Perhaps, without us realizing it, poets are the true heroes of our literary society. They remain there, tireless, each one in his trench, while the world in one and a thousand ways turns its back on them. Evicted from literary supplements, without magazines that have a real impact beyond the tiny space in which they appear, poets and poetry are barely allowed to occupy a place other than on the margins of our cultural system. It is true that, historically, with periods of greater or lesser visibility, poetry was always on the margins, it always had to create its own ecosystem, but never did it feel so close to the threat or condemnation to insignificance like today. There will be some who will argue that culture as we have known it until today is about to disappear, that, since the market is not outside of us but in ourselves, a mutation has occurred in our way of knowing and in our way of read, that the digital barbarians are here and plunder our villages, those that we built in Romanticism and that appealed to depth and spiritual adventure as supreme values of art, and that, in this mutation, poetry has been the first victim. For these, what we are witnessing is seeing the smoke from the fire of our old beliefs. And yet, poetry remains alive, creating its new face and putting words to this time of so many crossroads and complex current events. Of course, in the development of poetry written in 2024, all the wounds and all the uncertainties of our culture, all the changes and diverse landscapes that make up this new century, are very present, very latent. Poetry continues to resist despite all the silences with its usual weapons: expressing sensibilities, gaining a new form of language, approaching that enigma that is looking and writing things again. Perhaps, without us realizing it, poets are the true heroes of our literary society. What crisis of poetry can we talk about when there are still Circe Maia, Raúl Zurita, Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Ana Blandiana, Joaquim Manuel Magalhaes or Joao Miguel Fernandes Jorge accept the challenge of being conscientious and adventurous, the dialogue of his writing with this time? How can we think about the irrelevance of poetry after having read with absolute amazement ‘The Last of Our Uncles’, by Linda Pastan, published just a few months ago by Pre-Textos? How can we not recognize that great voice of writing in Spanish that is Fabio Morábito after approaching a book like ‘Song Second’, in Visor? How can we know about the suffering that history causes, about so many silences and deaths in that endless war between Israel and Palestine, without approaching the poems of ‘Nothing else to lose’, by Najwan Darwish, in Broken Glass? Or how can we face the wounds of Europe without opening this score of ‘Music for the Dead and Risen’, by Valzhyna Mort, which has appeared in La Bella Varsovia? Images that burnIt is clear that any of these books are played with fire, that their Images burn because they are images born of sensitivity and intelligence, of risk, that draw the portrait of our identity better even than many novels that occupy covers and featured pages in our literary supplements. Culture has not died in them, it is not an outdated superstition, but something that continues to define that great project of the human mind which is its sentimental understanding of what surrounds it. Speaking of culture, it is a pleasure to follow in the footsteps of happiness behind Juan Antonio González Iglesias through a Naples of life, autobiography and humanism in ‘New in the new city’ (Visor), to approach that monumental edition that is ‘Poetry of Kabbalah’, by Peter Cole (Vaso Roto), to understand the mysticism of the Jewish tradition, and reconcile with the symbols that found our deepest reality after the illuminating poems of ‘Blindness, there you will be’, by Jeannette L. Clariond, in New York Poetry Press. 2024 is the year in which two of today’s great poets compiled their complete poetry: Eduardo Moga in ‘Ser de incertitude’ (Dilema) and Marcos Díez in ‘Con sol interior’ (Visor), at the same time that Hiperión published ‘ Hear the cracks’, a great anthology carried out by Francisco Javier Irazoki of that poet as secret as it is essential, Ramón Andrés. And 2024 has opened up to that mythical territory that José Luis Puerto has created, whose latest installment ‘Cristal de roca’ (Páramo) once again presents us with powerful writing, which teaches us a way of being in the world, of dialoguing with memory, of diving into intrahistory to unravel what we are. Poetry of history, poetry of culture and of course poetry of intimacy, poetry as a look towards family memory, towards a house and towards a love, that is ‘In the garden of the poem’, by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, published by Acantilado, a book that is enjoyment from beginning to end and that has the strength of sincerity, of risking everything in each verse. Because, in effect, we are going to find those intimate worlds, our existential or family tragedies, our searches, our loves found or lost, the nature of time in books like ‘The Sun and the Other Stars’, by Raquel Lanseros (Visor) ; ‘Dawn always promises’, by Ignacio Caballero (Vitruvius); ‘A moment’, by Luis Muñoz (Visor); or two already essential books by the young María Paz Otero: ‘In the afternoon’ (Vitruvio) and ‘Los atormentados’ (Rialp, Adonais Prize 2023) Without a doubt in this sonorous solitude of poetry are those new poetic universes created by young people , that ‘millennial’ generation that is actually the first digital native. In them, the avant-garde is defined as a new impulse and we must hope that they are received as a commitment to the future, in a panorama where, as Vicente Monroy, one of them, writes, “our race is stingy with the living, generous with the dead.” ». There will be silences, they will want to make them invisible, but each poem remains an act of redemption, an act against surrender, because, as Darwish would say, «despite everything / it is still my duty to say a few words / poisoned with hope, / here “In this assembly of despair”
#Poetry #twelve #months #silence
