Reciting these lines aloud helped her get her temper under control. I’d try to figure out what had happened. Neither of us was thinking about poetry, yet it was the only way we had of saying anything to each other.

—

I used to think poetry had to be corny, cheesy, sentimental. When I was an undergraduate, my idea of a poet was someone who listened to ballads and gave away handmade paper roses. In those years, the slightest expression of sensitivity had me in a permanent state of discomfort. A familiar pragmatism prevailed, one that had me used to feeling estranged. I sought out ways to remove myself from people and from words. 

On a park bench, a student was reading aloud the first page of his recently published book. I laughed. I said something. I don’t remember what exactly, but I know my tone was spiteful and cruel.

I fled sentimentality, thinking that way I could distance myself from poetry and thus forget the image of my mother reciting poems, poems that she too would eventually forget. 

—

When poetry didn’t speak to me, I blamed the poets. In class, we’d read Mario Benedetti or Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. With every poem the abyss grew wider. I had no interest in discovering other forms or other writers and doubt it would have made much difference if my teachers had chosen different poems. As Ben Lerner suggests, there often exists an interior border that prevents us from connecting with poetry. 

Some classmates, equally removed from poetry, cultivated it discreetly: They wrote letters with poetry in them, made it their own through pop songs or the figure of a troubadour singing about the Revolution. Our school was for developing skills in maths, physics, and chemistry, not for counting syllables or composing lines. 

I always found the spectacle of poetry a bit ridiculous, but I also felt a kind of envy. I wanted to believe in words. Not the words we read in the classroom, but the ones we say to ourselves.

—

Since time immemorial, people have questioned the role of poetry and of poets. Plato’s Ion accepts the idea that poetry is not created by humans. Rather, the gods availed themselves of an “insignificant poet” in order to divest him of reason and deliver him the most beautiful lines. This function, which might seem inoffensive, ended up being deeply problematic, because it put the truth in question. How were people to know it was really the gods who were speaking? Ought people to listen to what was being said?

Without a definitive answer to these questions, the solution was to try and get rid of the poets. 

In her book The Fire and the Sun, Iris Murdoch reminds us that the platonic vision changed in texts that associated this trade with beauty. It went from being repudiated to being a contained aesthetic: a small space—the coming together of pure pleasure, true beauty, and profound experience—where acceptable art could be found. For Plato, Murdoch writes, “decent art must obey truth; and truth is expressive of reality (the two ideas blend in the word ἀλήθεια), and is pure, small in extent, and lacking in intensity.” Poets obtained permission to practice their trade again, on the condition that they would stick close to reason and could manage people’s reactions to their verses. 

—

In a primary school Spanish class one day, we learned the story of Sor Juana. When lessons were over, I spent the afternoon pretending I was her: being alone, reading, writing poems. As the game extended to the only bookshelf in the house, I found the anthology containing the quatrains my mother had memorized. I immediately sought them out, underlining the title of the first page in green ink. 

My mother gradually forgot those lines. 

My childhood came to an end, and my adolescence, and the book stayed where it was. Intact. 

II. SONOROUS FLUID

The first time I left the country I was fifteen years old. I wasn’t scared of going to a new place, but rather of not being able to relate to it. It worried me that I couldn’t even translate what I was thinking and feeling into my native Spanish, let alone English, despite having made considerable effort in class. I was carrying an anger around that got in the way of words. My mother tongue was broken. 

During that trip to the United States, I realized something: I communicated better through maths. My English is and will remain rudimentary—but despite all its flaws and defects I felt safe in there, in that unintelligibility. 

—

At home, my attempts to keep my distance from my parents proved insufficient. I was busy every afternoon with some extracurricular activity, or else spent it playing in the street. If they asked me to go with them to get togethers of family or friends, I’d make the excuse that I had homework to do. Often, I just locked myself in my room to listen to music and look out the window at a peach tree that flowered every year. 

