Sebastião Uchoa Leite

the Body, the Consciousness, the Poetry

Abstract

Beginning with an initial reflection on some of the most significant aspects of Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s poetry, based on demetaphorizing, humorous and ironic procedures, this article turns to the poet’s work to investigate how his poetry, suspicious and separated from certain torrent of lyrical emotion, is related to the figurations of illness and to the corrosion of the body, especially in A uma espreita (2000) and A regra secreta (2002). To do so, the article relies on a close reading of poems in which the limit experience of illness emerges in greater depth and in more sneaky, dizzying and self-investigative way. Finally, the 1995 poem “Minha (anti)boêmia” is analyzed, a text published in an inedited way in the magazine Ouriço (2021), demonstrating how the mechanisms of self-investigation suggest, for the poet, the affirmation of life and the maintenance of lucidity.