Poetics and Politics of the Portuguese Experimental Poetry

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetics and politics of the Portuguese Experimental Poetry movement, addressing the question of how aesthetic practices combined with ideological issues. This aestheticization of daily life is furthermore related to the political unrest of the 70s in Portugal, as it poets often challenged conventional critiques of the self-reflexive and self-representational stances of avant-garde poetries. In this way, it is argued, experimental poetry connects theory to a general sociological and political praxis, thus assisting us in understanding communication in the arts as a mixed process of poetics and politics.