Ler com as mãos: gestos editoriais como lente crítica para poesia contemporânea

Abstract

Independent and artisanal modes of poetry publishing in Latin America have proliferated over time in response to diverse political, economic, and social contexts, as noted by Matías Moscardi and Luciana di Leone. In the 1990s and 2000s, for example, with the advance of neoliberalism and the contraction and consolidation of the publishing market, self-publishing practices multiplied. In this context, poets began to turn to alternative formats—such as booklets, zines, plaquettes, blogs, and posts on social media—based on a do-it-yourself logic, in which the roles of author, editor, and reader frequently overlap. This movement does not emerge as something entirely new, but rather revisits earlier experiences, such as the poesia marginal of the 1970s, which, in response to restrictions imposed by the military dictatorship that were reflected in the publishing market, explored precarious and artisanal media such as mimeographs, silkscreens, and printed matter in nonconventional formats, as part of a politics of the desacralization and decommodification of poetry. This practice of “editing with one’s hands” continues into the 2020s, on the margins of the commercial and industrialized publishing market. In this way, in artisanal publications, the influence of editorial modes on reading, as pointed out by Roger Chartier and Miguel Leocádio Araújo Neto, is intensified, since the materiality of the book—its materials, formats, and gestures of making—becomes visible and active in the reading process. Based on the proposals of authors such as Eric Schierloh, Ulisses Carrión, Ana Mazzoni, and Damián Selci, a mode of reading is thus proposed that considers editorial aspects as constitutive language of the work. This experimental methodology is applied to the analysis of artisanal books produced by small Latin American presses, such as the Argentine publisher Arroyo and the Colombian publisher Dosis Mínima, as well as collective productions, with a focus on women authors. The reading of these books centers on the materials and manual gestures involved in their production—gathering, stitching, and folding—and on the sensory dimension of reading, in an attempt to read these poems with the hands.