Amputated verse

loss and entropy in Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s poetics

Abstract

From the 1990s onward, Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s poetic work becomes intensely crossed by the experience of the sick body and the proximity of death, faced by the poet in his last years of life. This turning point, observed by critics such as João Alexandre Barbosa and Paulo Andrade, is preceded, however, by a poetics – already present in Uchoa Leite’s work since his antilyrical turn in Antilogia (1972) – that yielded to the verse a phantasmatic, vampiric mode of existence, which Luiz Costa Lima compares to that of an amputated limb. The article aims, thus, to understand how the poet engages this experience of loss of poetry in the face of the experience of loss of the body and the world, the growing sense of entropy in the self and the other: “Perplexed/ We go all disconnected/ in this universal whirl.” To do so, it analyzes some poems from A uma incógnita (1989-1990) in critical approaches that read Uchoa Leite’s vampiric verse as a possible modality of the modern poetry’s tombeau and its constitutive state of crisis (Marcos Siscar); and in dialogue with the Brazilian poetry linked to the idea of anthropophagy, thought of as a theory of mourning (Roberto Zular). And it concludes that, even though we are not facing an anthropophagic work or one that erects a tomb monument to poetry in its equivocal saying of the loss, such theories help us realize how the poet turns this loss into a space of encounter, of sharing and transformation of meaning.