Felipe D'Oliveira — born Felipe Daudt de Oliveira, in August 23, 1890 — was a Brazilian poet, journalist and pharmacist, born in Santa Maria, a city located in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of the country. Now, a mostly forgotten man of letters, he has enjoyed a moderate degree of fame and celebrity during his lifetime. 

Pharmacist by profession, he moved to the state's capital, Porto Alegre, when he was eighteen years old. Early in his youth, he started to collaborate in several newspapers and magazines under his own name, and under several pseudonyms as well, which was a normal habit back then. He also wrote poetry, possibly being remarkably influenced by the European symbolists. Soon thereafter, this literary school was perfectly integrated into his personal style, while he also became a member of the Grupo dos Sete — which means 'Group of Seven' —, a circle of intellectuals and friends dedicated to spreading symbolism in Rio Grande do Sul. In 1911, he published his first book of poetry, titled Vida Extinta.  

The poetry of Felipe D'Oliveira is generally simple in substance, but marked by a sensibility of splendor, grace and perception of reality that becomes tangentially circunspect, as he hides underneath the surface of the words an intricate cosmogony of vulnerable restlessness, that subtlety rises to the forefront of the genesis of his emotional horizon. Despite the fact that at twenty-one years old, he could be inadvertently considered a young and talented poet on the rise, his second volume of poetry — titled Lanterna Verde — would be published more than fifteen years later, in 1926. 

Besides the fact that he was an an accomplished intellectual, Felipe D'Oliveira also displayed fitness for physical activity. He was an avid fencing practitioner, and founded in Rio de Janeiro the Federação Carioca de Esgrima, an association dedicated to this sport. 

Felipe D'Oliveira was also a politically minded and active individual. He was an ardent suporter of the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution — despite the fact that he was not involved at all in this event —, an uprising that took place in the state of São Paulo, against the government of fascist dictator Getúlio Vargas. For his political convictions, Felipe D'Oliveira was pursued by the police, but managed to evade them succesfully. After getting into exile at an embassy, he went to France, where he would die in a car accident, in February 17, 1933, at forty-two years old. 

He had some books published posthumously, of which we can highlight Alguns Poemas, a collection of poetry, released in 1937, and the prose work titled Livro Póstumo, released the following year, in 1938. Unfortunately, as soon as he died, Felipe D'Oliveira was immediately forgotten by the public and the literary establishment, something that sadly happened to most of his contemporaries, in Brazil. 

In the recent past, however, more specifically during the nineties, some of these forgotten authors — including Felipe D'Oliveira —, had their works rediscovered by a new generation of scholars and intellectuals, who were willing to rescue the literary legacy of once notable, prestigious and relevant writers, who had been entirely neglected for decades by the public, the publishing market and the universities, to introduce them to a whole new audience, who never had the opportunity to read them. Although far from being as comprehensive as it deserved, this work was fundamental to rescue important parts of Brazil's literary canon, that had been entirely forgotten by the sands of time. Now, the formidable work of poets like Felipe D'Oliveira, as well as several other equally magnificent authors, can be properly appreciated, as they weren't for a long time. 


Wagner

(editor's note: Music inspires us all, especially reviewers. Sometimes the music we listen to inspires our writers to come up with something different, like a poem or a short story. In these series we compile those writings. Or, as Thorsten wrote:
"This record forced me to write something else"

ambient

Life exists only in connection to witnesses. Post-Modernity can only exist after modernity. Black cannot survive without white. And yet – they are all the same, the are language. Thoughts. A stream of consequences rushing through the tips of tongues or fingers in order to sound and evoke something, be it empathy or a feeling of togetherness or antipathy, a sign of intelligence or utter stupidity. 

However – how to describe something that is voiceless but speaks to us? That instills insight but never affirms? Well, pictures might do. And for the sake of this review, pictures painted by binaries will... 

A state-of-the-art WWII motorbike sliding across the Berlin streets. A left-alone helmet lying on the street, no wonder that high-ranked Ivan is not alive.

The beams of the star gliding across a surface black. S/He wakes up, beams tingling her back.

The mere sound of a deep-tuned bass rolling over it all. The shadows for our hero’s last withdrawal.
 
The rocket slowly getting deeper and deeper into the abyss. Kubrick’s visions – nothing more is this. 

The building right next to the Spree was a palace of rust, but it would never falter, never fall to dust.

Harrison Ford on his last neon-lit run. His search for solution undone. 

Embraces are held for a bit too long. Permeated by each and every part of the next song.

A million words to choose from, but nothing to hold to this form.

Sounding from left to right all is glistening tight. Each idea is shown up when the time is ripe.

