Education by Stone Read online

  This freeing of the poem from the poet has its price. The relationship with the author created by a well-made poetry of personal confession or remembrance will more easily captivate and move the average reader. The resolute impersonality of Cabral’s work — in which the word “I” rarely occurs — puts a heavy burden on technical accomplishment, and demands readers who appreciate that accomplishment. “Impersonal” does not mean “unfeeling,” however. The poet’s rigorous configurations placed words in a state of high tension capable of provoking, at certain moments, emotions of a rare order, and these were by no means an accidental by-product of his art. According to Cabral, his constructivist approach to poetry owed its greatest debt not to any of the writers and painters he admired but to Le Corbusier, whose theoretical works he had read already as a teenager. But if the Swiss architect’s most famous proposal was to see a house as a “machine à habiter” (machine to inhabit), Cabral chose another phrase of Le Corbusier for the epigraph to The Engineer: “machine à émouvoir” (machine for stirring emotion).

  In 1947 João Cabral took up his first foreign post, as the Brazilian vice-consul in Barcelona. Over the next forty years he held posts in England, Spain, France, Switzerland, Paraguay, Senegal (where he rose to the rank of ambassador in 1972), Ecuador, Honduras, and Portugal. All left explicit traces in his poetry, but Spain — where he spent a total of fourteen years, in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville — became the second geographical pole around which his poetry flourished. This was not a pole of opposition but one that echoed, in a European register, Cabral’s native Pernambuco. The relative socioeconomic backwardness of Franco-ruled Spain, the arid, harshly lit landscapes of Castile, and the stark essentiality of Andalusia’s cante hondo, the singing style typical of flamenco, had their counterparts in Northeast Brazil, which — perhaps not by chance — was never a theme in Cabral’s poetry until he went to Spain.

  The reciprocal relationship of the two regions is demonstrated in Landscapes with Figures (1956), where there is a pendular shift of geographical setting from one poem to the next (in the full-length work). This alternation between Pernambuco and Spain would occur throughout the rest of the poet’s career, sometimes within a single collection and sometimes on a larger scale, with entire books set in or evoking one or the other of the two places. Landscapes also set the technical parameters of Cabral’s most typical machine mold: sixteen of the eighteen poems are built out of quatrains, and perfect or assonantal rhyme (more frequently the latter) is employed throughout in an abcb scheme. And the machine worked. Cabral put almost nothing into it and managed to pull out stunning poems. The landscapes are all bleak or empty — three cemeteries, the “anonymous, plainfaced” sugarcane field, a “place in La Mancha / where the Castilian plain is hardest,” the “almost static” Capibaribe flowing through Recife’s “sclerosis and cement” — and the figures that inhabit them mostly dead or destitute; but the poet was able to find or create life in these desolate scenes.

  Uma Faca Só Lâmina (1956; A Knife All Blade) was Cabral’s most technically brilliant poem-machine. Three words, or images, or metaphors — a knife, a clock, and a bullet — weave in and around and in place of each other over the course of 352 verses, divided into eleven sections of eight stanzas with four lines containing seven syllables each. Perhaps because he realized that this poem smacked of an exercice de style, he published it and Landscapes with Figures in a book that also contained a lower-tension, higher-access poetry. Titled Duas Águas (Two Waters) and including both new and older works, the book’s subtitle indicated the two broad divisions of Cabral’s entire poetic output: Poetry of Reflective Concentration and Poetry for Wider Audiences. The latter category encompassed Cabral’s long narrative poems — The Dog without Feathers and O Rio — and the previously unpublished Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of a Severino), a verse drama. A staged version of this new work, with music by singer and composer Chico Buarque, won prizes in Brazil and France in 1966 and brought international renown to Cabral. “There are many of us Severinos / all with the very same life,” explains the protagonist, an archetype of the desperate Sertanejo who migrates to Recife from the drought-scourged Sertão.

  This, Cabral’s most popular work, was not one he cherished, judging it less well crafted than others. But it served, in his overall production, as an antidote to the danger that “work can become exercise, an activity performed for its own sake” and leading ultimately to “the death of communication.” Cabral followed up this warning, issued in a lecture delivered in 1952, with an indictment of poets who don’t take into consideration their readers, “the essential counterpart to the activity of creating literature.” A poet’s richness, he argued, “can only originate in reality.” Death and Life of a Severino, in keeping with the implied agenda, was grounded in the reality of Pernambuco not only thematically but formally, for it picked up on a local tradition of verse plays accompanied by music and dancing.

  Cabral’s more rigorously constructed work, his “poetry of reflective concentration,” reached its highest level of achievement in the 1960s, with the publication of Four Spot (1960), Serial (1961) and Education by Stone (1966). Although the poet claimed to be indifferent to music, the title of the second book recalls the serial technique of dodecaphonic composers, and the arrangement of its component parts lives up to the ideal. Obsessively driven by the number four, the book’s sixteen poems all have four parts consisting exclusively of quatrains. In the first poem each part has two quatrains; in the second poem, four quatrains; in the third poem, six quatrains; in the fourth poem, eight. The series repeats, occurring four times in all. Education by Stone, on the other hand, is a kind of poetic equivalent in verse to Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. Its forty-eight poems — all of which contain either sixteen or twenty-four verses divided into two parts of varying length — are formulated like theorems whose truth is tested by antithesis. Counterpoint abounds, with frequent syntactic and semantic inversions, and the second part of each poem is usually a corollary, an analogue, or mirror version of the first part.

  The play of oppositions is greatest in “The Sea and the Canefield” and “The Canefield and the Sea.” The first line of the first poem, “What the sea learns from the canefield,” is negatively restated in the fifth line, “What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield,” and then inverted in the first line of the second part, “What the canefield learns from the sea,” which is in turn negatively restated in the fifth line. The poem’s sixteen verses are all repeated in the inversely titled poem, “The Canefield and the Sea,” but in different order, and with the verb “learn from” being replaced by its linguistic counterpart, “teach.” The most famous poem in this collection, “Weaving the Morning,” uses the interconnected cries of cocks crowing at dawn as a metaphor for the human solidarity that enables each day to take shape and proceed smoothly.

  The intricately woven poems of Education by Stone are Cabral’s best demonstration of how words, things and people are inextricably connected, and of how it is possible to highlight, reinforce and augment those connections, thereby increasing meaning in language and in life itself. What João Cabral ultimately wanted to offer his readers was not finished poetic products but their example, their lesson, an education in how to make words into stones useful — and used — for building. His ideal for his verbal edifices is expressed in “Tale of an Architect,” where architecture is conceived as the construction not of walls but of openness, with houses consisting exclusively of doors (“doors-leading-to, never doors-against”) and a sheltering roof.

  It is hard to imagine how Cabral’s poetry could have developed any further as architecture or engineering, and the poet did not attempt a repeat performance of his achievement but chose instead to explore other paths. The eighty poems of Catchall Museum (1975) were, as the title suggests, a diversified miscellany, with themes ranging from Mauritania to Proust to soccer (Cabral was a champion player as an adolescent), but close to half of the compositions comment on write
rs and artists in epigrammatic fashion.

  In 1980 The School of Knives, set entirely in Pernambuco and based largely on childhood reminiscences, surprised everyone with its unprecedented autobiographical content. We are still in school, but now the subject is the lesson of his upbringing, and the knives of the title mean something different from what they once did. In A Knife All Blade the knife represented linguistic incisiveness and sharpness of vision, as it did in the poem “Yes Against Yes,” where it served as a writing instrument for Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge, two of the poets Cabral held up as models of compositional precision. In his 1980 work the knife became the razor-sharp leaf of sugarcane (in the title poem) as well as the scar-inflicting sickle of his childhood on sugar plantations (in “Plantation Boy”). The engineer’s principles were still at work but had been internalized, and the new cutting edge — made of memory and milieu — conferred a more intimate tone on the poems.

