Poesia auto-móvel

Abstract

This essay examines how the automobile reshapes urban experience and, consequently, the poet’s gaze in modern and contemporary literature. Arguing that the flâneur of early modernity gives way to the accelerated and fractured pedestrian of the metropolis, the text analyzes three poems — by José Paulo Paes, Sebastião Uchoa Leite, and Ana Cristina Cesar — alongside  Adoniran Barbosa’s song “Iracema.” The study traces the shift of the car from an emblem of distinction and progress to a banalized, even oppressive, component of everyday life, one that transforms both perception and subjectivity. In the selected works, the automobile becomes a metaphor for paralysis and dissolution, an agent of shock and fragmentation, or a sign of temporal urgency and instability. The essay argues that contemporary poetry, by capturing fleeting scenes of movement and crossing, stages the tension between lyricism and reflection, between subjective experience and the urban environment. Within the rapid flow of traffic — where encounters are brief and collisions replace epiphanic moments — the poetic gaze resists metropolitan speed and recovers momentary flashes of consciousness.