In Entrelinhas (Between the Lines), writer Walmir Luiz Becker brings together verses spanning more than eight decades of experiences, transforming memories, affections, and reflections into poetry. With direct and sensitive writing, the work revisits themes such as finitude, love, solitude, and belonging, connecting the author’s inner self to universal feelings. In an interview, Becker talks about the process of revisiting his own trajectory and how art becomes a way to preserve emotions that time insists on not erasing.
In “Between the Lines,” you transform memories from eight decades into poetry. At what point did you realize that these persistent sensations from your memory needed to take shape in verse?
It was in the first half of 1998, between February and May of that year, that I experienced what could be called a professional limbo. Let me explain: Disagreements with partners at a law firm where I had worked for over 15 years forced me to seek new directions in my profession. During this four-month transition period, initially intended for financial settlements, I had no legal matters to dedicate myself to. I then had time for more pleasurable tasks, such as reading some literary books that I had long postponed. Here’s a curious fact: in terms of literature, I’ve always leaned much more towards novels than poetry. Thus, it must have been as a joke, surely, that I conceived my first poem (Embolado) on February 9, 1998, which ended with the following verses: And he who has nothing to do/Thinks he is doing/Poetry/Committing at his pleasure/Heresies/Like these.
His poems are born from both joy and pain, love and heartbreak. What does poetry allow us to say about life that ordinary speech often fails to express?
In the most varied situations experienced by human beings in their daily lives, common speech is direct, objective, colloquial, informal, and spontaneous. It is frequently permeated with idiomatic expressions and lacks strict grammatical rigor. This mode of interpersonal communication can even be imbued, and often is, with feelings of joy, pain, love, and heartbreak. The ways of expressing them in everyday conversation or in the verses of a poem are what differ. Both speech and writing use verbal signs. These, however, when transformed into verses, are verbalized and organized in a rhythmic and sonorous way to express the subjectivity of the lyrical self. That is, joy, pain, love, and heartbreak can be the same, whether in common speech or in poetry. However, in a poem, the poet is his own interlocutor, speaking to himself, to his inner voice.
There’s something very beautiful about the idea that, even with the natural fading of time, certain emotions remain vivid. What do you believe makes some feelings remain so intense within us?
True. It’s natural that time erases from our memory the vast majority of memories accumulated throughout our existence. It would be humanly impossible for someone to retain all the events of their life forever and remember them indefinitely. That’s why it’s said that memory is selective, preserving only what is relevant and essential. We remember events and situations that somehow marked our lives. A first romance, a graduation, learning to drive are concrete examples. There are also abstract ones: feeling the first breeze of autumn and realizing that summer has passed; listening to the songs of the Bee Gees and being overcome by those good old sensations experienced by those who lived through the 70s; watching a sunset reflected in the calm waters of a lake. All of this, if lived and felt with sensitivity, provides us with feelings that remain within us, becoming eternal.
Her writing is simple and direct, yet it carries profound themes such as finitude, loneliness, belonging, and memory. Was this choice for a more essential language also a way to get closer to the reader?
The simple and direct language of my poems derives, I believe, from a unique writing style, present, in prose form, in all my published legal texts. I believe that the good reception I obtained with these publications was largely due to this way of writing, without prejudice to the essential issues addressed in them. Thus, the transposition of this style to my verses was not a deliberate act; it occurred naturally. In my poems, the choice of essential, profound themes, such as finitude, solitude, belonging, and memory, may bring me closer to the reader. However, if this happens, it will be more as a consequence than a cause. I don’t know if I was original in this, but the truth is that these themes were not chosen by me. They arose by chance, throughout all these years, amidst a whirlwind of emotions. As they emerged, I versified them in the direct, clear, and concise form in which they came to the public.
The book shows a very attentive eye for everyday scenes: the arrival of autumn, the sound of the last train, the anticipation of Friday. How did you develop, throughout your life, this sensitivity to perceive poetry in small things?
Daily life, with its apparent sameness, monotony, and repetition, doesn’t have to be boring all the time. It simply needs to be lived with more attention and receptiveness. Those who live this way may be surprised by unexpected, sometimes fleeting, moments that break the routine and warm the human soul. It is said that “beauty is in the little things.” Fernando Pessoa is also frequently credited with valuing beauty in simplicity and the details of everyday life. The arrival of autumn, for example, is usually one of those moments that always enchants me. I have never ceased to be moved by this season, when the sun takes on that more golden and soft light compared to the intensity it had in summer, and when, with a sudden drop in temperature, those first chills arrive. Not to mention the flowering silk floss trees.
In his speech, there is a very strong point: nothing was invented, everything was lived and felt. Does writing from one’s own experience make the process more liberating or more delicate?
All my poems have been inspired by personal experiences and feelings, from scenes and events of daily life, from memories of the past, both joyful and sad, and, more often than not, nostalgic and wistful, and from a whole amalgam of emotions and sensations preserved by time. In terms of style, my poems are far from fitting into the category to which hermetic poetry belongs. In this category, in which most current poets are included, the language is obscure, very refined, and difficult, if not impossible, to understand. It is a poetry centered on the poet’s inner perceptions and the intense use of metaphors. The researcher Mariela Augusta Masagão rightly wrote in Folha de São Paulo on April 14, 2019: “Brazilian Poetry Has Become Somber and Hermetic.” And now, answering the question objectively: I affirm that expressing one’s own experiences in verse is a process that is both delicate and liberating.
Your references to Cartola, Fernando Pessoa, and different Brazilian landscapes broaden the emotional dimension of your work. How have art and the places you’ve visited helped shape your way of feeling and writing?
There was a summer in my life, right at the very end of it, when I felt very sad. It was the kind of sadness that hurts deep in the soul, that makes you want to cry, and that comes on suddenly without you realizing why. It was, therefore, an existential sadness. I was at home, listening to music, and watching from the window that part of the day we know as twilight, when I started hearing Beth Carvalho singing “As Rosas Não Falam” by Cartola. Anyone who knows this song will understand the emotional comfort that came over me in that moment of sadness. As for the reference to Fernando Pessoa, it’s more than justified, insofar as, after him, it became more difficult to write poetry, an idea that, incidentally, is widely accepted by Portuguese-language literary critics. But I don’t see his influence in my poems. These are closer to Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who also speaks of the trivial, the simple, and the everyday in some of his poems.
Looking at Entrelinhas as a poetic portrait of your journey, what would you most like the reader to find there: identification, acceptance, reflection, or companionship?
I don’t expect the reader to identify with my poetic journey upon reading *Entrelinhas*. Each human being, as an individual, experiences very personal sensations, feelings, and emotions in their life, stemming from various factors such as education, religious belief (or disbelief), political preferences, economic situation, and social status, among others. Depending on their level of sensitivity, they may perceive an affinity with their own self in the sensations they gather from reading one poem or another, but not all of them. As for the reception and reflection on what I have written, I would very much like that. I would be happy if my readers, assuming I have any, would readily accept the simple and direct way in which I wrote my poems. Without any inclination towards hermetic poetry, I sought to express in verse, in a comprehensible, and sometimes melancholic way, feelings and sensations that my memory has retained over 80 years of life.
