[biography]



Born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1951, Pedro José Ferreira da Silva (his
birthname) completed a degree in Library Science but did not complete
his Literature degree and later became a poet, assuming the heteronym of
Glauco Mattoso, a play on words emphasizing the condition of glaucoma, a
congenital illness that would progressively lead to the author's
blindness in the early 1990s. In the 1970s, he was an essential member
of the so-called "mimeographic generation" (a term that emphasized the
amateur nature of production of early marginal poets) and participated
as well in the movement known as "marginal poetry", maximizing
non-commercial networks of poetry, a refuge of "cultural resistance"
used against the military dictatorship in power at that time. He created
the fanzine JORNAL DOBRABIL (a pun on JORNAL DO BRASIL, a daily
newspaper, and the "foldable" format of a pamphlet, published as
independent sheets). He collaborated in various venues of the
alternative press, such as LAMPIÃO, a gay tabloid; PASQUIM, a humorous
tabloid; ESCRITA, a literary magazine; CHICLETE COM BANANA, a comic
magazine; TOP ROCK, a musical magazine; etc. The author proceeded to
compose essays and literary criticism (published in books as well as in
the pages of the literary supplement, CADERNO DE SÁBADO, of the São
Paulo daily newspaper JORNAL DA TARDE). However, Glauco's work has
always been centered within elements of underground culture and
connected to themes of transgression, such as bizarre sex, S&M, torture,
violence in tribal rock scene, and, especially, the taboo side of
poetry, emphasizing its most scatological and satirical aspects. With
the loss of his sight, the author has subsequently abandoned creative
visual work (such as his former production of concrete poetry and comic
stories) in order to dedicate himself to the composition of musical
lyrics and to the production of records, in his capacity as member of an
independent recording company. Working in collaboration with Dr. Jorge
Schwartz, Professor, the University of São Paulo, he has translated the
original poems of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the best blind
author in the twentieth century. Glauco's works of poetry have remained
predominantly unpublished or sparsely published in books that have since
gone out-of-print, literary supplements (to newspapers) or fanzines.

"Glauco Mattoso's poetry may be chronologically and formally divided
into two distinct phases: the first may be called the VISUAL PHASE,
characterized by the poet's experimental parodies of various
contemporary tendencies, from Brazilian modernism to 'underground'
motifs, influenced primarily by Concretism, which esteemed the
graphic/visual character of the poem. [1] The author's second phase may
be termed the BLIND(NESS) PHASE, as his complete visual impairment leads
him to abandon processes such as dactylographic concretism, and he
begins to compose classical sonnets [2], where rigor in metric, rhyme,
and rhythm functions as a mnemonic device allowing the poet to perform a
re-working of old Glauquian themes (ugliness, dirtiness, wickedness,
vices, trauma, stigma), reappropriating concretist techniques
(paronomasia, alliteration, euphony and cacophony of verbal
configurations), while incorporating slang and colloquialism, elements
which have always been hallmarks of the hybrid style of the author. The
VISUAL PHASE runs from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, while the
BLIND(NESS) PHASE begins in 1999, with the publication of his first
books of sonnets." [3]

[NOTES]

[1] Click here for GM as [VISUAL POET]

[2] Click here for GM as [BLIND POET]

[3] See also [BIBLIOGRAPHY]

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