The Night Hunter
Nighttime Cruising In Roberto Piva’s Urban Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2358-9787.34.3.154-164Keywords:
Roberto Piva, city, night, cruisingAbstract
The poet Roberto Piva (1937-2010), in Paranoia, his debut work, published in 1963, takes a nocturnal journey through the marginal environments of São Paulo, transforming the city into a dreamlike space where desire reigns. In Paranoia, the night emerges as a place of transgression, excess, and sensuality. The desiring gaze of Piva’s poetic voice transforms the universe around him into a vertiginous stage for processions of marginalized beings, inhabitants of the city’s underworld, among whom the poet mingles in orgiastic communion. Piva’s wandering through the night of São Paulo can be understood as a poetic of cruising, as theorist Jack Parlett (2022) proposed in his book The Poetics of Cruising. For Parlett, the gaze and imagination shape the encounters between strangers in the urban queer universe. In this play of gazes, the author sees a theater of poses performed and directed at a voyeuristic gaze. Based on Parlett and other authors who explore the urban experience from a queer point of view, this work aims to pursue the traces of cruising in Piva’s urban lyric, trying to show how this production poetically stages the erotic game of poses and looks so dear to cruising through the poetic voice transit through the nocturnal underworld of São Paulo in the 60s.
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