It disturbs me to write about my poetry as I am asked to do so by those who make it known here in a breadth close to its whole (some unpublished works are still left out) because, in doing so, I would have to do two things: Either, a tare that does not seduce me, I would indulge in the onanism of a self-appreciation hopelessly tied to the umbilical cord that binds me to my poems; or, puffing fumes of objectivity, only by a factitious prodigy could I transmigrate from author to theorizer of this intimate, poetic subject of mine in which an ignotus that I am yet to know what it acts beyond me.  But suppose I don’t reach that “other” that, among my intrinsic pluralities, provokes me with words as I order them into images that liberate the language hidden in silence.  In that case, I may still fall into the trap that, right at the dawn of the Poetic Arts, Plato in the Ion set for the poets by saying that the gods put inspiration in their words.  Not that I find this impossible because my mind refuses to see anything outlandish, but it is dangerous.  Because if this is the case, the poet considers himself an exceptional being.  Giving rise to his arrogance, this exposes him to the ridicule of having no reason to boast since the verses he writes are not even his own but those of a supernatural entity that speaks through his mouth, reducing him to the role of a microphone.  Now, a vain microphone is a hilarious absurdity that removes all credibility from the poet.  It is not convenient for life to breathe the clean air of a beginning that poetry says it wants to emerge in our time as the hovel of the waste of a civilization paralyzed by the siege of catastrophic threats.  At this point, I’m tempted to get entangled in the thread that new science is extending to lead us to the postulate of a cosmic connection of poetry with an all-embracing language of music and mathematics in which the Universe is structured.  In mathematics, the number of syllables and accents is regulated in metric forms.  In music, only the simple melody is produced by this rhythmic arrangement, but that which in the enchanting logic of poetic language is essential to the poem (Mallarmé).  It is in this cosmicity of the poetic language that arises the remissive temptation that invites us to revisit Old Spiritual Treatises in which each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a number in a meaningful relationship of a constituent of the Universe.

…This is why each poem is a moral lesson, no matter how elevated, evanescent, or injected with virulent or boorish invective.  Indeed, not to be confused with the morality that expires with the religion that spawned it, but a spiritualized ethics that is already in this Kairos of the wheel of metamorphoses, in which the ghost of the dead God only appears to pass the baton to a new sacral legitimation, shows signs of wanting to be objectified.  Only if the poet’s fate recruits him/her to be an agent for the foundation of a new history of the mind, one where the phantasmagoria of the powers of social and mental environmental chaos paralyzes him/her in a disclaimer that relies on the narcissistic anesthesia of the others within the poet, or if the poet is tormented by the insistence of the memory of a future inscribed in the highest category of the Spirit that the pimps of the prostitution of life banish with widespread retros of economic supremacy, he/she can only unravel, in painful loneliness, the ingenuity of making the breath of the Universal Soul resound in the word the incubates the transformation of the human soul. 

Translated by Diniz Borges

*excerpts from the poet’s introduction in the book Poesia Completa, chosen by the translator to bring a little of Natália Correia’s thoughts to the English-speaking reader.