Essay poems, this sequence of 24 prose texts has an ethical and aesthetic purpose: to show and demonstrate that the surrealist concept of “absolute living”, or the idea of the “holy surrealist trinity: love, poetry, freedom” is not dead.
Naivety? Combativeness? Fidelity to that age-old statement that being in the world requires being honored by being alive? All that, but something more. When in the “rarities” section texts are written in prose that are narrative blocks and it is said that “this is not a novel”, but rather a portrait of “the incomprehensible”, what is declared is a principle of literature: the subject of the text, ironic, mocking, speaks of himself in the 2nd person, puts on the mask of derision: “You want to insult me with your youth”; “You invest as much in the gym as if it were possible for the past to be infinitely your future” (p. 969) and, in this scene between two, which is a fight for time and the time that passes, Luís Filipe Sarmento does not exempt himself from practicing literalness, rudeness: “You are brutal! As you like, I will ride you without a bridle, in parade (…)”.
It is not, therefore, sweet poetry, it is inscribed in the country and in Iberia, in Europe and the world. The singular surrealist who is the author of Grammar of Constellations (2012), em Casa dos Mundos Irrepetíveis has one of the most incisive readings of this dismal time: “Europe is populated by shadows in the pages of History, / opaque bodies of death, dense ghosts of catastrophe, / who wield weapons under a leaden celestial scenario / negotiate corrupt souls so that the effectiveness of the setback / is complete in a territory condemned to extinction” (p. 839). What we see in the evolution of this writing is, increasingly, the abandonment of the first person, now a subject who, after “Strangling death in his body” can, from a defensive and ironic distance, knowing that he will not have the laurels of the tribe, smoke a good cigarette, “keep in memory” the succession of smiles of pleasure and, in the path of a heterodox like Sena, reiterate the lesson we read in “In the country of bastards”.
This is because, in Kavafis’s path, the poem is, in this forgotten Portuguese poet, in this resistant to an art that does not abandon him because he neither abandoned nor betrayed it, the “World-Body, full substance that [lhe] saves your eyes” (p.800), as it was already the case in 1975, with The Age of Firein the premiere, the last refuge and the last stronghold so that life in Portugal, after fascism, was possible. This critical vision remains, in what is today a democracy of mediocres (the expression comes from José Gomes Ferreira, the poet). Erotic, sensual, committed to that surrealist trinity – love, freedom, poetry -, made up either of long poems, in free verse, Whitmanian, or of prose-essay poems that reveal, in a raw way, the author’s worldview; sometimes visual-experimental (see Matinas Laudesfrom 1994), playing with textual arrangements that give voice to the surreal polyphony (in italics and in round, two voices play each other semiotically); now figuring the poet as the one who fixes and draws the fire of the poem and dives into it, seeing “in the text the seduction by infinity”, LFS searches for “words, avalanchesstorms and letters” (p. 322). At every moment he seems to question his contemporaries: how can we continue writing poetry if it turns into a mere form of commerce? And how can we talk among ourselves, about poetry, if everything obeys the spirit of envy and intrigue that means that it is not spoken of, that nothing is said? How can we live in an environment that is measured by the ruler of hypocrisy, ignorance and vileness – in that intimate sense of vileness? Not being of our lineage, the truth is that Sarmento is faithful to an ideal.
Red (Poética Edições) is a life of poems made. Like it or not, the book is there, in its heteroclite writing (also tercets, also comics, also haikusmanifestos, injunctions, proclamations, exclamations, daydreams, and disappointments, dreams and sleep, the evidence against appearances), provoking those who, faced with such a book, cynically look at it, or cowardly ignore it. Because, after all, Luís Filipe Sarmento never ignored the reality of reality. Eliot reappears, as do other masters (Octavio Paz, in the surrealist-romantic conception of poetry as verbal erotica; Michaux and Pound, through the spell of a convulsive, imaginative, plural textuality; Campos, O’Neill and also Pacheco, for their sarcasm and irony, disappointment and hurt longing for a postponed fifth empire, thrown into today’s rubbish). The correlative is, in Sarmento, the same objective because “This devastated land / still reveals fragments / of the civilization we were: / monuments in ruins / show the survivors / the dead that we are” (p. 700)
Write without applying the new Orthographic Agreement.
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