At ground level — Figures in the prose in the poetics of Fernando Assis Pacheco and Manuel de Freitas

Abstract

This article intends to reflect on some configurations of the idea of prose in the thematic aspect (presence of daily life and of mundane elements) and in the formal aspect (simple, prosaic and narrative language, full of everyday terms and expressions) in the poetical works of Fernando Assis Pacheco (1937-1995) and Manuel de Freitas (1972 —). By paying special attention to how each one of them expresses his relationship with poetry and his understanding of it through poetical discourse and, in the case of Manuel de Freitas, also through the critical one, we intend to emphasize how these works, though temporally distant — since Freitas only started publishing in the 2000’s —, share a non-auratic notion of poetry, sometimes writing, as another poet said, “in the level of the butt/ of others” and declaring categorically that people should “Ask grandiloquence to others/ for I think it despicable in the current state of economy” or, still, “Where one reads poetry we should read nothing”, declaring the impotence of the act of poetical writing itself.