¿Cómo comprender, interpretar, prever hechos cuyas manifestaciones esenciales son la heterogeneidad y el conflicto?
Stephane Lupasco
To Luis Alberto Arellano
The dialogue between Spain and the Americas, which until recently seemed doomed to exist only as a pipe dream, has been made possible thanks to the tireless work of a few independent publishers[1], combined with the interest aroused by the poetry of some Latin American writers in Spain[2] and the emergence of websites and blogs[3]—unrelated to the interests that the canon had brought into play—worked in such a way that this dialogue began to take shape. At first, it was like the echo of a trill in a barren landscape. Today, they, whoever they may be, and also the others, have discovered that yes, there really is a series of communicating vessels that open up the possibility of recognizing ourselves as a wethrough an epoch-making discourse, and not with the emotional tedeum of a generation bewildered by the unprecedented dimension of the unknown.
The song moved from the intimacy of the village to the unthinkable spheres of a glocality. From there, I could glimpse that among us there were not only these communicating vessels but also the ghost of a canon stubbornly refusing to budge.
“It’s almost synchronicity,” I thought after reading La poesía de la normalidad (The Poetry of Normality)[4]. The text breaks down the rules that were supposed to govern the behavior of the young poet—a biologism that can sometimes be as disturbing as that other one that prescribes feminine poetry—as long as he was willing to achieve “success”—it goes without saying that this was in the literary scene of a few decades ago.
The path to follow, from the “ascetic method” to the key that refers to a collection of poems whose title represents “a kind of summary of the aesthetic keys to the work, so that no one gets lost…”—to mention just a couple of details—brings Spain and the Americas, or a good part of them, together in the same territory: one that must have developed in a perverted way under the yoke of the same rules.
Perhaps today, if I think of a writer born in the late 1980s, it might seem like the storyboard of some bizarre George Romero film. It was unable to withstand the passage of time. The poem that then shone in its “pure state,” understood as a repository of the literary, began to be contaminated by a series of references from quantum physics, astrology, graphic arts, and even genetics; and many of the writings that were once divided by genres, as if they could only exist within those closed structures, decided to cross these boundaries with the aim of constructing the present[5]until, finally, free from confinement, they found in the fragment the discursive unity of new texts that appeared as fusions in which purely aesthetic criteria were displaced to other spaces. Aesthetics is inseparable from ethics as well as from politics.
Writing (of poems and also of other alternative fields) became “de-literaturized”—with respect to the norms imposed by the canon—to become a binding exercise, not only with regard to the various dynamics of culture, but also to its various peripheral spaces. But the transition from normality, as portrayed by Mora, to abnormality is not so simple. It requires pausing to try to understand the new rules that have come into play, since the change in the author’s ideology brought with it the devaluation of “well-written work,” an aspect that was replaced by the need to rematerialize each particular perception of reality, starting, paradoxically, from an implicit antinomy between the author and reality itself, even establishing a new relationship with tradition.
The author’s writing, parricidal during the era of effeminate soliloquy, seemed to become regressive, mainly due to the rise of remixing, evident in rewriting, remastering, tuning, and even patchwriting. If this previously meant a burden, in this case, that of having to flee to the past in search of solid ground[6], from the new millennium onwards, the poet returned to tradition, not as the prodigal son eager for reconciliation, but rather as a dialoguing being who, from his original and unique experience, reappears in search of new revelations within a discourse that had been interpreted. From this notion, different relationships and notions of intertextuality were established, since today we speak of a form of writing that could even arise from a news item read in the newspapers and then then present itself as a puzzle, in which the data of literary tradition are profaned through a transformative dismantling, which Genette calls “literature in the second degree” and which, as it develops, leaves behind an infinite number of traditional and modern categories that served several generations to build works of great historical value.
As it develops, writing is once again invaded, but this time by a series of flows from clip genres, by the explosion of linguistic regimes, by the shift from subjective expression to processual programming, manifested in the aesthetics of contemporary interconnections. However, its traces are accepted without guilt or drama, free from the obsession with originality. Meanwhile, “Poetry,” understood as a literary genre, “sinks under its own weight of contradictions and appears before the public—what little remains—as an endless discussion of modes and a quarrel over procedures.”[7] This situation is a consequence of the sublimation of anachronisms such as the prestige of literature and the poet, which governed the old precepts of normality.
I would propose the idea of “Poetry” as a reference to the act of writing itself, which could even become a flow against the compositional dimension of the poem, and which does not necessarily appear written “on paper, or on a support that assumes the function of a frame and isolates the printed letter from the surrounding reality.”
