Las poéticas de Jacqueline Goldberg / Francisco Javier Pérez

The Poetics of Jacqueline Goldberg

The title announces the disturbance. Attractive and terrible, Verbos predadores (Editorial Equinoccio, Universidad Simón Bolívar/Editorial Boker, 2006), a book of books the gathers all the poetry published by the writer between 1986 and 2006, wants to be seen as a summary of a poetry and poetics achieved in tune with the best of Venezuelan literature today. One and the other, poetics and poetry, consistently run through the pages of this work of high caliber and voracious spirit. The collection that gives the book its title, Verbos predadores [Predatory Verbs], the latest of her work and written with conclusions, announces the metabolic edge of a poetry that exists at the limits of many digestions conquered with bites by words that devour all the securities of happiness and ruminate all their implacable desperation.

Five texts with identical syntagma announce a guide for the laconic and sublime method of understanding poetry and invoking a personal epistemology; a form that sees the world by means of forms. Given all the risks, this poetry theorizes convinced and pleased within an unquestionable knowledge, harvested by a pain recuperated “so that the book might grow within the book.” The poem is a structure that dictates misfortunes that create riddles and dense cavities of the spirit’s maps. The poem’s calligraphy traces the scribe’s diction, which is nothing more than an illegible “boreal invalidity,” possible only with the help of others who allow spelling to arise. The poet recognizes that she writes carried by tremors and that with them she is able to gain height with severity and insolence.

The scientific eye arrives at the unseen (“I never saw saffron plots, / nor their bastard complaints”), at the colors of the oracle (“Augury is redder than blindness”), at the poverty of manuals (“they never warn / of the outcome of the accused when the sky clears”) and the fascination with false names (that “twist a world without favors”). Theory proceeds to assess books of poetry as entities that “don’t cease,” “don’t lead” and “don’t bring about.” Each book of poetry is, effectively, a “jumble of tensions” and “the tribe’s exhausted field of stones.”

Born to loot, this poetics of acknowledgment now boasts of having sown the poems and that they will always be an escape forged in the waist and not in the feet, “as the forsaken believe.” The poem is an unhappy, deserting beast that is always passing through. “In the end the most horrible stories choose themselves / and a precipice flows from hesitation,” she prays at the entrance to the final poetics. “This is how the other pours itself into us: / from anguish to comfort,” seems to be the kind coda. “Identity is found in the book’s coat, / not in arguments, / nor in lean antonyms / we undress of their future or their tiredness” and, again, the animal book is recognized by its coat.

The bloody mission accomplished and worn out, will there be any salvation left for the word, since it is verbs that prey on existence? Here we have a poetry that doesn’t believe in renouncing life in the poem and that denies the postponement of suffering behind aesthetics. The hour of agony has arrived and this magnificent poetry reminds us without contemplations. Its goal is to announce the carnivorous truth.




{ Francisco Javier Pérez, El Nacional, 21 July 2008 }

La revolución ha terminado / Colette Capriles

The Revolution is Over

That’s what Napoleon Bonaparte laconically decreed in November of 1799, during the dissolution of the revolutionary institutions that after ten years had left France divided and impotent in the face of its own contradictions. Like so many things Bonaparte said, the phrase is at once true and false.

The recovery of the monarchical forms that Napoleon undertook proves that the revolutionary parenthesis hadn’t erased the popular nostalgia for centralization and hierarchies, while the bourgeois personality of the Napoleonic regime, along with his obsession for legislating to create a national order, manifests that the old order, definitively suppressed, nevertheless continued to live in the new one. The revolution would be like a parenthesis, a type of time tunnel leading to the place history had already planned, just quicker.

Maybe it turns out that revolutions end as soon as they’re declared clinically dead with a memorable phrase. Or perhaps, in actuality, revolutions are nothing more than “speech acts” (as Searle would say), that is, words that cause practical effects and create or destroy themselves discursively. At the beginning was the word, always lit up and incendiary.

The question would be: How does one know a revolution has ceased to exist? If one supposes a revolution is a leap between two eras, a type of agitated hallway that joins two universes, its death would be marked by the advent of a new order, or better said, of a certain normality. In other words, when it becomes habitual. When it definitively and inevitably encounters the past from which it disengaged and against which it wanted to fight so much. The successful revolution is the one that dies while contributing to the integration of past and future, that is, the one that ends up negating itself by admitting that societies don’t move by means of leaps and ruptures, but rather through complicated syntheses of new and old. But revolutions want to be eternal, within revolutions there’s always an impulse to perpetuate themselves as perennial exceptions, with the suspension of history that in Cuba, for example, transformed streets and bodies into examples of a carefully maintained wax museum. In the Soviet Union and the countries of the “socialist field” even the future was old. The representation of the contemporary and of the future’s technological delights could barely update the contrasted images of Fritz Lang.

Revolutionaries are never the first ones to perceive the pestilence of the revolution’s cadaver, protected as they are, always, by ideological Kleenexes at their noses. And what tends to be more paradoxical is that the announcement of a revolution produces, in and of itself, revolutionary effects that its leaders cannot foresee. The unexpected, unforeseen effects are what matter. That is exactly why, even though there might be family resemblances among revolutionary gestures, there is no definitive recipe that will guarantee for them (as they claim they want to do) an arrival at the sea of happiness. Actually, the repetitions are reduced to Marx’s comment about the 18th Brumaire: what is tragedy the first time reappears as farce.

And after the farce? Who picks up the pieces? How do we recycle what can still be used? One thing is true: revolutions fall apart from within, when the tension between the orthodox forces who’ve lost their sense of smell and the revisionist forces that still have it becomes unsustainable.

And for this to happen the revolution doesn’t need to have changed anything. It can have successes or failures, it doesn’t matter. Revolutions don’t die from inefficiency, from their own cruelty or because of the injustices they inevitable carry alongside them, but from weariness.

Like a plant that’s watered too much and produces nothing. The slogans and phrases are endlessly repeated, but each time they become a purely empty ritual that’s mechanically recited without being able to mask the terrible disenchantment.




{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 12 June 2008 }

Felicidad y felicitadores / Colette Capriles

Happiness and Congratulators

Maybe you need to have been educated, as I was for example, in the religion of the future and perfect society whose example was thought to exist in the Soviet Union, in order to have one’s head furnished by the most common or communicable images regarding the happiness we’d be given by a classless society: Eisensteinian drama and agrarian innocence, geometric order and broadsides flapping freely in the wind, barefoot doctors and happily disciplined children, consummate chess players and exultant workers gratefully marching before the Olympus of the Supreme Soviet, swollen with a warrior’s patriotism facing the military panoply. An ample collection of faded images that concealed the fear and subjection to the infernal and impersonal machine of the State and which have remained as relics, testimonies of the vain attempt to create ex nihilo a distinctive culture (and cult).

It’s not that I’m trying to give [Andrés] Izarra and his people a lesson, as I suspect they’re actually trying to create the visual dictionary of Chavismo in order to pull it out of the apologetic image of the “poor man with a uniform” who evokes such a scarce future, but I can’t help noticing that the events of the past few weeks don’t really help the selfless functionaries accomplish their corporate task, at such a hurried electoral pace. The predictions that contemplated the emergency of the intestinal contradictions in the government’s field (from the very moment when it seemed to bask in the hegemony of the 2006 presidential elections) are inexplicably coming true, like a well tempered curse, and they’re unveiling not political factionalism (that, most definitely, is normal) but rather a terrible blind spot for this government: the immeasurable mediocrity and coarseness of its spokesmen and decision makers.

The effect is so vast that even the calls to discipline (that is, to silence) are willfully ignored. On the contrary, they amplify them, because they’ve provoked a type of competition of adulation that convokes the most extraordinary verbal juggling and the most astonishing conceptual pirouettes, revealing a shameful intellectual nakedness. We already know the art of congratulation is only effective when it is undetectable and that requires a refined verbal repertoire.

