Valério Romão already wrote “a lot of poetry”, but confesses that he didn’t think he had a book. However, this time, he felt he was building a book to be “publishable.” “Mais uma Desilusão” (ed. Abysmo) is his first book of poetry.
There are almost 60 pages of intense writing, a long poem, in which the author known for his “Failed Paternities” trilogy explores his childhood and adolescence memories.
In an interview with Dress Rehearsal and Renaissancethe author who was born in France in 1974 and lived part of his childhood in Tavira, in the eastern Algarve, explains that the book “is a bit of a journey through the childhood and adolescence of someone who grew up outside of Lisbon, but somehow felt the pulse of the country”
Portugal at the time, in the 1980s and 1990s, was a country where, says Valério Romão, “news still came on television and in newspapers” and which entered the European Union, “having recently left the Estado Novo dictatorship. ”.
It is this “particular thing, of be between two worlds” that Valério Romão talks about in a poem book that is in his words an “anti-epic”. When asked to what extent we are faced with autofiction, the poet points out that “it will be a mirror relatively distorted by memory and by what the imagination does to the memory to complete it”.
“Mais uma disilusão” is a book that has a rhythm of almost a flood of words and images, where fine criticism appears wrapped in poetry. When we ask Valério Romão about his writing process, the author compares it to making a film.
“We can say that it was being filmed, without much concern about the final result. Then there was an assembly and cutting part, in which, yes, we had to make some seams that I hoped would not be too visible”.
The book that transgresses conventional boundaries in terms of the form of poetry also leads the reader to look at the country of the present. “An identity that barely survives any type of analysis”, points out Valério Romão, who felt that there was little written about those two decades that marked him.
“I don’t think there was anything that focused on those years in that way, especially the 1980s and 1990s.. These are things I had to say, which will then reach anyone who wants to read them.”
Valério Romão tells Ensaio Geral that this book is “a kind of revisitation”. Written “in summer”, the great poem also looks at what has “happened to us in recent years, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, global warming”.
“It’s inevitable that we don’t think, if at 16 or 20 years old we would have anticipated any of these phenomena, that is, was the point where we are now the point we thought we were going to be at when we were 16 years old? Clearly not”, he points out.
The author recognizes that “sometimes there is a more nostalgic or nostalgic perspective of an imagined state of affairs, and of a future that never came to be”. We therefore asked Valério Romão about this imagined future and the current present with “herd tourism” that he talks about in the book.
“If there are some advantages that came from this globalization, and from our entry into the European Union, it was the fact that we became marginally more remedied. We have more money, we have more literacy, we have more access to everything and more immediate. In my time, things came from outside. The records came from England, the clothes came from, I don’t know where. It was difficult to access things. And now there’s a Zara from Lisbon to Shanghai. Therefore, the world has become more homogeneous”, he says.
But there is always a but, says Valério Romão. “We lost what was unique, traditional or exotic. And tourism, especially this type of tourism, is nothing more than an attempt to find or discover even a little bit of this typical, traditional and exotic, which is increasingly reduced”.
And what is poetry for? The eternal question is asked by the poet. Valério Romão explains that poetry is “a privileged form, because it is the one that meets what is closest to us in terms of art, which is the word”.
However, in Valério Romão’s critical view, poetry is now “captured”. “I think that at the moment it is very focused on its ‘instagrammable’ and immediate and is allowing itself to be captured by devices of capturing the attention of contemporaries”.
He, who admits that he also uses social networks to share some of the poems that he has never published in a book, explains that “the format of poetry itself is getting shorter and shorter”.
“Now we have to fit into a square, because that’s how Instagram wants it. But not everything is poetry. 80% of what you do or 90% of what you do is absolutely ‘impostable’.”
While the reader has this poem book to read, the author is already working on the next work. “This year I plan to release a novelwhich I’m working on now. Let’s see when”, he says.
Source: rr.sapo.pt
