Accompanying her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, revealed to Coral Bracho a fertile field for her poems. From that brain that was crumbling between voids and abstractions, verses emerged that the Mexican poet intuited, converted into inspiration or simply reproduced. The “disease of words,” as the woman aptly described it, was the subject of Bracho’s latest book, It must be a misunderstanding: How do you know / that inside my bed / it’s not cold and there it is?, asked that head that was reeling and mocking the doctors. The poet, also a narrator and translator (Mexico City, 72 years old) hates interviews, she shoos away the recorder with a gesture of her hand, as if she were distractedly chasing away a fly, but she always has a ready smile, what is she going to do, if she has no choice but to deal with all those who have been looking for her since last September 4, when she was awarded the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, a literary recognition that places her alongside her “soul friend”, David Huerta , on the prestigious list of writers whose career is honored each year by the Guadalajara fair. For the rest, Coral Bracho does not suffer, she is happy with her two granddaughters and her writing is something liberating for her.
“I never thought about writing poetry, it was not a project, I did read French poets, or TS Eliot, who fascinated me, the Mexican José Carlos Becerra, who died young, but also novels, philosophy, I wanted to dedicate myself to science of the mind. I was not one of those girls who wrote poems, I was already grown up when I considered, from one day to the next, what it would be like to write poetry, I sat down in a park and began to describe what I saw. And I liked doing it. That was another mental region,” she says in the seclusion of a room at the Era publishing house, where she has published most of her poetry collections. It is an old house in the Roma neighborhood, in the Mexican capital, with a balcony and glass patio overflowing with plants that fight against the white aphid. On the shelves, hundreds of books, including Paradise, by José Lezama Lima, the text that inspired him to the art of short lines. “Lezama Lima was a discovery for me, an interest to get into writing, to observe how he could describe a minimal scene, a simple chandelier. “It was a confirmation of what could be done with language.”
The crow of the rooster
released his sun
in the middle of the room. The flares
They opened the curtain a little.
These verses are from Hotel room, a mysterious, disturbing, tormented and crazy book, where the mother’s illness was already glimpsed and Bracho investigated the poetry of Alzheimer’s, an illness that has been motivating the successful creation of filmmakers and writers for some decades now. Ana Teresa Carpizo Saravia was a dancer and translator. She got married at 18 – that’s where the dance ended – and she had six children, but a plane crash left her widowed very soon. “My mother spent the last years of her life with Alzheimer’s and she was ashamed that other people realized that something she said was not true or had not happened, she was always very confident and that made her very uncomfortable. As soon as I noticed her modesty, I immediately told her that I also had that disease of words. It was a discovery. Her gaze was that of a child, fresh, that made her dazzled, surprised. My mother was able to see a sunset over the sea and she told me: ‘You know what, suddenly fire came out of the sea, everything was burning.’ But she didn’t say it because she was worried about the fire, but rather fascinated with the image.
Pure poetry.
“Alzheimer’s is, in many ways, yes. It was very moving to approach her from that place. One day we took her to give a private dance class, in the room with the mirrors, and she enjoyed a guitar concert with friends.” This was the result:
How old am I?
At that age you tell me
who can be as happy as me
that I can do everything
what I like most: dancing,
sing? And from this disease
of words, the love of Álvaro, and you
-with these things we do-,
They are going to take me out.
This poem is headed by a parenthesis: (she speaks), with which Bracho distinguishes the verses that came free from that mind that was dissolving, but what surprised her greatly was how that collapse preserved a certain clarity about the abstractions “that have to to do with the human, for example justice.” On a walk through the city they both came across a pot of azaleas. “The bush was in bloom, beautiful, but there were two or three wilted flowers, mom sees it and exclaims: ‘There is no right, there is no right.’ She means that they didn’t water them, I thought. Then I understood: it was a question of justice, of equality, there was no right for some to be in bloom and others to be withered.” From there came another beautiful poem.
The uneasiness about the injustices of the world seems to have been inherited by the daughter. The FIL Prize jury highlighted her continuous investigation into the “politics” of poetry, as they said. “I have always done political poetry. There are times when I’m writing other things and I get obsessed and I go back to it. Since I was very young I have wondered how it is possible that there continue to be wars, it seems so absurd to me, with all the possibilities of avoiding them, of reaching agreements, other ways of organizing between countries… “
-More like they are premeditated, right? The sale of weapons…
-Of course, that’s what’s aberrant, it’s been a business forever and increasingly.
