Article
My friend the poet Armando Romero
January 18, 2006
“I know of no other more eloquent example of this condition, which I point to with the soaring humility of a friend, than that of Armando Romero.” (…)
“This poetry of Armando Romero has no antecedent in any known school or group. I cannot find those roots, those vestiges that announce others’ presences, reworked visions, a condition which is not by the way at all depreciative as long as those presences and those visions are grand and worthy. In Armando Romero’s poetry I find nearness, palpableness and a way of narrating a world that is unique to him and can only be shared by means of the slender crevice of his poems. How enviable and how terrible a condition this is. I do not believe that this poetry enjoys – or lacks, depending on how one looks at it – that which is usually referred to as a large diffusion, a certain popularity. His poems, written solely for poets, are like water that a fervent mill returns to its original riverbed.”
“Having made this poetry, having lived it like Armando Romero has lived it, is what turns a poet into a condemned man. From this come desolation and love, disorder and joy that he sows with his footsteps among the people.” (…)
From the prologue of El poeta de vidrio (Caracas, Fundarte,1979). Reprinted in: Alvaro Mutis, Desde el solar (Bogota: Ministerio de Cultura, 2002)
Note on the author
Alvaro Mutis, the Colombian poet and author, is, together with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps the most important and revered Latin American writer today. He has won the most prestigious literary awards in the Spanish, Latin American, European and North American worlds, excluding only the Nobel Prize. American author John Updike published a detailed article in the New Yorker (February, 2003) on his appreciation of Mutis’ work and achievements.
Colombian poet Alvaro Mutis on the poetry of Armando Romero: “Having made this poetry (…) is what turns a poet into a condemned man.”
“Poetry is an activity for the condemned. Poets walk through the street with the face and the gestures of the passers-by and only in this way do they survive; because if they had dressed themselves with the robe of asbestos and phosphorous which they should be wearing, people would flee from their footsteps and terror would reign all around like a luminescent crown of justice. Poets understand this situation and accept the painful burden of this humiliating camouflage. But a place remains where this condition of ‘victim’ marked by the seven fingers of clarity, beauty, ire, timelessness, dreams, death and love cannot be hidden. The words of the poet, as well as his gaze and his interaction with the other poets, point to this place.”“I know of no other more eloquent example of this condition, which I point to with the soaring humility of a friend, than that of Armando Romero.” (…)
“This poetry of Armando Romero has no antecedent in any known school or group. I cannot find those roots, those vestiges that announce others’ presences, reworked visions, a condition which is not by the way at all depreciative as long as those presences and those visions are grand and worthy. In Armando Romero’s poetry I find nearness, palpableness and a way of narrating a world that is unique to him and can only be shared by means of the slender crevice of his poems. How enviable and how terrible a condition this is. I do not believe that this poetry enjoys – or lacks, depending on how one looks at it – that which is usually referred to as a large diffusion, a certain popularity. His poems, written solely for poets, are like water that a fervent mill returns to its original riverbed.”
“Having made this poetry, having lived it like Armando Romero has lived it, is what turns a poet into a condemned man. From this come desolation and love, disorder and joy that he sows with his footsteps among the people.” (…)
From the prologue of El poeta de vidrio (Caracas, Fundarte,1979). Reprinted in: Alvaro Mutis, Desde el solar (Bogota: Ministerio de Cultura, 2002)
Note on the author
Alvaro Mutis, the Colombian poet and author, is, together with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps the most important and revered Latin American writer today. He has won the most prestigious literary awards in the Spanish, Latin American, European and North American worlds, excluding only the Nobel Prize. American author John Updike published a detailed article in the New Yorker (February, 2003) on his appreciation of Mutis’ work and achievements.
© Alvaro Mutis
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère