Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Brazilian Poet

Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in Minas Gerais, on October 31, 1902.

His poems approach quotidian issues, and have a good dose of irony and pessimism. In addition to poetry, he wrote several essays and short stories.

Son of farmers of Portuguese ancestry. Drummond studied in the city of Belo Horizonte and later with the Jesuits at the College de Anchieta Nova Friburgo in Rio de Janeiro, from where he was expelled for "mental insubordination." Back in Belo Horizonte, he began his career as a writer with the Diary of Minas, whose readers included followers of the incipient modernist movement in the State of Minas Gerais.

In 1924 he started to exchange letters with the poet Manuel Bandeira. He also met Blaise Cendrars, Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral and Mário de Andrade.

Under pressure from his family to obtain a diploma, he studied pharmacy in the city of Ouro Preto, graduating in 1925. He founded with other writers, The Magazine, which, despite its short life was an important vehicle for affirming Modernism in Minas. He joined the public service and, in 1934, transferred to Rio de Janeiro, where he was the Head of Office for Gustavo Capanema, Minister of Education, until 1945.

Drummond then worked as director at the Service of Historic and Artistic Heritage National and retired in 1962. From 1954 onwards he was also a chronicler in the Morning Post and, from the beginning of 1969, in the Jornal do Brasil.

With Sentimento do Mundo (1940), José (1942) and especially A rosa do Povo (1945), Drummond started his work of contemporary history and collective experience, participating in social and political matters.

The amazing series of masterpieces from these books indicates the full maturity the poet achieved and maintained.

In 1965, he published in collaboration with Manuel Bandeira, “Rio de Janeiro in prose and verse.”

Drummond produced some of the most significant works of Brazilian poetry in the twentieth century. A strong creator of images, his works have as a theme, life and the events of the world, with verses that focus on the individual, homeland, family, friends, and social issues, as well as questions about existence, and about his own poetry.

Several works of the poet were translated into Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. He wrote hundreds of poems and more than 30 books, including those for children..

He translated to Portuguese the works of several authors like Balzac (Les Paysans, 1845; The Peasants), Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782), Marcel Proust (Le Fugitive, 1925 , García Lorca ( Doña Rosita, the soltera o el lenguaje de las Flores, 1935) Francois Mauriac (Thérèse Desqueyroux, 1927) and Molière (Les Fourberies de Scapin, 1677).

A target of unrestricted admiration, both for his work and for his character as a writer, Carlos Drummond de Andrade died in Rio de Janeiro RJ, on August 17, 1987, a few days after the death of his only daughter, the journalist Maria Julieta Drummond Andrade.

Check out some of Carlos Drummond's poems:

José?

What now, José?

The party’s over,

the lights are off,

the crowd’s gone,

the night’s gone cold,

what now, José?

what now, you?

you without a name,

who mocks the others,

you who write poetry

who love, protest?

what now, José?

You have no wife,

you have no speech

you have no affection,

you can’t drink,

you can’t smoke,

you can’t even spit,

the night’s gone cold,

the day didn’t come,

the tram didn’t come,

laughter didn’t come

utopia didn’t come

and everything ended

and everything fled

and everything rotted

what now, José?

what now, José?

Your sweet words,

your instance of fever,

your feasting and fasting,

your library,

your gold mine,

your glass suit,

your incoherence,

your hate—what now?

Key in hand

you want to open the door,

but no door exists;

you want to die in the sea,

but the sea has dried;

you want to go to Minas

but Minas is no longer there.

José, what now?

If you screamed,

if you moaned,

if you played

a Viennese waltz,

if you slept,

if you tired,

if you died…

But you don’t die,

you’re stubborn, José!

Alone in the dark

like a wild animal,

without tradition,

without a naked wall

to lean against,

without a black horse

that flees galloping,

you march, José!

José, where to?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

To wake, to live

How to wake up without hurt?

Restart without horror?

