Annotations (excerpts)
A man in an apartment in this city or any other, fights with words. He is one of thousands; I don’t know the proportion. Maybe there are others in other apartments, but there’s no clearer evidence: modern society long ago condemned the man of letters, the man with a passion for words, a growing exile, but at the same time he has lost his voice. He can’t express himself. He lacks a language. He depends on clichés, stereotypes, noise.
Poetry can accompany man, who is now more alone than ever, not to console him but to make him truer. That’s why it tends to be dry, hard, sober. Besides, what consolation can there be?
A man who says or speaks himself with words full of sides, in a language close to the everyday one (before, it needed to be “sublime”), such is the poet.
Poets don’t convince.
Nor do they conquer.
Their role is another, far from power: to be a contrast.
The poet lives far from the world where ideocracy rules.
I don’t distinguish between life, reality, mystery, religion, being, soul, poetry. These are words to designate the unnameable. The poetic is the life of all that, feeling what those words try to say.
I am prose, I live in prose, I speak prose. Poetry is there, not anywhere else. What I call prose is the speech of living, which is always cut through by mystery.
He who speaks in a written text is absent; you can’t interrupt him, propose questions, observations, comments. It’s a peculiar dialogue of two solitary people, but how much more alive sometimes than many of our conversations.
1983
{ Rafael Cadenas, Obra entera, México DF, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000)
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