September 24
Mensagem from Mario de Sa-Carneiro
Instructor Kent Johnson
Spanish Language
The Highland Community University
Freeport, Illinois 61032
Dear Instructor Kent Johnson:
I am a visitant Professor to Brown University in the fields of Luso-Iberian
Poetry, and the Librarian Henry Gould has told me about the essay separated
into various articulations that you are typing on the Internet Listserv
called SukSuk. Therefore, he shared with myself (through the medium of the
electronic mailing, consequently my incredible speed) the letter by de
Campos to Reis that you fragmented for your companions. I am happy to have
found it. There is a very large amusement park right in front of my present
lodgings.
Neverthemore, I must bring forth a correction for you. The letter in
question is not of the mad author de Campos; it is by the diffident Bernardo
Soares, a very important distinction to be making, I'm sure you would
consent to me.
But my focicle is the following, to share with you the text (fragmented) of
a letter written to me by another friend of Henry Gould, the Professor Edwin
Honig, also of Brown University, and honored some years ago by my country
for his service to my country, awarded to a different scholar, by the force
of Law, from a different country.
In the end, I do not think he would mind, for poets are always roasting
their minds on a spit, in any case. Privacy is a hoax. Well then.
Mr. Honig has said of Fernando Pessoa:
**The stratagem behind such metamorphoses has been tried but scarcely probed
by modern poets casting off the subjective self [by the way, sorry to
interrupt, please, but do the Linguistic Poets say that they cast off the
subjective self also? I believe Mr. Gould said to me that they say so]: to
cope with estranged fragments of poetic identity by making specific dramatic
characters out of them, occasionally lifted from one's personal life {...}
The practice also serves to mute momentarily the disquieting problem of how
to continue in a world inimical to poetic survival: Be not one poet but four
or even nineteen!** [Here, undoubtedly, Professor Honig means that a tasking
of the poets of avant-gardeness is to make forth multiple authors and let
them run in the world to see what will manifest from them. How referential
like a fetish to be merely one "real" Author or Academic! Please excuse me
for my interruptings.]
**When he wrote, 'I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness,' he was
stating the condition of the post-Romantic who, finding no model in the
past, was left to rummage through his consciousness for whatever guidance
the search might generate. The sentence further implies that the alien 'I'
does not belong to 'my consciousness,' and hence is detached and something
different from the central *I*. In pursuit of the other, the wanderer keeps
translating the inscrutable messages of consciousness by impersonating, as
translators do, the absent author himself, possibly to achieve some
affective identification with a fictive self-- perhaps a hypothetical former
self, perhaps a self-to-be...**
Incidentally, in the light of these reflections, it was interesting to
myself to attend the Convention of the Modern Language Association in
Chicago the last year and to sit in a lobby of the Hilton regarding the
Professors. I thought to myself: Is there any hope for poetry other than a
boring Poetry of Poets? Fashion and circumstance answered no, en absoluto.
I should add, Instructor Johnson, that I understand you have poetic readings
at your University. I also am a man of craft, with five authors to my
Alexandria of names, and I would be honored to come to your village.
Anything to get out of Providence for awhile, as they say... Or, failing
this, please let us meet next time you are in this dead and infernal city.
Let us continue, I hope, a correspondence.
Sincerely,
Mario de Sa-Carneiro, Ph.D.
***
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