SONNETTRIP

[NOTES] [0010] "Sonnetto Nojento" is essentially a strong poetic defense of fetishism, emphasizing the relativity of notions of "normality" and questioning canonized notions of "good taste."

Once again, the poetic voice attacks the judgmental subject, finding perverse and repulsive patterns in conventional everyday choices and practices. Most of his examples revolve around images of food, relevant in the sense that his fetish is orally celebrated. Ultimately, determining what is "normal" becomes an impossibility. Mattoso maximizes linguistic strategies to achieve this effect. For example, the paranomastic link between "pé" (foot) and "pó" (dust) makes this combination much more aesthetically connected than "cha gelado" (iced tea) and "peixe cru" (raw fish).

[0012] Other interrelated facets of the performative identities of the poetic voice appear throughout the collection [see 0028].

In "Sonnetto Solado," for example, Mattoso characterizes, for the first time in his poetic universe, his own blindness as an integral element of masochism and self-degradation. Strangely, the poem, in the form of an advertisement of services addressed to one who possesses authority over him -- half-heroically, half-cowardly -- seems to transcend the physical and emotional pain of irreversible glaucoma into a sexualized outcome which only solidifies the desire to suffer self-inflicted and othersolicited cruelties. But the poet, of course, manipulates the tragedy of his blindness to heighten the will to suffer.

Certainly, the poem satisfies the Deleuzian prerequisite of a contractual arrangement initiated by the masochist-victim.

The poetic voice deepens his own degradation by adding his blindness to the equation of inferiority. Almost as if his physical condition provides further justification for his unchosen masochism, blindness is treated as yet another symbol of humiliation within the larger inferiority complex that Mattoso carefully constructs. Sustaining a self-imprisonment that simultaneously evokes bitterness and gratification, the poetic voice is fully conscious of his desire to suffer and to serve as "capacho" (door-mat) to an arrogant man who is defined as superior merely because of his ability to see and because of his eroticized feet. In the Mattosian poetic universe, feet