Regis Bonvicino

“what to tongues is denied”
a nova utopia [the new utopia]
by Régis Bonvicino (S.Paulo: Quatro Cantos, 2022)

Ezra Pound's name was the first to echo as soon as I started reading this book. Not because of his political options, since the new utopia is at the antipodes of Poundian fascism, but because this is the kind of poetry that the American poet wanted for his modern epic: a poetry that is "hard and dry". And, indeed, later in the book, in a poem about the emerging fascisms of the present day, Pound and his work are the object of reflection by Régis Bonvicino, the Brazilian author of the new utopia. Ironically, instead of the Poundian "make it new", the poem carries the title "Make it old" (101-104).

On November 20, 2021, Régis Bonvicino was interviewed by Runa Bandyopadhyay (India), with Aurora Fornoni Bernardini. Organized by Ekhon Bangla Kobitar Kagaj. What follows is the script for the interview, followed by the video. Below that is a short review, published in Cuba, of Bonvicino’s most recent book.

Régis Bonvicino is to twenty-first century São Paulo what Charles Baudelaire was to nineteenth-century Paris: the poet as flaneur wandering through the cultural detritus of our time with mordant gaze and dark wit. Bonvicino’s ebullient poems are replete with philosophically searing perceptions and socially conscious lament. Not yet elegy, Bonvicino’s unrelenting acknowledgments center on the parasitic relation between those mangled by society and those doin’ the manglin.’

Folha de Sao Paulo, the main newspaper of the city, published today a translation by Régis Bonvicino of "On Election Day," a poem I wrote five years ago, just after the election of President Obama. The poem was collected in Recalculating.  
Gabe Rubin made a video of my reading the poem for this publication:

  Artists' books extravaganza: fabulous digital catalog of scores of books from Collectif Génération / Gervais Jassaud