My sleep carried me

to that kingdom where life is inexistent

and I remain inert without passion.

How to repeat, day after day,

the incomplete fable,

to bear the likeness of all rough things

of tomorrow with the harsh things today?

How to protect myself from wounds

that tear in me the events,

any event

that resembles the earth and its purple

madness?

And the one more wound inflicted by myself

every single hour - torturer

of the innocent that I am not?

No one answers, life is cruel.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Time

Who had the idea of slicing time into pieces,

which were given the name of year,

was a genius person.

Industrialized hope

pushing it to the limits of its exhaustiveness.

Twelve months are enough for any human being to get tired and give up.

Then comes the miracle of renovation and all stars once again

we pick up another number wishing that

from now on everything will be different..

...For you,

I wish your dreams fulfilled.

The love you waited.

Hope renewed.

For you,

I wish all the colors of life.

All happiness you can smile to

All songs you can thrill.

For you in this new year,

Wish all friends to be better,

May your family be more united,

May your life be more lived.

I would like to wish you so many things.

But nothing would be enough...

So, I wish only that you have many wishes.

Big wishes and may they move you further every single minute,

on route to your happiness!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

Shoulders support the world

 

There comes a time when we no longer say: my God.

A time of absolute purity.

A time when we no longer say: my love.

Because love proved useless.

And eyes don’t cry.

And hands only weave in rough work.

And the heart is dry.

Women knock at the door in vain, don’t open it.

You stay alone, the light goes out,

and in the dark your eyes glow enormous.

You’re convinced, you no longer know suffering.

And you expect nothing from friends.

Old age matters little, what is old age?

Your shoulders support the world

And it weighs no more than a child’s hand.

The wars, famines, and talks in buildings

only prove that life goes on

and not all have freed themselves yet.

Some, finding the spectacle barbarous,

prefer (the delicates) to die.

There comes a time when there’s no point in dying.

There comes a time when life is an order.

Merely life, without perplexity.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Poetry

I spent one hour thinking of a verse

my pen does not want to write.

Yet, it is here inside

restless, alive.

It is here inside

and does not wish to get out.

But the poetry of this very moment

                                             overflows my whole life.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Pathetic Poem
What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is love coming to an end,
It is the man who closed the door
And hanged himself in the curtains>

What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is Guiomar who covered her eyes
And blew her nose fortissimo.
It is the still moon upon the plates
And the cutlery shining in the pantry.

What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is the dripping of the water faucet,
It is the inaudible lament
Of someone who has lost his gamble
While the music of the band

Goes down, down, down.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Non-reasons of love

I love you because I love you
You don't have to be a lover
and not always know how to be one.

I love you because I love you
Love is a status of grace
and it is not payable

Love is given freely
it is sowed in the wind
in the waterfall, in the eclipse
Love runs from dictionaries
and several regulations.
I love you because I don't love
Enough or too much me
Because love is not swapped
nor conjugated nor beloved.

Because love is love for nothing,
happy and strong in itself.

Love is Death's cousin,
and of the death, winner
Even if they kill it (and they kill)
in every moment of love.


>>>>>>>>>>>

Definitive

Definitive, as everything that is simple.
Our pain doesn’t come from the things that we’ve lived,
but from the things that were dreamed up and not acquired.
Why do we suffer? Why do we automatically forget
what we had enjoyed and we suffer for our unfulfilled projections,
for all the cities that we would have known next to
our love and did not happen, for all the children that we would have together
and didn’t have, for all the shows and books and silences that we would have shared
and did not share.

For all those kisses canceled, for eternity.
We suffer not because our work is stressful and pays little, but for all the free
hours that we lost to go to the movies, to talk to a friend,
to swim, to date.
We suffer not because our mother is impatient with us, but for all the
moments that we could be confiding to her our deepest
anxieties if she was interested to understand us.