It’s also due to arrogance, though it would be an arrogance that’s somehow naïve. I suppose the members of the government, starved of sane intellectual commerce with the well-trained people who’ve been excluded from the national project, have developed a type of private language (like univiteline twins) and have forgotten the public tongue. Maybe that’s what explains the profusion of crude terms so many official spokesmen use to whip their auditoriums: most definitely, they speak “domestically,” because the country is like their plantation. And as I was saying, it sometimes seems they genuinely believe, these peculiar speakers, that their private world is universal. The gravity of this is that they’ve lost their original language and no longer understand the tongue everyone else uses. The Greeks, inventors of democracy, never ceased to think about it and recognize (or almost, celebrate) the constant struggle against their own defects. The starting point of democracy is that every citizen has the capacity for judgment necessary to evaluate political life and speak in the assembly.

In Athens this simply meant that he could govern. But this natural wisdom was in no way spontaneous: it stemmed from what they called paideia, which is precisely a general education, not a specialized one. It is the apprenticeship of justice and reverence, of decency, as we’d say now.

The Government doesn’t need to be more efficient. Better said, efficiency is not what it lacks. It’s not a matter of administrating better the handouts for the “slight” demands of the masses, as the President qualified them not too long ago. What’s lacking is decency, consideration, common sense.




{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 1 May 2008 }

Rafael Cadenas Accuses Chávez of Building a “Disguised Dictatorship” in Venezuela

[Photo: Gabriel Osorio, El Nacional]

Valladolid, 21 May (EFE). – This afternoon the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas has accused the president of his country, Hugo Chávez, of creating a “parallel army” and of building a “disguised dictatorship” primarily through the manipulation of audio-visual media in order to control and manipulate public opinion.

“The most precise definition is a militaristic autocracy,” Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) has declared to EFE before participating in a reading at the Casa Zorrilla of Valladolid, where he arrives after visiting Málaga and participating in the IV International Festival of Poetry in Granada last week.

If Colombia suffers “the great tragedy of an endless war,” in Venezuela’s case “there’s an extremely serious situation because this president is a threat: he has created a parallel army and is ultimately preparing a war no one knows exactly against whom.”

Hugo Chávez “talks a great deal against the “empire,” but I believe this is actually done in order to dominate Venezuelan society,” reflected the poet, essayist, translator and author of collections such as Los cuadernos del destierro (1960), Falsas maniobras (1966) and Intemperie (1977).

He also referred to the “war rhetoric” that emanates from the spheres of power in Venezuela, with a president “more concerned with the cult of his personality fed by shameful adulations and that, like many other leaders, he considers himself to be supported by what they call God, whom they turn into their own lackey, putting him at their own service and speaking in his name, but in the end they turn him into a criminal.”

“Venezuela is a divided country and you can’t go on in that fashion: among intellectuals there is a sector that supports the government and another that rejects it,” added Cadenas, who has recognized within his poetic work an evolution toward texts that are simpler, less literary, more naked, plagued by silences “in order to place the reader inside.”

He also admitted his poetry is not easy to read or even understand, and he has defined it as “simple while also being complex, ironic and reticent.”

When he referred to Venezuela as a “disguised dictatorship” he explained that in the press, despite everything, “one can express oneself and I ask myself: Why? Very simple, because the government knows the masses don’t read articles and interviews but they do watch television and listen to the radio, which is where he puts pressure and vigilance.”

He operates in this manner in hopes of reaching a “communicational hegemony” based on “TV stations and networks of local radio stations perfect for dominating,” Cadenas added.

Cadenas, whose complete works have been published in a volume by the Pre-Textos publishing house recalled how in his own moment he was able to access Spanish writers of the Generation of 98 and the poets of 27 – among whom he cited Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda – with more ease than certain more contemporary, though already dead, authors like José Ángel Valente, Ángel González y Claudio Rodríguez.

He has declared his admiration for Saint John of the Cross, to whom he dedicated a brief essay in 1977, “but not only because of his poetry, but rather for his thought, that of a radical mystic closer to the Asian current that interests me so much.”

Regarding his frequent travels, the Venezuelan writer has pointed out he likes them because they’re “useful for feeling the atmosphere of places” where his preferred authors spent time.

Last week he visited Granada and participated in a reading alongside the Colombian Piedad Bonnett and the Federico García Lorca house, in Málaga he participated in an academic event in the Centro de la Generación del 27, and in Valladolid he visited the houses of Cervantes and José Zorrilla, as well as following the trace of Saint Teresa of Ávila at one of her first foundations.

“You can’t imagine what it represents for us. Spain is very present in Venezuela, including in my native city which was first called Nueva Segovia de Barquisimeto,” he concluded.




{ El Nacional, 21 May 2008 }

París, 1968 / Edgardo Mondolfi Gudat

Paris, 1968

Unlike the hippie movement, which left some curious relics along the way, such as the peace logo, the student protests of the French May haven’t bequeathed anything, not even those street slogans of the time, like “It is forbidden to forbid,” as if tangible proof of their nihilistic spirit. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that the substantial nucleus of what was the French 68 doesn’t live on in the direct assumption of the protests that continue to be incarnated by student movements anywhere on the planet. Simply because, where it fits and can be diagnosed, the explosion from Paris’s Latin Quarter signified a before and after in the denunciations of the university against authoritarian gestures.

The historic May that now celebrates its 40th anniversary had many exceptional witnesses, but there’s one in particular whose testimony has always fascinated me because what happened ended up splitting his world in two. I’m referring to the English historian Eric Hobsbawm, who by pure chance coincided with those events on the streets of Paris. Hobsbawm confesses that he was surprised by what was happening without being able to understand, from his classical Marxist pupil, the dimensions and implications of those student protests. I think few authors are capable of pouring forth such candor as he does when he invites us in his autobiography to accompany him as he confronts the events of the French May of 1968. The author shows how reality defied the traditional left of that moment: because, while Hobsbawm does warn us with a certain air of melancholy that plenty of water has passed under the bridge since then, he recognizes that his first reaction was to welcome that shuddering in the streets with open disdain, and to qualify it as a “psychodrama rebellion.” Maybe without realizing it at the time, his dismissive way of qualifying what was happening made him, as a representative of the old left, involuntarily join forces with people from the French right, such as Raymond Aron, who also qualified that protest as mere “street theater.”

The distance covered since those years has allowed Hobsbawm to take shelter in regret, with a great deal of honesty. But that stupefaction was normal for an old school Marxist who didn’t suspect that, in the future, he would cease to be one when faced with all the disillusions planted during the sixties. After all, as he himself points out, Lenin would have been equally disconcerted by another one of the memorable slogans of the French May, as vivid as “It is forbidden to forbid”: “The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.”




{ Edgardo Mondolfi Gudat, El Nacional, 8 May 2008 }

Anacronías / Antonio López Ortega

Anachronies

An implacable observer of Venezuelan reality – the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, who lived in Caracas for about ten years while editing the magazine Nueva Sociedad – used to tell me that our society, while seemingly modernized, thought of itself through a rural lens, as though it had no relationship to any new events. We have to recognize that in our speech, for instance, similes that have to do with flora and fauna are abundant, and we also have to remember that most Venezuelanisms, according to Ángel Rosenblat, originate in games and chance. The stamp of turning significant events into nature is so marked that even petroleum, perhaps the 20th century’s most influential milestone, rather than being seen as a rupture of the pastoral paradigm, is understood within the context of sowing it, that is, of returning it to the earth, as if a hundred years of extraction were not enough to speak to us of another reality.

This fixation could even be laughable if it didn’t mean, on the other hand, a true process of social immobilization. If everything is earth and its excretions, then cities, streets or aqueducts are third-rate solutions. Today’s urban impulse, of which the capital city is the best example, is non-existent. In this revived process of reconquering lands, even at the cost of invasions, the cities are abandoned: there is no one to theorize them, to reread them, to invest in their progress. A vegetal, heavy and preterite arcadia conquers the minds of our leaders while the cities rot. But the state of our cities is barely an example of what is actually an anti-modern thought that ends up opposing everything, instead of navigating these challenging times in order to opt for improvements and to correct excesses. And after so much excess, against any model, it ends up finding nothing.

Our civic images belong to the past, as though we had already lived them. And they belong to the past because that’s where we seemed to feel most comfortable, as if the uterus were enough shade rather than thinking of adolescence or adulthood. Seen from a psychotherapeutic angle, we prefer immaturity, inconsistency, instead of facing the challenges of later stages. Except that no responsibilities exist within immaturity, no life project, no vision for the future; nor is there any effort, tenacity or desire for improvement. Let the vegetal arcadia rule, we say to ourselves, with pastures moved by the wind and cows that graze with millenary chewing.