The ship is sinking slowly into pure deep. Nothing holds on, it is too steep. 

Falling back onto cushions of drone. All unique, somebody’s clone.

The first voyage to the next planet in line, floating closer to Mars. The humans are about to turn this planet too into a farce.

13 songs, an unlucky number. Thirteen miracles, not one going under. 



Thorsten

Over a falling agony 
Melancholy rises
Nobody will ever feel or see
the distant grace 
of a splendor
that never was   

So all the sodomy upon which the human beings enjoy their disgrace
Becomes a paradox
We try to be invisible, but in fact, we’ll never be
So many distant planets are tired of us
A complex diagram of fragile behavior
Delineates our sour existence
Now it is evident

We will never become
We will never feel   
The solitary presence
Of our ghostly demise


​Wagner

If we fall
Altogether
Nobody will ever promise rescuing us 

Sincerely, I will never see
I will never feel 
The lightness density of life
Over the horizon 
Of your eyes again 
 

​Wagner

Unrestrained 
By a severe darkness
Nothing in this world could be forgotten
Easily 
Except for your kindness 
A sensible intuition

Everything remains unrestrained 
A desolation that could be manipulated 
Through a forest 
Of consecrated brains  
Shattered illusions of false memories
My shadows remain obliterated 
By a horrendous  
Disposition of time


​Wagner

Now we feel
One thousand skies
Falling over 
Our unspeakable desolation 

Into the vicinities of our splendorous discontent 
Life never manages to be an instant fortuitous glory
Into the graceful, but somber distance of a moribund solitude
A breathtaking rudeness 
Consolidates the painful road 
To desertification  

And we never feel the risk of monotony
Desolation – by itself – strikes us indirectly
Blank faces never stares at each other  
Only an empty universe
Will be allowed 
To understand precisely 
the vibrant and cold  
eternal darkness of the night 


​Wagner

A hazardous density strikes the most introspective thoughts
Ambiguity rises
as poverty reduce silences 
Nothing seems proverbial, children cry cities made of dust and agonies

Your soul will be questioning a sincere alliance with the downfall of melancholy 
Anything but emptiness would be justified 
Towards our own sad propensities, we relentlessly feel that invisible universes explode in absurd angles that strikes incomparable levels of miserable existence
As the endless rain begins to fall in the night
intrinsically     

Nobody has conceived the fugacious
Elements 
of its own
Convoluted anxiety 
We live in miserable solitary grains of empty splendor that nobody has ever seen

What we all want to desperately feel – the night guardian has irreparable expectancies that retain humankind’s morbid delusional inclinations towards an endless sleep  
Shadows move, but nobody has seen anything beyond the infinite desert of stones that is everywhere to be seen 
Saturated by an epigram of desolated cruelty
The dark cosmogony of a persistent life
Armies of shadows march towards the dehydrated pyramid of its own destructive essence
Suddenly, a million sun rises – the unexpected return that nobody has ever admitted
In a peculiar instant of cosmos drudgery 
Everything is calcined  
Cemeteries disappears 

Maxwell Bodenheim – whose birth name was Maxwell Bodenheimer – is now a relatively forgotten American poet and novelist, who achieved great fame in the jazz era of the 1920’s. His mother and father were German-speaking European immigrants who settled in the United States by the 1880’s, and Maxwell Bodenheim was born in May, 1892, in Hermanville, Mississippi. It was in Chicago, however, that Bodenheim had started his literary activities.

There, with the now legendary writer Ben Hecht, Bodenheim founded a periodical, where several individuals that would become major icons of American literature have collaborated, like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg, amongst others. Nevertheless, it was in New York City that Bodenheim would become a more renowned man of letters.  
​
Sadly, fortunes drastically changed after Bodenheim found fame in New York City. Only in the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties he remained regularly productive, after that he wrote and published only sporadically. Since there is absolutely no reliable biographies or documentaries about Bodenheim, everything that concerns his life, in overall, is largely obscure, and only a few facts about the writer are positively known with veracity. 

What can be said of Bodenheim for sure is that he was married three times. First, to Minna Schein, then to Grace Finan – to whom he became a widower – and last, to Ruth Fagin, a woman twenty-eight years younger than him. A little after the mid-thirties – for reasons that are largely unclear – Bodenheim’s condition and personal circumstances severely deteriorated. He even became a miserable beggar, asking for money in the streets. Despite the fact that by this time he was a published and moderately successful writer, he resorted to mendicancy for a living, and he was generally unrecognized by the people who gave him change. He was arrested by authorities several times for vagrancy, and even arbitrarily committed to mental institutions. By this time, Bodenheim had also become a chronic alcoholic. 

