Skies on the ground of the page: image, surface, poetry and politics(Considerations about Carlos de Oliveira)

Abstract

Stars are recurrent images in the poetry of Carlos de Oliveira, constituting a key tounderstand his poetic and political project: they are counterpoint, resistance, utopian construct that impose itself before (or within) the salazarista “night”: simile of the writing itself. Deepening this reflection and relating the star-signs of the Portuguese poet to the equally obsessive stars of Mallarmé’s poetic universe, to the skies in Magritte's painting and the theoretical reflections by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Rancière, we sought to recognize the representations of the starry sky as conceptual, self-reflective images, allegories of the poetic image: decayed sky, desacralized, inscribed at the bottom of the page – dis-aster. In this perspective, the poetic image and the surface of the poem’s page reveal, by their very construction, as political acts of defiance of all determinism of form and signification, of classifications and hierarchizations, and of submission to sovereign models and powers.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n45a1062.