Two poems about what we have been talking. The first, about
appropriation, is from a Brazilian poet called Leminski. The latter, about
artifacts, is by Pablo Neruda, who requires no introduction.=20
Although they complement each other, I've construed the former in
part from an ecological and mediated perspective (Lang, Gibson, Uexkull,
Vygotsky, and others). The latter, I've read from distributed and situated
perspective (Bateson, Hutchins, Lave, Latour, etc).=20
Enjoy,
Luiz
----------------
by Paulo Leminski =20
"saber =E9 pouco | to know is a little bit
como =E9 que a =E1gua do mar | how is that the sea's wate=
r
entra dentro do coco? | gets into the coconut?"
=20
-----------------
by Pablo Neruda
"Toward an Impure Poetry"
"It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look
closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long,
dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the
coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter 's
tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text
for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that
the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of
such a things -- all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the
world that should not be underprized.=20
In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing
of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints,
the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.=
=20
Let be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by
acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine,
spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or
beyond it.=20
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup stained,
soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams,
observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls
and beast, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and
doubts, affirmations and taxes.=20
The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste,
sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea
sounding - willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep
penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry
soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten
delicately with the sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument
so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the
woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the
tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious
consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.=20
Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and
unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away
in a frenzy's abandonment - moonlight, the swan in the gathering
darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's
concern, essential and absolute.
Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.=20
=2E.."=20
pp xxi-xxii
Pablo Neruda Five Decades: A selection (Poems 1925-1970)
Edited and Translated by Ben Belitt
Grove Press New York 1974
_____________________________________________________________
Luiz Ernesto Merkle merkle who-is-at csd.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario voice: +1 519 858 3375 (home)
Department of Computer Science fax: +1 519 661 3515 (work) =20
N6A 5B7 London Ontario Canada www.csd.uwo.ca/~merkle