The difficulty of poetry: hallenging the theoretical model by Alfredo Bosi

Abstract

This essay seeks to delineate the parameters of what, in the course of this ongoing research, we are calling the “difficulty of poetry”. For this, a critical reflection on the concept of “resistance”, as formulated by Alfredo Bosi in the 1970s, is taken as a starting point. We seek to demonstrate that the functioning of the Bosian concept of resistance depends on a double projection: on the one hand, having lost its ability to “name life”, the resistant poem, or the poem read under the notion of “poetry as resistance”, projects itself onto the image of what the author calls the “mythical lost unity” of poetry; on the other hand, by fixing itself in an “open present”, the resistant poem prophesies a “promising future”. Based on an analysis of the political and ideological conjuncture of Brazil today, and, more broadly, of contemporary capitalism, this article points to the works of three contemporary Brazilian poets to defend the hypothesis that this mechanism of double projection no longer finds a place today. This leads us to try to define the impasses of contemporary poetry based not on the idea of ​​“resistance”, but on the proposition of the concept of “difficulty”, whose theoretical limits this research aims to establish.