axes that generate the vectorial
field of contemporary poetry. From the convergence of these axes and depending
on the development of the productive process, certain results, some
predictable, some not, will emerge.
It is not necessary here to enter deeply
into the multiple problems which the mere mention of these names together
provokes on the threshold of contemporary experiments in poetry. Instead it
will be sufficient to merely give some hints of the morpho-cultural catalysis
caused by their works.
The Mallarméan constellation‑poem has as
its base a concept of multi-divisions or capillary structure. This concept
liquidates the notion of linear development divided into beginning‑middle‑end.
It substitutes in its place a circular organization of poetic material that
abolishes any rhythmic clockwork based on the "rule of thumb" of
metrification. Silence emerges from that truly verbal rosette, "Un Coup de
Dés," as the primordial element
of rhythmic organization. As Sartre has said: "Silence itself is defined
by its relationship with words, just as the pause in music receives its meaning
from the group of notes which surround it. This silence is a moment of
language." This permits us to apply
to poetry what Pierre Boulez affirmed of music: "It is one of those truths
so difficult to demonstrate that music is not only 'the art of sounds,' but
that it is better defined as a counterpoint of sound and silence."
The Joycean universe also evolved from a
linear development of time toward space‑time or the infusion of the whole in
the part ("allspace in a notshall"), adopting as the organogram of Finnegans Wake the Vico‑vicious circle. Joyce's technique evolved pari passu with his own work and under
the influence of Bergson's concept of "durée."
Mallarmé developed a visual notion of
graphic space, served by the prismatic notation of poetic imagination in ebbs
and flows which are dislocated like the elements of a mobile, utilizing silence
in the way that Calder used air. Joyce, on the other hand, holds to the
materialization of a "polydimensional limitless flow"—the "durée
réelle," the riverrun of
"élan vital"—which obliges him to undertake a true atomization of
language, where each "verbi‑voco‑visual" unit is at the same time the
continent‑content of the whole work and instantly "myriad-minded."
Mallarmé practices the phenomenological
reduction of the poetic object. The eidos—"Un
coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le hasard"—is attained by means of the
ellipsis of peripheral themes to the "thing in itself" of the poem.
In the structure of the work, however, what Husserl notes with relation to his
method also occurs: "Said with an image: that which is placed between
parentheses is not erased from the phenomenological table, but simply placed
between parentheses and affected by an index. But with this index it enters
again into the major theme of investigation."
Joyce is led to
the microscopic world by the macroscopic, emphasizing detail—panorama/panaroma—to the point where a
whole metaphoric cosmos is contained in a single word. This is why it can be
said of Finnegans Wake that it
retains the properties of a circle--the equal distance of all its points to its
center. The work is porous to the reader, accessible from any of the places one
chooses to approach it.
For Cummings the
word is fissile. His poems have as their fundamental element the
"letter." The syllable is, for his needs, already a complex material.
The "tactical modesty" of that poetic attitude is similar to that of
Webern: interested in the word on the phonemic level, he orients himself toward
an open poetic form, in spite of the danger of exhausting himself in the one‑minute
poem, as he faces the hindrances of a still experimental syntax. As Fano has
said with respect to Webern's early works, they are: "Short organizations
materializing a 'possible' and concluding on the eventuality of new
transformations. A catalytic procedure in which certain base elements determine
the disintegration and clustering of a substance which is transformed, without
themselves being affected."
Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, in particular "The Pisan Cantos," also offer the reader an open structure. They are organized by the
ideogramic method, permitting a perpetual interaction of blocs of ideas which
affect each other reciprocally, producing a poetic sum whose principle of
composition is gestaltian, as James Blish has observed in "Rituals on Ezra
Pound."
The contemporary
poet—having at his disposal a lexicon which encompasses acquisitions from the
symbolists to the surrealists, and in a reciprocal way, Pound’s "precise
definition" (the poetic word comprehended in the fight of an art of
"gist and piths"), and also having before him a structural syntax,
whose revolutionary perspectives have only been faintly glimpsed—cannot allow
himself to be enveloped by the Byzantine nostalgia for a fallen Constantinople,
nor can he, polyp‑like, stagnate at the margins of the morpho-cultural process
which beckons him toward creative adventure.
Pierre Boulez, in a conversation with Décio
Pignatari, manifested his lack of interest in the "perfect" or
"classic" work of art, in the sense of the diamond, and stated his
concept of the open work of art as a
kind of modern baroque.
Perhaps the idea of a neo‑baroque, which
might correspond intrinsically to the morphological necessities of contemporary
artistic language, terrifies by its mere evocation those slack spirits who love
the stability of conventional formulas.
But this is not a cultural reason for
failing to enlist in the crew of Argos. It is, on the contrary, a prompting to
do so.
São
Paulo,
1955, 1965
[The
basic book for Haroldo de Campos in English is Novas:
Selected Writings, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Odile Cisneros,
& Roland Greene, published by Northwestern University Press in 2007. While Haroldo died in 2003, he and his
brother Augusto are widely acknowledged today as two of the truly major poets
of the last hundred years, bringing poetry & poetics together.]
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