The Incessant Flow of Samuel Jaramillo’s Poetry

January 18, 2006 But, of course, he is best known for his poetry. The second area I’d like to emphasize regarding his poetic work is his potential for expansion. A look at the sum of his output reveals a constant transformation, or rather, growth in conjunction with an increasing complexity that nonetheless takes place along an absolutely discernible and completely coherent trajectory. Every book that Jaramillo gives us contains new points of view, new cares and interests, new uses of formal constructions, as part of a worldview that he builds up gradually and broadens through his writing.

He published his first book of poetry, Rough Knocks (Ásperos Golpes, 1973), at an early age, something not unusual with poets. It drew immediate attention because its texture was unusual in the panorama of poetry being written in Colombia at the time. Formally very rich, with great sonority and imagination, a little cryptic for the contemporary taste, its central note of intangible anxiety struck a chord amongst young people of the poet’s own age who could perhaps identify with this feeling.

His next two books, Citizen of the City and the Night (Ciudadano de la ciudad y de la noche, 1980) and Geographies of Hallucination (Geografías de la alucinación, 1981), mark a process of convergence with other poets of similar ages and positions that together became highly influential within Colombian poetry during those years. This group became known as the “poets of image,” a term coined by Jaramillo in one of his essays. These poets sought to distance themselves from both of the prevailing currents in poetry at the time: the conversationalists and the prosaists, whom they suspected of being victims to the risk of trivialization. They also tried to rid themselves of a sickeningly individual introspective secretiveness, which had apparently lost relevance in a country shaken by conflicts and contradictions. Paradoxically, these poets insisted upon expressive richness, especially as regards the exploitation of resplendent imagery, as well as using other resources such as the occasional construction of high and startling environments, ominous atmospheres, and the recovery of postponed characters: all this was put forth in a project that could be called political, in harmony with the intellectual environment of readers their own age. Jaramillo was foremost in the effort to forge some of these formal reference points and to explore what would come to be some of the thematic axes both for the group and in his own work: the difficulty and precariousness of words, night and the city as the territory of freedom and threat, the wariness inherent in living in an oppressive and tense society, destiny and the excessive challenges given itself by his generation. (Geographies of Hallucination concentrates upon this last topic, and does so very resoundingly).

From this moment on, Jaramillo’s work starts to go down ever more personal and individual paths, without ever losing his connection with these roots. In his following books, The Jungle That Returns (Selva que regresa, 1988) , which received the country’s most prestigious award, that of the University of Antioquia, Jaramillo introduces us to one of his most outstanding abilities, that will eventually become one of his defining traits: his capacity for enunciating poetic exploration within a defined geography, which in turn acquires literary status. Jaramillo spent the first years of his life in the middle of a jungle, and in this book, dedicated to childhood, the humid tropic of the Colombian Pacific coast with its overwhelming exuberance, transmuted by the poet’s verbal power, becomes the natural and imperceptible continent of that paradisiacal state that is childhood; lost forever, but recoverable through poetry.

Jaramillo’s next volume, Double Night (Doble Noche, 1998), is a very disquieting book while at the same time being of especially careful and suggestive construction. This volume investigates religious matters, but is marked by a paradox: the poet explores the feeling of transcendence, something inalienably human, but does so through contemporary men who are not rationally religious: the “mystique of the unbeliever,” as one of its commentator’s affirms. The first part of the book, the “first night,” approaches precisely the desolate conviction of the absence of God. The reiteration of this emptiness that the poet, like a reverse pantheist, acknowledges everywhere takes shape on a stage that becomes fearfully coherent through this exploration: the melancholic and oppressive landscape of the Andean plateau, the Savannah of Bogotá. In all these overwhelmingly forceful poems the Savannah is always “on the point of tears,” lit by a feeble and saddened sun, definitely unearthly, and it acquires, as has been mentioned, the status of meaningful territory, of literary geography. The “second night,” refers to that which remains to the modern man who has abandoned all belief: human love. “But there night also falls,” says the poet, thus completing this double circle of darkness.

Samuel Jaramillo’s most recent book, The House That Breathes (Casa que respira, 2002), points in another direction and contains an interesting formal proposal. Focused on the transition to adulthood (a “treatise of sentimental education”), the volume is structured such that it creates a convergence between poetry and narrative. The volume opens with a poem where an adult man returns to the house, now in ruins, where he spent his adolescence with his grandparents, in a specific region of Colombia, the mid-mountain area dedicated to the growth and production of coffee beans. Through individual poems, which can be read separately, a dual story is constructed: the collective history of this region, which only two generations previously had been impervious to colonization, the latter consolidation and urbanization, and above all, the horrifying era known to all Colombians by the oppressive title, the generic nature, of “The Violence,” a larval political war that tormented this country and that region for decades. Parallel to this, the poet “narrates” the individual story of the speaker, of those persons connected to him, the discoveries made by every man during this frightening time, but which are carried out in this case within the aforementioned context: the collision of loneliness, desire, death and, above all, that which the poet describes as the frontier of adulthood, the discovery of the passing of time. This book, which could also be considered as a single poem, or as a narrative, because of the use it makes of resources normally related to this genre (time passes, the characters evolve, there are events and outcomes), ends with the poet once again at his starting point in his adolescent home. However, what was previously nothing more than a ruin, the reader now sees it filled with all the life that has passed through its spaces, and that continues passing through Jaramillo’s poetry.

Samuel Jaramillo’s poetry flows. It changes yet remains the same. Like a river, we might say.