EDITORIAL DEVICES OF MARGINAL MATERIALITIES:

FROM MIMEOGRAPH TO ANTHOLOGY 26 POETAS HOJE

Abstract

This paper focuses on some poetry publications that belong to the vast concept of the “geração mimeógrafo” ("mimeograph generation”). It seeks to understand the materiality of these editions as a driving force that configures the editorial and aesthetic marginality of the productions located in the effervescent 1970s. It is argued that not only the marginal meanings linked to the discourses present in the works of poets like Chacal, Charles and Nicolas Behr, but also the editorial materiality and the independent manner of publication and distribution of their texts potentiated the aesthetic choices of each artistic project, flowing into nonpartisan and/or nonprogrammatic postures in the literary manifestations produced in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship. It should be noted that marginal productions had the mimeograph as the first alternative for poets who felt the urgency to be published and read, when they could not (at first) count on hegemonic editorial support. Therefore, the independent editorial materiality, manufactured and self-managed, was a constituent part of the subversion of the writings by marginal poets in the studied period, making, at first, totally malleable or nonexistent the boundaries between poetry and marginal publishing. This picture was transformed with the publication of the poetic anthology 26 Poetas hoje (1976), organized by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, dissolving the technology/manufacturing dichotomy and helping to open new paths, not only in the restricted space that the big publishing houses gave to the “juventude do desbunde” (“junkie youth”) but also in the academic literary critics, who found the low cost and handmade production of the young marginal poets and their works, which were, in the genesis of their dissemination, outside the hegemonic national publishing market.