The poetry of the present and the realistic machinery

a reading of Ana Guadalupe's poems

Abstract

Starting from two poetry anthologies recently published at Brazil – As 29 poetas hoje (2021), organized by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, and É agora como nunca (2013), organized by Adriana Calcanhotto – this paper explores what Tamara Kamenszain, Argentine poet and critic, calls "realistic machinery", which would be functioning in certain poetic production since the 1990s. This realistic machinery would put in scene a "profaned" poetry, restituted to the use, and that stages multiple voices, performing a post-self that allows itself to be fully seen in the poetry of Ana Guadalupe. If in As 29 poetas hoje we see on the scene an orchestration of voices, a choir, thinking with Tamara Kamenszain, we can say that this plurality of voices finds a common ethos, a self that adds up: a self-you-us that erases that unitary voice of the self-centered lyric self. This paper, thus, seeks to make visible in the analysis of some poems written by Ana Guadalupe that there is also in scene a kind of self that, in fact, is never only authorial or autobiographical: a self that knows and recognizes the marks through which it has passed; a provisory self; a self that is, sometimes, foreign; a self that inaugurates itself in the instant-already of the poem, in the here-now of the poem; a self that feedback itself in a possible rereading (of the poem); a self that is hostage to other selves. This choir of selves presents us the task to try to understand the movements and motivations that this profaned poetry arouses, being itself a good demonstration of the poetry of the present that invests in the capture of a profaned real.