The death of Maxwell Bodenheim – which took place on February, 1954 –, was a particularly tragic one, and the main reason why his fame somewhat expanded; the incident supplanted his notoriety as a writer. In 1952, Bodenheim had married a woman – his third wife – named Ruth Fagin, that shared her husband’s degenerated, miserable and completely destitute lifestyle. Bodenheim did everything he could to survive, including marginal activities, treacherous, though innocent scams, mendicancy and he also wrote poems for changes. Most of the scarce money he made, though, were spent with alcoholic beverages, that Bodenheim somewhat used extensively to alleviate and anesthetize his suffering. His wife Ruth sometimes prostituted herself, to have an income, a degraded activity that frequently enraged Bodenheim. They were homeless people, used to sleep and live outdoors. 

On February 6, 1954, an acquaintance of the couple, a man named Harold "Charlie" Weinberg, offered to Max and Ruth the opportunity to spend the night in his apartment, to which the couple agreed. Once they were there, apparently – the veracity of the story is debatable – Weinberg tried to have sex with Ruth, and she was indeed predisposed to have an intercourse with him. Bodenheim was drunk, and appearing to be sleeping in the couch. Nevertheless, he was seeing everything, and suddenly stood up, enraged, and challenged Weinberg for a fight. Weinberg then killed Bodenheim with two gunshots, and stabbed Ruth to death. Weinberg shortly thereafter confessed the crime to the police, and tried to minimize his evil deed, by justifying that he had killed two “communists”, despite the fact that there is no factual evidence implying that Bodenheim or Ruth were communist sympathizers. Weinberg was arrested, considered insane, and locked for life in a psychiatric facility. The writer Ben Hecht – his friend and former literary colleague – paid for Bodenheim’s funeral expenses.     

Six months after Bodenheim’s murder, his biography, My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, was published. Bodenheim himself, though, was barely involved in the project, whose work was commissioned by a publisher named Samuel Roth, and was ghostwritten by a professional writer named George Plotkin. Apparently, Roth had requested and paid in advance for Bodenheim’s account of his life as a Greenwich Village bohemian and respected literary icon, an assignment that Bodenheim – in this period of his life, mostly depressed and despondent – was barely willing to commit.  

Unfortunately, by the time of his death, Bodenheim was already a largely forgotten writer, and since then, his work has never been properly revived, analyzed, studied, republished or appreciated. Bodenheim remains scarcely read and debated in literary circles today. His poetry, in particular, has a peculiar charm, a picaresque and sometimes quasi-surrealist beauty, that explored in the density of ephemeral and frugal moments the most obscure and fatalist resentments of life. Never really compromised or preoccupied with form or metric, his poetry was prominently modernist, and celebrated the arbitrary agonies of existence, in a constantly candid and moderately vibrant melancholy, that, it is suspected, were typical of his behavior.  

If you want to know better the work of this marvelous – though unconventional and undisciplined, but mordacious and genuine – literary icon, the website Black Cat Poems is the perfect place to start. There, you can read more than one hundred poems by Bodenheim, for free. I hope you enjoy, as much as I do. 


Wagner

The unforgettable glorious ocean of infinite winters is the pale endless extension of a cold anesthesia, that seeks between the worlds of a ludicrous barrier the solid eyes of justice that perpetuates a lonely calmness within my soul, easily conflagrating worlds of undefined reason over a conscience of undying virulence. Nevertheless, these winds never flow over infamous temples of occasional glories. 

Parallel to these monuments of stolen voices, ignored statues of confused chaos swallows laws made of lethargy, the static apathy of an infamy produced by late storms of anger and drowsiness. Where they will go, and with what specific purpose?  

Since these days of infinite deception forgive the impetus of the black wind declining over the dying repentance of my mortal anxiety, I renounce the anticipation of my general irritability. Resounding over a dark sentiment of incongruous stigma, my position will be forever restored by the dark winds of my eyes. 

In all of this tiredness, the evasive subtleties of an ineffable cold keep worlds of unreality distant of a sincerity that never existed. And what can I reclaim, besides the fact that today is incredibly cold? And has always been so terribly cold and perpetually empty. 

Horrendous days of tumultuous forgotten beauties from sleepy times were ostensibly obliterated by the simple exhaustion of existence. Rationalizing in the evident storm of an invisible possibility that keeps my mind dormant and distant, the shadows in the vicinities of an infinite horizon soon demanded the world that I inhabit to be converted to smoke. If I align myself to the exact intolerance system that is inherently attached to my life, I will never be the same person again. But I certainly don’t have to think about these ordinary ambitions. I would never see the spring of a lifetime attached to the essence of a primitive deception again. 

The sky that I hide behind the oceans of my fears would never be taught in public schools.