Lex Icon

Salette Tavares

Translated by Isabel Sobral Campos, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

CONCRETE POETRY, POETRY, TRANSLATION  | $20

May 2024
Read an excerpt

SHOE

Liturgical poem about the shoe. While reading this aloud, one should rigorously observe the instructions in the margin. Do not forget to recite using a microphone connected to several loudspeakers at high volume. Place a shoe upon a table. The faithful who observe this ceremony should stand barefoot with a shoe in each hand.

Officiant (standing): The shoe

the shoe alone.
EVERYONE: A shoe just shoe.

Officiant: The mouth shoe

the nose shoe
the ear shoe
the hand shoe
the eye shoe
the leg shoe
the shoulder shoe
the breast shoe
the stomach shoe
the sex shoe
the knee shoe
the foot shoe.

EVERYONE (on their knees): The shoe

just
shoe.

Tavares explores an anarchic and cinematic Welt (mundo, world, ālam) rich in the abecedarian and profane.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Appearing for the first time in English translation, LEX ICON presents everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. As abstraction distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, so too do Tavares’s poems distill the essence of everyday items in language. LEX ICON connects Tavares’s early poetry to her later graphic sculptural poems. Foregrounding insights into human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in simple household objects, the poems collected here also present these as almost mystical artifacts that partake in some unnamed ritual.

About the Author

Salette Tavares (1922-1994) was a Portuguese writer, theorist, and visual artist. She was a member of the experimental poetry group PO.EX and was involved in the publication of the first issues of Poesia Experimental. Her books include Quadrada (Moraes Editores), Lex Icon (Moraes Editores), Obra Poética 1957-1971 (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), and Poesia Gráfica (Casa Fernando Pessoa). Her spatial poems were exhibited at the 2014 retrospective, Salette Tavares: Spatial Poetry, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Praise

Salette Tavares’ Lex Icon is a tour de force that catalyzes the dualistic tension between word/thing and human/artifice. The book acts upon the distrust of language and reality, foreshadowing contemporary debates between Continental and Analytical philosophy and within the seductive illusions of the disinformation age. In poems on the peculiarly boundaried nature of our shared material reality, Tavares explores an anarchic and cinematic Welt (mundo, world, ālam) rich in the abecedarian and profane. Her text’s elliptical bangs, pauses, reverbs, and collisions roam the psychoanalytical and phenomenological, the theatrical absurdist and the empty room. Informed by sensibilities both Beckettian and Buddhist, poems with seemingly innocuous titles like “Tablecloth” train our attention back on language and object, whose domesticated familiarity we have long taken for granted. Isabel Sobral Campos and Kristofer Petersen-Overton’s first collaborative translation awakens Tavares’ penetrating, methodical, and pugilist poetry for readers of English and lays a gilded wreath around its astonishing feats.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Reading these poems I can’t but think of an exquisite, part Surreal, part Fluxus dinner party with Francis Ponge, Ana Hatherly, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, Matisse, and the De Campos brothers seated at the table amongst Salette Tavares’s family members and others. At some point they’d all perform “Shoe,” an absurdist liturgical poem and perhaps the most subversive text in this book allowing us to witness the radical transfiguration of the quotidian before our very eyes.

Mónica de la Torre

About the Translators

Isabel Sobral Campos’s new book is How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press). Other works include Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), Material (No, Dear and Small Anchor Press), You Will Be Made of Stone (dancing girl press), Autobiographical Ecology (Above/Ground Press), and Sobriety Crystal (The Magnificent Field). Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series.

Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, Politics/Letters, and WarScapes. He teaches political theory at Babson College and lives in Cambridge, MA.

In the News

Links

Salette Tavares’ concrete poems appeared in Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre’s Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (Primary Information, 2020).

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-99-2
Trade Paperback
152 pp, 5.75 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: May 01 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: Lost Literature #33