Fernando Ferreira de Loanda: a priceless debt

Abstract

This text was written as a response to Joelma Santana Siqueira's generous invitation for me to give a lecture at the Federal University of Viçosa, on Fernando Ferreira de Loanda, poet and editor of both Orfeu, the magazine and the publishing house, which published a significant part of the generation of 45. The poet, studied by her, was my friend for the last 10 years of his life and, with Sergio Cohn, we have made an interview with him and an anthology of his poems, published in the Azougue magazine in 2003, a year after the death of the poet. In a tone that is both autobiographical and essayistic, I bring to light something of my relationship with Loanda and my admiration for him, moments of a poetic dialogue that, in different ways, I carried out with his poetry, a quick reception of his poetry by Leonardo Gandolfi in an unpublished poem, differences between Loanda and Domingos Carvalho da Silva (poet, the main organizer of the I Congresso Paulista de Poesia and editor of the Revista Brasileira de Poesia, another nucleous of the same generation), general characterizations of that generation and a critical reading of the poem “Kuala Lumpur”, present in the homonymous book from 1991.