Apocalypse
My country ruminates in secret
the water of disasters.
It rests its teeth from the wings and ruminates
–teeth that bleed
much more
than a shipwreck’s oars.
Much more than the youths beneath the stormy
August sky.
Only the lips of the eye whistle like the serpent
arrows with letters of vengeance.
Red ballads crossing the night
like errant stars.
What does the master demand? melancholic children scream
in the nights of clay. It is spelled M
before B and P as in the word Constantinople.
When one is born beside an immense lake
like the leguminous chest of the servants.
When one grows beside the chest of the water
around which
the world rotates
divided into its parts:
you tell me alligator tail
in love with the garden of petroleum’s
gelatinously blind lightning.
You tell me wolf extinguished like a lamp
by the thirst of a hairy worm of the seas.
You tell me
oh! brooding virgins
of tragic hawks.
Tell me, aren’t we born and grown for the world
and yet we sprawl like a domestic rooster
on the shores of conquest?
Aren’t we born and grown like the world
that divides into blood
of conquerors
and sores that open
like the ears of humiliating sadness?
My country ruminates in secret the water of disasters
What does the master demand? melancholic children scream
in the nights of clay.
It is spelled M
before B and P
as in the word Constantinople.
A distant ship hangs between the trunks
of the palms
like a hammock
of a monstrous king.
On the tar paving-stones
of the ports the parents are dying.
They fold themselves over the
exportable boxes of the heat
consumed by countries
intoxicated with fires.
Only at noon arrives the tribe
of the blood faces –seeking their ancient age
of gold among the rats killed by the gust
of carbide horns that ripens the plaintains.
It might be that on water
the inferno
truly begins.
The high martyrdoms
truly begin.
It might be that in the brilliant docks
of the bonfires
a man could aspire
to nourish
the insects of the forest.
A man could attempt to strangle with sex
the green fires that swell
like the seed of beasts
whose gale interior protects
the large dicotyledonous wings of the tropics.
What does the master demand? melancholic children
scream in the nights of clay.
Beneath its crazy lobster ceiling sun
the city
also hears
its own birth.
Around the coconut groves it was growing
and circling like a little donkey.
Around the temple of the thieves it was growing.
Around the fire of the swamps.
It was growing around the desolate miners
inside their skeletons
with orbits of agonizing lanterns.
The city was growing –it always grows
around the golden victims.
Of the dead that surround their memories
with oral violets. It only grows around
the excavations
where the dead
tend to hide forever.
My country ruminates in secret
the water of disasters.
Under that sun with black skin an island
builds itself alone at dawn.
From the heights of the jungle
rivers of purple oranges depart.
Dead avalanches of pewter animals depart.
The cattail
with its slimy
centipede feet.
So then an island is not a nest
of blessed
corals.
It is not an open door to the moon
that drives with sinister threads
the lightning’s cruelty from all the skies.
An island is the obscure
center
of the zone under surveillance.
Plump spadices sustain
the luminous eggs
of a somber fauna.
And finally a meaningless story
ends up denouncing the wake
of the always ancient woman
by which the gramineous shack could participate in the party.
What does the master demand? melancholic children
scream in the nights of clay.
It is spelled M before B and P
as in the word Constantinople.
Maracaibo, 1952.
{ Hesnor Rivera, El Salmón: Revista de Poesía, Apocalipsis: Año III – No 7, Caracas: January-April 2010 }
Showing posts with label El Salmón. Show all posts
Showing posts with label El Salmón. Show all posts
1.06.2011
2.18.2008
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 }
(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 }
2.16.2008
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 }
(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 }
2.14.2008
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 }
(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 }
2.08.2008
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 }
(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 }
2.06.2008
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
“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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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 }
(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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
“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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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 }
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