“The poet and the world” – “Experimentalism.” By Natália Correia

      In the indefinite wait for the new man, the old man evades the drama of ambiguity (the simultaneity of values that are fading and those that are being announced) by deciding on impersonalism. It is in this vacuum that the adaptation to precarious political-economic-social solutions, a disbelieving accommodation to ideologies, the concupiscence of the transitory, and the stripping away of personal coercions that might disturb the comfort of taking the tastes of the majority as one’s own is justified.

      In a world where the scientific imperatives that shape man’s destiny are presented as mysterious operations of initiates reminiscent of the old priests manipulating the lives of the multitudes in the laboratory of the spiritual tyranny of the temples, the old man replaces the old religious terror of afflicted dependence on scientific authority, transferring to the earthly sphere the perplexities once concentrated in the afterlife. The new man, a specific psychology to be determined by technical and scientific acceleration, appears to him as a stranger, a ghost waiting for him in the future to remind him of the uselessness of his formulas, his beliefs, and his actions to erase his passage in this world. And so, the old man annuls himself, nihilizes himself, and accepts the imperatives of mediocracy that depersonalize them. Within the depersonalizing phenomenon of massification determined by the demographic and technical vortex, this other psychological level of man chooses the path of impersonalism. It is this decision that forms the spirit of the age. In this mental atmosphere, a new poetry emerges – experimental poetry – committed to abandoning psychological determinants in favor of sociological demands.

        The novelty of this poetic experience is that it doesn’t want to be new because it expresses impersonalism, the new attitude of the old man; it is after the fact of his dissolution into the masses, it ignores the past, the individualist paradise that dissolves into the standardizing prerogatives of the collective and gives up on intuiting the new man so much so that it abandons the subjective qualities that bring the future up to date. Experimental poetry breaks free from the linguistic circuit in its undefined sociological objective. It gathers information from the world in which it is produced, assimilating the means and resources of the society of technology and science, demanding itself as a synthesis of the living culture of the masses through which and for which it works.

         But it is in its very sociological coloring that experimental poetry raises an enticing controversy insofar as it proposes to satisfy the aesthetic needs of the masses, returning to them, albeit transformed by an imaginative intervention, the motifs it received from them, becoming indispensable since in its conjunction with the spirit of the age it gives up that aggressiveness of the unthought which is the dynamizing and formative value that qualifies art and its distance from fashion.

          As a first critical argument, we ask: to what extent is the spirit of the age in which a poetic style is inscribed recognizable? The spirit of the age is the resting point of the age. For our times, this means that the spirit of the masses – impersonalism – is the resting point of our era. Art, in the case that interests us, poetry, is a deviation from this point of rest which, in its displacement, in its independence, presupposes a sense of the quality of a differentiated sociological group which, by distancing itself from the point of rest, has a critical perspective to focus on it objectively, moving from being passively participating to being creatively participating. Therefore, a new poetic style is not the expression of the spirit of the age but of the mentality of a particular group whose assumptions cannot be identified with those of the masses.

      On the one hand, experimental poetry observes an intellectual deviation – the intelligibility of all possible relationships and consequences – from the point of rest of the time when it sets out to think about the spirit of the time. However, since the context of its reflections is the spirit of the age itself, it loses the powers of attraction, exemplarity, and influence that come from the quality recognized in the independence of the differentiated group. And so the new style emerges as a curious paradox of poetry that denies itself, of a need that knows itself to be unnecessary, as an insurmountable rationality of the spirit of the masses, as the expression of an impersonal that is unrecognizable in the game of a differentiated intellect that assumes differentiation. Its reluctance to face the fulcrum of poetry, the felt continuity of psychological fact, gives this new poetry a character of rationalized autophagy, the dimension of humor that supports its structure. Humor is implicit in its self-denial.

     In the very name it chooses, experimental poetry declares its purpose of anti-creation. What is required is not a poetic creation but a poetic product with a view to its methodical observation. An artificial production, therefore. But here, the artifice, the object of the experiment, has a human value just as much as the attitude that is anti-poetic because it unilaterally disdains the psychological compounds that allow the poetic cosmos to be formed, is a radically humorous position, in that it makes an artifice serious that is not serious because it is made severe.

   In its novelty of not being novel, experimental poetry, which is an act of lucidity that overlaps with the act of creation, knows that, by presenting itself as an aesthetic reduction of mass culture, by dispassionating the psychological sources that provide information about the unthought of the future, it does not organize itself as a language that already expresses the reality of the new man, in other words, the imprint of his interiority. Consequently, it doesn’t ignore the fact that it is the new poetry of the old man, of his voluntary impersonalism, that no man’s land in which he strips himself of his old individuality to enter a new mold of individuation.

Translated by Diniz Borges

These extraordinary chronicles by Natlália Correia were written in 1968-69 for a newspaper in Lisbon.

[1] Natália Correia (1969). «O poeta e o mundo», «Experimentalismo». Diário de Notícias, 6 de Março, pp.17-18.