In the Poem: Literature and Music Recital

NO POEMA - Architectures in Voice and Verse

 

1.

 

We all know: words wear out in their daily use. They stiffen up, lose their meaning and so we become chattering machines, repeating noisy emptiness that is meant to be practical and objective. The poem, on the other hand, suspends this poor fate of speech: language renews itself, meanings don't rest, the imagination stirs, silence returns - we return ourselves to what makes us human. Listening to verse out loud suspends utilitarian time, launches the most prosaic space into other dimensions. The habit comes from a long way back. It goes back to the origin of the poem in ancient times. To get closer, we remember the 19th century, when soirees consecrated domestic conviviality between poetic sighs and the strumming of pianos, while outside, far from the aristocratic bourgeois atmosphere, nonconformist poets chanted verses of political and social revolt from the balconies of their houses; the small life of cafés and taverns also invented their destinies to the sound of verse. Modern poetry dethroned the poet of amenities and romantic raptures, but it didn't give up the practice of saying and listening to the poem. The avant-garde expressed itself loud and clear. Today, recitals, soirees or simply readings - no matter what they are called - occupy cultural spaces in tune with the internet and new media.

2.

These assumptions form the basis of NO POEMA - Arquitecturas em Voz e Verso, a show whose unique feature is to bring together poems that focus on the themes of the house, architecture, the city and travelling. It is therefore a question of showing - or hearing - the extent to which modern poetry has formed its sensibility in dialogue with motifs, problems, questions, intuitions and feelings that are very close to those that drive architecture and urbanism. If these disciplines necessarily work within their operational limits, poetry, on the other hand, is much freer. The main thing: architecture is a way of seeing. And this can be found in the poem, the song, the visual arts, philosophy and, without a doubt, in the daily reflections of any citizen - home and city are assets common to all. Poetry, however, is a kind of luminous synthesis of everything that animates and shapes the vast and complex urban experience.

Conception, text selection and direction: Eucanaã Ferraz.


Biographies

Eucanaã Ferraz was born in Rio de Janeiro on 18 May 1961. He is a poet and has published several books, several of which have won awards in Brazil and Portugal, where his work has been published regularly since 2001. He also writes for children and young adults. He has organised books by Caetano Veloso, Adriana Calcanhotto and Vinicius de Moraes, among others. He teaches Brazilian Literature at UFRJ's Faculty of Letters and has been a literature consultant for the Moreira Salles Institute since 2010. He has curated several visual arts programmes and directed musical shows.

Rosa Maria Martelo. Writer, researcher at the Institute of Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, retired professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto. She has published the following books of poetry: Duchamp's Door (2009), Matter (2014), Siringe
(2017) e Drawing in the Dark (2023). His most recent essays include The Names of the Work - Herberto Helder or the Continuous Poem (2016), Slowly, Poetry (2022) e Diffuse Matters, Powerful Things (2022). He co-organised the anthology Poems with Cinema
(2010) e A Kind of Cinema (2019) and organised the Dialoguing Anthology of Portuguese Poetry (2021). He co-directs the online magazine eLyra (elyra.org.)

Tatiana Faia (1986) is the author of five books of poems: Lugano (2011), Teatro de rua (2013), Um quarto em Atenas (2018), Leopardo e Abstracção (2020), Adriano (2022) and a book of short stories, São Luís dos Portugueses em Chamas (2016). Together with José Pedro Moreira and Victor Gonçalves, she is one of the editors of the magazine Enfermaria 6. A Room in Athens was honoured with the PEN poetry prize in 2019. Her most recent book, Adriano, brings together four poems and an essay that take the figure of Emperor Adriano as their starting point. The book was a semi-finalist for the Oceanos prize and was translated into Greek by the poet Tonia Tzirita Zacharatou. She has translated the Homeric Hymns, Philo of Alexandria, Herman Melville and Anne Carson into Portuguese. She has a doctorate in ancient Greek literature with a thesis on Homer's Iliad. She is the author, in collaboration with the composer João Ricardo, of a libretto and an aria for opera. She has lived in Oxford for over a decade.

He was also the jazz coordinator and programme maker for the European Capital of Culture - Porto 2001. In 1999 he founded the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos, of which he is currently artistic director, musical director, composer and arranger.After teaching at the Portuguese Catholic University and at ESMAE's Theatre Department, he was one of the founders of the first Jazz Degree in the country, also at ESMAE - Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espetáculo.

Mário Santos (saxophones, composition)
He has been teaching Instrument and Combo at ESMAE's Jazz course since 2006.He leads the projects "Os rapazes do Jazz", QMS bA4, bA5 and SMS bA6 (with which he recorded the discs "Encomenda" and "Nuvem").He has been a member of the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos since its foundation (1996).Since 1986 he has been progressively active in the field of jazz, performing in the main Portuguese and foreign jazz venues and festivals.During his career, he has taken part in workshops, recordings and concerts.


Technical Data
Curator and Artistic Director: Eucanãa Ferraz
Reading: Eucanãa Ferraz Rosa Maria Martelo Tatiana Faia
Piano: Pedro Guedes
Wood: Mário Santos