Quote by Ferreira Gullar: “Poetry is life asking to be understood before it disappears.”

Experience passes constantly and cannot be held. Poetry is the attempt to slow that passing, to understand a moment or a feeling before it is gone. It is less about beauty or craft than about the urgent need to grasp what is happening to us before time takes it.

Gullar wrote Dirty Poem while in exile in Buenos Aires in 1975, as Brazil's military dictatorship continued to suppress political opposition. The poem was written under the assumption it might be his last work. He was living in fear of the dictatorship's reach and grappling with questions of mortality, love, and what poetry could still mean under state terror.

Brazilian poet and art critic, winner of the Camões Prize in 2010, whose work moves between concrete poetry and urgent political verse. His long poem Dirty Poem, written in exile in Buenos Aires while fleeing Brazil's military dictatorship, is considered a masterpiece of Brazilian literature.