  True to his own program but again taking everyone by surprise, João Cabral returned to “poetry for wider audiences” in 1984 with the publication of Auto do Frade (The Friar), which tells the last day in the life of Frei Caneca, who was sent to his death by the Portuguese court in 1825 for spreading republican ideas and for his role in the Pernambuco revolutionary movement of the previous year. Consisting of seven dialogues between the condemned Carmelite friar and the people of Recife who make up the chorus, it packed the same dramatic force as his first verse play, Death and Life of a Severino, and was poetically superior.

  The title Agrestes (1985) means “rough, wild, rustic”; it also alludes to the semiarid, rocky region of Northeast Brazil known as the Agreste and situated between the Mata (on the coast) and the Sertão (in the interior). This compendium of ninety poems forms a kind of inside-out autobiography, the negative of a missing photo, in which the author reveals himself obliquely, through the topics he addresses. It begins with poems about Pernambuco, particularly childhood visions of it, and ends with poems that comment on death in Cabral’s customarily detached fashion. In between there are poems about places where he served as a diplomat — West Africa, Ecuador, and Spain — and about his favorite writers and artists, including Valéry, Paul Klee, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, this last being the subject of three poems. In “Renewed Homage to Marianne Moore,” Cabral characterized the American poet’s concept of poetry as a crutch for a lame leg, as something that is created not to express what one has but to substitute for what he or she is missing. This recalls a distinction Cabral made, in an interview published in 1974, between “crutch poets” and poets he called “bleeders.” Writing, for the bleeders, is an overflow of their intense inner feeling, whereas crutch poets write to make up for what they do not feel, at least not in a spontaneous, emotional way.

  In 1987, with the publication of Crime na Calle Relator (Crime on the Calle Relator), Cabral’s poetry shifted in yet another direction, toward storytelling. The sixteen poems that make up the collection narrate tales and anecdotes culled from his own experience or from what he learned secondhand. Half of the stories are set in Spain, and Cabral’s last collection was dedicated entirely to Spain, or rather, to his favorite city there or anywhere: Seville. Cabral may have been a “crutch poet,” but Seville brought out a bit of the “bleeder” in him. Which isn’t to say that his poetry became a mere outpouring of heartfelt sentiment, for it was the very sparseness of expression and economy of gestures that Cabral admired in certain bullfighters, in the “cante a palo seco” (a severe, a cappella style of singing), and in flamenco dancing. But the world of Andalusia aroused an exuberance in Cabral that was otherwise rare. Flamenco music was the only kind he ever admitted to liking, and the women he loved were Sevillian, even if they had never lived there and had no Spanish blood. The leadoff poem of his last book, Sevilha Andando (Seville Walking), published in 1989, is titled “The Woman from Seville Who Didn’t Know It” and pays homage to his very Brazilian second wife, the poet Marly de Oliveira. (His first wife, Stella Maria Barbosa de Oliveira, died in 1986; the couple had five children.) Women and Seville were frequent poetic subjects as far back as Four Spot, though they tended to function as tropes. In Seville Walking, Cabral delighted in them directly and sensually.

  Reading Cabral’s last two books, we might suspect that he never really needed a crutch; that instead of making all those constructivist, thinglike poems to fill up an inner void, he could simply have spent more time in Seville, which drew out hidden, perhaps repressed facets of his personality. But we might as readily suspect that the city that had such a liberating effect on this poet was not the Seville that lies north of Cádiz and west of Córdoba but the Seville he invented, word-stone by word-stone, over several decades of his writing life.

  Whatever the case, the world João Cabral re-created in poetry — a kind of verbal reconstitution of what is — will endure for a long time, both as a highly original artistic monument and as an invaluable didactic example. He has shown us a new way to make poetry and, what is more, a new way to see things. More modestly but no less importantly, he has directed our vision to certain plain and concrete things that we might never have stopped to consider before. “A stone is a stone is a stone” could not have been a João Cabral poem, but it could have been the conclusion to a poem, or to his entire poetic enterprise — hard and heavy, like everything real.

  Richard Zenith, 2004