These ages of ours will have to be seen in a not too distant future as a true social reversal, as a fear of growth, as a rejection of the minimal modernizing impulse we harvested in previous decades. Under the narcotic spell of petroleum, betting as ever on a state economy, the sum of individual efforts evaporates without incurring in collective construction. We already know the brand: of a society that is its own prisoner, immobilized by its own lack, nostalgic for a lapsed imaginary, ignorant of the processes all modern societies set for themselves so as to be up to the task of global challenges, which translate every time into growth, as well as human development and environmental equilibrium.

To live in anachrony – that could be the slogan –, as though we were someone else’s dream, as if 25 million beings depended on the good or bad nights of a single dreamer.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 April 2008 }

Así en la guerra como en la paz / Colette Capriles

In War As in Peace

As at other junctures throughout this near decade, war seems to be a continuation of politics: Chávez acts not with institutional logic (annoying normative procedures that seek consensus based on petit bourgeois neutrality) but rather with the logic of the Guevarista and Maoist foco: “When the enemy advances, we step back; when the enemy stops, we assault him; when the enemy becomes exhausted, we attack; when the enemy retreats, we chase him.”

Thanks to the equalizing power of television, which has allowed him to develop a unidirectional rhetorical arsenal 
with which he doesn’t so much rule as emit irrefutable orders, war and peace end up being the same thing, or merely a change of scenery and costumes.

Expelling people from Petróleos de Venezuela is the same as moving tanks from Maracay. And not only are the distinctions blurred between the civilian and the military but those that divide the internal and the external are also dissolved.

As though the swelling of vanity that has been underway in the President’s body could no longer contain itself within the narrow confines of the national territory and instead spilled over like a stain that fights to grow.

From the beginning, the President’s management confuses all borders: the ghost of La Gran Colombia, that unfinished project, has always obfuscated the perception of the geopolitical context. The nationalism involved in the sanctification of Bolívar’s “thought” necessarily implies, by definition, Bolivarian imperialism notoriously reincarnated in our President.

Maybe the circumstances will turn out to be opportune, serving as a release of domestic pressure within his administration. But what is revealed isn’t just a simple maneuver to cover up discontent and convoke disappointed public opinion through nationalism. On the contrary, it is a strategic moment.

As it was demonstrated by the hierarchy of relations with Colombia in the Venezuelan government’s recent agenda, ever since the failed negotiation up until what we saw last weekend, and as the documents found in the laptop belonging to Reyes are now revealing: it is effectively an offensive strategy that, given the increasingly weakened objective conditions of the guerrillas, couldn’t be delayed any longer.

But, whose offensive? What is important to elucidate politically is how the alliance between the Colombian FARC and Chávez’s political project is integrated. From what can be intuited amid the informational fragmentation, we can now discern a type of broad continental group (that far from being progressive and of the left, is completely reactionary and retrograde, isolationist, autarchic and caudillista), whose threads move by means of the flow of petrodollars to a great degree, yet isn’t completely dominated by the Venezuelan President.

There is a confluence of interests among different actors, but there is no clear political axis. Hoping to mime the role of Cuba and Castro during the subversions of the 1960s, Chávez is not pondering the differences that exist between the revolution based on moral incentives preached by Guevara and the revolution of the electronic transaction of hundreds of tons of cocaine.

The relative power of the narco-guerrillas can’t be compared to the penury of potential guerrillas in all the regions of Latin America that Cuba received and carefully trained to initiate subversion in their countries of origin.

And the same can be said about the other actors: governments like those of Morales and Correa, no matter how aligned they might be with Chavismo’s imperial power, have to guard their own interests.

The Colombian government decided to create a crisis so as to unveil in all its splendor the role of Chávez’s government in the various domestic scenarios of neighboring countries. Chavismo and its franchise with Correa will keep trying to bring ideology into the situation, as though it were a repetition of the Bay of Pigs. But Colombia will try to demonstrate that, actually, this situation isn’t about politics or ideology, good intentions, or socialism: what we have here are merchants who traffic in drugs, in people, in ideas, in hopes.




{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 6 March 2008 }

Héctor Silva Michelena: “El socialismo es una idea antigua” / Gloria M. Bastidas

Héctor Silva Michelena: “Socialism is an ancient idea”


[Photo: Sandra Bracho, El Nacional]

A former Communist Party militant, inveterate bohemian, doctor in Social Sciences, economist and poet, Silva Michelena takes a stroll through those years when he burst in against the establishment and gives a critical glance of today’s political scene.

In the veins of Héctor Silva Michelena (economist, doctor in Social Sciences, university professor and poet) flows unimpeded the blood he inherited from his two philosophical-literary gods: Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Baudelaire. In order to understand this irreverent man – born in Caracas in 1931 and shaped by the Jesuits at the San Ignacio School; and education that his father, who was a petroleum worker, paid for at great expense – one first has to pry into his pantheon.

Only by invoking his heroes can one understand him. Nietzsche, who exerted an enormous influence on the existentialist writers and fell victim to madness at age 44, was the philosopher who yelled that heretical phrase: “God is dead.” And Baudelaire, the poet of dissolute life, the genius who caught syphilis and was put on trial for writing poems that clashed with morality and good manners, is a key figure in the dictionary of modern poetry.

For Silva Michelena there are idols that ended up having clay feet and who were shipwrecked, but those two, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, float untouched in his plasma.

Silva Michelena displays an ample culture. He can just as well impart a master class on the theory of value (even with equations, if he’s asked, since he is an economist and mathematician) as one on the origins of the Dadaist movement in Switzerland with the poet Tristan Tzara at the reigns. A movement that would later lead to surrealism which impacted this intellectual’s generation so much, whose gallery includes, in effect, many other names besides those two who are canonical to him. One of them, very important for understanding communist utopia and Chavismo’s genealogy: Karl Marx. But the author of Capital has ceased to be for him, as he was before, a deity. Of course, he admires him for his “fertile” thought, although in a less orthodox way than in the sixties, when he was a militant in Partido Comunista de Venezuela. With the collapse of the Berlin wall, he prefers to adhere to so-called “Critical Marxism”: no dogma or ideas set in stone.

– “Socialism is an ancient idea. It’s based on three key elements: an ideal, a program and a regime (the execution). The ideal has existed since a long time ago. In the 7th century before Christ, Hesiod was already talking about a Golden Age: a time in which man could fully satisfy his needs because there existed an abundance of goods. That plethora, on which creative leisure imposes itself above the slavery of work, is what communism also seeks.

“Who doesn’t want a better world? It’s an idea so powerful that it’s become irreversible. We agree on the ideal. But then comes the program, which contains the design for what will be done. And, in the case of communism, the program par excellence is The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx with the help of Engels and published in 1848. In it, they describe the evolution of capitalist societies, a model that would tend to exhaust itself and would be substituted by the dictatorship of the proletariat. That collides against the concept of liberal democracy and already contains a problem: a dictatorship, even if it’s of the proletariat, is a dictatorship.”

Notes on a collapse. The study habits the Jesuits inculcated in him are a trademark. As soon as he’s welcomed the journalist and photographer to his apartment in Colinas de Bello Monte, he says: “I was preparing myself for this interview until 2:00 in the morning.” It is touching to observe him as he pulls out from the bundle of files on his table the impeccable notes he has written the night before. Suddenly, he shows us a page inhabited by a diminutive script and enumerates the reasons why actually existing socialism collapsed: “One: the administrative apparatus eliminated competition among producers; one area would overproduce and another would underproduce, which is why sometimes sewing needles were abundant and bread was nowhere to be found; two: direct control of business was exerted by political units (intervention by the Party); and three: the lack of freedom and democracy. That is what’s called the total State. And we were headed in that direction, but the December 2007 referendum forced Chávez to turn on the brakes. Chavismo is a project that, as it tries to absorb these ideas, incurs in what Jean François Revel called the totalitarian temptation.”

