Neither vata, nor antivata

"Refusal poetry" and the case of Lygia de Azeredo Campos

Abstract

This paper seeks to complexify the understanding of what is meant by “refusal poetry” (Campos, 2006) through a necessary focus on gender and historical context, concentrating on possible patterns of said refusal in contemporary female poets’ works. We operate through a conceptual framework drawn from Tamara Kamenszain, who popularized the symbolic opposition between “vates” and “antivates”, and Augusto de Campos, known as “poetamenos”, before our main focus ultimately shifts to the brazilian Lygia de Azeredo Campos’s poetry. Her first and only book, published posthumously, fuels the discussion around voices shaped by unpretentiousness and brevity and how they can embody a destabilizing critical attitude. This same stance can stand in opposition both to a male-dominated poetry comfortable with its hegemony and to male poets who, despite performing against the sexist isolationism of male-dominated literary circles, can not escape contradictions (simultaneously fed and masked by the poets’ own position of power) such as their condescending gaze toward “minor” modes of refusal, as the ones approached by this paper.