ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Manoel Ricardo de Lima
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I was born in Piaui, a state that sits in the Northeast of Brazil. The State is very poor made up of people who are racially mixed indians and whites. The state does not have many blacks from when it was colonized. I grew up as an adolesent in the same city where I was born, Parnaiba, a small city near the river of the same name. A strong river that is dense and cuts the city on one side on the other is the ocean. Parnaiba is the only piece of sea coast in Piaui, maybe 72 kilometers in total.
Until then, 15 years old more or less, I had all the formation of a child in the middle class but lived with a certain misery of the soul this is very evident in the states like Piaui in Brazil. I read allot of science fiction, police stories and westerns and also lots os comics. At 15 we moved to Fortaleza in Ceara, this city has grown allot and has over 2 million residents today. It was very common for people to move in that epoch (1986) is was like a great northeastern diaspora to our neighboring state of Ceara.
In Fortaleza I had all of my formation and my first contact in fact with poetry. I had small tablets of notes and in secret I would note one or another thing from then on in Fortaleza I made friends that liked to write poems. Friends that I have to this day. Poetry was a priority always.
2) What are your influences? Poetic? Artists? Others that influence your work?
I do not know how to speak of influences. There are however poets that interest me allot I want to cite the Brazilians but list could be very long. First Joaquim Cardozo most importantly but always. I also have been influenced by João Cabral de Melo Neto, Mário Faustino, Horácio Dídimo e José Albano. Afterwords, a certain production that I cannot say I see with clarity, our myths and decadent parts of our culture.
Having said that Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandiera e Murilo Mendes are lodestars for poetry written in Brazil for all time. I like very much the romantic poetry of the 18th and 19th century especially the arcade and romantic poets. I also like very much the prose from the 19th century. Authors like Machado de Assis, Joachim Manuel de Macedo, Raul Pompeia are prose writers I like very much more than the poets. I always liked more prose, I believe this always interested me more in Brazilian literature in comparison to the poetry. Today I have rediscovered more Jorge de Lima, Rui Ribeiro Couto, Dante Milano and Raul Bopp. In the visual arts I created a work in 200 with Elda Tessler a visual artist from the south of Brazil with a name as suggestive as Fortaleza, Porto Aleger. Fala Inacabadas-Objectos e um Poema is the name of the book. I have seen and read poetryt with tired eyes for her.
3) What is your opinion of global poetry? American poetry? Latin American poetry in Spanish and Portuguese?
I have not read it all until now I have the sense of other languages but not entirely. Merely in two or three with some certainty. I force myself allot. and it is allot, from there I leave this question to say something else that I see with this in this moment and this is more important: I think that for whatever reason when I say or think of a poem today I put the word crisis before I look at it because I think that the crisis always is there. Because I think that a crisis is always there and I do not have time for it. It is always in crisis. I do not know the best or worst moment to create or read poems. I can say however that in my time I search and live in the best form possible with happiness and a little delecacy
I know that this is not possible. I know that also in our times is it complicated to think of poems, art and any aparatus of love, selection and create for the sake of creating. You need to look for a change called prestige and this is a horror. There is no work and poems but there is prestige. Today my question always is what or when and how is a good poem? Or how to say to a friend "Poetry is good because? to note on the paper and send to a lover? " Why read in loud voice? Why go out screaming in he street for a poem? Why make money with it? etc etc" it is good to feel servile but why serve: because? we do not all know.
4) When did you become a poet? When did it become part of your life?
Maybe you ask this of everyone and many say to this day that they are not poets. What is formation, what poet is not a poet and etc etc etc. Good, I might say this as well. But I publicized my first book Embrulho in 2000. The same time I publicized Falas Inacabadas with Elida Tessler. Onlyu in 2003 I returned to publishing a prose poem As Maos in this I asked a few friends that they record a cassette of selected parts. We are all friends and we write, make movies, dance ,visual artists finally in 32 fragments. The book is divided in five parts it is a spiral inside a square one two three four and then again. At our debut I set of the book in another sequence with other voices and various voices making an audition with these tapes and mixing the sequence after. This is what is called invisible books. A book of mine that I set up with other voices and various persons in a sequence that is unknown afterwords.