The birds arrive to the apartment’s window box, drawn by the fruits his wife, Adicea Castillo, places there. They sing and peck while the economist’s words do a pirouette and extend through the mangroves of those convulsive sixties when he formed part of the anti-systemic literary group Tabla Redonda, founded in 1959 by Manuel Caballero, Rafael Cadenas, Jesús Sanoja Hernández, Ligia Olivieri, Darío Lancini, Arnaldo Acosta Bello, Jesús Enrique Guédez and Pepe Fernández-Doris, among others. Afterwards, he and his brother Ludovico joined the group. Those were also the years of the leftist group El Techo de la Ballena, which included Edmundo Aray, Adriano González León, Salvador Garmendia, Carlos Contramaestre, Caupolicán Ovalles, Ramón Palomares, Efraín Hurtado, Rodolfo Izaguirre, Daniel González, Juan Calzadilla, Francisco Pérez Perdomo and Perán Erminy. The predecessor to those two movements was Sardio, which was composed of, among others, Adriano González León, Guillermo Sucre, Elisa Lerner, Mario Matute Bravo, Héctor Malavé Mata, Luis García Morales, Carlos Gottberg, Rómulo Aranguibel y Gonzalo Castellanos.

The mistrust of the PCV. Silva Michelena continues to ride the time machine. “Our life was very close to that of hippies. Ludovico and I would drink a bottle of rum daily.” They drank, but the intellectual capital gain they generated drew everyone’s admiration. In fact, Silva Michelena was considered one of the most important scientific cadres of the Communist Party, though his licentious lifestyle created mistrust in the cell where he was active. When he published his first collection of poems, Arácnidas, he was suspended for three months from the PCV. The reason (so Baudelairean): he dedicated a few verses to the whores of Sabana Grande that scandalized the hard liners of the organization, who considered them to be of low ethical standards. Those poems were not at the service of revolution, something that went against the Zhdanov Doctrine, created by the Russian who was so important in the implementation of actually existing socialism and whom Silva Michelena compares, after a lament, to Francisco Sesto [Minister of Culture].

– “[Jorge] Giordiani [former Minister of Planning and Development], a red monk for whom the world hasn’t changed, exercised a great deal of influence over Chávez. He has the thinking of what Popper called closed societies, which is the dogmatic vision; nothing changes, everything is immutable. But when societies open up, one emerges from the crystal bell and permanent challenges arise. Reason is very important. Think of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot. Reason could handle everything. And Marx is part of that: the great certainties, the extraordinary certainties: there can be no doubt about anything. But reason can be used for good or evil. You can reason in a certain way for the implementation of slavery and in another to reject it. You can reason in one manner to democratize society and in another to get rid of democracy, which is what Chávez does. He is a victim of the belief in the superiority of socialism. He is committing a true archaism: there can’t exist an aggiornamiento, an updating, of something that was a spectacular failure. What’s left of Cuba? A poor society where rationing cards still exist. Chavismo inhabits the prehistory of the human spirit.”

Isn’t 21st Century Socialism democratic? The question makes the poet economist once again turn to his files, from where he pulls out an article published in Le Monde. And he lets loose the hemerographic arsenal. “Edgar Morin, a French sociologist, points out that we must return to the three questions Kant asked himself two centuries ago. One of them is, What am I allowed to expect? (which is the ideal). The other is, What can I know? (which is the program). And the third one is, What should I do? (the execution, the regime). Marx elaborated his thought on these cognitive bases. Morin then adds: “Today we know that the sciences contribute local certainties but that theories are scientific in the measure that they are refutable, that is, untrue.” And Marxism is not refutable. Because if you refute Marxism you’re expelled from the party and taken to a firing squad. Morin remembers that Marx was a determinist and believed he had uncovered the laws of the future. Morin says: “The Marxist conception of mankind is one dimensional and poor: neither the imaginary nor myth were part of human reality: the human being was a homo faber (the worker who makes), with no interiority, no complexities, a Promethean producer destined to defeat the gods and dominate the universe.” ”

*

Economic Fraud

Has Héctor Silva Michelena turned into a man without utopias? No, not at all. He still ciphers his hopes in what he calls societal utopia (a better world, but free, closer to market socialism) and in what he baptizes as a personal utopia: writing. In March he will publish a book of poems called Crepúsculo. And he wants to finish another text called Curiosidades éticas socioeconómicas [Ethical Socioeconomic Curiosities]. He took the name from Baudelaire, who wrote Aesthetic Curiosities. Another idea he has is to write an essay in which he will try to demonstrate that all economic theory is fraudulent because it adopts the guise of natural sciences when it inscribes itself within the social sciences.

“One can do a study of the body by means of a blood test and will know the measure of white and red globules. You can’t modify that reality. But reality is modified in the social sciences because ideology becomes a factor.” Then he mentions the case of Marx, who postulated the inevitable triumph of socialism. Afterwards, he refers to how Milton Friedman refutes the author of Capital. And he concludes by saying: neither socialism, nor neoliberalism. That is why the disciple of Baudelaire prefers to take refuge in poetry’s fallible kingdom. “There one can find truth within and that doesn’t bother anyone.”




{ Gloria M. Bastidas, El Nacional, 24 February 2008 }

República del Este / Francisco Massiani

Republic of the East

To Adriano González León

Níyume, my love, yesterday you were like a ray of sunlight in the crystals of my window on a cloudy day. We talked about loved ones (I remembered Eulimar, Nelly, Beatricita, and friends like Florencio, José Luis, Luis Yslas, José Miguel), and you told me about Oscar Marcano, about your dad, your brother, and inevitably, yes, about Adriano, about Adriano’s regrettable death.

We were drinking red wine (me more than you) and then you had the idea of asking me about the República del Este. Yes, it was at the Paprika, an enormous bar located on Mexico Avenue in the 1960s, where the unforgettable Caupolicán Ovalles proclaimed himself President of a new republic: La República del Este. The witnesses were Camilo Guevara, who was designated Secretary of State that same afternoon; Mario Abreu, Minister of the Interior; Alejandro Oliveros, Minister of Culture; and yours truly as Ambassador to Corsica.

I told you, Níyume, or I remembered with saudade, about the places where we used to meet, in those years (the hippies, explosive Woodstock, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the eternal Beatles, the French May, Georges Moustaki, Serge Reageni, the Latin American literary Boom: the grand Rayuela, Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Adriano’s País portátil, and Garmendia’s Los pequeños seres. As well as the admirable poetry of Gerbasi, Cadenas, Montejo, Sánchez Peláez, García Morales, Guillermo Sucre (and I think Hanni Ossott’s devastating poetry wasn’t quite known about yet). Some of the places in that delicious Caracas of the 1960s include the Paprika, the Tic Tac, the Gato Pescador, the B.Q., the Frisco, the Don Luis (a German brewery) the Baviera, the Suma bookstore, the Viñedo, the Vesuviana, where we used to gather with those beloved beings, many of them now dead: Manuel Alfredo Rodríguez, Luis Salazar, Hugo Batista, Manuel Quintana Castillo, Oscar Díaz Punceles, Marcelino Madrid, Junio Pérez Blasini, Alberto Brand Vallés, Miyó Vestrini, Mary Ferrero, María Elena Giusti, Tamara William, Alberto Patiño, Carlos González Vegas, Héctor Mayerston and Héctor Valverde.



Returning to the República del Este, if memory serves me right, its presidents, elected during drinking sessions amidst cordial friendship, included Manuel Alfredo Rodríguez, Elías Vallés, Junio Pérez Blasini and, of course, Caupo, who proclaimed himself President several times. Adriano frequently attended these gatherings. As did Orlando Araujo, César “Loro” Señini, Negra Maggie, Trina, Orlando’s enchanting wife, the beautiful Violeta and Chino Valera Mora.

Yes, Níyume, yesterday afternoon was marvelous. Nostalgic, sweet wine. It was like a ray of sunlight in the crystals of my window on a cloudy day. It was the afternoon with wine (a sunny afternoon) and more wine, along with happy and tender friendship.




{ Francisco Massiani, El Nacional, 21 February 2008 }

Un tratamiento posible / Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey

A Possible Treatment
(El Salmón Poetry Magazine, Part V)

In this fifth and final installment, and after a symptomatic review of the state of Venezuelan poetry, El Salmón presents a possible strategy for creating an alternative publication that would respond to the necessities this collective understands as urgent. Without Adamic or parricidal presumptions, a promise to read.


