Anthologist-Translator: Ati Solerti
Postface: Alberto Santamaría
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Unai Velasco Quintela, Berta García Faet, Andrés Catalán, Laia López Manrique, Elena Medel, Luna Miguel, Guillermo Morales Sillas, Yeray Barroso Ravelo, Ángela Segovia, Fruela Fernández
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The purpose of this anthology is to present ten young poets, men and women, from various cities of Spain, whose work is both widely recognized and awarded in many occasions. This was the primary criterion for the selection of poets for this anthology; nonetheless, there was also an aim to select poets based on different writing styles, choice of themes and personal poetic qualities.
The main point of interest here lies purely in the particular way with which these poets perceive the incentives that give them inspiration, and how they process, interpret and record these incentives. They allow themselves be defined by a particular space and time, and within the confines of that region, they contemplate their history, their past, as it contrasted to their present, they frequently clash with traditional language norms, discover their roles in the here and now, and with their gaze set on the future, they decode each and every single individual word by setting its meaning on paper. Once each meaning is set, their poems are outlined. By leaving traces of a poetry that roots itself deeply, the poem thus becomes dominant, calls for deliberation, sets the mind in motion, stirring emotions as it balances between rationality and sentimentality, two aspects contained in each and every experience, each and every aspect of society, the world and even history itself.
I would like to express my warmest gratitude to Guillermo Morales Sillas and Mario Dominguez Parra for their suggestions, which I took seriously into consideration, although the final selection was purely mine. I would also like to wholeheartedly thank the poet and essayist Alberto Santamaria for his valuable input, giving us a very enlightening postface on the subject of the poetry of young Spanish poets.
Lastly, I would like to clarify something: If you notice a certain unevenness in the number of pages dedicated to each poet’s work, this is because each poet has contributed material of their own free choice, not lengthier than five pages.
Ati Solerti
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When someone, as in my case right now, attempts to compose a critique by approaching the poetic coordinates of a specific group of active poets, who, among other things, are also quite young, a long list of recurring questions and problems comes up: what sort of poets are we talking about? From what perspective? With what intentions? What are we actually referring to when we talk about a group of poets? What are their points of reference? What is their status relating to previous poets – or to tradition? Etc. All these aspects have been clearly and thoroughly investigated as regards the twentieth century.
Over the past few months, Spain has seen various anthologies attempting to show a line of coordinates for contemporary Spanish poetry, which means poetry composed by poets mostly born during the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.
In my opinion, all poets who write come face to face with an initial fundamental problem, that of time – or, better yet, with the problem of the here and now. This, in turn, comprises two separate problems: one is writing in the here and now, the other is writing about the here and now.
Nevertheless, writing about the here and now means writing about the time condensed in the here and now. One of the telltale features of these poets is their gaze towards the past, which is less a game of nostalgia or elegy (as was customary in the poetry of experience, and the only reason I mention this is because I feel it is essential in order to comprehend the change) and more like a past that continues to exist in the present, albeit without a moral lesson and with no intentions of universality. As Walter Benjamin would say, poets try to read their own lives, their past, by swimming against the tide.
As a consequence, the poetry written by several poets born in the ‘80’s is considerably different than the poetry of the past. From the denouncement of the leading role of the ego, a fundamental characteristic for the majority of poets born in the ‘70’s, we have come to a need to establish the biographical ego as an axis for poetic transformations – an ego that is no longer a narrating subject, but a subject whose ego, whose very identity, is neither narrative nor logically narrative, therefore it is not moralistic, but absolutely schizoid. This is an ego impossible to be grasped, yet who observes all these probable hypotheses that we are discussing.
Body, language, time, failure, confession are merely few of the terms of the sensitive economy that exemplifies the poets we are talking about. It is obvious that none of these elements are new, yet in spite of this fact, what’s interesting is how each poet expands on them, how each poet handles these changing, different, bizarre components in the light of an ego that is no longer ashamed of identifying itself.
Other than time, there also exists a space, a body, a physical ego. Another defining element of contemporary Spanish poetry is the unreserved return to the ego, a fact that is apparent, for example, in poets born during the ‘70’s, who somehow began moving away from the dialectics of good and evil imposed by the poetry of experience.
We can also somehow view this writing of the ego as a retrospective exercise, a way to rewrite the past, both the historical and the familial – as a means to comprehend the past as some sort of historical / collective subconscious that is acting incessantly in the present and the writing.
There is a definition of poetry that appears to me to be quite true and astute: It is the definition given long ago by Mario Perniola in a book of his about Situationism. He wrote: “Poetry […] is the idea of communication in itself, expressed in the context of a social structure in which the only true language is the lie”.
This seems to me a definition that makes cynical insinuations. From the one hand, it expresses the fundamental fact that poetry is communication; on the other hand, however, poetry is a form of communication that requires a language detached from the modes of communication established by a language perceived as semantic structure. Poetry is viewed as a form of communication that defies the accepted notion of communication. In this sense, I believe that certain poets exhibit an obvious tendency to use language by imbuing it with schizophrenic qualities, making it “go nuts”. Language, therefore, is not what it seems; language conceals many aspects, many characteristics and complex organisms.
Time, body, landscape and family, all of which are yearnings of a returning and revolving identity, are nodal points in this network of poetry written by poets born in the ‘80’s onwards.
Excerpts from the article “The Image in the Poem: A Cartographic Projection of Contemporary Spanish Poetry”
Alberto Santamaría