Unfortunately, dear reader, although the person responsible for this newsletter is a reader of poetry as habitual as narrative, he is also aware that habit does not always go hand in hand with the necessary knowledge to speak about certain subjects.
For this reason this space has perhaps been confined to mentioning the names of some poets from time to time, or even a particular poem from time to time, as well as quoting a verse inserted from there in an earlier installment, for illustration or as a mere cartoon.
This time, however, I want to talk about a poet and a book, without, of course, going into deep poetry, or rather pointing to other areas. So I want to talk about Balam Rodrigo and his latest book, El tañedor de cadavers, to actually talk about those moments when reading and aesthetic experience collide head-on, literally attacking or overrunning daily life.
Balam Rodrigo, on the bookshelf
The first book I read by Balam Rodrigo, a Mexican-born poet, in Villa de Comaltitlán, Soconusco, Chiapas, in 1974 was Marabunta. So, although I didn’t look for that book because in reality I was looking for the Central American Book of the Dead without much luck, I was not only surprised but I was traversed, shaken outside and shaken inside: this book I faced, without a Having an idea of what it would be, contained, distilled and exploded the odyssey of countless people in a circular and eternal flight.
The urgency of finding the Central American Book of the Dead then became an obsession, an obsession that luckily I was able to satisfy very soon. The blow that reading Marabunta had meant multiplied, if such a thing was possible: in my hands, in my pupils, in my gut, not only the exodus of migrants again, not only this language out of a thousand languages, again not just this absolute testimony of an era embroidered with endless testimonies; not only these poems, which were absolutely literature, since they needed no more than the minimum to produce the greatest – “Reconstruct the faces of childhood, / Those of those Central American migrants who lived, / They ate and dreamed between the jambs of my house . / Their bodies and names have turned to mist, / chalked in memory, / like the diffuse scribbles I’ve cut into this book”—.
From the common hit to the only one
It is clear that the form of the blow that reading, for example, the quoted fragment delivers, is a blow that any reader who does not reach the book with the protective mask receives on the chin. However, these types of punches, capable of reaching consciousness and rendering him unconscious in a second, are sometimes personal. Punches you feel when you receive them, unique, as if thrown exclusively for you, you tell yourself or think while reading. That’s exactly what happened to me when I got to Balam Rodrigo’s latest book, El tañedor de cadavers – the poem from which the title of the anthology, Forensic, which is part of the On the Professions section, is about a science and technology Man who, during the autopsy of violently destroyed corpses, imagines he is composing symphonies: “To be precise, I work as a coroner / but I consider myself an artist / perhaps the foremost expert in necromusicology : / I profess an indescribable Thanatic melomania . / Let me explain: / my profession is in the morgue, / I work with corpses on the griddle, / but when it comes to autopsies, / I reveal a secondary criminal interest: / I perform euphony on every corpse, / I pose hidden pieces for orchestra / in the human organs / I discover thanatological music in the bones and tissues: / a beautiful score is every death”.
However, the blow I found unique, as if it had been dealt me, came not from that other poem, but from reading Cosedoras de balones de futbols, which is part of the section On the Trade of Air and Sleep, like the The rest of the book is interwoven with the echo of voices that are as common as they are everyday, and which is also the poem with which the book begins: “And all my dreams go silently / like all the people who disappear here. / The women of this city have no more breasts: / a bundle of balloons sprout from our dry trunks, / a bundle of fat children of the wind, / who do not seek a caress, / but a well-aimed kick that throws them away. / We care for the deceased with countless breasts, / we quench the endless thirst of the disappeared. / Feeding ghosts with the dark milk of memory / and the hope of those who seek at least / a part of themselves in every place: / torn balloon segments / of the insatiable pack / the master of fear”.
Explain the coup, this disappointment
Why did I feel that this last poem was mine, written only or mainly for me? Because life made me spend most of the summers of my childhood in Chichihualco, a town in the Sierra de Guerrero, where the seamstresses live and work, due to the opportunities that are not more important here than the importance of chance, here Balam Rodrigo balls . This place, which in my memory until reading this poem was a place of naive and childish happiness, is suddenly, suddenly, this other place devastated by violence, especially that resulting from the drug trade linked to the cultivation of poppies came from. This place, which I clung to in my memory so as not to suddenly disappear, is another heart of disappearance that has gradually filled my country with holes.
Suddenly the aesthetic experience of that wonderful book El tañedor de cadavers, which sings about the professions of those who were born and will leave with nothing, is the focus of my own life, the life that I share with you all, the means with everyone else, but also of what belongs only to me: that is, in the center of my deepest intimacy, which explodes and explodes into pieces.
After all, that’s what great literature and great poetry do: not only do they traverse us like insects on a sheet of Styrofoam, but they can dissect us from time to time, tearing personal and shared memories apart.
And of course, great literature and great poetry also have the ability to turn us into someone else with a single swipe.
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Marabunta has been published by various publishers, including Praxis, Los perros románticos and Yagurú. The Central American Book of the Dead was published by the FCE. For its part, El tañedor de cadavers is included in the Conarte edition.
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