Alternative spaces have always been a necessity for literature. The legitimization of the word associated with poetry (both the creative and the reflexive one) can be given by means of organs separate from institutions, which in most cases condition and limit the potentially confrontational power – and thus a renovating force – of literary reflection. However, in a country such as ours the birth and sustenance of these alternate means of legitimization becomes more and more difficult. There are few independent magazines able to maintain themselves over time without disappearing or submitting to the monetary power of institutions. But the alternative isn’t necessarily tied to monetary independence. Its quality as an “other,” its alterity, is to be found in the path it has chosen to navigate.

Reflections on poetry should enliven us. If the publishing houses don’t incorporate themselves beyond praise, let prologues remain for the foolish. If we start from the belief that poetry can’t be critiqued we’ll get stuck in an absence of criteria that can only lead to silence, that silence one finds in the very substance of chatter, of the adulating noise that paralyzes the growth and development of the poetic word. We think poetry, like all arts, can be critiqued.

Our poetry is waiting, serenely, for the anxious and daring reader who will know how to extract from her all that we owe ourselves. A history remains to be organized, there are pending dialogues, urgent confrontations, inevitable complaints and owed applause. When, if not now? In our literary reality, new dialogues are pertinent in which fraternity doesn’t come before honesty: that praise be given to the word and not to friendship. Conference panels that will attend to new poetics along with editorial projects that will revise forgotten oeuvres; workshops open to honest revision; sincere questions about our poetry’s chronological line; renouncing omission in regards to evidence. May pens that articulate favors instead of truths think twice before putting prestige at risk for the sake of a friend.

If we’ve decide to take on the risky adventure of a magazine dedicated to Venezuelan poetry, it’s not with any desire to turn readers toward our own work; it has been because of a thirst, a weariness of private complaints regarding matters we should attend to as being public and on paper. It has been because of a reverential respect for the Venezuelan poetic tradition. We feel the need to revisit our poetic patrimony to ventilate it, expose it, take it off the dusty shelf so it can walk around and its fur be illuminated. Just by visiting a used bookstore or browsing through an ancient manual of Venezuelan literature, a heterodox anthology, an edition of unusual essays, we can find dispersed traces of admirable, strange or hilariously stingy forgotten poets worth reviving. It’s painful to contemplate how Venezuelan poetry is sifted through, almost directionless, as though no one were to blame.

We’d like to read, but read seriously: to open a space where the fraternal pat on the back isn’t a prerequisite; where polemics are possible without meltdowns; where names forgotten by publishing houses and new voices might be able to, at least, show themselves; pages where careful pens can exercise today’s intoxicated duty of criticism with the necessary license so that honesty (of a fundamental reading, not one turned into favor or reproach) be the only common place. We shouldn’t confuse the silence of readers with approval.

We must liven the voice. The well-worn reading doesn’t deserve being reduced to the most boring portion of a book’s baptism. It’s fair to bring back its political character, its contrasting dynamic. No longer the act among the same group of friends who’ll buy the book at the end, but the poem itself waiting and predicting. Poetry read aloud doesn’t require an editorial stamp or approval: it is enough of itself when it succeeds in drawing people towards itself. El Salmón wants to be a space for the legitimization of the words that precede us, the never reedited, the unpublished and the words that reflect around all of them. More than just wanting to create a new space, we think it has to be revived, to free it from the emptiness that has accumulated on top of it. In this way, we’d like to be rescuers more than pioneers, re-creators more than inventors. Nor do we hope to remain in the earnestness of a gesture that would define us as a generation. The pages of that magazine we have thought prefer to gestate rather than generate: to be a reading collective; to open spaces for awakening the possible dynamics of the word; to attend to poetry from a multiplicity; to notice it, annotate it and opine on it.

But we only promise one task: we will read. Read ourselves, read ourselves, read ourselves and learn that creating a tension of ideas has nothing to do with treason, but with intelligence. The alternative, and never a polemic for the sake of polemic. Not this silence.




{ Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1 December 2007 }

Agorafobia crónica / Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey

Chronic Agoraphobia
(El Salmón Poetry Magazine, Part IV)

Rather than nostalgically lamenting the inevitable, El Salmón prefers, in this new installment, to reflect on the disappearance of poetry collectives and the institutionalization of literary magazines.



Instead of a code of static ideas, the notion of a “poetics” can function as a moving, transfigurable and potentially transfiguring exercise. It is, among other things, a medium for evaluating what has been established with the goal of defending it or proposing something: a new sensibility, a new theme, a new literature. For these and other reasons, the majority of Venezuelan manifestos, groups and literary magazines have shared that brusque form of taking a position at a time of aesthetic crisis, whether it’s for supporting a dominant current, getting rid of it or stopping the changes on the horizon. Likewise, these spaces have served as fertile territory for gregarious group experiences, those that give themselves an impulse by means of the public, reactions and polemics.

It’s not easy to explain why that collective need for confronting the problems of literature by means of criticism and poetry for denunciation and counterpoint has extinguished. Perhaps it has become evident that the idea of writing poetry as a group hides a great contradiction: as powerful as the collective impulse might be, the truly significant works are born of the individual, differentiated filter. Groups exist to give flight to the back & forth critics insist on calling process.

Within the base of manifestos, groups and movements, magazines have functioned as common ground, a floor from which one lifts oneself toward that same space of individuality that legitimizes those proposals that were born of an initial collective experience. The typical example is the mythical single issue of the magazine Válvula, thanks to which writers like Antonio Arráiz, J. A. 

Ramos Sucre, Fernando Paz Castillo, Miguel Otero Silva and Uslar Pietri found a place for their voice. Antecedents like Cosmópolis, Alborada and the experience of Ramos Sucre and Cruz Salmerón Acosta with the magazine Broche de Oro, added to the milestone of Válvula, provide evidence of a symptom: collectives don’t intoxicate the work of those who participate in them, but instead serve as an efficient space for speaking in common and not saying common things, at least when the word that opens up manages to find a thirst surrounding it. Was it not Viernes that allowed the publication of Rilke, Rimbaud, Valéry and Eliot, to thank it for a few? You could find there voices such as Pablo Rojas Guardia, Luis Fernando Álvarez and Vicente Gerbasi, but also the revisions that at the time were imperious (each herd knows its own urgencies).

The collectives that were able to momentarily introduce changes into the dominant thematics (we think of Tráfico and Guaire, for example, who brought the very necessary sense of the everyday, urban and prosaic) lose their value if they come to a standstill in the same repeated poetic exercise for fear of contradicting themselves. Once they’ve managed to mitigate the problems they once denounced as a group, nothing remains but to oppose themselves, which leads them to naturally lose their relevance. That return of their members to the tradition they were critiquing, the pact with silence in other instances, gestures that many have interpreted as a betrayal, perhaps reveal a true dynamism, a more genuine and profound search for the poetic word.

Except for magazines such as Babel, by Juan Riquelme, or Ateneo, by Emilcen Rivero (which never cease to appear on the bookstore shelves, insistently displaying new voices and reviewing the others), the possible hemerographic space is paralyzed. The movement of the poetic word is undermined by matters that individualize. Today’s poet is agoraphobic and dependent on editorial favors. Something like Contrapunto would no longer exist (nor Andrés Mariño Palacios sharing with Héctor Mujica, José Ramón Medina, Pedro Díaz Seijas, Antonio Márquez Salas, Eddie Morales Crespo, Alí Lameda, Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla or Luz Machado), but instead individuals micro-published in the extinct magazine Imagen. No more Cantaclaro (nor Miguel García Mackle, Jesús Zambrano or Leopoldo Sucre Figarella) but instead a few poems by Daniel Molina or María Antonieta Flores loose in the pages of Papel Literario. No more Apocalipsis or Cuarenta Grados a la Sombra or Tabla Redonda (with Adriano González León looking at typewritten frescos by Guillermo Sucre, Luis García Morales, Elisa Lerner, Salvador Garmendia, Rodolfo Izaguirre and Efraín Hurtado; or Juan Calzadilla next to pieces by Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Edmundo Aray, Jacobo Borges and Carlos Contramaestre; or Rafael Cadenas flanking unpublished texts by Jesús Sanoja Hernández, Arnaldo Acosta Bello, Eduardo Acevedo and Jesús Enrique Guédez), only outdated reviews in the Revista Nacional de Cultura. After the Pandilla de Lautréamont, should we settle with Poetas en Tránsito? Interesting poetic proposals by young voices that are aligned with the thought that today is the Government have institutionalized themselves within the State’s editorial exercise. All of this makes it more difficult for the poet, as Rafael Cadenas said in Anotaciones, to remain a foreign element to power: to be a contrast. Neither paper nor the hemerographic possibility: ephemeral loose poems (and poets), placebos for the ego scriptor. Institutionalization has diminished the confrontational power of literary magazines.

