Excerpt: Ferreira Gullar in conversation with Ariel Jiménez

The following text is an excerpt from the book Ferreira Gullar in conversation with Ariel Jiménez, published by Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 2012. Ferreira Gullar was born in 1930 in São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil. His poetic production has been closely intertwined with his work as an art critic. From his first major collection of poems, published in 1954, to his Concrete and Neoconcrete work, published from 1957 to 1959 (and including the important 1959 works “Neoconcrete Manifesto” and “Theory of the Non-Object”), Gullar’s writings are essential to the history of Brazilian and Latin American literature, deeply influencing generations of artists.​

Ferreira Gullar: "Nasce o poema" [The Poem is Born], is a reflection on poetry, and arises out of a conversation with a person who was asking me what I did to write my poems. I began to explain how I did it, and in the course of my explanation I realized that I was writing a poem. So I excused myself, stopped the conversation, and went back home to write the poem.

some people think

they know

how the poem should be

I scarcely know

what I'd like

it to be

because I change

the world changes

and poetry erupts

in the most unlikely places

sometimes

smelling of flowers

sometimes

detached in the smell

of rotting fruit

which loses itself in rot

(the closer it comes to night

 the louder the scent

cries out)

sometimes

in the grinding

of silence

in a small shop in Estácio

in the afternoon^[1]

All this while remembering a day in 1955 in the Estácio neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, where I was working. It was a hot day, with a lot of sun. Amílcar de Castro and I went out to catch the bus and go home. It was so hot that I went into a store, a small establishment selling dishes and porcelain objects. When I went inside, I not only found the shade I'd been seeking, but also the silence, and so I noticed those cups covered in dust, in the shade of the shop. That's where the poem started to appear, but of course could not fully be born in that moment because Amílcar was nervous and the bus was already coming.

So I moved along

And the poem remained

unborn

a part of the shop's air

a part like the dust

on my hair.^[2]

And I left, I traveled to the Soviet Union, to Chile, and to Argentina, and the poem continued waiting for its moment to be born, which arrived eleven years later.

What happened, in part, is that I write very little, and my poems come into being based largely on chance; they aren't situations I can control, and for that reason, my poetry volumes are not books with a single subject matter.