“Beauty is not a place where cowards end up,” Olga Novo wrote with brilliant courage. Here is a lampoon that founds a new time, I thought when I saw that resplendent dragonfly detach itself from its nymph molt and fly with all the cages behind it.
That dragonfly, that brave beauty that Olga Novo refers to, could pose today, against all adversity in an untamed place called realistic poems. Writing always compromises, but Daniel Salgado’s new work goes beyond commitment. Franz Kakfa asked, he asked us: “How can you enjoy the world if not by taking refuge in it?” That is the position where the realistic poems. Because the refuge, reality, is a place to save. It is like naming again with a strange, natural and endearing light, the shattered dreams, the failed maps, and the scars of language. In virtual dispossession, that retrofuturism, the question is where the world’s feet rest.
Thus, in the one entitled “Celso”, it is said: “As the feet of the world rest in your country / and calculate the disposition of the hours, the eternal combat of the poem against erosion.” This long writing that culminates the book will remain as one of the lucid and moving declarations of a “common presence”, the poetic and contemporary rescue of what Walter Benjamin formulated as a moral beam to support the sky: “There is a secret agreement between past generations and ours.” Behold, in realistic poemsthe keys to the “secret agreement.” Consciousness as a poetic being, with hands weaving beauty, freedom and truth. This “secret agreement” is not a typical inheritance. It is a meeting place: “A red thread sews us to those who were before us.”
Beyond commitment, yes.
realistic poems It is all constituted as a territory of de-extinction, even in the surprising liminal details. Thus, the initial quote of In death of realismby Pier Paolo Pasolini: “(…) the impure Realism / marked with partisan blood / and the passions of the Marxists.” Thus, the dedication: “The realistic poems They are dedicated to Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín and René Char and are, finally, for Naima, Celso and Irene.” Thus, the colophon: “Realistic Poems came out of the press in November 2024, one hundred and seventy-nine years after the Situation of the working class in England, by Friedrich Engels, and nine after I desertby María do Cebreiro.” Or that tiny and friendly typographical silverfish grafted into the credits: “Following in the footsteps of the first edition of Das Capital by Carl Marx that was published in Hamburg in 1867, Craw Clarendon characters were used on the cover for the title and Bodoni characters for the author’s name.
This work of de-extinction, of rescue, has nothing of uncritical nostalgia. There is a paradoxical saudade that can be perceived as sadness. What is sad can be understood as a kind of honest activism of fragility. In the way Mary Oliver tells it in The untamed writing: “When I was young I was attracted to sadness. It seemed interesting to me. It seemed to me like an energy that would lead me somewhere (…) And now I understand that only a few things make me sad, but constantly.”
In the realistic poems by Daniel Salgado there is that state of affairs that constantly saddens. The “few” things that crush the lives of the majority, of people and nature, such as the violence of the “desperate exchanges” imposed by the large property-owning minority. That state of affairs in which “the market economy” occupied everything as a “market society.” The great expropriation that also affects the meaning of words. Therefore, poetry, with its fragility, is a strong resistance.
The rescue and de-extinction of language occurs in realistic poems as a subtle counterpoint to sadness and through irony. The poetic enhancement of concepts and expressions that seemed rusty, derailed or that had been beheaded. Because there is also a common grave for words.
Thus, poetry as a “means of production.” And what does it produce? “Knowing about beauty beyond what manuals and consensus landscapes say.”
Know about beauty, yes. Of brave beauty.
#brave #beauty #Daniel #Salgados #Realistic #Poems
