A Poética Intransitiva de Ferreira Gullar

Abstract

Written while Ferreira Gullar was in exile and regarded as one of his highest poetic achievements, Poema sujo [Dirty Poem] (1975) has been usually read as a cry of protest against the military regime established in Brazil in 1964. More than just a testimony against the brutality of the 64 regime, however, Gullar’s text inserts the reader into the heart of a developing poetic consciousness, in the tradition of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Nevertheless, differently from Wordsworth’s romantic poetics, in which subjectivity is seen as pre-existing the writing of the poem and the poem is conceived as an attempt to recover a lost innocence and a sense of totality, Poema sujo inscribes a performative subjectivity in the very process of poetic creation. Thus the poem emerges as an example of how the intransitive writing proposed by Roland Barthes may function as a form of resistance to a dehumanizing, dessacralized present, where poetry, material and corporeal rather than spiritual and transcendent, affirms a renewed humanism that, while aware of its limitations, remains generous and utopian.