My Poetry Corner September 2023 features the poem “Ears of Dew” (Ouvidos de Orvalho) by Brazilian poet, writer, journalist, and columnist Fabrício Carpinejar from his award-winning 2002 poetry collection Biography of A Tree (Biografia de Uma Árvore).Born in 1972 in Caixas do Sul in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, he is the third of four children of the poets Maria Carpi and Carlos Nejar. At nine years old, after his parents separated, he was raised by his mother.

Growing up in a home with a large library, the young Fabrício was free to explore any book that aroused his interest. “At 7 years old I was already a poet. I have always been excessively distracted,” Carpinejar told journalist Marcio Renato dos Santos during an interview for the Public Library of Paraná in August 2017. “Imagine, I am the son of two poets, so at home the language was metaphor. We spoke in metaphors, in figures of speech. I see people speaking objectively, but that’s not my idiom. I was raised in another environment. And I’ve always been a basement child, a tree child. There are children who have pets, I had a tree. A plum tree, lived in it, it was mine and no other brother could climb it. It was where I hid to cry, when I was angry, etc. This is a poetic distraction. So I’ve always been weird. And weirdness is a poetic gift.”

The blossoming poet moved to Porto Alegre, the state capital, where he studied journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, graduating in 1995. Upon launching his first book of poetry in 1998, he began signing his name as Carpinejar, the combination of his parents’ surnames. In 2002, following the success of his first four poetry collections, he became a master in Brazilian Literature at his alma mater.

Set in the year 2045, Carpinejar’s fourth poetry collection Biography of A Tree begins on his 73rd birthday when he settles his accounts with God. “It’s an intimate apocalypse,” he told Rogério Eduardo Alves during an interview for the Folha de S. Paulo in September 2002.  “The poetry [in the collection] is the ear of the tree, the ear of the dew, the hearing of hesitations and small defeats. God does not speak; man fills his silence and squanders his name to relieve himself of his own judgment. I combat the easy idea of transcendence in Brazilian poetry. God appears in the book in the second person and always in lower case, in direct treatment, shoulder to shoulder. In the end, God is fired for just cause. To be fired is the contemporary and possible death of God, an evolution of death described by Nietzsche. To fire God is like taking away his market functionality, the productivity of his days, his guardianship over our destiny.”