The heart thing is incredible. Although the most used metaphors wear out, become deactivated, and become clichés, the heart persists as a still luminous and close way of referring to what touches us inside, especially love. The poet Berta García Faet (Valencia, 35 years old), one of the most celebrated on the scene, has no qualms about using it. Her latest book is titled Hunch and another previous volume, in which he compiled his poetry between 2008 and 2011, was titled traditionalist heartboth published in La Bella Varsovia.
How much heart? “I have no idea. There are some symbols that combine their bouquet of meanings perfectly, and never go out of style,” explains the poet at the Juan Raro bar, in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés. It is not the only word that tenaciously accompanies her, like “presences that assist you”, that appear to her and that she has a hard time getting rid of. Also the poplar, the sunflower, the alajú. “It’s not that they don’t mean, they mean a lot, but I don’t know exactly what they mean,” says the poet.
There are things in poetry that have no explanation, we will have to get used to it. “It’s okay to ask what poetry means. But many times, when we want to justify what we write, it is due to a control compulsion. Another thing is conceptual art, which is precisely about that, creating a concept. But if the question is ‘what does this poem mean?’, the answer is always going to be: “I have this intuition, but I’m not sure.”
Self-consciousness and childishness
García Faet, therefore, speaks, above all, about love and above all about language, and mixes it in poems that are sometimes deliberately naïve or corny or teenagers, sometimes deliberately modern or erudite, sometimes deliberately witty. “I don’t really like that ‘deliberately’ thing, I prefer to say that in my poems there is a certain self-awareness,” he explains, “I know when I am using a childish texture or a cheesy texture.” That is: when reading García Faet’s poems one gets the feeling that, beneath a certain casualness, the poet knows perfectly what she is doing at all times. Power without control, as a tire advertisement said, is of no use. In fact, her doctoral thesis was about “childishness,” that is, “the chosen childishness of certain lyrical selves.” “I think it is an aim of poetry and art in general: to mix artifice and intimate truth so that they are indistinguishable.”
In Hunch A series of sections are compiled, from 2010 to infinity, which she calls “seasons”: “It is ordered with a mixture of thematic and chronological criteria,” she explains, “I can’t distinguish between love poems or language poems, they intermingle. But I can say that certain poems belong to one time of the heart and others to another.” The dates she offers (it is very important for her to date them) refer to the first version of the poems, but most often they have been transformed over the years: “Their chemistry is transhistorical,” she writes in the epilogue. .
García Faet fantasizes about putting all the boys she has kissed since 1999 in the same room, she writes a letter to her friends with children or a poem to Punky Brewster, she tries to write small poetic novels, she draws self-portraits with verses. “I managed to write a book of poems about a lame dog, fleas, mystical roses and daisies, and that makes me happy,” she also writes in the epilogue. There is pretended candor, and intelligence. Her poems, too, and although it may sound strange to say it in poetry, they are fun. “I love that you tell me that,” says the poet, “there is the idea that depth is linked to solemnity, and I don’t think that’s the case. “I don’t connect with poets who take themselves too seriously,” says the writer, who says she loves comedians and who laughs enigmatically at some of the questions. “Thought also has to do with the spark.”
Igniting words
Your new essay, The art of lighting words, which will appear in mid-November, is about poetry, but it has some epistemology: “It deals with the relationship between the poetic and the expansion of knowledge, a very broad and exciting topic. For example, how we expand our perception of the world through metaphors,” she says. Although it sounds theoretical, the author assures that it is for all audiences.
Reflection on poetry is, therefore, one of the tasks that surround the poet (hence, it is assumed, the self-awareness in her poems); and that reflection has been accompanied by experimentation. “I have explored different avenues, I have exhausted them, I have reached the limit of what I have been able to do in that path,” she says. There was a time when she explored a more narrative or dramatic lyrical self, another time when she tried to make poetry without tropes, without symbols or metaphors, another time when she embarked on a very sonorous and material poetry that, she later discovered, had to do with the neobaroque.
He won the Miguel Hernández National Prize for Young Poetry in 2018, for The phosphorous psalms (The Beautiful Warsaw); It is just one of the many awards he has received. She is now 35 years old. The good thing about literature, compared to sports, is that you can stay young for longer. Do you feel like a young poet? “It is striking how, in general, the passage of time punishes women,” she explains. “I notice it and I’m only 35. At 25 you can receive excessive attention, what matters is that you are young, and that causes fascination and interest, as a woman and as a writer. That makes me review the past: Did they listen to me because of poetry or youth? “It looks like poisoned candy to me.” The passage of time is also noticeable in the weightless realm of poetry. “I look around and see that it’s not that I have a generation of poets behind me, it’s that I have two!” She says. Some names to keep in mind: Juan Gallego Benot, Juanpe Sánchez, Andrea Abello, Héctor Aceves.
García Faet will continue to weave his poems in the time to come. This is what he does: “I seek the search. It is not that I am looking for any answer, but for beauty, even if it is a very ugly beauty,” he concludes.
‘Hunch’. Berta García Faet. La Bella Warsaw, 2023. 360 pages. 17.90 euros.
‘The art of lighting words’. Berta García Faet. Barlin, 2023. 224 pages. 17 euros. On sale November 15.
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