While the trip was a triumph for the teachers and parents of our small public school, it only made me desperate. I stopped caring about getting good marks or about my classwork. My thoughts had been dragged from one place to another. 

—

When I got back from the exchange, it was only a few months before I moved out of my parents’ house. I was to return, once in a while, but as a foreigner. 

I was a tourist resigned to the fact that visits were uncomfortable. It was only ever a matter of minutes before tedium took told of me. The ordinary conversations, their ways of showing affection, every worry weighing on their shoulders: none of it made sense. There was an abyss pushing me insistently away. 

—

On careful reading of some of W. H. Auden’s poems and essays, I noted that his estrangement was both spatial and inner. Outwardly, the poet had left the UK at the outbreak of the Second World War, which was to be a recurring cause for scorn in years to come. Inwardly, Auden subverted ideas he didn’t agree with: First he let them stretch out to their full extent, then he watched from afar as they revealed the premises of their arguments, only to later dismantle them with all the calm in the world. 

Auden had constructed an interior border both open and solid. 

—

When the writer Joseph Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union—invited to leave, as he ironically put it—he needed an address somewhere outside the country before he could get out of the forced labor camps. Brodsky gave Auden’s address in Austria. They didn’t know each other personally, but the Englishman received him without question and, with the help of other writers, facilitated his move to the United States. Ever since he was little, Brodsky had secretly been reading an anthology of US poets in which Auden’s work appeared. 

Faced with his inevitable exile, the Russian man followed a stranger’s footsteps, and in his time of greatest need the Englishman took him in.

—

The sonorous fluid emerging from the mouth of one of the last five Kiliwa speakers flows into my ears, unrestricted by any barrier my uninitiated mind might erect. My mind, despite everything, seeks sense, coherence, something remotely familiar. I give up before long and sink into the acoustic river, knowing that, for someone, what I’m hearing is speech; that this acoustic fact contains meaning that is entirely lost on me. 

—Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, “Ëëts, atom: Notes on Indigenous Identity”

—

On examining his own condition of exile, Brodsky would recall some of the reasons why a writer decides to inhabit another language. Because of an uncontrollable desire to distort language, as in the case of Vladimir Nabokov; to experience admiration once again for the novelty of words, as in the case of Samuel Beckett; out of necessity, as in the case of Joseph Conrad; or as a way of getting more profoundly close to someone, “to please a shadow,” just like Brodsky wanted to please W. H. Auden. 

—

One Christmas I went home alone, right in the middle of all the carols and the food. At the wedding of one of my cousins, I spent a large part of the evening in the car. 

I didn’t belong to that place or to that family, but I had left part of myself behind with them and I was trying to somehow get it back. 

Books gradually changed the way I looked for it. With every book I read I became more of a blur to other people. Immersing myself in those pages made me a strange being: an unintelligible self. I had discovered a way of being calm: being the family negative, an absent self. That’s how I realized that the part of me that was lost was not to be found at home—that I had to look for it elsewhere, and that books were one way I might set off on the expedition. 

III. DEATH TO THE FATHER

I was lucky to have read Octavio Paz’s books before I took a single class at university. The professor, a translator of the absurd, cursed him loudly, endlessly. He left us with nothing, reducing Paz’s work to dust. To top it all off, he wrote us a prescription for a Mexican author who did deserve our respect, a sugar-coated patriarch for generations to come. The patriarch was not like Paz, because he had not devoted himself to turning Mexican literature into a mafia. The patriarch, unlike Paz, was known outside Mexico. The patriarch was a great writer. I didn’t need to know the details of the missteps he’d taken towards the end of his life to draw certain conclusions from that fortuitous reading. 