The group experience in itself is not enough for putting together a significant poetic oeuvre, since if this never transcends the limits of the gregarious in the inverse journey toward particularity, it ends up diluting itself in an impersonal emptiness incapable of transformation. But José Barroeta said, in La Higuera de Otra Edad (1982), that a literature’s change is related to the transformations of a society. As Ángel Rama assures us, in his Antología de El techo de la ballena (1987): terrorism has concluded its cycle and we must live together (reconciled, we would add) with what we tried to overthrow.




{ Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 November 2007 }

Estrabismo académico / Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey

Academic Strabismus
(El Salmón Poetry Magazine, Part III)

In this new installment of El Salmón the discussion centers of the actual relations between Venezuelan poetry and the academy, through a reading of the symptoms that agglomerate in the country’s spaces for teaching literature.


If you ask someone who has passed through the schools of Literature at UCV [Universidad Central de Venezuela], UCAB [Universidad Católica Andrés Bello], ULA [Universidad de los Andes], or LUZ [Universidad del Zulia] what teachings he received in Venezuelan poetry, or at any of the Masters programs in literature in our country, the answer is always lukewarm. The common denominator is superficial, incomplete, dispersed readings.

The Escuela de Letras at UCAB proposes an attractive, three-year stroll through all of Venezuelan literature. The program for those courses includes a mixture of essays, fiction and poetry, meticulously pointing out the writers, eras, books and literary groups that will be addressed during the year. But the reality is something else: according to the faitful testimony of students, the courses never live up to what the program says and the readings that are done remain lackluster. At ULA, the situation is almost identical: poetry of the independence, the overlooked XVIII and XIX centuries, poetic avant gardes and the poetry of the 1960s: all leading to contemporary fiction. Some audacioud docents dare to address the literary groups Tráfico and Guaire (including, even, the poetry of Martha Kornblith or Gonzalo Fragui) without managing to set a precedent.

The chronological structure is an evident hindrance for anyone who’s beginning to connect with the poetic word. Rafael Cadenas already proposed, in En torno al lenguaje, that literature doesn’t have to be taught in a chronological manner, not because he might have anything against time’s continuity, but because of a matter of affinity: for the young reader it will be easier to understand Víctor Valera Mora or Yolanda Pantin than José Antonio Maitín. So then, why force him (in a clearly positivist effort) to begin with Andrés Bello, with the absurd excuse that without having read him he won’t understand the source of newer voices? The inverse journey turns out to be much more revealing than a slow historical process that arbitrarily begins at the invention of our identity. How much more would he gain by discovering a tradition, before Darwinistically refviewing our poetic genome in filiations, evolutions and descendants?

Another pedagogical hindrance at UCV, ULA and UCAB is that docents assign a chain of expositions for students when it comes time to resolve national poetry, in this way freeing themselves from much of the work and turning the course into a boring succession of lectures. By now, we shouldn’t use the excuse of collective learning in an academic reality where the master class setting is evidently more enriching than the seminar or the workshop.

The Escuela de Letras at UCV has characterized itself by being more open to paraliterary disciplines, as well as to new phenomena and problems of literature in the world. But freedom shouldn’t be confused with an absence of rigor. What many of us were thankful for while we studied for our degrees, we now perceive as lagoons in our formation. At least this was the case up until the recent renovation if the pensum which, we think, will remedy some faults.

The graduate degrees at ULA, at USB, the Instituto de Investigaciones Literarias and the masters program in Venezuelan Literature at UCV are a few of the entities that have done the most to address these problems. However, and perhaps for lack of docents dedicated to Venezuelan literature, the masters at UCV only offers one subject dedicated to the topic and it generally suffers in the search for someone to teach it. While the territories of fiction are covered by specialists like Carlos Sandoval and Ángel Gustavo Infante, the field of Poetry doesn’t count of a professor of the same academic stature truly dedicated to the genre.

These limps had become more evident: whoever wants to have an idea about the historical process of Venezuelan poetry will only find in bookstores the book by Rafael Arráiz Lucca, El coro de las voces solitarias which, according to muffled academic mockery, is marred by clumsy writing and untrustworthy facts. One must recognize that Arráiz Lucca is the only person who has ventured in these years to publish a complete history of our poetry, demonstrating that he’s the last truly ambitious researcher remaining with ties to this topic. But whose responsibility is it to answer for the mistakes of this title? Its appearance deserves an immediate response from the academy itself but, being so short sighted, it is incapable of focusing in the right direction. Who will take a step forward with the national truth placed in the editorial format? Does no one else dare to lift our poetic history?

Other efforts are found in La sociedad de los poemas muertos by Jorge Romero León (one of the few titles to emerge from the teaching body of UCV’s Escuela de Letras), the heterogeneous Nación y literatura (evidently a study of literature and the nation) compiled by by Carlos Pacheco, Luis Barrera Linares and Beatriz González Stephan, and Al filo de la lectura by Javier Lasarte. In combination, they can give a fragmented idea of our poetry’s history.

Once again the sigh: it is up to readers and students to take the reigns of their own formation, to sort out the difficulties presented by the study of our poetry. Institutional, editorial, academic and even bureaucratic barricades have always been characteristics of our nation. Poetry is not exempt from the context into which it was born.




{ Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 17 November 2007 }

Antologopatía, antologofrenia y antologofilia / Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey

Anthologopathy, Anthologophrenia and Anthologophilia
(El Salmón Poetry Magazine, Part II)

The analysis of the editorial reality of Venezuelan poetry is the focus of this second installment presented by El Salmón as a portion of its particular symptomatic revision of the genre that occupies them. Papel Literario once again provides a space for the reflection initiated in our previous edition, disseminating new readings of our literary present.


No one can be impressed by the affirmation that many of our greatest poets have fallen into oblivion. But we’re not only speaking about literary criticism (which in its most serious expression makes an effort to explore new territories), but rather about the publishing houses, who don’t seem to realize that their catalogs’ titles have gone out of print.

In a country like ours, whose literary tradition has been formed by the force of reduced numbers of editions, the reprint becomes a constant urgency. We know the publishing houses try to fight this problem by elaborating poetic anthologies, but these eventually tend to have no effect besides making the reader miss what hasn’t been included in its pages. In most cases the anthologies, more than an exercise in selection, are one of arbitrary suppression of poems. Normally the editor trues to justify his own injustices, applying the formula of “every anthology is always incomplete.” If that’s the case, what’s the purpose of continuing to produce anthologies? What purpose does a selection of poems serve? Do they think that a collection of poems can be mutilated without damaging the meaning of the group of poems?

The reader, with his hands tied by the tyrannical mediocrity of certain publishing houses, has no other option but to settle with a truncated book whose voids are impossible to fill. We can’t even turn to public libraries, full as they are of false value and absences on the shelves.

It’s one thing to edit a selection of texts by José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Juan Liscano, Víctor Valera Mora or Rafael Cadenas, poets whose complete works can be bought today in several of the country’s bookstores, and something else entirely to publish an “incomplete oeuvre” of a poet whose books are out of print.

For example, if Hanni Ossott is a poet of immeasurable value for our tradition, why does Monte Ávila Editores limit itself to making a mere anthology, when it’s capable of collecting all her books? This edition, which appeared recently in the Altazor collection, could well have been a complete collected poems, but someone thought it would be an exaggeration to add a hundred more pages. The same thing happens (though we don’t know if this is at the request of the authors themselves) with the anthologies of Reynaldo Pérez So, Carlos Contramaestre, William Osuna and Elizabeth Schön. How long will they postpone the publication of the complete works of Ramón Palomares, Alfredo Silva Estrada, Guillermo Sucre, Eleazar León, Eugenio Montejo, Lucila Velásquez, Ida Gramcko, Caupolicán Ovalles, Gustavo Pereira or Juan Calzadilla? When will they reprint Hesnor Rivera, Emira Rodríguez, Miyó Vestrini, Luis Fernando Álvarez, Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, Pablo Rojas Guardia, Salustio González Rincones, José Tadeo Arreaza Calatrava, Igor Barreto, Jacinto Fombona Pachano or Luis Camilo Guevara, among others?

