Maloqueirista Poetry

Maloqueirista Poetry was born in 2002, the child of a meeting of poets tying their work to the city of São Paulo. Since then, the group’s ambulant and nomadic identity has allowed them to begin a popular dialogue, meeting the people where they are. This relationship with the popular territories and the flux between the periphery and the center speaks not only to the group’s strategy of collective action but also to the popular origins and trajectories of their members. Always resisting dominant media, the group traversed the beginning of the digital era alongside the rise of blogs and social media. They came to make use of those new elements as tools without abandoning written press, generating a wide-ranging readership for their own brand, and resulting in dozens of publications.

Their principal characteristic has always been their diverse and controversial artistic style, maintaining poetry as a linguistic base. They have maintained their goal of bringing open access to the field of creation and experience-sharing through interventions, performances, poetry slams, workshops, publications and multidisciplinary events.

These activities, among others, highlight not only their poetic and aesthetic dimension but also their territorial and political side. Pointing out a few of the diverse activities the group has undertaken over time that illustrate this last element: the Outras Margens cycle, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Culture in São Paulo; receiving the Third Cooperifa Award in recognition of initiatives that promote access to culture for underprivileged social classes; artistic residence at Morro do Querosene and a partnership with the Espaço dos Parlapatões group for the realization of the Maloqueirista Recital, an open mic event for artistic expression and written work launches; the screening of the Malocália project at SESC Pompéia, mixing performance poetry with music, body and visual arts etc; With the creation of the magazine Revista Não Funciona, edited from 2004 to 2009, they gained major reach in Brazil, publishing more than 500 artists and authors in both text and image forms.

They also achieved translations in Catalan and Spanish for a project undertaken by researchers in Barcelona. In this debut edition of Peripheries, we have selected a varied and plural set of work to provide a panorama of the multiplicity of language and themes that make up Poesia Maloqueirista. Here, we will see how poetry is capable of raising the curtain, though aesthetic investigation and perturbance, the complex screen of subjects and territories that compose the dynamic of the city. This publication features the works of: Aline Bins, Bárbaro Rosa, Giovani Baffô, Caco Pontes, Inayara Samuel, Leo de Abreu, Paloma Kliss and Pedro Tostes.

Giovanni Baffô

at home
for the street boys
the last to sleep
turns out the moon

…

favela

these tight alleys
no horizons
are what set us
to watch the many stars

…

the sun’s greatest pain is going out at night

Thiago Calle
mother ship

as dogs die
and my children don’t visit
I go from one final stop to another
transiting
an epic saga leading both ways
I have epileptic attacks
epics in the collectives
feeling scents from beyond
I close my eyes to
muscle contractions
bites on the tongue

I awake alone
on a crowded bus
and none of my children are with me

in vain, I call
they won’t pick up
my children they’ve got children and i don’t have them
inside me

Não mais

I am a UFO contacting
intercity
collect calling attention

mothership hovering
in the shadow of the cityscape

…

they play with us
time
and the pans in the fire

...

omen

a poem
as now

where you want
whenever
as is

something
kind of like now

as now wishes
as though now were

that which now is

Inayara Samuel

it’s pure asthma

I wanted to stop writing this poetry
urban poems
But there is in my hands
an uncontrolled pollution
a jammed stared
my ashes in the sink
I would like to blabber
tides, breezes
and passersby
that would pass me by
nice and slow…
(i just coughed - i need a cigarette)
My God!
Now, just for now
for my chest:
a little seashore poem

Pedro Tostes

P S

a concavity
with no cavity

like a consensus
with no sense

a poet
With no love
is not a poet
but a pretender

(though the words spread with the
same heat)

ps: will this poem be an artefact
or will it be art in fact?

Bárbosa Rosa

She comes and continues on
Like she were my soul
I calm her with flowers
And love her for instants
My desires come and go
Dying like the sunflowers
If rather, she were my soul:
So that my demons
Would be others

Aline Binns

words

neither do i want that many
or that few
not wanting definitions
or even sentences
I just want thirsty wandering
hearing myself silently
while i cross
this life in tumult
this fuss
this insane hunt for everything
for the nothing that i need

Caco Pontes
citadel of chaos

I saw adults and cars
in planned viaducts
in the suns of the city
grey-blue são paulo

And fatigued
in dead exhaustion
lost in pure confusion
in front of the facile

And also the status
causing collapse
is too much for us

good will

The time and the drink
and later, the swelling
when you have
no escape
to the aqueduct and its tracks

Paloma Kliss

(...)

you in the China
of your WALLS

Me - flowing -
from the EXPWY waving…

in the fog of lost dreams
absent looks of all tastes
that bleed with no cure

when now already exhausted
- in tacit agreement -

we quit each other

Leo de Abreu
desde menino

I grab walls
thick concrete
cement to cover the hole
in the ozone layer
mismatched
at Largo da Batata it’s just me
just me

Grey is the color of my hair
black is the color that prevails
this is the condominium where i’ve lived
since i was a boy