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Poetic Profile
Sérgio Medeiros
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in the Central West, near the Brazilian frontier with Paraguay. This place is where they speak three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and Guarani (There are over 15 million speakers of this Native Language in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina and it is the official language of Paraguay). The years that I lived on the frontier I appreciated the sense of the three languages. I was able in recent years to spend time in Asuncion, capital of Paraguay to study the Guarani Language.
Lamentably, I still cannot speak Guarani very well, but it is easier for me to read foreign languages than speak them. Almost 98% of the Paraguayan population speaks Guarani and Spanish. This is interesting because I have read all these languages since I was young. My family had an excellent library in Bela Vista, where I was born in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. I liked to read poetry especially Experimental Modernism. I did not like much the poetry of the Romantics for example. Today I like some verses from Romantic poets not more than this. I admire the second romantic period, pre modern for example Sousândrade a great poet, (Virtually unknown in the USA)
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
I have many favorite authors including many who are not part of the canon. I like the indigenous writer Jeronimo Tsawé, who lived in an areas in the east of Mato Grosso. He just died and he was a great narrator and he left various myths and stories. I analyized these in my first book “ O Dono dos Sonhos” this was published in 1991 for a small press that does not exist anymore.
I learned with Jeronimo( but not only with him) to face the visible as something very instable, something escapes and it is difficult to but you also have to be instable to capture this sense. My Poetry has this character of the hallucinatory I think worldly objects scrutinize a series of images that deconstruct while looking to register the actual naturally it is not captured. Finally I owe allot to I owe allot to the Modernist Masters; Valery, Eliot, Apollinaire, Stevens et cetera .Of the Brazilians my favorite poet is Sousaandrade am author from the 19th century who had certain moments and rhythm and much energy and times hallucinatory. To speak of rhythm another great influence is music, John Cage is cited here and copied and plagerized in my writings. Cage's music and Cage the poet, actually I am preparing a new book "Multiplicação" in which I select a soundtrack and develop while I listen. The music accelerates, the way of Nancarrow and composer has been called the "mago da pianola" . I like in my writings to slide fast like his music. These give me liberty and overall in poetry it is true that I am inspired when I see and hear (when I feel lost, without knowing my language) over all what constitutes the passage in he place where I live (City, Ocean, Street) the passage that observes how at times a Impressionist picture or a modern sculpture.
I do not believe that it is possible to observe a landscape without cultural references. Also, it is fundamental to have in my side my muse, Dircinha, to whom I read and write to whom I delegate at time the work of organizing in any way (but efficient) my collection of landscape descriptions.
Dircinha, to me, incarnates the incidental, although when she tries to organize the chaos she works with rational choices. I learned with Cage and with Dircinha not to renounce a third hand, somebody's hand, the incidental hand...
3) What is your opinion of Global Poetry? American Poetry? Latin American poetry in Spanish and Portuguese?
I do not have any opinion about poetry in any country. Poetry for me is made when you lose your opinions and make the inevitable, when you write according to your impulses; emotional and intellectual, in name of something that doesn't "exist" yet, that doesn't fit into anything, at least temporarily. I read a lot what is written in English and French, for example, but my choices are always arbitrary, dictated by the "heat of the moment", only for the pleasure of reading, and to discover an unexpected usage of the language. I know today that the global and regional, the central and peripheral can superpose, can coexist, and suddenly, there is only poetry, walking in the dark, as always, without knowing exactly where it its, if it's in the center or at a any border. This is the courage and the weakness of poetry.
4) When did you 'become' a poet when did poetry become part of your everyday life?
I have always read a lot of poetry, I always wanted to write poetry, bu I was incapable. That's why I published later. I was born in 1960, but my first book of poetry was published in 2001, "Mais ou Menos do que Dois" (Iluminuras); the second, "Alongamento" (Ateliê Editorial), was just published in the last semester of 2004. I lived in France, in Paris, when I had to conclude my studies and write my PHD theses about indigenous myths in Brazil. There I saw common people at the Cafes, but I knew that also writers used to sit there to write. I was not able to do that in Paris. When I came back to Brazil, the destine brought me to Florianopolis, an island, where I know live, with my wife Dircinha and my son Bruno Napoleão. I suddently started to write down my ideas (never conclusive) about what this new landscape suggested; this work is done on the streets, walking, stopped in front of something, sitting somewhere...
I Rediscover an experience I had done in the 80's, when I started to visit indigenous villages, the xavantes and bororos: to write when I walk, to write in the outdoors, registering what I see....But I don't write only outdoors, sometimes I sit in my house and discover things that call my attention, banal things, that I can't describe, except imagine them in a continuous metamorphis. But I need to see something to, then write the poem, that consist, in a certain way, in a declaration of what I didn't see, except an inconstancy, a transition between two inaccessible stages.
