Wordsworthian II

In 1978 the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Romulo Gallegos (CELARG) organized a reading and conference in honor of Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981). One of the panelists that day was the Caracas poet, translator and critic Alfredo Silva Estrada, who read his essay "El poema: La forma de una vida" (The Poem: A Life's Form). This was republished in the book of essays about the poet, Fernando Paz Castillo: Ante la critica (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1990). Silva Estrada discussed Paz Castillo's work in prose and in verse:

"The conception of the word in Fernando Paz Castillo
identifies itself with his feeling of time.

Lover of the present, of the here, now,
the poet doesn't say, he can't say the present.
Because the present is the unspeakable itself
the flight itself of time in its highest ecstacy...
Time, that a priori form of vertigo...
That nothingness, that almost nothingness where philosophers and poets
abyss themselves forever, joyously or turturously.

The temporal emphasis in Fernando Paz Castillo
is placed in a certain past:
A place of rest, preserved by spirit.

Here the poetic act is a ritual of memory.
A ritual often interrupted by euphonic meditations.
The perceived, the present--ephemeral--,
the poet's vision moves him toward a preterite
already blessed by the soft trembling of the eternal and the instant
thick ciaroscuro where opposites de-limit themselves:
the mystery shimmers,
light undoes the forms,
each form in dialogue with an absent form,
--counterpoint of presences and absences--,
immobility the meridian of movement,
a continuous beyond appears within each thing,
determining fluid and imprecise traces."