The poem Catar feijão (Culling Beans) from Educação pela Pedra (Education by Stone, 1966) is one of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s various poems that explore the process of writing. Dedicated to the Portuguese poet Alexandre O’Neill, this poem reaffirms its author’s preference for the use of simile instead of metaphor through the unusual comparison between writing and culling beans (“Culling beans is not unlike writing”).
As in other poems from the same book, Culling Beans is formulated like a theorem, and it is divided into two parts of eight lines. The first part points to the similarities between culling beans—an apparently mechanical and thoughtless task—and writing, therefore emphasizing the importance of physical work—as opposed to pure inspiration—to the process of writing poetry.
According to the poem, the success of both procedures presupposes careful separation of the light, unwanted superficial elements—redundant words, hollow beans—from the heavy, essential components—meaningful words, fresh beans. The last four lines of the first part of the poem refer to the differences between the two terms of the comparison (in order to perfect a sentence, one cannot toss out all the words that float since “all words will float on the paper”) and anticipate the second part of the poem, which focuses on the limitations of such comparisons.
Culling beans, on the one hand, involves the risk of leaving an unchewable grain among fresh beans. When dealing with words, on the other hand, attention is required in order not to avoid, but to select a “toothbreaker.” According to the poem, stonelike words are responsible for anchoring a sentence in reality and, as a result, for inducing the reader’s feelings. To give “the phrase its most vivid seed,” careful selection and the precise location of words are required. The unexpected usage and the unusual positioning of words are responsible for a productive interruption of the readers’ expectations. Such an interruption alerts readers to the meaning of words, which had been dampened by their constant use.
In Culling Beans, Cabral de Melo Neto makes use of assonant and consonant rhymes. Among his play—and work—with words in this poem, one can point to the presence of neologisms—fluviante and flutual, translated as “flowing” and “floating”—created through the exchange of suffixes between the words flutuante (floating) and fluvial (fluvial). By emphasizing the stem of adjectives and reminding readers of the arbitrariness of their formation, the poet recovers the sonorous and graphic materiality of words and brings their concrete referents closer to readers.
Cabral de Melo Neto’s understanding of writing as a rational fight against any excess is also developed in other poems, such as A lição de poesia (The Lesson of Poetry) and O engenheiro (The Engineer) in O engenheiro (1945), and Psicologia da composição (Psychology of Composition) in Psicologia da composição (1947).
Bibliography
Cabral de Melo Neto, João. Selected Poetry, 1937–1990. Edited by Djelal Kadir. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1994.