We suffer not because our team lost, but for the suffocated euphoria.
We suffer not because we age, but because the future is being
confiscated from us, thus preventing a thousand adventures to happen to us,
all those with whom we dreamed and we never ever try.
Why suffer so much for love?
The truth was we did not suffer, just thank you for having known a so
nice person, which generated an intense feeling in us and made us
company for a reasonable time, a happy time.

How to ease the pain that is in what wasn’t lived? The answer is simple as a verse:
Deluding themselves less and living longer!
Every day I live, the more I become convinced that the waste of life
are in love that we don’t give, the forces that we don’t use,
in the selfish prudence that nothing ventures, and that, dodging the
suffering, we lose also the happiness.
Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional ...


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Check more poems here!

Sole by Seth Godin

"All you've got, all your brand has got, all any of us have are the memories and expectations and changes we've left with others.



It's so easy to get hung up on the itinerary, the features and the specs, but that's not real, it's actually pretty fuzzy stuff. The concrete impact of our lives and our work is the mark you make on other people. It might be a product you make or the way you look someone in the eye. It might be a powerful experience you have on a trip with your dad, or the way you keep a promise.


The experiences you create are the moments that define you. We'll miss you when you're gone, because we will always remember the mark you made on us.

There's a sign on most squash courts encouraging players to wear only sneakers with non-marking soles. I'm not sure there's such a thing. If you've going to do anything worthy, you're going to leave a mark."

John Berger´s Quotations

 s

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.


I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.


John Berger

“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”

“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

“Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”

“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”

“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”

“Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”

“The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.”

“Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.”

“Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.”

“Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.”

“I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.”

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”

“Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.”

“That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”

“Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.”

 

“Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.”

“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”

“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.”

“The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.”

“Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.”

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”

“The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.”

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”

Check one of my old posts about Berger´s book HERE!

Check out online articles about John Beger Here!

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Three ways TV changed everything (and what's next) by Seth Godin

Here is one insight about TV and its 

"TV changes everyone it touches.

TV brings mass. For fifty years, TV meant that programmers and advertisers had a very good chance to reach everyone, or almost everyone, at the same time. TV integrates a culture, because there's instant common touchstones being generated daily. (When I say, "yadda yadda yadda" or "where's the beef," you know what I mean, right?)

TV brings pluralism and diversity. This seems to contradict the first, but it doesn't. Once TV has opened a channel to the brain, it can bring in whatever it chooses, without clearing it with you first. So, the viewer can discover that people-who-don't-look-like-us aren't so different, or that women might be good cops, or that a member of the [insert oppressed group] might also be a person too.

and finally, TV brings dissatisfaction. Advertising needs to make you dissatisfied to work. And picture perfect sitcom families have more money and less trouble than most folks (because they're not real).

Now, of course, TV isn't what it used to be. No more three-channel universe. That means that the cable/internet virus changes everyone in a very different way. Call it the million channel world (mcw).

The mcw brings addressability. There is no mass any more. You can't reach everyone. Mad Men is a hit and yet it has only been seen by 2% of the people in the USA.

The mcw bring silos, angry tribes and insularity. Fox News makes a fortune by pitting people against one another. Talkingpointsmemo is custom tailored for people who are sure that the other side is wrong. You can spend your entire day consuming media and never encounter a thought you don't agree with, don't like or don't want to see.

And finally, I have no idea if the mcw is making us happy. Surely, a substantial use is time wasting social network polishing, and that's not really building anyone's long-term happiness. And the mcw makes it easier to get angry, to waste time (there's never 'nothing on') or become isolated. Without a doubt, the short-term impact of mcw is that it makes it easy to spread terror and harder to settle on the truth. At the same time, there's no doubt that more people are connected to more people, belong to more tribes, have more friends, and engage more often than they did before it got here. We got rid of some gatekeepers, but there's a race for some new ones. In the meantime, a lot of smart people are fending for themselves, which isn't so bad.

One thing we learned from the TV age that's still true: more media is not always better, particularly when we abdicate our power to filter and choose."