Poetry night 1

Well, look at the game you can do with your friends: call them to your house, BYOB or BYOF, and have them bring as well a poem. Yes! You can only enter provided you have a poem. Better if it is your own, but if it is not, it has to be one which really moves you. Easy? Then you fold it and put them all in a bowl or urn (more poetic)and when the party is going fine, make a circle and raffle poems. everybody gets one and read silently. After that, one establishes a sequence and people read. As the reading finishes, the group is supposed to guess who brought the poem and why. And after the author or fan is discovered, he or she can explain the reason for that specific piece.

From today on, I will post the poems (most of them in Portuguese) and explain why people chose to take them. Hope you like them. (the posts are in English since some friends who do not know Portuguese wanted to understand a little bit of what is going on in the blog!)

M. took this one by Fernando Pessoa.

Escrever é esquecer.
A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida.
A música embala, as artes visuais animam,
as artes vivas (como a dança e a arte de representar) entretêm.
A primeira, porém, afasta-se da vida por fazer dela um sono;
as segundas, contudo, não se afastam da vida -
umas porque usam de fórmulas visíveis e portanto vitais, outras porque vivem da mesma vida humana.
Não é o caso da literatura. Essa simula a vida.
Um romance é uma história do que nunca foi e um drama é um romance dado sem narrativa.
Um poema é a expressão de ideias ou de sentimentos em linguagem que ninguém emprega, pois que ninguém fala em verso.

To write is to forget.
Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.


According to M. he brought this one because he wanted to illustrate the theme of the night, poetry, arts and the way we were making it be part of our lives.