5) What is your education? Was it important?
I graduated in Philosophy, at the same time I studied Literature. For me this first formation was and is fundamental. What has happened behind me I hear and read the world. After I did graduate work in Literature I maintained a column in a good magazine in the city of Fortaleza about literature. now I am a professor in a Brazilian university giving classes of literature of Brazil and Portugal and semiotics.
6) Poetry in the US is divided into Experimental, Popular et cetera how do you classify Brazilian poetry?
Brazilian poetry accompanies and fills the whole country. Brazil is very large of confusion with flora and fauna that are very different the people are formed for various ethnic groups, various formations of language, accents and principals. I do not know why people do not travel within the nation? Finally the image your all have of poetry in the country I dont know. A poetry that also we dont know we are blind to the habits and citys of the center like Rio or São Paulo, our major cities I dont see more because it is narcissistic principally to be a critic is ot be a narcissist especially in the university.
Then beyond these two cities the country goes on, travel much, know the delicateness and change t hat our geography possesses. Experiment behiond the dislocation of the nation. A fundamental thing is to make poetry here like Mario de Andrade did.- one of our most interesting poets and one of the most profound of the first half of the 20th Century.
7) Favorite Food?
Today, I am far from the Northeast of Brazil and my native cities as I finish my graduate work and I am living temporarily in the south of Brazil in Florianopolis at the other extreme of the nation. I miss very much the food of my region. The Northeast has less pepper, the fish are grilled the lobster, the Moqueca (Fish Stew with Dende oil) Bacuri Ice Cream, Rice and Beans, Dried Meat, Lemon Cake, I miss all of these.
8) Sports Team? Activity?
My team is Flamengo, a team that dominates Brazilian football. I am 34 and I am a professor since 18 I have been giving classes, I like this allot, I am in the university as a professor since 27. I like very much my students and examination day to day teaching.
9) Vacation Spot ?
The Northeast of Brazil has advantages. We have beaches that are unseen in the rest of the world in tranquility and beauty. Some places are just empty and you can sit in a hammock, drink coconut juice, listen to the wind always a beach in the northeast, always.
10) Swear Word?
R – I must laugh at this I am not certain but Puta que pariu is perfect editor's note this in an exact translation (Whore that Gave Birth)
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
I am not certain how to form a poem but I can say how the poem is formed. But I work on them until I get stuck and always with much happiness. Poems are not work and there is never sadness or tiredness in making them. When I speak of fullness and tiredness I speak with much happiness.At times I am able to protect an idea and I have it very clearly. I have two poems and one long poem in prose the work is absolutely rational and I am careful with my texts.
2) Is poetry organic or synthetic for you?
Poetry is an incorporation. Like all possibilities with language, there is not a conversation in which you say a simple hello or hi, this is also an incorporation. It is in the body, you rest, you eat and you live the daily stuff of life the structure is fictional what we call the truth. Poetry is not different: a elaboration of language of the life of the world the separation of the forms of poetry and these give a sense of movement and they give another impression and I think that is the poem in other words.
3) Where do you write? Is Ambiance Important?
I always write in the same place. No other. In the house in front of my computer in my office of work and in the whole house. before I wrote on a typewriter. After a computer. It is always the same way to try to experiment before I cannot but every word is there or it is not. Once I am not interested and immediately I turn off the computer. and we shall see if it serves later for a poem.
4) Between found language and created language where does your work fall?
My work stays between encounter and create, what do I create. Today more it is poetry of encounter. Because I am interested very little in he strange idea that literature is all that it seems without being fixed. I want the same but I am trying to write books that are invisible. For this perhaps my dialogue with visual arts is today much more intense than with literature.
Links
http://www.secrel.com.br/jpoesia/mricardo.html
http://popbox.hpg.ig.com.br/manoelverso.htm
http://www.blocosonline.com.br/literatura/prosa/inmemoriam/2004/pm040824.htm