The skin-poem or The explosive fuel book - a reading of Luís Miguel Nava

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Luís Miguel Nava, trying to look at his poetry as a thought - a body's thought. We start from a theoretical text, where the poet denounces the privilege of the intellect and asserts the sensibility as a criteria to inspect not only poetry but everything that surrounds us. Nava bets on a wider conception of the word sense, extending it to "everything that we perceive, either through intellectual way or through the skin or through the heart". The poet tries, thus, to recover the sensual and affectionate components etymologically mixed up in the term, but rejected by the tradition of western thought that intended to make the reason to be the only legitimate instrument to inspect reality. From his point of view, the signs of the world make sense for us not only as we understand them, but as they affect us corporeally. And being affected means being transformed, changed into another one. Finally, we attempt to investigate the bonds between the theoretical ideas developed by the writer and the expression they assume in the poetic language. We'll note that the body and its senses turn into a way of knowledgc that acquires very specific contours through subjective writing experimentation. An experimentation that does not go on without shaking the identity principle and risking self dissolution.