The poet Rafael Cadenas Source

Friends of @ADSactly, I publish today the second (and last) part of my interpretative work about the reflections presented by the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas in his book Annotations. If you are interested in reading the first part, you can go here. It is worth insisting on the relevance that this writer has for contemporary Spanish-speaking poetry. More information about his life and work can be found at this link.

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As we have indicated, Rafael Cadenas criticizes the concept of art as an autonomous, self-sufficient domain that transcends the supposed inferiority of things, of the immediate world. This position corresponds to his critique of poetry and the personal assumption he will make of it; to the crisis of consciousness before the poetry that all his work embodies as thought and writing, and in which, at the same time, lines of reformulation of the conception of poetry can be glimpsed.

Who can today, without feeling a certain discomfort, sit down to write a poem, to make a work of art? We write, we write down, we record. C'est tout. The other we leave to those immune beings that the madness of our time, the human collapse that we perceive, the destruction of the planet, cannot shake; to those who still believe in the finished poem, the beautiful object (...).

The dilemma of poetry is faced frankly within a civilization that has liberated its perversion and atrocity. It seems to resonate in the reflection of Cadenas the discomfort of Hölderlin's phrase: "Why poets in time of hardship?", or Adorno's categorical statement: "No poetry after Auschwitz". In addition to this perception, we also highlight the appreciation of poetry and the poet as an acting dissident:

Poets do not convince.
Nor do they win.
Their role is another, alien to power: to be contrast.

Poetry is at the opposite end of systems. Today they are ghosts of history who wander around looking for beings without caution. (...) We must flee from every person who promises salvation.

From a similar consideration, he exposes in another fragment that the voice of poetry has to speak from insecurity, with life as the only handle, and that what is expected of poetry is that it "makes living more alive". Or as it will also maintain: "Poetry can accompany man, who is more alone than ever, but not to console him but to make him more true". From these foundations we can infer a reformulation that is oriented towards a poetics of living:

The language of poetry looks at mystery, keeps it in mind; it is what makes it essential. The other languages do not notice it, they do not give it room, they operate behind their backs; many of them are sure, affirmative, wise; they are full of sufficiency; they exude authority. If anything has to do with poetry, it is fundamental ignorance, not knowing, on which the world of man is built.

Source

Hence the inconclusiveness of poetry. It moves on an edge where there is no room for resounding certainties. This is its disconcerting force.

Conceiving poetry as a revelation of what exists, an activity that shows, that des-covers, leads Cadenas to think of it as a language "close to that of every day", "that sprouts unpretentiously in the thread of days". It is that exercise of writing down, recording, in which poems are moments, fragments of living.

In this way, Cadenas questions the pretension of making poetry a separate world. He declares his renunciation of the poem that has become a fetish, an idol of a secularized cult, and thus his distancing himself from the tendency to conceive of the poet as a specialist, an "expert", and from the inclination towards the incommunicability of poetry. Such a judgment is most clearly expressed in another significant fragment of Annotations, along with several considerations:

Writing can only be today to defend the privileges of life, threatened by man. It is an urgency; but according to many modern poets, it is bad art to say, to say something, whatever. They believe that the touch is in hiding (...) Perhaps a certain darkness is inherent in poetry (...)

Cadenas claims and confirms the ethical sense of poetic writing: to welcome and sustain the gifts and rights of existence. And this necessarily implies the revaluation and recovery of meaning, of its communicative function. But, at the same time, he knows the contrasting role of poetry and its minority situation, often inevitable. He is aware that perhaps a certain opacity is characteristic of poetry, but what he accuses is that ingenious tendency to hide, to "make it difficult to find the presumed treasure".

Source

In contrast to all the artificiality in use, Cadenas confesses "a craftsman who loves words". The relationship with the word, as it declares and seeks, is that of an attentive and humble exercise, like the work of the craftsman who loves and works his matter with patience and obedience, without falsifications or affectations. For this reason, given his questioning, he distances himself from verbosity, facundia and easy brilliance, characteristics of a certain poetic discursiveness.

His divergence from the artificial form sought by a certain modern poetry does not imply that he rejects everything developed in modernity. That is why he says:

The modern thing that attracts me would only be the proximity of the language I use with respect to natural speech, the free verse that avoids even the slightest assonances, the unbribable dryness, the absence of literary figures, the prosification of the text, antipoetry, allusion, irony.

These options strengthen his proximity to prose, a position in which he coincides with other authors who have dismantled the supposed difference between poetry and prose. This is how he emphasizes it:

I am prose, I live in prose, I speak prose. Poetry is there, not elsewhere. What I call prose is the speech of living, which is always pierced by mystery.

Annotations wants to be the communion of a thought and a saying that bet on a poetics of living, in which the word is gratitude in vigil.

Bibliographic reference

Cadenas, R. (1983). Annotations. Caracas: Edit. Fundarte

Written by @josemlavem

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