Adrienne Rich

Love discussing literature with friends.

Having this talk to Andréa Martins, one of my long-term friends who happens to be a writer and an advertiser too, I had this insight to go back in writing in Portuguese as well. That made me conclude that a good thing would be to start a new blogg entirely in that language.

Don't know whether I can digress powerful texts in my own language as I used to. However, that is some kind of ability that we don't lose as it would be a material gain. It is a talent that is conquered, that can be modeled, remodeled, painted, vanished, polished. It's never gone. It just stays there asleep prostrated in some corner of our unconscious.

Gotta wake it up and it will come up as a brand-new force on me.

No, no, no. I won't give up writing in English. I will not kill this blogg. I am going to have to sort out my collectible vocabulary and previous learned writing skills for both languages. There will be another challenge to me. I love being dared. I was born to it.

Meanwhile, I have read a terrific female American poet called Adrienne Rich. She has done prose and poetry. To read and understand her, it is something that has to be appreciated as a continuous process, just like any other good famous writer. What I love most about her is that she shows us a clear poetic vision through powerful and simple words.

I try to write following the same style. Wait a minute there! I am not comparing her to my writings because that would be way too pedant. Quoting a book about her: " reading through her poems we may sometimes wish for more relaxation and playfulness, for a liberating comic sense of self almost never present in her work. What we find, however, is invaluable - a poet whose imagination confronts and resists the harsh necessities of our times and keeps alive a vision of what is possible."

Here it is my favorite of her poems...

PLANETARIUM

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them



a woman 'in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles'



in her 98 years to discover

8 comets



She whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses



Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind



An eye,

'virile, precise and absolutely certain'

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us



Tycho whispering at last

'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'



What we see, we see

and seeing is changing



the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive



Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body



The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus



I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me And has

taken I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.