Sexual and (anti)literary representations in the shamanic poetry by Roberto Piva

Abstract

This article analyses the representation of sexuality through the literary references in Roberto Piva's shamanic poetry (started with Cyclones, published in 1997). The references to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as well as to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s works are examples of sexualization because of the way of reading by the Brazilian poet, which enables a writing both full of sexuality and suggestively “anti-literary”. This ambivalence is a particular aspect of the shamanic poetry that, in contemporary times, derives from the ethnopoetry created by the American poet Jerome Rothenberg – which moves between literary and non-literary fields through specific references to particular poets and to (anti)literary movements.