Diogo Alcoforado

Poet, painter, and professor. He graduated with a Superior Course in Painting from ESBAP (Escola Superior de Belas Artes do Porto) in 1965 and earned a degree in Philosophy from the Faculty of Letters of Porto in 1976, also completing a course in Pedagogical Sciences at the same Faculty. He was a Drawing and Visual Education teacher in secondary education. In 1977, he began teaching Aesthetics in the Philosophy course at the Faculty of Letters of Porto, where he obtained his doctorate in 1990 with the dissertation «Sentido Trágico da Ideia Baudelaireana de Modernidade: Alguns Aspectos da Prática Pictórica Francesa: De Courbet a Cézanne.» He was a co-founder of the poetry notebooks «Exercício de Dizer,» where he published the series «Sete Meditações sobre os Rios» and «Sete Exercícios de Pura Circunstância,» included in the collective volumes Exercícios de Dizer (1977) and Terra: Porto (1980). He published the series «A Miragem: Onze Meditações em Forma de Soneto» in the magazine Nova Renascença (nº. 10, 1983). He also has poetic collaborations in the magazines Loreto 13, Hífen, Figuras, and Letras & Letras, and in the cultural supplement of O Comércio do Porto. He is represented in some collective poetry publications. He has essays on aesthetic problems or other domains of Philosophy published in various magazines, such as Nova Renascença, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Revista de Filosofia da Faculdade de Letras do Porto, Revista de História da Faculdade de Letras do Porto, and Humanidades, and also in the book Breve Meditação sobre a Evolução dos Objectos (1970). For some time, he wrote art criticism for the cultural supplement of Jornal de Notícias. His poetry is marked by a rigorous exercise of language, which leads words to develop an abstract plot characterized by the superposition of planes, many times created by diversification or metaphorical dissemination, by recourse to intertextuality, by the exploration of word similarity or paronomasia, etc. Following certain choices in the sixties, his language always seeks a purification that immediately gains density through a rigorously pursued imaginative concentration.