Book, Dirty Poem[LS]

Originally published in 1976, Dirty Poem transformed the landscape of Brazilian poetry with its sweeping torrent of verses, the ultimate expression of a subjectivity convulsed by the suffocating atmosphere of the dictatorship. The poem was written in Argentina, where the author was in exile. “I felt like I was inside a siege that was closing. So I decided to write a poem that would be my final testimony, before they shut me up forever”, wrote Gullar. “I imagined that I could vomit, in automatic writing, without discursive order, the mass of lived experience - pouring the past onto paper and, from that magma, construct the poem that would end my biographical and literary adventure.” Forty years later, the poem is as current as ever.