Looking for Truth in All the Right Places: Bodies as Texts in the Erotic Poetries of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Ronaldo Wilson
Presenter Title/Affiliation
University of Miami
Start Date
21-5-2021 10:00 AM
Event Name
Panel discussion
Panel Number
1
Panel Chair Name
Eva Nossem
Zoom URL to Join
https://ciis.zoom.us/j/91406227849
Zoom Meeting ID
914 0622 7849
Abstract
What surfaces when we align contemporary raw U.S. homoerotic poetry with shy late 20th-century Brazilian hetero-erotic poetry? In erotic poetry, inner and outer worlds frequently converge on the body to create new landscapes ripe with expression. If sexuality is vital to the process of identity-making, then the language of erotic poetry is a site of creation. In this paper, I examine the liminality explored in the erotic poetry of the late Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the contemporary Black gay poet, Ronaldo Wilson. Specifically, I trace each poetic quest for truth through the acts of transgression, linguistic and sexual, as it relates to identity-making. In writing the erotic, each poet inverts high culture to open up conversations about wonder, shame and nostalgia with the body as a stage. Drawing from Bakhtin's concepts of translinguistics and the carnivalesque, I perform a textual analysis on selected erotic poems of Drummond and Wilson to highlight the relationship between narrative and transgression. I compare the use of bodies and their fluids as a vehicle for continuous identity construction through rejection, repurposing and/or renewal of the self in poetry. By cross-temporally juxtaposing two distinct literary voices whose erotic poems intersect on the liminal space of the body, I show how the transgressive spirit of erotic poetry can be a fruitful and queer space apt for articulating ideas about language, class, race, sexuality and gender.
Presenter Contact
mxf986@miami.edu
Looking for Truth in All the Right Places: Bodies as Texts in the Erotic Poetries of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Ronaldo Wilson
What surfaces when we align contemporary raw U.S. homoerotic poetry with shy late 20th-century Brazilian hetero-erotic poetry? In erotic poetry, inner and outer worlds frequently converge on the body to create new landscapes ripe with expression. If sexuality is vital to the process of identity-making, then the language of erotic poetry is a site of creation. In this paper, I examine the liminality explored in the erotic poetry of the late Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the contemporary Black gay poet, Ronaldo Wilson. Specifically, I trace each poetic quest for truth through the acts of transgression, linguistic and sexual, as it relates to identity-making. In writing the erotic, each poet inverts high culture to open up conversations about wonder, shame and nostalgia with the body as a stage. Drawing from Bakhtin's concepts of translinguistics and the carnivalesque, I perform a textual analysis on selected erotic poems of Drummond and Wilson to highlight the relationship between narrative and transgression. I compare the use of bodies and their fluids as a vehicle for continuous identity construction through rejection, repurposing and/or renewal of the self in poetry. By cross-temporally juxtaposing two distinct literary voices whose erotic poems intersect on the liminal space of the body, I show how the transgressive spirit of erotic poetry can be a fruitful and queer space apt for articulating ideas about language, class, race, sexuality and gender.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/friday/21
