“Plano Pirata” of the Possessed Poem: Time and Humor in the Brazilian Poetry of the 1970s

ABSTRACT This article proposes to analyze the ways of thinking and dealing with time in the Pirate Plan, poetic experiment published by the Brazilian poets Paulo Leminski, Antonio Risério and Régis Bonvicino in the late 1970s, which made a parody-homage to the “Pilot Plan of Concrete Poetry”. It is argued here that the text expresses the experience of a generation of poets that bet on humor as a way of art, of ethical-political critic and temporal conduct that was configured as a way that generation found to participate in disputes over temporality in that historical moment. As opposed to the desire for updating and instrumental submission of the past to the demands (assuming the consumerist or avant-garde forms) of the present, such a generation questioned the actuality by means of a tension of this with the past multiples that inhabit it, opening the now for its possibilities, outdating it.