Central Park, NY. Photo by Rosario Bartolini
I imagine that, somewhat in the manner of Pound or Eliot, and no less of César Vallejo, I have stopped at the following:
Any work of art is a mixture of freedom and order. Art oscillates between chaos, on the one hand, and pure mechanics, on the other. A pedantic insistence on detail tends to exclude essential form. If the essential form is firmly held, freedom of detail is possible (Ezra Pound).
Art is an escape from fixed positions; a timely evasion of a norm… (T.S. Eliot).
The technique: it always reveals what we really are and where we are going (César Vallejo).
I say somewhat because, on the other hand, the myth in my poetry is not pasteurized, as it is in Pound; also, although it seems otherwise, in Walt Whitman (“master athlete” and hardened “tramp”) and even – someone as “cerebral” as Pound – in the author of Altazor. Both, these last two, dazzled or casual before the stream of their own images (Imaginism). By the way, I think of a Vicente Huidobro as an intersection between Whitman and Pound. And I also agree with what Octavio Paz thinks of Eliot: palimpsest art from the Western or classical tradition. Therefore, here we also find the myth already deceased; and we only have quotes or traces of him. Analogously to what happens in Pound, we insist vortex of fused and fusing ideas, honest will for aura and style.
However, and on the contrary, in César Vallejo and I verify that also in my poetry, the myth is given raw and is alive; Although it does not pretend to be explicit or, it would be execrable, something merely decorative. That is to say, the myth is an acolyte of itself and creates an archipelago; brings together, such a real and active agent, community. In short, it aspires to become an overseas Amerindian conceptual mediator and cross-sectional to any language. Poetry that finally does not hide, but rather supports, a corrector restorative way in its reception. A reading, for example, by Trilce, and although it is paradoxical in the case of an “avant-garde” text, happier than others. I purposely evade, together with what would constitute a random or arbitrary reading of that collection of poems, the term “pertinent”; and, rather, I refer to an embodied and post-anthropocentric reception of both the poetry of the author of Trilce and mine. Vallejo will not be Whitman, he will not try to corroborate Rousseau’s “ideas” in his poetry; nor will it be Pound. Neither Eliot nor any “little God.” Nor, though both “abolitionists”, would R. W. Emerson share “transcendentalism”. Vallejo is a poet without membership, being Pound’s club, as we know, much more exclusive than Harold Bloom’s 100’s.
And in Spanish, I don’t write.
