Rafael Cadenas / Entrevistas

Interviews with the author 1966-1999.


“Really, I think that the writer can, at any time, sit down to write. In the poet’s case, it doesn’t happen like this. It’s easier to tell someone: ‘I’m going to write an article’ than to say: ‘I’m going to write a poem.’ This doesn’t mean that prose is not difficult. Good prose is rare.” (132)


“What is poetry for you?
Something that is in poetry in the form of writing and outside of her, in the theater, in the novel, in the essay, in painting, in music, in conversation, in class, anyplace where the mechanical is broken and life enters the scene.

In cultural terms, poetry is a form of expression. It constitutes a subsidiary orb, never fundamental. The foundation is reality, that which we don’t know, which radically exists. I still believe that poetry can get us closer to the silence in which this reality is felt.” (249)


Rafael Cadenas, Entrevistas (Caracas: Ediciones La Oruga Luminosa, 2000)