MAlways keep a piece of paper and a pen nearby. You don't want to be caught off guard by inspiration, which doesn't choose a time or place and almost always leaves as quickly as it arrived. He learned this since he was a teenager, when he started putting his first poems on paper. Since then, poetry has become a kind of main avenue, along which not only the poet circulates, but also the linguist, the teacher, the administrator and the public policy manager, all brought together in one and the same person, who serves by the name of Carlos Vogt. I'm three hundred, I'm three-hundred-and-five, he jokes, repeating Mário de Andrade. Last Thursday, the versatile Vogt launched the book Poesia Reunida in São Paulo, a work that contains the six previously published titles, including the unpublished poems by Pisca-alert. Secretary of Higher Education of the State of S. Paulo, former president of Fapesp and former dean of Unicamp, Vogt is part of the so-called “Generation 60”. In addition to the unpublished poems and Cantogragia, Poesia Reunida is composed of the volumes Paisagem domestic (1984), Geração (1985), Metalurgia (1991), Mascarada (1997) and Ilhas Brasil (2002). Full professor in linguistic semantics at Unicamp since 1969, Vogt is also coordinator of the Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor), at the same university, and editorial director of the magazines Ciência & Cultura, Inovação Uniemp and ComCiência. In the interview that follows, however, he leaves aside the formality of the manager, the technique of the linguist and the didacticism of the teacher. As the subject is poetry, the poet speaks.

Jornal da Unicamp – There are few poets who reach the level of publishing their poetry together. In your case, is this a culmination or a new beginning?

Carlos Vogt – I always have as a reference the work Confissões (Ed. Globo), by Somerset Maugham, for which I wrote the preface for the Portuguese version. When he published the book in 1938, the author was over 60 years old. He considered that this was the moment to take stock of his literary career, imagining that he had reached its peak. He continued producing and died at the age of over 90. So, the act of gathering is also a way of organizing the work. In my case, it means more than that: in addition to bringing together, it points to the continuity of the work, as the book contains unpublished poems. With the unpublished books, the book is saying: “more is coming”.

JU – In the preface to Poesias Reunidas, critic Alcir Pécora says that his poetry has a double aspect: the epigrammatic and the discursive. In his opinion, are these two aspects dichotomous or complementary?

Vogt – In fact, the preface says that these two aspects coexist in the same space without mistreating each other. I think these are two sides of the same process. I explained this poetically in the book Metalurgia (1991), with the poem that gives the book its title, in which the image of the construction of my poetry takes on both aspects. The image of the craftsman who refines the form to make it lean, but who does not disregard everything that is left over in this process of turning the word, and which falls to the floor like filings. Then, he collects it and makes it into a longer, more discursive poem. José Paulo Paes, in Metalurgia's ear, captures well this tension between the long poem and the short poem. The differences consist in the fact that the long poem makes incursions into the more sentimental aspect, which takes up a more autobiographical trajectory, while the short poems, on the contrary, are very much aware of the more reflective aspect about the circumstances.

JU – What defines these two aspects in your poetic creation process?

Vogt – The epigrammatic poem, which was widely practiced by modernists, aims at such a synthesis, as if the author suffered from the vertigo of verticality. You focus on that minimal form and that minimal form has to contain all the relationships and associations. As they are very economical poems, the title becomes part of the poem in several ways. At the same time as it is part of the poem, it is foreign to the poem. In the case of political poetry, for example, the epigrammatic poem, although it contains political themes, does not rise to the stage, does not proselytize poetically for political conviction. It is a poetry of reflection and criticism, and the relationship with the titles is fundamental to making this game. In long poems, the relationship between poetry and the literary universes in which my poetry is produced occurs. You are talking to these books, in a kind of hypertext present in poetry. All of this is written in a navigated river, which is the story of a personal life.

JU – In addition to your poetic work, you are originally a linguist. How does linguistics coexist with poetry?

Vogt – In fact, linguistics is the profession I chose. It has to do with the same attraction I have for language. Interest in understanding the structure of languages, representation systems, and concept formation. This has always interested me. The practice of poetry precedes that of linguistics. As a teenager I wrote my verses there, I started rehearsing translations in French and English, which were bad, but showed a certain interest. From an early age, however, poetry became a profession that was also inseparable from my personal choices. The two things are very close together. This is positive, but sometimes it can seem negative, because there would be a tendency to transfer the linguist's technicality to poetry, which could sound artificial from the point of view of poetry. It’s not that poetry doesn’t have technique. There is, a lot. The point is that this technique cannot be above the expression capable of constituting itself in the place that the reader frequents and where he feels comfortable recognizing experiences that he has not had.