Time transformed the drama of “to be or not to be” into “to be and not to be” in a “dreamwake continuum” in which poetry reveals itself, yes, but as an explanation that develops through praxis without having to supplant the literary with other sociological topos, as happened a few decades ago.
Today, the ambiguity of poetry lies in the fact that it cannot be thought (and written) by establishing an external morality. That is why it is not realized through a specific stylistic imprint. It is about creating an object that does not superimpose any practice that could be reproducible.
Writings no longer plagiarize themselves, they disassociate themselves from possible manipulations, and seek to distance themselves from their own limits. There is refinement, integration, and euphony in them, understood as proportion. The objects and the subject occur as immanent variables of the statement, adjusted to the verbal rigor that infects the entire text. From this, we can deduce that the status of poetics in these times is to problematize, and that attacking the linguistic surface is nothing more than causing the language with which the poet is invested to skid.
When it is said that words replicate, nothing else is being done but marking their area of dispute: poetic writing as good meat on the grill, allowing itself to be savored, going from the formless to the uniform through an innate exercise of slowness. This slow-motion veil of a syntax that is conceived as urgent does nothing but place style in an imaginary corset, but one that is no less palpable for that. It is that which holds the words together and does not necessarily make up the poem, because otherwise we would be faced with a mere artifice of containment.
Carlos Germán Belli called this asir la forma que se va (seizing the form that is leaving), but with a fundamental difference: the writings do not appear modulated by a concern with transforming the substance, mood, or setting of the texts, generating a version of the rhythmic event that sets the scene where the pretense of truth does not seduce, not even with its imitation bijouterie.
Not all that glitters is Lezama.
So how to read poetry in these times of transformation?
I think we can distinguish two types of discourse: one that, while removing some literary categories from the game board, requires an understanding of other, new ones—many of them forged outside literature; another that arises from a certain melancholy for the poem—absent—a feeling that compels us to bring it back, thus requiring a cover. Both converge on the place that the author occupies in them, sometimes appearing as a space through a Googled quote; in others, as a frame on which a kind of hard-edge painting will be performed. In them, the encounter and reflections on the literary become possible to the extent that much, if not all, of the writing is found either in another realm or in an offside position that is not penalized by the referee.
Today, alongside the poem, we can recognize other avenues where a certain degree of poeticism can be experienced. What I appreciate is the independence of poetic writing from the support of genre, a fact that, rather than making writing transparent, since the literary no longer appears as an isolated system, destabilizes it, because by the mere fact of having become a binding exercise, writing, quotative and intertextual[10], seems to shift along irregular, imperfect, chaosmotic emotional coordinates, the same ones that demand tabular readings[11] capable of superimposing the different isotopic lines that the text contains.
Juan José Rodinás[12] distinguishes five expressive models:
1) an epic that seeks to accumulate all the traces of history in the vein of Dante or Pound’s Cantos;
2) a civil writing, experimental but ironic in its approach, situated or situationist, which seeks its discursive limits in concrete experience, the daughter or granddaughter of Anglo-Saxon objectivism;
3) a poetry of images, sometimes sober, sometimes fast-paced, which believes in transcendence and in the evocative power of silence;
4) a poetry of anecdote, almost narrative, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes neo-damned, which formulates vignettes about everyday life;
5) a poetry of artifacts, more difficult to classify, and closer to conceptual art than to conventional literature.
But, as Rodinás himself warns, these expressive models often intermingle without forcing us to choose between experimentation and anecdote. Anecdote requires a certain level of experimentation, as long as that experimentation is organized around the anecdote. These writings represent, at the same time, a reflection on language—all of them show risky attitudes in syntactic, rhythmic, conceptual, or discursive areas—on tradition—with which they dialogue through rewriting and other strategies of appropriation using texts that demand to be understood as spaces of identity transmutation—and also on reality. They appear before us in a condition very similar to that of a dream that demands to be interpreted, although their most defining quality is their resistance to interpretation.
Otherwise, the dream would have no possible formula.
