Tradition and topicality in certain contemporary Brazilian poetry

Abstract

Assuming that poetry plays an active role in constituting our relationship with language and reality (Siscar, 2010), and considering the existence, in Brazil, of poets who write poetry “with evident signs of reading Portuguese literature” (Silveira, 2008), I seek to delve deeper, studying the work of poets who fit this description, one of the main characteristics of more recent Portuguese poetry, that is, the awareness of an irreversible “virtualization of the real” (Martelo, 2007). And this deepening involves, in my opinion, the consideration of problems related to self-knowledge, which entered the order of the day with the emergence of the Philosophy of Mind (Ryle, 1984) and with the radical skepticism represented by the supposed impossibility of accessing our own states mental (Putnam, 1975). As I try to demonstrate, rather than being characterized by the presence of a certain content of tradition, what certain contemporary Brazilian poetry proposes is an epistemological update of the dissent theme as a way of thinking, that is, as a language, by displacing its dialectic of distancing and rapprochement between conflicting poles (Marnoto, 2015) for the relationship between the self and its own consciousness, access to which has become as problematic as the perception of reality in poetry inherited from the modern tradition.