For these and other reasons it can be such a satisfaction for those interested in Venezuelan poetry being able to once again have access to materials that have been unavailable in bookstores for decades. In this sense, the publishing house El Otro, El Mismo, run by Víctor Bravo in Mérida, has performed a very important task for Venezuelan poetry. Since about four years ago, when the first volumes began to appear in bookstores, we Venezuelan readers received with surprise and gratitude the complete works of poets such as Luis Alberto Crespo, Reyna Rivas, Patricia Guzmán, Márgara Russotto, Armando Rojas Guardia and José Barroeta. For many people it meant the chance to finally read collections that had been out of print for a long time. What has been lost sight of is the value for our literature of a collection of Venezuelan poetry that will decide to publish complete works and leave behind the old mania for compiling anthologies. But we soon realized that the books released by El Otro, El Mismo hadn’t been prepared with enough care. Biographical information printed in dark red ink over a black background (Aún no, by Esdras Parra; Con el ala alta, by Patricia Guzmán); incomplete indexes (Obra poética by Luis Alberto Crespo); dozens of repeated pages (Obra poética by Márgara Russotto); and a correction process plagued by mistakes are some of the blunders to be found without looking too hard in these poetry volumes.

Besides missing a greater care on the part of the editors at El Otro, El Mismo, it’s hard for us to understand the criteria used to select the authors to be published. Why publish José Antonio Castro, Joaquín Marta Sosa, Rafael Arráiz Lucca and not Ramón Palomares, Alfredo Silva Estrada or Francisco Pérez Perdomo? We’re not saying the first group doesn’t deserve it, but an alarming imbalance in the list of that publishing house’s priorities is noted.

The only possible diagnosis is the editorial clumsiness as a national stigma. That’s why mentioning the name of Luis García Morales to any critic is to revive a surprised memory; that’s why knowing Linos by María Clara Salas, or Cruce de caminos by Eleazar León, or Guillermo Sucre’s La Mirada is practically impossible; that’s why Igor Barreto finds only complicity in the beautiful morgue of Los Amigos del Santo Sepulcro (perhaps the best edited poetry titles in the national book distribution scene); that’s why finding a copy of Guayabo by Gabriela Kizer, edited in Colombia by Enrique Hernández D’Jesús, is an impossible adventure. We should recognize once and for all that this isn’t a situation limited to the oblivion of poetry from years ago, but rather a fault we drag around, a cursed dead weight, a bad habit that makes the genre suffer.

Anyone with basic knowledge of editing and international standards knows that an edition of a thousand copies isn’t enough for the book to be considered “edited.” For the implacable effects of market techniques, the state sponsored publishing houses provide evidence of an abundant appetite capable of editing up to a book a day, but incapable of articulating an authentic conceptual and research effort that can manage to provide a structure – without the habitual diaspora of series, collections and mutilated texts – for our poetic tradition. At a time when Latin American integration is being proposed, we only have one basic library of authors (with all the sins we’ve already accused the anthologies of committing) to bring us closer to the rest of Latin American literature: this is happening in the country that conceived the Biblioteca Ayacucho imprint.

Relatedly, marvelous opportunities for stimulating the curiosity of a possible public who would make new editions of these forgotten voices “viable” are lost. In this very supplement, in the October 20th edition, Antonio López Ortega writes of a dossier of Venezuelan literature he put together and which was published – and this should be celebrated – by the Hofstra Hispanic Review. López Ortega points out that our poetry “enjoys a growing editorial projection, which has brought with it a critical evaluation that wasn’t seen before and that depends in great measure on external factors.” We disagree: he marvels at an edition by Siruela of Las formas del fuego by J.A. Ramos Sucre, with Sánchez Peláez at Lumen (overlooking the curious presence of José Ramón Medina in that collection, a title that by the way isn’t available at the web site for the affiliate of Random House, as though it were only sold here in this country), with Eugenio Montejo and Rafael Cadenas at Pre-Textos, along with the deserved, international and belated honor paid to the poetry of Hanni Ossott and José Barroeta. It seems that all this is something with which poetry should strut itself in front of any other literary genre.

López Ortega overlooks that Alfaguara and Random House Mondadori have offices in this country and are publishing the novelties of our fiction writers, while the gestures made by the machinery of the aforementioned transnational publishing house referred to in his dossier only include two living voices: Cadenas and Montejo, with the former not having published poems in nearly fifteen years. Once again the fascination for the legitimating spaces abroad and the slight mention of what the publishing affiliates have done for our country (initiatives that have benefited, among other authors, López Ortega himself).

The summary of the aforementioned dossier published in Papel Literario is, as well, a list of what can and can’t be found in bookstores and not of our literature: he uses 14 fiction writers (10 of them alive and writing) and 11 poets (6 of them dead) in order to define the inhabitants. Moreover, he refers to the voice of María Antonieta Flores (1960) as “one of our youngest writers,” an unfair display of the new poetry if we consider López Ortega’s selection includes a story by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (1981).

And there we find a symptom that fiction shares: Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s publicized work (he is the winner of Monte Ávila Editores’s 2005 Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors) owed part of its success to his being able to guard his unpublished condition as a treasure, since this is the only possible strategy for very young writers. Only in this way, if one triumphs in any of the diverse convocations opened for those who maintain their editorial virginity, is it possible to capture the interest of a publishing house for one’s second title. The other road, the route removed from contests, one’s poetic work presented without the necessary mechanisms of legitimization by judges, or without literary godfathers, suffers a perilous trajectory. So, to edit without a prize is almost a favor.

This is why, if something editorially speaking resembles the success López Ortega describes in his dossier, foreign academics and editors found several poetic voices of impeccable quality who, thanks to our editorial oversight, still preserve their potential gold mines of work, exploration and fascination. But only by means of a decent editorial selection will it be possible to develop them here, at home… meanwhile, we continue to depend “in great measure on external factors.”

Todos han muerto, José Barroeta’s complete poetry edited by the Catalonian imprint Candaya, is a faithful example: any of the reviews available on the web page of a publishing house that treats its authors with such care can be a discovery for a student of Letters, for whom the academy and its pensum can make his access to national poetry even more difficult. But that would mean leaving the waters of publishing to swim in those of the academy. And that matter deserves another installment.




{ Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 10 November 2007 }

Patología actual de la poesía venezolana / Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey

Current Pathology of Venezuelan Poetry
(El Salmón Poetry Magazine, Part I)

A group of very young poets emerges on the scene of Venezuelan letters. They’ve arrived with a project under their arm: El Salmón, a space for thinking about and questioning poetry, for reading and debating it. Papel Literario opens its pages to the impulse of new energies.


At a moment when our literature is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in fiction, it is opportune to ask oneself about the state of, more than just the new Venezuelan poetry, the national poetic tradition. El Salmón presents a symptomatic reading of the possible spaces for legitimizing our poetry.

There are at least two types of readers of Venezuelan poetry: the academic researcher or professional critic, and another more common one who settles with what he finds in the city’s commercial bookstores. The latter is always satisfied. He feels that poems are songs for seduction, for learning how to live or for cultivating the spirit. In general his taste is instinctively directed towards the poetic discourse that doesn’t hide its meaning, that doesn’t put its own capacity for being understood at risk in order to illuminate what can only be named from darkness, from the hermetic or silence. Although it might be bold to say so, the academic researcher or professional critic of Venezuelan poetry is also satisfied. His work is important and he can speak with authority close to the center of the minuscule circle of our literature, because he knows and has studied and has read everything. His complaints aren’t related to the day to day of Venezuelan poetry; his discomfort is with history and he only fights with ghosts.

