From “Some Parasurrealistic Latino-American Poets”

January 18, 2006 but I will insist on Raul Henao book El Bebedor Nocturno (The Nocturnal Drinker), awarded with the second prize in the “III Concurso de Poesía Eduardo Cote Lamus“, of the Institute of Culture and Fine Arts from Santander. (I am usually fascinated by those “second prizes“, because, as it happens with the book with which I am concerned, its quality is so high that one guesses that the first prize must have given to a genius. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case, and there is almost always a large dose of politics and nepotism in these affaires of literary awards.)Raul Henao is a “damné” poet and a distant descendant of Gerard de Nerval, whom he often quotes into his poems, I don’t know if he has read one of my favourite poets, Tristan Corbière, who lived in the French Medellin, the city of Roscoff, in Brittany, amidst rain and mist, writing poetry filled with visions that sometimes also appear in the work of Raul Henao. On the other hand, I see a possibility to approach some aspects of Henao’s poetry, in which Venezuelan critic and poet Juan Calzadilla has seen “an absurd imagery to well fit the spiritual requirements of our age”. He is not so different from Jose Asuncion Silva, whose modernity has not been studied as closely as it should, because the critics prefer to focus on the poet’s most renowned texts, such as his very famous “Nocturno”.Henao is one of the most representative “enraged people” of his generation (he was born in 1944), and I will rank him among the spiritual inheritors of the ’68 Sorbonne, as in the days when “the imagination’s gotten the power”, similarly to what happened along the walls of Paris, the song of the poet of Medellin is a cry against organized society, against governments and polices, and, as he claims, will stay when the governments leave. His poetic lemma is “desperation”. I don’t know, however, if Henao has ever talked about the debut book of one of his favourite authors, Emil Cioran, “On the heights of desperation”, published in Bucharest as long ago as 1934.Henao’s poetry is full of phantoms and characters that he certainly did not make up, but found in the streets of his provincial city or in nightmares, which are almost the same: the traveller without any luggage (as the majority of us are), the fiendishly tongued bird charmer, the white-bearded chamberlain (a beautiful title for a book of poetry), the oneiric-mantic man (as each poet is), the tailor of desperation (who obviously tailored Cioran’s clothes), the finer-than-salt manicurist, the boatman from the country of the elms, the black man of the fountain (whom I met one night in Madrid, passing by the Conde de Nieblas street). The list is clearly an almost complete typical mythology of the north, seen or imagined in Colombia.The titles of the poems in this collection are very interesting. Some are romantic, such as “The Vision”, “My Demon” (they populate both the world and Henao’s poetry, and I remember once reading an interpretation of the devil by another Colombian, German Arciniegas, that could be used as an introduction to a book of poems dealing only devils), and “Serenade”. In contrast, there are also typically surrealistic titles, “Widow of Varnished Wood”, “Homage to Apollinaire”, “Words to Tiresias”, “The New Frog”, “Dream’s Wardrobe”, that any great poet in the world might use as the title of a book of poetry.Finally, I have to mention, very briefly, an aspect that has always captivated me in Latin-American poetry: the province, as it appears in the work of some poets like Jorge Tellier, Francisco Amighetti, and Alfredo Sancho and perhaps one or two others. Raul Henao is part, spiritually, of this family, but surrealism has taken him much further than the Chilean poets and the Costa Ricans, universalising the province and giving it a demoniac air that is seldom found in the works of the others.