JU – There is another question related to this aspect. You developed a career as a poet and at the same time established yourself as a manager. How does the poet interact with the administrator?

Vogt – Mário de Andrade, in the poem Eu Sou Trezentos, says: I am three hundred, I am three hundred-and-five. I think this issue is linked to a tendency to want to multiply personas in my existence, knowing, like everyone else, that life is brief. So, the more you can try to multiply yourself in experiences and activities, the more you will have the illusion of having lived more intensely and vertically. This has to do with the fact that I have carried out activities that could seem incompatible, but with which I have the pleasure of working, such as being a teacher, educator, advisor, critic, reader, manager, administrator, poet... So, If I'm not three or three hundred and fifty, I try to at least be half a dozen (laughs). Even because this thing about the poet living in the clouds doesn't make any sense. Its relationship with life, with everyday things, is a fundamental element, among other things, for the construction of poetry itself.

JU – According to commentators on your work, it is at the same time innovative, whilst still being part of the historical series of Brazilian poetry. In your opinion, what lineage does your poetry stem from?

Vogt – It's difficult to make a personal analysis. I think that, from the point of view of Portuguese-speaking poetry, my poetry has a strong relationship with the classical and even medieval tradition. It has an often classic twist on syntax. This certainly bears marks of the poetry of Camões and some romantic Portuguese, such as Almeida Garret. In Brazil, it goes through the romantics without a doubt, because they were the poets I lived with as a teenager. Gonçalves Dias, Casemiro de Abreu, Álvares de Azevedo. By the symbolists, such as Cruz e Souza, Alfonsus de Guimarães. And, later, by the modernists, such as Mário de Andrade, Carlos Drummond, Oswald de Andrade. But, it is also a poetry marked by the generation of 1945, by the constructivist experiences of João Cabral de Melo Neto, and in part – and strange as it may seem – with the poetry of Ferreira Gullar, especially Poema Sujo. Without ever being programmatic, I have always lived with this vertigo of verticality, which has a lot to do with the search for visual poetry, with the construction of poetic space, although it is a poetry that is extremely marked and involved with the issue of time.

JU – Contrary to what happened in the past, today poetry follows an underground course. In his opinion, is it possible to have an overall view of poetry in Brazil today?

Vogt – I think so. There are generational trends – I don’t know if the term is appropriate. I think it is possible to identify major trends and, within them, figures that stand out. At the same time, a group of poets who work to maintain quality and poetic production. Chronologically, I belonged to the generation of the 60s, which is a generation marked by diverse influences, both from Brazilian and foreign poets, which allow us to identify interesting trends. In the 70s there were also movements that followed one another, such as Marginal Poetry, which had great importance in Brazil as a cultural phenomenon and later as a poetic achievement. So, I think it is possible to identify broad lines. It is clear that things are happening at a speed that is no longer the same as before. In the midst of all this, it is not simple to identify the great narratives.

JU – Speaking of the generation of the 70s, at that time the movement of the so-called Mimeograph Generation to overcome the difficulties of editorial insertion was well characterized. It seems that nowadays, the Internet provides a much broader outlet. How is poetry reacting to changing media?

Vogt – If you search the Internet for poetry sites you will come across an impressive amount. There are everything from more organized sites to those that simply accumulate poems. What we have, in fact, is an interesting vehicle for the circulation of poetry. This boosts poetic exchange, but it did not generate any new movement, unlike the so-called marginal poetry of the Mimeograph Generation, which practiced an aesthetic ideology in opposition to the programmaticism that had taken hold in Brazilian culture with Concretism. There was, therefore, a scenario against which marginal poetry set itself, in form and content. All of this became part of a poetic attitude. Today there is no such movement. I think we are experiencing an adaptation to the media. Maybe some interesting movement will emerge in a while, but it's not that simple anymore.

JU – Does this mean that the role of the vanguards has been emptied?

Vogt – Vanguardisms are movements that necessarily presuppose a reference that characterizes a state of cultural neurosis. You have a set of norms, rules and symbolic systems functioning with an operational capacity to determine the behaviors that make people feel suffocated. When an avant-garde appears that exercises disqualified production from the point of view of material and forms, there is actually a movement to explode this neurosis. One of the characteristics of postmodernism is symbolic indigence, which makes it difficult for new avant-gardes to emerge. Break up what? On the contrary, we live in a state of extreme concession. It is the state of non-neurosis. Everything is possible and nothing is strange. From an artistic and literary point of view this is a complication. We have small movements of affirmation, but there are no new waves.