Now, although it is true that logic is discarded in most of these texts, this does not mean that meaning is disregarded, even when it is difficult to grasp. Meaning is not erased in this way, but rather dispersed, packed into a concentric, lifelong structure from which it cannot easily escape. It is meaning that “becomes time,” and what is more, it yields to the destiny of desire, but from the very core of the body itself. It is a maxim, but also a minimal notion to corral the poems into a status outside of meaning. Meaning is delayed, and this “making time” extends into a formal refinement that recalls the fall of sand in its interstice of time, turned into a clock. Again and again, the text turns over its hourglass-poem to restart the meaning that is not completed, but refined (even in an acoustic way) until it disappears into the zero state of form. In this way, the resurrection of the poem is seen as a parasite that attaches itself to the face of a bird in circular flight, elusive, imposturous, and theatrical.
For a writer of poems, his action aims to reach his own limit, which is why his writing reproduces a thought that comes from a place further away than the entire outside world, and thus approaches an inner whole. In some cases, they come from reality at the edge of events that suddenly trace the spectral silhouette of a language that empties the body and integrates it into an apparent permanence, thereby proposing, once again, the outline of a writing in that body revisited by the taxidermy of language. Thus, a truth dwells that only confesses its silence and finds in the absence of fixity a speed detailed by the texts. It is a poetry that shields itself from nothingness, that is its maximum resistance, where the subject is caught up in events that go beyond their individual horizon of meaning. As the poet Reiner Kunze said in an interview with German radio in 1977, “the poetically structured subconscious is stronger in exceptional moments than the objective consciousness programmed against poetry.” With reservations, this definition could be applied to moments in any writing, but in these poems, it is even more evident.
Who knows the prehistory of writing?
Only by calling on the idea of that subconscious that determines all work can we converge on a minimal answer. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that today’s poems possess an incorrigible writing, that is, one that is strengthened by difference and disrupts similarities. They set in motion a lyrical clockwork mechanism that occurs in the desiring dialogue with a geographical language: whether Uruguayan, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Mexican, Costa Rican, Argentine, etc., these are languages that present a structure that is both “detained and disarmed” with respect to the idea of conventional poetic discourse, since the latter is difficult on the surface; in their apparent monolithic organization, where a mobile, airy, spongy area is defined, like quicksand.
The more comfortable we feel in these poems, the more we sink. As soon as we understand that writing works like a sacred river and has the speed of gold, a peculiar syllabary is formed through which a contingent of poets operates. It is as if we took for ourselves, like a treasure that is so hidden that it is easy to discover, that there has always been a pulse that goes from papyrus to memory, or from the first writing to temporal propulsion. Thus, words are allowed to increase their efforts to escape. They redouble, resent, duplicate, strengthen their power of gaze in the catalog, functioning without mitigation through a system of irregular pieces that follow one another like a labyrinth of mosques. An imaginary border is placed between the arterial response and the movement destined to intervene on the relief and embroider the elusive. One must observe very carefully to realize how these writings process not only the avant-garde but also the sound of their contemporaries, and now return to us worlds that we could have dreamed of but which followed other paths. Some also function as a blurring and expansion of recovered time, under the tutelage of the creative eye that desacralizes the concept of linearity of the gaze. A linearity, yes, but linked more to the reading eye than to the creative eye, where popular language and language traversed by genres are explored, which becomes induced in a reflective series of poems of infinite meter. It is the maremagnum of a poet’s textual device, that of enhancing the sudden incursion of everyday words as one of the forms in which poetic language appears, profoundly.
The simple, then, would become flesh for the writer. In this way, language is not rediscovered in orality, but follows the course of a practice that leads to a preconceived expressive approach. The word becomes practical, which is also poetic, and its fortuitous accumulation in this series of poems manages to overload the verse until it becomes ridiculous, that is, quantitative, and therefore capable of weeding out meaning.
The essence of these poetics is that the various forms of intervention of the “poetic thing” do not represent any interference—they all converge—and ultimately do not manage to hinder or exalt extraneous noises. They can coexist, but for that to happen, the author’s hand, together with the anhydride of experience and sensitivity, must combine by force of style, whose synonym, torsion, means nothing more than the effort, the hustle and bustle of writing.
The word that fits this book like a glove is “portable,” even in the sense given to it by Marcel Duchamp. And also in another sense, if you like, more familiar, because it reduces its own elements in order to maintain easier control over them. However, this task of miniaturizing the settings has the opposite effect, since the poems function as a touchstone for a world in permanent flux, that is, without a definite form, and because, ultimately, the distance, which calls for retrospection, seems to have been written in a foreign language. And that is the point where darkness is measured out and spaces are amplified. In this foreign thing there is an already established “uprooting,” due to the absolute absence of a representative character.