I agreed with the professor. Without question, Paz belonged to a particular moment in time: He had made many errors, of course, but he’d also got some things right. Leaving the latter aside for a moment, the poet’s trajectory was part of a continuum in which he was not alone. Throughout the twentieth century, Mexico perfected a system whereby the hegemonic party had a special ability to draw everything to it while keeping certain necessary things at arm’s length. Thanks to its despotic authority, it was practically impossible to exist outside of the party: Since one of its objectives was to stamp out the dying embers of the Mexican Revolution, the caciques became its first members. This union, already problematic, became more complex when it began trying to eliminate difference: There was only room for those willing to fit themselves precisely into the mold.

—

So what does all this have to do with the professor and the patriarch? The bridges between authoritarianism and our own generation have always been broken. Ever since we were children we have been taught, in good humor, to make fun of the king. We realized this thanks to Paz, or without him, or despite him. Perhaps that’s why the professor was discouraged by the sight of our faces: away with the fairies, bored out of our wits. We paid no attention to the suggestion that we ought to revere the patriarch. 

—

Every time I read “A Draft of Shadows” by Octavio Paz, I’m reminded of my father strapped to the alcohol rack. I could never talk to him, just like the voice in the poem.

—

The Bow and the Lyre opens with a list of definitions describing what Paz understands by poetry. In the first paragraph there are eighty-six definitions in two hundred and seventy-five words. On average, one every three words. Seeing all these definitions together, seeing the tally, left me feeling like there was no definition at all: “pure and impure, sacred and damned, popular and marginal, collective and personal, naked and clothed.”

I divided up the paragraph at every appearance of a full stop, to create a list with twenty-eight sections. This was the only way I could get some of it to make sense. 

—

Poetry Is Cursed Food 

In an interview, Nicanor Parra was asked: “Who introduced you to the vice?” The journalist was trying to figure out why he had abandoned mathematics for poetry. The Chilean was silent. Because if Sabellius, who as well as being a theologian was also a consummate humorist, could reduce the tenets of the Sacred Trinity to dust and refuse to answer for his heresy, why couldn’t Parra? 

Poetry Is the Bread of the Chosen

Witold Gombrowicz makes this very clear in Against Poets, where he criticizes the “poetic mass”: the ritual that turns poetry into an activity that’s out of the reach of mortals and the uninitiated. The professionalization of language aimed at tiny, select groups who believe they understand the messages encrypted in lines of poetry: the Narrowing becomes Narrower, Beauty becomes more Beautiful, Profundity becomes more Profound, etc. Meanwhile, the bread disappears. 

Poetry Is Exorcism

The only documented case is that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He wanted to rid his body of the image of Kublai Khan, the last great Khan Mongol and the first Emperor of China. Coleridge was a literary critic as well as a poet, and he had read Khan’s biography as part of his work. But the pages of the book hounded him everywhere he went. At the time, the use of opium was recommended for such emergencies, so, before going to sleep, Coleridge prepared a mix for his pipe. When he woke, he set out immediately to transcribe the three hundred lines of poetry he had dreamed, but a friend arrived out of the blue, so there ended up being only fifty-something of them. 

Poetry Is a Spell

When Sor Juana wrote the “Hendecasyllabic Labyrinth,” she was thinking about the years her Excellency the Countess of Galve, doña Elvira de Toledo, was to spend with the Count, her husband. The poem should be read three times, each time starting from a different column. Each column has thirty-two possibilities, almost two hundred thousand combinations. Five hundred and thirty-nine years if you read just one hendecasyllable a day. Some time later, efforts were made to find out more about the count and countess, but nothing has yet been discovered of them. 

Poetry Is Magic

Poetry is not magic, W. H. Auden assures us. 

Poetry Is an Ascetic Activity

For Giorgio Agamben, a poet is anyone willing to surrender to the inability to do something. 

Poetry Is Innate Experience

Choosing a nickname is an intuitive way of finding a permanent link, of making up for the inexact choice of a person’s name. That same intuition is put to work in every poem: it’s not just a search for words, it’s also the relationship generated between them. 

Poetry Is the Word of the Solitary

Despite the recognition her work garnered, Marianne Moore never felt satisfied with her poems. There were fourteen years between the publication of her first and second books. If it had been up to her, as it was to Emily Dickinson, her poetry might only have been read after her death. 