5) Where were you educated? Was this important?
I am a professor, I teach literature and mythology, I try to confound both, I try to put aside the indigenous myth and vanguard poetry. That's why I translated in it's totality, the Mayan cosmology "Popol Vuh", with professor Gordon Brotherston's collaboration, an specialist in pre-Colombian literature from Stanford University. This work (which is my post-doc research) was done in the US, during 2001, and will be published in Brazil in March or April of 2005. I consider fundamental to my poetry this close contact, not only as a reader, but sometimes, also as a scholar, with the metamorphism and uncertainties of the myths.
6) Poetry in the USA is divided into many camps, experimental, popular et cetera what is the state of poetry in Brazil?
I believe that I make experimental poetry, why and get into language just like I walk into an indigenous village, without knowing where I am stepping on. Then, what I write must encompass this perplexity of being in an "incomprehensible" place for an occidental mind. When I used to visit the indigenous villages, in the first years of my formation, I used to take with me Alice's books (Carroll's heroin) and I imagined myself with her, entering a world which rules I didn't catch, or when I did, it was difficult for me to accept it or put in in practice. That's how it happens to me today, when I write my texts. For me it doesn't exist a fixed form, I don't think I will ever write a sonnet, for example, although I admire many sonnets. In my first book there are no verses, only phrases; in the second, there are phrases that look like verses, because of the special distribution. I like these uncertainties. That's why I adopted Jorge Luis Borges esthetic lemma: (the poetry) "Sin prefijadas leyes, obra de un modo vacilante y osado, como si caminara en la oscuridad". Vacillate daring is a magic formula for me. I believe there a lot of people vacillating and daring in the actual Brazilian poetry, but others chose the fixed forms. I don't know if these vacillate, or really dare. Well, some are blind, others pretend to see the light of fixed forms, popular or nor. I prefer this dichotomy and this other, between experimental and popular.
7) What is your favorite food?
I am in the obscurity in this respect anything vegetarian. I will devour it without vacillation.
8) Sports Team? Activity?
I do not have a team but I watch the World Cup. I ride a bike, my favorite sport since I was a child, I don't play Soccer on weekends, the favorite pass time of Brazilians.
9) Vacation Spot?
I like California allot, especially San Francisco Bay
10) Curse word?
I never use them in my writing but in silences and emptiness when I write I used them as a way of complaining.
11) You are a poet, researcher and scientist how does this effect your work?
I believe I already answered this question - I am a professor and a researcher. As a poet, I absorb everything I can about myths of non occidental people. This widened my view, or, shows my blindness. That's why, in my first book, I offer poetic versions of my personal myths, precarious versions, temporary. I miss of a primordial vision, founding. In the second book, I rehearse a systematic eye over something, but this something escapes under the eye. The eye again doesn't fuse anything, just perplexes. Just.
12) Describe you poetic community now?
The community exists, I am not a part of it at the moment. The dark wave advances but has not brought me yet to her.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
First of all, I simply write, I don't take in consideration the definition of gender: I make descriptions, dialogues, sketches, reflections, then I blend everything, or I delegate this task to my muse, which task is to arrange (in my absence) what I don't want to arrange myself. So, the verse is not my objective, nor the poem. Ultimately, yet, I started playing with the idea of the poem, the versified text, and organized few texts myself, in a form, let's say, recognizable poetic. My muse, took these texts and put them in a sequence. That's how I work. The muse is a wind that stirs my threads of descriptions, of dialogs and of reflections, giving a greater (dis)order to the ensemble. She is the breeze on my sketches. I am a poet of sketches. Although I work a lot on my texts, then: search the sound, the image, the muse's "order", I can make great changes, to achieve a certain result that appeals to my eye and to my ears, simultaneously.
2) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
I never work with the idea of synthesis, my favorite word is metamorphous, transformation follow by dispersion...then the necessity of a muse on my side, that is the one that collects the loose pieces...but no synthesis is possible, what I saw when I wrote, is different from what she sees when she organizes my phrases. Of course, sometimes a poem is born ready, it doesn't need a new order, a new disorder, but I don't see synthesis, or the possibility of synthesis between my conception of the reality and the function of the poetry to capture this reality.
3) Where do you write? Is ambiance important?
Well, I believe I also answered this question: I write with an eye on the landscape. The ambiance is not important. But I don't write in front of a computer's screen, I write looking to something greater, that transcends the bedroom, the living room - the outdoors' metamorphosis, the metamorphosis that exists since the world is world.
4) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
I create and invent new descriptions, comparing one thing to another. This is not encountered language, this is elaborated and invented during the act of seeing. Besides, for me, this is properly seeing. But these descriptions never reach the target, they are collections of sketches, they are attempts to use the language like a mirror of the metamorphosis of the reality.
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