At the mid point between them exists a type of reader who is not quite as disciplined as the first but is much more enthusiastic than the second. For him poetry is found between discipline and disorder, between “work” and affinity, between a interest and shuddering. He reads for the emotion, to taste vertigo, the madness in the words, the thorn in the voice. He wants to have the complete works of his favorite poets, but the only thing he finds is crippled anthologies, false heights, empty shelves. This is the reader that suffers the most with the situation of Venezuelan poetry. We’re not just talking about the quality of current production; what really makes us uncomfortable is the absence of spaces for legitimizing the poetic word, the complete oblivion into which many of our poets fall, the silence and disorder of the publishing houses, magazines and literary supplements and the laconic presence of poetry at literary events and centers for academic specialization. These are the symptoms that point out how poetry has been relegated almost to the region of being an accessory, something disposable.

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Notable collections such as Altazor, by Monte Ávila Editores, have lost the concept to such a degree that they measure a young voice such as that of Domingo Maza Zavala with the same measure as Sánchez Peláez, Hanni Ossott or Luis Alberto Crespo. The excessive editorial flexibility of El Perro y La Rana clouds its own field of action. Initiatives such as the collection Fondo Editorial Pequeña Venecia disappear without a goodbye. The good intentions of a publishing house such as El Otro, El Mismo are eclipsed in poorly executed editions and with horrible proofreading (Bid & Co suffers from the same ailment). Fortunately, something is salvaged by places such as Editorial Equinoccio, poet editors (like Enrique Hernández D’Jesús and Igor Barreto) and second hand bookstores. Forgive us anyone we overlook, but this is more or less how one puts together a basic library of Venezuelan poetry.

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There’s a shade of candor to finding on the Internet the remains of the digital archive the extinct Verbigracia left hanging like an anthropological footprint: “a journalistic space consecrated to the revision and exhaustive and current debate of ideas in the various fields of knowledge.” Papel Literario is the last traditional space for the revision of the literary word (and sometimes the not-so-literary), which precisely because of its nature as a supplement can’t attend to the dynamics of poetry with the necessary concision.

The spaces within independent magazines are thankful towards those individual efforts to keep the faith in the genre… but they suffer in terms of distribution. The institutional magazines (for example, Revista Nacional de Cultura, Poesía) get caught up in an excessively fraternal exercise, dedicated more to an embrace than to criticism. The cultural magazines with high circulation (Plátanoverde, Veintinuo…) mistreat the poetic text in various forms, the most common one being that recent mania for seeing the text as a “graphic element” and not as a functioning discourse.

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Being an audience member at conferences and a reader of poetry are vocations that should be taken separately in our country. Except for the convocations by publishing houses for publicizing and making a bibliography of the results of a contest, or the presentations of titles (like Editorial Equinoccio, whose Papiros series has generated a new space for all the literary genres), it’s rare to be able to set up a conference table with poetry as its axis. If it happens to be a posthumous tribute, always late, it’s likely an elegiac discourse will supplant a critical one.

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At the recent VII “Mariano Picón Salas” Biennial of Literature there were seven tables dedicated to reflections on fiction: “Horizons of the New Latin American Fiction;” “The Voice of 20th Century Venezuelan Women Writers;” “Around the Short Story;” “Inventions of Reality;” “New Narrative Poetics” (there’s one); “”New Narrative Poetics” (there’s two), “New Narrative Poetics” (and three): three tables devoted to exploring what’s new in the universe of the short story and novel.

For poetry, there was barely the commonplace public reading. Neither a debate to confront new poetics or the horizons of the new Latin American poetry, to mention a space that was thought about with so much interest for the fiction writers invited to Mérida.

It’s worth noting that the biennial was honoring José Barroeta and Elizabeth Schön: poets. On another note, Gabriela Kizer’s collection Tribu won the “José Barroeta” International Poetry Prize, while the “Julio Miranda” International Prize for Short Novels was declared without a winner.

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We’re annoyed by the editorial fetish that seeks to stamp everything with the 21st century brand, pretending to pull a “new literature” out of nowhere, as though it were a white rabbit and the 21st century the bottom of a magician’s black hat. New literatures emerge when they deserve to, no matter how much we pull at their ears.

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“Read to Understand the World” is the slogan for the Universidad de Carabobo’s International Book Fair. Basing ourselves on this phrase, we should understand the world as a place that’s still divided by the matter of genre [género: also gender] (not in a literary sense, but rather in the strictly biological one): women’s poetry transformed into a required dimension (Edda Armas, Piedad Bonnet and Yolanda Pantin at a reading) and the parody of the male poets scheduled for a different day and location (the women’s reading, moreover, was scheduled to be held in the Ida Gramcko Salon).

Looking at the program for tables at the VII “Mariano Picón Salas” Biennial (and the program for any traditional literary event) shows that this separation of authors by gender is not an accident, but is rather a bad habit for which, it must be said, women writers also share the blame.

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Anyone who dares to touch the topic of literary collectives with candor (always at a café and never at the table of a debate) spout this commonplace: “The conditions don’t exist.” Since the groups Tráfico and Guaire [in the 1980s], then, the conditions don’t exist. What those conditions might be seems to remain a taboo, but poetry continues to be inoffensively individual, never gregarious, never common, not even generational.

Occasionally, we see the emergence of some manifestation of the figure of the public reading, that old animal that refuses to die (or perhaps we stubbornly misread what is actually its final shudders). But what should be a constant activity has become a mere sporadic whim. This remnant is the only expression of collectivity that remains for us in poetry. We must recognize that the public reading is a well-worn formula, of a social order and conceived for friends. Even then, the spaces available for that customary ritual of the poetic word (we speak of the reading that doesn’t have as an excuse the baptism of a new collection) are shrinking, with bookstores being the last corners available for the unofficial word.

While young fiction writers have achieved a victory with the ReLectura group, the last thing poetry remembers is a mixture of installation and uniformed performance called Poetas en Tránsito. We haven’t heard of any group of poets who have presented a proposal worthy of attention, a collective that seriously considers the elaboration of an ouvre capable of surviving the limits of the moment in which it is produced, that won’t evaporate within a sterile urban sensationalism.

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Fraternity is the sin and omission its indulgence. Book reviews have become ruses full of evasions because the person writing is my friend before he’s my reader. Our criticism has ended up being congratulation, gesture. We are fascinated when Argentines, Mexicans and Spaniards critique a verse by Montejo, the work of J.R. Medina (beyond the idea that “we owe the existence of the Biblioteca Ayacucho publishing house to him”) or Hanni Ossott’s editorial homelessness. We look at the foreigner spellbound while he speaks of his national literature with value judgments based on fundamentals. Naïve, we confuse honesty with audacity. When will we learn that a review is not a blurb.

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To many of us the poor treatment our poetic tradition receives is more than evident. The complaints we present today (this tip of the iceberg) are discomforts that appear on a daily basis for any reader of Venezuelan poetry, in his conversations in the hallway or at the café, like a thick and bitter tail that’s dragged around for years. That’s why we’ve decided to occupy a space generously made available to us by Papel Literario for the next month, in order to articulate and leave a register of a need to reread, revisit and recognize our poetry.

At this time it doesn’t seem prudent to take on an Adamic stance in these matters. The renovating gesture always hides the intention of erasing tradition with a pen stroke. We would like to reengage the current of our poetic heritage, for pleasure, for the sake of knowing where we stand and where we should (or could) go. There’s still a great distance to cover on these waters.




Santiago Acosta (San Francisco, 1983) has a degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he is currently studying for a Masters in Venezuelan Literature. His first collection, Detrás de los erizos, won the 2007 Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors, sponsored by Monte Ávila Editores.

Willy McKey (Caracas, 1980) studied Literature at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He made a brief incursion in university editions with the experimental collectives Imprima no Deprima and El Colgado (UCV Student Merit Award, 2005). His first collection, Vocado de orfandad, won the 2007 Fundarte Literary Contest.




{ Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 3 November 2007 }

Primer plato, segundo plato y postre / Luisa Pescoso P.

First Course, Second Course and Dessert

Héctor Torres (1968) is a Venezuelan writer whose short stories have appeared in the newspapers El Clarín of La Victoria, La Antena of San Juan de Los Morros and in the literary magazine Letralia. He has published Trazos de asombro y olvido (1996), Episodios suprimidos del manuscrito G (1998), Del espejo ciego and El pintor de bisontes (still in the process of publication). His most recent creation, El amor en tres platos (2007) combines humor, the everyday and the absurd.


“And in her heart, depression, the sensation of emptiness, the feeling of solitude, a fear of night and the water’s roaring