Minimalist verse and expression have been essential (but not exclusive) during my whole life, ever since I realised that my father used to express himself through common and personal aphorisms, which we, the family, should interpret. 

My first poet (some poets are “ours”, as they become part of our life), used to frequent the house of my childhood. I’m talking about António Aleixo, the best Portuguese popular poet, a very poor man who lived in a little hut with a goat that provided him with the milk he needed to attend to his health problems. He expressed himself in quadras, quatrains of 28 syllables, and it was impossible to be as good as my illiterate master, even considering that the measure of the quadras were open to other possibilities (Pessoa himself wrote a lot of quadras “at the popular taste”)… So I took my first serious steps in poetry trying the so called modernity, but at the same time going back to the traditional roots of poetry. It was impossible for me to choose a single way, and soon I found myself balancing between the making of long poems and the aim to cut excess, emphasis, sentimentalism and rhetoric, writing at the same time long  “cantos” as well as small poems.

My way to minimal poetry was mainly discovered in the convergence of two poetical miracles: the nuanced musical phonemes of ancient Portuguese poetry (the cantigas de amigo of our 13^th century) and the less musical but more discreet cadences of Japanese haiku and tanka). For example, in 1959, in a book whose title was Telegrams, I wrote this first poem:

Antes a lágrima

só depois… a pérola

Entre lágrima e pérola

aconteceremos

First the tear

then the pearl

Between tear and pearl

we will happen

I knew that what I was doing was not new regarding Portuguese poetry, except in my attempt to depreciate man in comparison with Nature; and not new regarding the Japanese haiku, which I discovered in 1958, except for my impudent lack of attention to Nature and emphasis on man’s transitory nature. In my humble poetry I deal all the time with a kind of intrusion of different elements, coming from distant canons. It seems to me that, due to my longstanding dilettantism with regard to the poetry of the East (not only the Japanese, but also the Chinese philosophical concreteness and the Arab approach to love through the ghazal songs), and since the Fifties, my aesthetic criteria are always balancing between my sentimental and my ideological experiences. My obsessive return to the power and subtlety of Nature has always been a discovery, a recognition, an affirmation of the fact that man is nothing more than dust and fire, sex and chant.

Reading thousands of classical haiku, I was surprised to see that man was not more important than a flower or a mountain, and that a poetical experience as Bashô’s frog jumping out and into the sleepy pool told me all about life everywhere. In the Chiyo’s haiku I’ve also learned that man’s fertile soul is nothing more then “the fertile soul… of a single vine”. So it was not only philosophy and experience that showed me the pettiness of man. It was also poetry that did that, particularly Japanese poetry. That’s what I intend to say, from a different point of view, in some of my haiku:

Ecos. Pegadas

sem som — a terra toda

um grão de pó

Echos. Soundless

footsteps — all earth

a grain of dust

Nada feito pelo homem me

surpreende — uma formiga,

sim. Ou uma camélia

Nothing made by man

surprises me — an ant,

yes; or a camellia

Sometimes I think about the richness of two famous Pound’s haiku, somehow considered as the first poems that made a kind of fusion between characteristic values of Eastern and Western poetry, namely a kind of balance between the values of man (public and private) and the essence of nature. Those poems say:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of the faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

which is a sudden calligraphy in the air, as all poems are, but this time coming from an apparition of people as being the sad part of Nature; or the private version of man’s compassion:  

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

Has this compassion any connection with the compassion, for example, one finds in a great poet like Issa? Issa’s compassion is a kind of gracefulness regarding Nature and its creatures; Pound’s compassion is also attentive to man, as petals of a bouquet of life. Somehow compassion (or indifference?) in my haiku is coming from the Whole, and the Whole has no favourites, not even the sense of justice between Law and Chaos. So, in my haiku, I am very critical of man, and I say without ambiguity that man, the father of morality, is the great predator.

A few months ago I was invited to write some poems to an Anthology on “natural catastrophes”. I agreed if they would accept my idea that man is the most dangerous natural catastrophe on earth. So I offered a collection of 36 poems like these:

Praia deserta —

o lixo dos homens contra

a beleza eterna

A deserted beach –

man’s garbage against

eternal beauty

Lago de Ohrid -

até no seio da morte

a natureza sorri

Lake of Ohrid –

in the heart of death

nature smiling

Um petroleiro!

No mar também habitam

animais doentes

A petrol tanker!

The sea sick animals

also roam

O vento que sopra

do deserto: lamento de árvores

que já não existem

The wind blowing

from the desert: moaning trees

no longer alive

and these poems represent exactly what I think about us, men.

I’m trying to be scrupulous in giving some material, taken from other poets’ work and from my own, as examples because I think it’s important to write haiku not as an imitation but in order to change the orientation of this minimal poetry without changing its spirit, producing not only some aesthetic compromises but a new ontological difference as well. And sometimes it happens.

All my life as a poet – since 58 - I drank from literatures of the east as well as of the west, of north and of south, of old days and of our days, and as a result, when dealing with poetry I feel myself as a kind of world citizen. Or a poetry citizen? Anyway I should like to finish my speech with some words about the importance of being (more than writing) a haiku. I use to say that a poet does not prepare himself to write a haiku: he is a haiku. The poem makes its way into the poet as a discreet but uncontrollable desire and it goes out as a unique stroke of sensation, feeling and knowledge in words: few, essential words. Bashô would resume this idea with one single word, Karumi, that is, the simplicity of form combined with a subtle interpretation of life.

Well, even when it’s being under attack from many sides, it seems clear to me that poetry – and specially haiku – is the most accomplished combination of music, meaning and heart that we know. My personal conviction is that poetry is the place where we can find at the same time, and side by side, knowledge and mystery. We can’t have more then this little thing, this androgynous animal of words that contains in itself what is essential to “all things”, because all things, according to Anaxagoras, “possess a part of the whole”.