Organizing shards

situation of Brazilian contemporary poetry through the anthology Uma alegria estilhaçada

Abstract

The essay seeks to establish some lines of force present in contemporary Brazilian poetry from the reading of the anthology Uma alegria estilhaçada: Poesia brasileira 2008-2018 (in free translation: A shattered joy: Brazilian poetry between 2008-2018), organized by Gustavo Silveira Ribeiro (2020). For this, the text is divided into two parts: the first investigates the arguments presented by the critic as criteria for choosing and organizing the anthologized poems and authors, seeking to see how such criteria are inserted in the current debate on the problem of evaluating literary works; in the second half, we suggest that the authors of the anthology display three distinct general attitudes, whose main traits we seek to characterize. We call these three attitudes Modern, Anti-poetic and Contemporary, each representing a different way of articulating the relationship between truth and language.