—

In a text barely a page long, by way of an obituary, Luis Villoro uses The Bow and the Lyre to bring together Paz’s life and death: “failing to understand, he attacked those who should have been his brothers—although taking different routes, it’s true—in the search for the other.” His poetics showed how opposites are united, but never managed to perceive the disruptive acts of other voices. 

IV. GREAT ART

Poetry is often reproached for being “disconnected from reality.” Dehumanized language that has forgotten everything else: art for art’s sake. Witold Gombrowicz’s Against Poets—given originally as a lecture on August 28, 1947, in Buenos Aires—is one of the best known of these reproaches. 

In the two versions of the lecture in circulation, I couldn’t quite see why he claimed that unreadable poetry has done great damage, much more damage than unreadable prose texts, which he only references specifically in the second version: in the first, all he does is allude briefly to Joyce’s Ulysses and Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, as “too ‘artistic.’”

If we concede to this provocation and follow Gombrowicz’s lead, in the final pages we glimpse what is perhaps the root cause of his anxiety. For him, “being in the presence of great art is like being in the presence of men who are more mature than us, with broader horizons and stronger sensibilities.” For this reason, he considers our ability to connect with art to be limited, narrow. And besides, it has to be learned.

If culture is human production, then art cannot be a divine concession. We are not born with the ability to be moved by a work of art; we develop it. 

Though Gombrowicz had sought to make poetry more capacious, he might, on the contrary, have limited it even further by identifying quite so many obstacles to forging a connection with art. 

—

In antiquity, it was common to associate the activities of a carpenter with those of an artist. At that time, an object’s value was not determined by its utility. The focus was the ideas behind it, on the process of conceiving it, and on the object itself. Creation, from the intellectual to the practical. 

Slaves were made to do mechanical labor: they were denied the opportunity to learn a skill and understand the ideas behind it. Over time, the division of labor and aesthetics changed that perspective. Functionality brought together mechanics and skill to the extent that we have forgotten how to distinguish them. For its part, beauty, as the aesthetic ideal, provided what is still understood today as the work of art. The spectator was born. From understanding we moved to mere observation. 

Before, when art was a trade, not just anyone could be an artist. Nowadays we all can, but there’s no guarantee we can turn an object into a work of art. 

—

A few years ago, I sat in on a university class about art and power in which Sara Uribe’s Antígona González was discussed. The students were puzzled and to some degree angry. The poem alludes to the thousands of people who have been disappeared in an apparently endless war. Those who managed to express their discomfort all did so in more or less the same terms: It wasn’t prudent to write about this topic, more context was needed to show what really happened, isn’t it opportunistic to write about something so current? Why did their reading provoke this kind of reaction? The more I thought about it, all the possible answers led me outside the text. 

Though it had nothing to do with Sara or the poem itself, the students’ reading had affected them in several ways. Perhaps it answered a question they had been circling without knowing how to formulate it. Because often, even when an answer is given repeatedly, we can only really see and analyze it once we’ve articulated the question. The discomfort was a sign that the query was in sight, that it was making itself known, but confronting a new question isn’t easy. Like the students, we all know the desire to remain somewhere familiar: in a loop where both question and answer are well worked out. 

—

But beyond the fact that it would be very unfair to blame the students or the author for what the text may or may not mean, I’d like to focus on the moment of encounter between reader and poet: charged with previous experiences, with our deficiencies, with all the distance we’ve traveled on the road to this book. How do we approach a text? 

A retinal approach, an entirely visual one, might lead us to think that nothing precedes it: as if we could be spectators from ground zero. But reading is not retinal, it’s conceptual, and perhaps the most difficult thing about it is to recognize our preconceived notions and stop trying to adjust the world and our readings to them. Instead of confirming the answers we already have, let’s just activate the questions. Read the text from the perspective not of spectator, but of creator: from the point of view of technique and poetics rather than aesthetics.

