“Trash is an Ethics”: Critical Notes on Poems by Pedro Mexia

Abstract

Critical reading of some poetry by Pedro Mexia, highlighting ways of thinking about the relationship between poetry and ethics in the face of the dominant neoliberal discourse in contemporary society. The work Contratempo (2016) and its dystopian perspective in relation to contemporary times, through the eyes of an urban poet who walks through the city of Lisbon represented as a ruinous space. When describing the degrading situations imposed on individuals by the neoliberal economy, the poems emphasize banal circumstances present in the urban landscape marked by debris and remains. We analyze the descriptive process in Mexia’s poems in order to reverberate the disenchantment, failure and above all the melancholy of the contemporary subject. This approach is developed from the perspective of psychopolitics (SAFATLE, 2022; HAN, 2017 and 2018), questioning the resistance of poetic discourse to the economistic demands of neoliberalism that profoundly affect the lives of contemporary individuals.