These are no longer times of cursed poets or bohemians, nor of tormented suicides. Perhaps neither of mocking Quevedos nor of chivalrous Garcilasos. When the Uruguayan Ida Vitale was given this same FIL award and announced that she had been awarded the Cervantes, in 2018, she cooked a cod for the EL PAÍS correspondent who went to interview her, Enric González. That same everyday spirit, without personages, also distinguishes Bracho, who does not even present himself as a poet. “When they ask me what I do, the most I say is that I write poetry.” Much calmer than in front of journalists she guesses before the white sheet, in a creative process that amuses her and that she explains like an elusive cooking recipe: “Since my first book, Fleeting skin fish, I have always had the same attitude when facing a poem, just like now. I think of something I want to write about, an idea, I see something that prompts me to enter into it… From the first sentence, a very unique mental process occurs, the first words lead to the next in a way that does not you feel when you speak, that’s why they say inspiration, it’s as if it came from outside, it has so much power. It is something that flows without you being fully aware, it is a lot like singing. A state of mind that continually gives you suggestions, I don’t think about what word comes next, because if I think about it, I’ve already stopped.
Bracho’s poems are framed in the neo-baroque. It just means that they are not made for clarity, “it just means that they are complex for the reader.” But the neobaroques are very different and few recognize themselves in that label that Lezama Lima adorned like no other. “I am interested in all forms of poetry and I know that a poem can be read in many ways, even in ways unforeseen by me, that is why I have not liked giving interviews, so as not to explain the poems, to let the reader, If you are interested, get into them from your own way of seeing, feeling or thinking.”
And now Bracho searches again in the volume of his Collected poetry 1977-2018, and recite some of those poems. No one has to ask him, he gives his deep and serene voice to whoever listens to it. These are no longer times of gods. The poet was taken down from Olympus and today he is amazed when the lottery gives him a jackpot. “I would like poetry to regain the place it once had, although I believe that new forms of expression have opened up and many young people are finding comfort in poetry… Or so I think, since I belong to this medium and know many of them…”
Despite the complexity of her verses, which are not such, you just have to let yourself be enveloped in her music, the author of The will of amber, The being that is going to die either If the emperor laughs, He has always had fun writing. “It absorbs me, but it doesn’t torture me, even if I talk about suffering, I don’t suffer it either, rather it frees me. Some are tremendous realities and I find writing liberating, I enjoy it very much. When I realized it was enjoyable I kept doing it.” He is for that reason happy with his pen so he distinguishes between being a poet and writing poetry. “I would never see myself as a poet.”
This fleeting woman is now compiling the verses in which she remembers her childhood and for her granddaughters she would like to return to some childhood stories of which she has also left good examples. Writing like playing, like painting, like singing. She arrives at the torturous meeting with the journalists like the former teacher she once was, with a satchel full of books she wants to show off. He takes from it some editorial treasures on which he collaborated with the painter Irma Palacios or with the plastic artist Vicente Rojo: an exquisite wooden box from which he extracts loose sheets of heavy cottony weight. Each one is a handwritten poem edited by The Gray Cat. And she begins to read those verses inspired by her infinite amazement at the Alhambra in Granada.
Verses in permanent reinvention
Fish with fleeting skin (1977). Student of Hispanic Studies at UNAM and reader of Deleuze and Guattari, she enrolled in the neo-baroque trend. “On the margin there is an abyss of tones, of clarity, of shapes. We would have to / enter lightly, darkly into that moment of dance.” Her poetry, closed and complex, proposed its own universe from her first book.
That space, that garden (2003). This book, which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize from Writers for Writers, is the testimony of a full literary maturity. In the space of the title, creatures from Bracho’s imagination play and in that space life is rooted in death because “the dead also return there.”
It must be a misunderstanding (2018). The Alzheimer’s suffered by his mother inspired this book about the meanings discovered when investigating forgetfulness through poetic knowledge and a broken language. “But the meaning / of the whole persists: between moments, / between fictions, / under incessant fractures. Like a threshold, a handhold.”
Collected poetry 1977-2018 (2019). When the Era publishing house published this volume, readers were able to see how Bracho has been reinventing his style in each book, but he has always been faithful to his literary project: through a repertoire of images, through the body and towards philosophy, think about life and death.
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