Article
Interview with the poet Fernando Rendón
May 31, 2007
FR: The award of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize 2006 of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín will not have any effect on the opposing Colombian armies’ desire for dialogue at the moment. With very few exceptions, the media in our country has not reported on the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize given to our organization in the Swedish parliament on December 8th last year. This says a lot about the deliberate refusal of most Colombian media not to recognize the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, which in itself is a form of mass media, simply because it cannot be manipulated or bribed.
JAL: I said it has something of a fiction, because it is not political rhetoric but poetics that embodies this longing for peace. I return to an idea that comes to mind from time to time when reading Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas, a novel about the Spanish Civil War. Cercas affirms that he was mistaken in supposing that wars are fed only by heroes, by soldiers, because he had discovered that at the origin of this fratricidal war were poets with their panegyrics and speeches, and their poems inciting to take one side or the other. With Colombia having been at war for many years, do you think that poets represent this possibility and, as Cercas writes in his novel, one of the causes of the confrontation?
FR: Wars are not fed by heroes or soldiers nor are they caused by their wish to be heroes or soldiers. Only an ignoramus would say that poets are at the origin of wars. Soldiers and poets are the victims of wars, they do not cause them. The economic and political interests of the dominant classes of the invading country are the origin of wars of invasion. The economic and political interests of the dominant class of a country are the origin of wars of subjection of one class by another. And there is one more variant: those who push peoples into wars of liberation are the same dominant and oppressive classes of a country. In all of these kinds of wars, soldiers and sometimes poets, take part. René Char, for example, as a guerrilla commander, took part in the struggle of the French Resistance against the fascists. The struggle of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín is for all Colombians to take the side of poetry, of a dignified life, and of peace with social justice, so that the killing that has devastated Colombia for decades stops.
JAL: You yourself are a poet and I know you’re also a man with very clear political ideas. There have been many episodes in which ideology overwhelms poetry, to a point where emotion and reality are absent. What is your view of these situations in a literary plane?
FR: The literary plane is a fiction if it is not associated with life itself. Poetry can never be ideologized. And censorship does not come only from the State. Some poems may contain ideological elements but you cannot bring poets to an inquisitorial trial on account of it. Some have chosen to remain silent in the face of the killing and to prevent others from talking. I think that some critics have a quite restrictive vision of what poets must and can think, write and do, poets being nourished by freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. But I agree that we poets must be attentive so that our poems do not become pamphlets and we must prevent the limitation a poet’s mission to that of an ideological pamphleteer.
JAL: Fernando, tell me how the Festival of Poetry was created, how the idea came about and what the real possibility was of establishing, in the midst of such a bloody situation, a cultural event that involves — I don’t know if this was from the beginning — thousands upon thousands of inhabitants of Medellín and other Colombian cities?
FR: If Mexico City lived in a situation of war and bombs and car bombs exploded on its streets, would you flee? Would you hide every day? If massacres and political genocide were a daily happening in your country, which route would you take? Well, it was in those circumstances that we founded the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, to oppose terror with beauty, to bring poetry face to face with violent death. We interpreted the love of poetry and the will to live of thousands of people, at the right moment. Then we decided to continue and to expand annually this venture that breaks with all political moulds and poetical ways of thinking.
JAL: Why such a massive and popular festival? This question is not harmless or naive. I ask it because I have heard that some poets who attended the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, although moved by the public, have questioned its literary effect. That is to say, they don’t think these public readings promote the reading of poetry or the knowledge of poets, or the appearance of new writers. From your point of view as an organizer and poet, and cultural promoter, what is you assessment of these things, beyond the political effect of the festival?
