Notional Reading Plan (XXXIV)

Bakers know how to make bread, the public knows how to whistle, plumbers how to fix a tap. But pilots no longer know how to fly zeppelins ; and who can still sand metal, compose a fugue, cut off a condemned man's head, or write verses? There are still cleaners, musicians, executioners and poets: but certain skills are no longer required of those who are these things. In the days when people flew zeppelins and beheaded people by hand, poets still wrote verses; they amused themselves by arranging collections of signs representing words, hesitations and noises, so that whoever understood them would come across things they had seen or heard before; and remember them.

There are still those who certainly know how to write verse, but it is like someone who is proficient with an axe, skilled with a solarina, or who composes fugues out of boredom. These are rare and antiquated customs. The majority of current poets are concerned with saying what they think is happening; and this phenomenon always bores the voice. The preoccupation with noise distracts from the correct expression in philosophical missions. It is therefore not surprising that, although other things have undeniably been gained, the ear has been lost. This ear continues to be required, however, by short forms without great ambitions, by song lyrics, by ambiguous puns, or by poems in verse by dead poets who no one cares about.

One of the Portuguese poets who required a cultivated ear the most was João de Deus (1830-1896). Even when he wrote indifferent verses, he never lost sight of the sounds. João de Deus collected his poems in several anthologies with vegetal titles, culminating in the thick Campo de flores , published the year after his death. But the flowers in his verses often make one blush because João de Deus could never resist the possibility of a good verse. The great subjects of poetry (love, death and the friendship of dogs) seem to be just a pretext to deal with what really interested him: rhythms, noises and hesitations.

One example is a splendid twelve-line narrative poem of his. The first part describes the suffering caused by a soldier’s indigestion; and the final six lines explore solutions. The soldier has been given two “sisters” in the seventh line, for no apparent reason; one gives him medical advice in the eighth and ninth lines: “Put two fingers in your mouth / Make me want to watch.” The soldier rejects the advice with indignation: “Two fingers in your mouth . . . crazy?! / If I could put them in / I would put two bananas.” When you hear “mouth” you immediately hear “crazy”; but the word “sisters” delays the word “bananas” for five whole lines. The lines in the poem repeat the two movements of the soldier’s bulimia; and they are a triumph of poetry and technique that few would know how to repeat today.