Pessoa and Co., by Francisco Pessoa, translated and edited by Richard Zenith.

CONCEPT

This book has taken me all over the place. Originally, when I first glanced at the table of contents, I almost emailed you to ask whether we were supposed to read just Fernando Pessoa or if the work of his associates was relevant. By the time I finished the Introduction, though, I had to Google Richard Zenith to make sure that he wasn't the man behind the curtain, a la Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Kimbote, and John Shade.

My impulse is to support this sort of project. I can empathize with what (I suspect) will be peoples' main objections; that most of these poems are overly general and viscerally lacking. Of course, taking the slant of postmodern (proto-postmodern?) thought and existential philosophy and then reading it in translation can't help matters. Still, there are a couple easy responses to such objections.

First, on the level of prosody, there's a musicality of rhythm and cadence that comes, not only through a conspicuous meter (upon which Pessoa typically relies in these pieces) but also repetition. Generalized words such as "things," "exist," "myself," take on more weight than their literal or contextual meaning by virtue of where they are placed, how, and how often they are used.

Second, I talked about this with Amy Lawless, and she summed up my thoughts in saying that "the whole project was so intriguing." Pessoa is a legitimate example of someone who subjected, quite literally, his life to his process of creating art. The same postmodern maxims of uncertainty and narrative take on an unexpected poignancy when they appear in a person's life to such an extent that they drive away his romantic prospects, and maybe even drive him to death through drinking. Though the second point is a matter of conjecture.

These are the two aspects of this work I am most interested in, quite aside from the fact that tis relevance to "myself and others" is so conspicuous as to be negligible. I'm going to focus, however, on the way breadth, and specifically the broad or vague words common in these poems, suggests a particular way of reading, and how such a reading steers interpretation.

Within each persona, and looking at each poem, there's a lot that many people would consider to be "bad" writing – that which speaks generally or generically, situations "told" instead of "shown." While I admit that evocation, of images, ideas, or emotions are what's likely to make a poem or story memorable to me, I can't see any reason to restrict the way in which this is achieved. The Pessoa poems, in addition to their reliance upon repetition, can also be engaged allegorically, sentimentally, and, as we considered with O'Hara, as correspondence.

One of my favorites, for example, was "O Morning That Breaks Without Looking at Me," by Ricardo Reis. There's a nod to sensory detail – the wave that "tossed by storms / High into the air, returns / With more weight to a deeper sea." But prior to this are earlier repeated vague references: "to be real," "I feel nature," "they exist," "I am small." The referents are equally vague, so there is no question that the goal is not to imply a relative immensity of scale.

As I came up on these words, especially "thing," "exist," and "real," with "nature" close behind, however, they came to take on two several carefully located meanings.

One, for example, is conversational… the word is vague not for its lack of applicability, but because the speaker is struggling to find a word to fit a concept, extemporaneously: "They exist and I am small." In fact, in Reis particularly the meter and stress sequence suggests this level of emphasis. If read aloud, with pauses and gestures and inflection, this breadth takes the form of a sort of exasperation at being unable to express the whole idea.

A similar approach yields an emotional or sentimental angle on the piece. In "Ah, the First Minutes in Cafès of New Cities," deCampos' writes his first stanza:

Ah, the first minutes in cafès of new cities!
The early morning arrivals at docks or at stations
Full of a tranquil and luminous silence!
The first pedestrians on the streets of a just-reached city,
And the special sound of time's passing when we travel...

"Time's passing" presented as a concept is easy in conventional form, but isn't a particularly prescient or evocative detail, and the phrase it modifies, "special sound" is even less helpful. This statement ought not to be considered as a conclusion independent of its causes… as an abstraction derived from the observation of earlier details. Instead, the earlier details provide a few examples of the moments encompassed and included at the end. The "first minutes," "early morning arrivals," "tranquil and luminous silence," and "first pedestrians" are all aspects of a large category of experience: "special sounds of time's passing." The breadth, then, is an exhortation of conceptual immensity where the color and texture of its moments are already provided.

Finally, there's an open-ended allegory in the generality of these poems. In both of the above examples, as well as in "The Wind is Blowing too Hard," ("If I let my mind go, I'll heighten my mystery") Some Music ("Something that life has no part in!"), explicitly in the Sebastianism pieces and cagily in virtually all of the Caeiro poems, breadth is personified. It's almost as if "mind," for all of its inherent properties, is a free-agent, capable of moving around and, allowed sufficient freedom, of developing properties of enigma.

In almost all of these cases, the implications imply a vastness of potential and a limit of the time or experience to engage that potential. This, in turn, implies a difficulty in establishing borders and boundaries. At this point it's easy to make a connection, and perhaps a deliberate one, between poems that are vague and open-ended and mortal identities with the same properties.

In a longer paper, I could develop this argument comprehensively… Last week I had trouble drawing enough from my reading of O'Hara to make many general statements on his work. Today, while I feel I can make and back-up any number of general statements on Pessoa, the statements themselves demand such precision in definition and qualification to set up that any particular claim seems to turn into a rabbit-hole leading to a much longer assignment.

Suffice it to say that, however antecedent these poems may be considered to a self-defined and acknowledged "postmodernism," Pessoa's cross-referentiality and the lack of a discernable "center" in his work – any sort of fixed perspective or vantage point – is as thoroughly postmodern as anything I've ever encountered, and saturates the work not only in the form of his myriad identities, but as broad and cloudy turns-of-phrase that seem to open up into a wide and empty universe.

I could go on to discuss how this affected me, making the various poets blend together in a way that renders many of their personal and stylistic differences moot. Or I could talk about my conversation on Pessoa with my wife, who has worked as a research coordinator with schizophrenics, and our attempt to puzzle out his possible motivations. But I've already gone on for a full page too long.

I'll be thinking about Pessoa for a long time.

END OF POST.