In this way, the texts shift, they are not interchangeable with another reality, they follow the volutes left by the vestiges of an incineration about which we know nothing and which we never witnessed. Thus, memory functions as something that can be seen and touched, and childhood as something that retains for itself the mystery of the incorporeal. That is why they unload, as we were saying, onto a shifting, elusive, transitory zone, just at the moment of becoming mere mechanisms of memory. Even memory of language.
It is possible that the foundation of human existence is dialogue with the very occurrence of language. Even for a thinker like Martin Heidegger, language is the most dangerous of all possessions. This notion further functionalizes the idea that language is not an innocent matter, and that poetry is the most dangerous and at the same time the most innocent of occupations.
There are works that break this logocentrism and turn it into realizable matter; writing always works on an imaginary scaffold: when it seems about to fall, it retraces its steps, as if remembering when it was able to balance itself.
One of the best exegetes of Paul Celan’s work is Jacques Derrida. When he felt compelled to define the relevance of the Romanian/German poet’s work, he did nothing more than rely on writing to redefine what a poet was for him. Great poets force critics, and later thinkers, to repopulate language. The mark of poetry is the proclamation of a new form of orality. Few achieve such a degree of transfer, because, ultimately, to change the modes of language is to pervert the event. And the poet is that kind of writer who donates his experience to a reader he assumes he does not know.
Derrida calls a poet “one who makes the passage with events of writing, giving a new body to this essence of language.” He also understands that creating a work “is to give language such a body that this truth of language appears and disappears, appears in elliptical retreat.”
The question is: why do these modes of language appear?
We need only look at what his poems focus on. There is a mechanism that reminds us of the action of a story where the fragment appears as what could have remained, as that which remained suspended there—but also as a probable hint of what is to come.
If we prefer to speak of a story, it is because a space is established there, in this case an interior space, also semantic, where spatial representations condense the procedure of his poems. That interior space is not a singular subject, but a plural one. But not just any plural: poetry settles in a we that defines it like no other.
* This text was written in collaboration with Argentine poet Mario Arteca and was published under the title Como débil antena que sacuden los espasmos del mensaje (algunas advertencias) as a prologue to the volume País imaginario. Escrituras y transtextos. Poesía latinoamericana 1980-1992. Madrid, 2018. Ay del seis Poetry. 432 pages.
[1] Liliputienses, Amargord, Kriller 71, Varasek, La Garúa are some of them.
[2]José Viñals, Isel Rivero, Ana Becciu, Mario Merlino, Yulino Dávila, Mario Campaña, Luis Arturo Guichard, Arturo Borra, Laura Giordani, Magdalena Chocano, Andrés Fisher, Julio Espinosa, Eduardo Fariña, Martín Rodríguez Gaona, Óscar Pirot, Giovanni Collazos, and Diego Palmath are examples of this. In this regard, we should also consider the contribution of Extracomunitarios. Nueve poetas latinoamericanos en España (Non-Community Members: Nine Latin American Poets in Spain). Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013. This is a valuable work by Benito del Pliego that includes many of the poets mentioned above.
[3] Marcos Canteli’s 7 del 7 was perhaps the first digital space to take a chance on this. Later, Transtierros appeared, a project that developed over a decade.
[4] Vicente Luis Mora. Singularidades. Ética y poética de la literatura española actual, Madrid, Bartleby, 2006.
[5] Josefina Ludmer. “Literaturas postautónomas.” See: http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v17/ludmer.htm
[6] Maurizio Medo. Backstage, 18 entrevistas y algunas notas alrededor de la poesía contemporánea. Liliputienses. Cáceres. 2017.
[7] Jorge Fernández Granados. See: http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/esta-en-crisis-la-poesia
[8] Sandra Santana. See: https://sandrasantana.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/eielson_poesianoescrita.pdf
[9] Daniel Freidemberg / Poetry against poem. The elusive and the incomplete in Juan Gelman. See: https://transtierros.org/2017/11/24/poesia-contra-poema-lo-inaferrable-y-lo-incompleto-en-juan-gelman-daniel-freidemberg/
[10] Ibid.
[11] Marjorie Perloff. “The Challenge of Language. Interview with Enrique Mallén.” See:https://transtierros.org/2015/05/30/el-desafio-del-lenguaje-entrevista-con-marjorie-perloff-por-enrique-mallen/
[12] Juan José Rodinás. Genetics and imposture of emotion in poetry. See: https://transtierros.org/2017/12/19/genetica-e-impostura-de-la-emocion-en-el-poema-juan-jose-rodinas/
