Poetry as Necessity and its Places in Contemporary Times

This book deals with the importance of poetic language as a means of human communication and interaction, its presence and resistance in contemporary times, especially in urban and human spaces. Because it verifies the place of poetry in a consumerist society, marked by the word and the media image, the study reflects on basic notions such as communication, poetics and poetry, mythos and logos, space, place, urbanity and contemporaneity. With the aim of bringing knowledge closer together, the foundation is based on theorists from communication, philosophy, linguistics and sociology, without neglecting poetic productions; we therefore mention Ciro Marcondes Filho, Aristotle, Heidegger, Morin, Huizinga, Kristeva, Maillard and Flusser as the main ones, as well as Italo Calvino and his notion of the ideal city. In order to deal with living poetry in the city, we present here an interpretative reading of an urban poem inscribed on the staircase leading to the National Theatre in Brasilia.