—

In some of their texts, both Giorgio Agamben and Boris Groys insist on a return to technique and the ideas behind it. The remnants of this restrained aesthetics, where a work of art can only exist if pure pleasure, true beauty and profound experience meet, has an even longer history than the tradition of art as technique or poetics, although it might sometimes seem to be the other way around. Technique and poetics as part of artistic labor, part of everything that contributes to making a work of art and an artist; not just the seams but also the non-linear paths and practices that become public narratives, beyond the works of art themselves. 

—

Although Sara Uribe’s poem constructs its own narrative, it also confronts other, previously established narratives. Many of them with undisclosed intentions or in the name of a poorly articulated cause. A reading in which the dice are loaded.

What hidden narratives are activated when we read Antígona González?

The words prudent, real, and opportunistic are based on a path that is not that of the poem. Rather than unmask the intentions behind the words, my question was, and still is, how do we open them up? How do we make sure they give rise to a sea of inquiry rather than the same old paltry, mean response?

—

W. H. Auden, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, had to confront criticism from his fellow writers in print on countless occasions, principally from George Orwell. In 1938, the author of 1984 referred to a line from “Spain,” about Auden’s trips there during the Civil War in 1936. According to Orwell, only the kind of person who is always elsewhere when the trigger is pulled could write that in war there are “necessary murders.” Only someone as superficial as Auden could speak of death as though it were just a word. 

In 1946, Orwell took aim again, this time at the “artificial pleasure-resorts” described in Auden’s “1 September 1939”: the insistence on the breakdown of private lives at a moment that transcended individuality, the banal concern for daily activities during a war when everything was at stake, or the ridiculous use of love to take aim at the State. In politics, Orwell thought, “it matters not what you think, but how you think”; it’s not politics that are important, but rather principles, to which “a few irreducible individuals” still maintain allegiance.

—

According to Christopher Hitchens, this was perhaps Orwell’s most shameful chapter, because although Auden’s words evidently weighed on him, his main problem with the poet was an “unexamined, philistine” prejudice against homosexuals. At the time, in the United Kingdom, people who revealed their homosexuality were tried and sentenced either to prison or to hormone therapy intended to “cure” them. It happened to Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned from 1895 to 1897, sentenced to “sodomy and gross indecency.” It happened later to the mathematician Alan Turing, who augured the computational turn, played a decisive role in the deciphering of Nazi codes, and was injected with estrogen for a year, provoking a severe mental imbalance and leading to his suicide in 1954, two years after his trial. 

—

Orwell was interested in moral, not poetic problems, but he still tried to get Auden to resolve them through poetry. When it came to “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,” what concerned Orwell was the image of the normalization of murder, which he attributed to the poet. As though by definition an armed conflict did not have the death of living beings as its inevitable disastrous consequence. In any case, eventually Auden changed the line to “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder” and as of 1950 stopped including “Spain” in his volumes of selected poems. The problem was not whether people “maintained allegiance to principles,” but what those principles were in the first place. 

With a bit of perspective, I do not judge Orwell, but I am moved and interested by Auden’s position. The poet listened to the criticism because of the vitriol that accompanied it. He remained open to the accusations he faced. He listened, took note, made the necessary changes. Despite being accused of being superficial for constantly resorting to love as a motivating theme in his poems, he continued to do so until his death. With every attempt to break his sensibility, he revived a possibility of understanding: He made it the first step on a more profound journey. 

—

When Auden writes that “we must love one another or die,” he doesn’t expect us to buy flowers at the nearest stall, but to cross the border: to build bridges with his sensibility, so much broader than our own. 

—

Auden’s poems, Sara Uribe’s Antígona González, every poem that has been required to answer questions it is not concerned with—they are all doors trying to stay open. We have always desired to close them: ever since Plato, when he tried to exile poets because it was impossible to know whether their lines really were dictated by the gods. 

—