Alquimia del bárbaro / Juan Calzadilla

Barbarian’s Alchemy

     Rimbaud discards his poet’s investiture to assume his Eurocentric condition. In the African colonies he finds, oh, his next plunder. What follows isn’t poetry.
     On the other hand, Blaise Cendrars is a reclaimant of the colonialist Rimbaud. In his adventures in Africa he goes in search of a photographic alchemy of the verb. For him poetry starts to be something that’s not exclusively in words, but in the glance, in his Kodak and in journeys.
     As for me: I’m one of those who thinks of his work as something exterior to myself. I’m not much of a protagonist. The place where I find myself, in relation to my work, isn’t very defined, not even in a journey to the interior of my own self.




{Juan Calzadilla, Libro de las poéticas, Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006}