SONNETTRIP

FOREWORD Born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1951, Pedro José Ferreira da Sylva (his birthname) completed a degree in Library Science but did not complete his Literature degree and later became a poet, assuming the heteronym of Glauco Mattoso, a play on words emphasizing the condition of glaucoma, a congenital illness that would progressively lead to the author's blindness in the early 1990s. In the 1970s, he was an essential member of the so-called "mimeographic generation" (a term that emphasized the amateur nature of production of early marginal poets) and participated as well in the movement known as "marginal poetry", maximizing non-commercial networks of poetry, a refuge of "cultural resistance" used against the military dictatorship in power at that time. He created the fanzine JORNAL DOBRABIL (a pun on JORNAL DO BRAZIL, a daily newspaper, and the "foldable" format of a pamphlet, published as independent sheets). He collaborated in various venues of the alternative press, such as LAMPEÃO, a gay tabloid, and PASQUIM, a humorous tabloid. Glauco's work has always been centered within elements of underground culture and connected to themes of transgression, such as bizarre sex, S&M, torture, violence in tribal rock scene, and, especially, the taboo side of poetry, emphasizing its most scatological and satirical aspects. With the loss of his sight, the author has subsequently abandoned creative visual work (such as his former production of concrete poetry and comic stories) in order to dedicate himself to the composition of musical lyrics and to the production of records, in his capacity as member of an independent recording company. Working in collaboration with Dr. Jorge Schwartz, Professor, the University of São Paulo, he has translated the original poems of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the best blind author in the twentieth century. Glauco's works of poetry have remained predominantly unpublished or sparsely published in books that have since gone out-of-print, literary supplements (to newspapers) or fanzines.