"Atenta como uma antena"

a invocação à Musa e a poética da escuta de Sophia

Abstract

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen's “Poetic Art II”, like the other texts of the homonymous sequence, presents a theory and an interpretation of poetry that reveals, specially, a worldview. Speaking of poetry not only as an object on which to weave her considerations, Sophia transforms it into a subject of demands and requests directed to her, stating that “it is from the unrelenting obstinacy that poetry demands that the 'obstinate rigor' of the poem is born”. Two of the most important demands amongst those mentioned is the imperative of facing the “universe”, and being “attentive as an antenna” - a formulation that becomes a kind of motto of Sophia’s thinking. The idea that the poet must be attentive thus permeates her poetic work. The act of listening emerges not only as a “vibration with the outside”, but rather as something that comes from an urge or a desire to listen. As a fundamental condition for writing, this urge will take shape in some poems in terms of a request, a prayer, or, more specifically, an invocation to a Muse. Thus, we are presented to a moment before the listening act, and so emerges, in the list of the three Andresenian actions - listening, naming and making landscapes, as Silvina Rodrigues Lopes points out -, a fourth: invoking - that is, asking to listen. In this text, we investigate the relations between listening and invocation that appear in a poem like “Musa”, of Livro sexto (1962).