Antonio Sergio Bessa Did the search for a new subjectivity lead you to the “other”? You mentioned your readings of Eliot and Pound, and as you know, a major part of their poetry is a kind of collage of other poems and voices. Is that what attracted you to their work?

Francisco Alvim No doubt. What I found in Eliot and Pound was a voice coming from a new, crushed subjectivity, which had already emerged, splendidly and movingly, in Baudelaire. My feeling is that, in our time, this subjectivity became manifest in poetry in two ways: via material things, of the thing-thing and the word-thing, and via man. “Via” here is meant as channel, as in voice, or speech, and of course writing. Via man, it became pluralistic and fragmented, because today man is a being without individuality, and the world, a reality imploded into a thousand fragments. Thus the shrapnel of voice, voice which is also, above all, a desperate attempt—inexorably failed—to hear itself and the other’s voice.

— from BOMB’s interview of Francisco Alvim by Antonio Sergio Bessa, AMERICAS: Brazil Now! Winter 2008 issue

 

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Three poems by poet and diplomat Francisco Alvim from Elefante, translated by interviewer Antonio Sergio Bessa.

 

 

Open
for Cacaso

 

Sometimes the gaze follows
the network of light
without any curiosity
any illusion
It goes on in search of time
and time, as always,
emptied of everything
is not far
is here, now
The gaze with no memory
without destiny
arrested
in the air of air
in the light of light—
site?

 

 

Poem
for Carlos Drummond de Andrade

 

There are many shadows in the world
They blow in the clouds
and in the air they
glitter solitary like topazes—
drops of dimmed light

The stars blow wind
Shadows are the wind of stars

At the bottom of waters trapped
in ponds and dams
there is a wind of waters—
shadows

In the sea
they refract submersed
transient
amidst forests of algae—
shadows of emerged shadows

They are made—the shadows—of dark
air
They remember all and nil

The flight of shadows
spins around a sonorous
column, the poem—
light from inside

Out

 

 

No Plot

 

Still

 

In the platform above

 

Between the legs
on the floor
the groceries in a plastic bag

 

Far from verse, almost prose
No guts
for the always venturesome—
while they last—
flights of passion

 

Far so far
from humor from irony
from the polymorph voices
sibylline
tattered in the tongue’s
ear

 

Where ground is ground
legs, legs
things, things
and the word, none
There, only the refraction
of an idea
of a thought exhausted
of movement

 

Between two roads
two harbors
(two lagoons)
two illnesses

 

Sublime virtues of chance
why not take me
from inside
and protect me from the cold outside
from the incessant, unbearable flight of plot?
from choosing?

 

 

Read Francisco Alvim by Antonio Sergio Bessa in BOMB’s Winter 2008 Brazil issue, on newsstands now. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!