školská 28

Project in Prague
Poetry, language and lectures by foreigners

Poetry could have many sources, styles or even a father and a birthplace, poetry can also reveal directions or ways.

It puts in words things that we have never expected or give different names to others that we have forgotten or we have always knew.

It's true that poetry can open a smile or show unusual places in front of our eyes. But is it the face of someone more expressive when is reading a good poem than when it is doing something else like walking on a park or cooking for a 7 person family or even when is waiting for a late train after work?

To make someone's face look wiser in front of a poem, could be one of the poetry's roles, much more than the trivial wish of the writer's immortality or geopolitical influence.

There isn't any definitive aim, because poetry can't feed trees or cows and it can't put the clouds away, even if you read a poem very loud, about a sunny day, in the top of a tower or mountain.

Talking about the process by which a poem came in to the paper is important if you want to write an assay about it, not before you present a poem in public or like an introduction to a book. Because this brings noise and leads the reader an the listeners in a rigid way, instead of leaving the freedom to choose different directions.

It is like, If you say, Oh! I wrote this poem in Prague or in Greece in front of Parthenon or in India when I was in a monastery. No one will ask you about it, if the poem doesn't values for it self.

You can't measure the quality of a poem by the sweat or danger that you had to pass trough to write it.

The lecture is very important for the meaning and the vibration of the key words and ideas of a poem. A good lecture can rescue a medium poem, like a good musician can do with a regular partiture.

But a fragmentary lecture can give away a very good text. It is again like a bad musician who plays with a bad instruments a master piece.

But if you play a regular song wrote for a piano with a flute or a bass, you can go beyond the initial partiture and reach new directions.

The lectures and dialogs in foreigner languages have always fascinated me, sometimes I stay very long time just looking and listening to people speaking different idioms and I think that they speak so well and they understand each other, and articulate and make sounds very different to my own language. You can easily imagine philosophical argues from dialogs between people in the supermarket or poetry and tales from the woman in the loudspeaker of the train-station.

Because the languages them selves have substance and internal charge that irradiates, just like some countries, cities or even centuries, because language is also a place where you can go.

That's why learning foreigner languages had this dichotomy, you can enrich your vocabulary, your own personal brain library of sounds, concepts, and read texts in the original idiom. But it takes away from you this possibility of get involved and being affected with trivial dialogs when you don't understand a word, only the bodies and the mood.

Give Portuguese poems to non Portuguese speakers is something in the middle of this, is like to give a western scale partiture for violin to an Arabic musician. It's a cross between two biological different species, and the result is an hybrid that could or not be feasible.

Since 2002 I started to write long poems about the mutual influence of places and people expressions. Texts with an obscure and transfigured look about some basic mechanisms of existence in over stimulative places.

In 2007 was selected for the national award of young writers (Jovens Criadores 2007) with a poem about Lisbon, , which reflects this line of writing.
Synopsis
It is the writing of a desperate man who accompanies the crickets (cvrcek) by slow ridges of the city.

Lisbon is the bas-relief that drains into an underground beach, balance through the night with the face full of cars, is a site in a state of transition, without the flowers under the tongue or the orchards of oranges behind the eyes. Grows on top of clouds between a departure from bulls in the morning and picking the end of the afternoon in to the stables.

There are animals dressed for war and all the space is used to accumulate hatred in blocks and launch a look of gray under the tall buildings and small individual caves.

Between killed and sold, a love run over at the red signal and the stenography of vandals, there is the wind in the feet of tramps, as roots translated for the new avenues, dried trees on the extension of roads and the social fabric.

In the stairs of an empty church I found a woman and a strong wind around the neck, they invited me to a house with an apple in their lips and the skin of the eyes as gills in a thick river. They sat me at a table with pigeons kneeling in the breath of women who died every time another wind was born in her.

Lisbon has 400000 words ready to click under the arm and the throat caught in a building for a hundred years. Lisbon leads itself to other places in small closed neighborhoods or houses in the way and it is always her that grows inside our mind when we try to forget a city.

The other side of my work as an artist is photography. Since 1998 I follow and catalog the human faces of several villages in the northern countryside of Portugal. Some of my photos were published in magazines and awarded prizes in local photo contests.