FR: Why not a massive and popular festival? Shall we close the doors of poetry in the face of a population that flows toward its source? The question is certainly not harmless or naive, as asked by some of our poets who would like to have ownership of the ineffable and drool for poetry to be the privilege of the elite. That is as if love and poetry were destined for the chosen ones and not for the whole human species. These poets say they are moved by the public of the Festival, but they deny the poetic intelligence of youth and doubt the effect of poetry on the private life of persons and the collective sensibility. The people that applaud, do they not read? No new poets will come from the People? What proves it? Today Lucía Estrada is considered perhaps the greatest female hope in Colombian poetry. Since 1991, since she was a child, she has been part of the public in most festivals. And she has also read her poetry as an invited poet. Our public have been nourished and strengthened by this vast poetic fire. This public looks for the authors, talks to them about their poetry; it is the people who talk about poetry on the street that feed poets. Let’s not forget it.
JAL: The organization of a Festival of such dimensions as it has now reached, necessitates many factors, but above all it needs the firm conviction of a cultural manager that he is going right direction in an adequate context. How have you, with your small organizing team, obtained the financial resources, persuaded politicians and bureaucratics, resisted the attacks of groups of intellectuals and sometimes the bad faith of many colleagues who want your efforts to fail? How have you experienced and managed these problems common to all cultural ventures? How have you taken advantage of criticism and how have you confronted political battering?
FR: Prometeo is made up of a group of poets who share common principles, purposes and a work method which aims at the creation and promotion of poetry. We have overcome all kind of obstacles, a lack of financial resources, pressure, scorn and threats. I also realized that poetry can generate hatred between humans. Many writing colleagues, as you call them, with their backs to the killing, have wished our efforts to fail, lacking all generosity and greatness. Deep down they think that poetry is just a literary genre. They would like the Festival to disappear. Their uneasiness is just another expression of human nature. Human clay is fragile. But meanness is one thing and criticism another. We have built the Festival based on a daily dose of lucid self-criticism. The Festival is now considered a model in the world, and we have a whole chain of complementary projects: The School of Poetry of Medellín and the poetry workshops, the publishing of the Prometeo review (76 numbers in 25 years), the making of documentaries for TV and of DVD’s containing the audiovisual history of the Festival, and a digital anthology of world poetry. Further, we have developed a solidarity action for the foundation and support of new poetry festivals here and there, all over the world.
JAL: Which have been the main obstacles you have had to overcome and which have been the not only the stimuli but also the elements that have helped you in the process of creation and expansion of the Festival?
FR: The main obstacles we have had to overcome are products of the ignorance of the State about the nature of life and poetry. Our State is generous with war and death, and mean and indifferent towards the life expectency of the population. The army grows while the population wanes because of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and poor health. Poetry is useless for bureaucrats because this is a pragmatic and utilitarian society. The state cuts funds for culture and increases taxes for everything. We are close to social organizations because we have understood that it is very difficult to realize a poetic action on a grand scale, because we have to offer the population a breath of new life under the current conditions of war, and we have seen that the road to peace must be cut out. We are convinced that there no present or future is possible without poetry. Poetry is the life of all, mysterious and open, inviting us to plunge into ourselves and into others, for we are the other.
JAL: This year’s will be the XVII Festival, which in the course of past years has invited 747 poets from 131 countries, what does it mean to have this network of contacts with poets of a very high level? How could you take more advantage of their presence in the country in the interest of the culture and peace of the Colombian people?
FR: We rely on the tacit support of hundreds of poets from all over the world. Many of them have written articles on the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, which have been published in countless media in more that 50 countries. It is, in fact, a network of advisers, guides and brothers from all over the world. I am sure they will be fundamental allies in the near future and help strengthen the vast Colombian poetic project and reach a definitive peace in our country, which will transform Colombia into a country for poetry and for life, materially and culturally important in contemporary history.
JAL: Finally, Fernando, two more questions. What next for the Festival after this great international recognition; what are its aspirations? And you, Fernando, as a poet, following in Hölderlin’s footsteps, what sense do you see in going on writing in desperate times?
FR: The Festival will go on existing with ever greater energy and will be a lighthouse visible in the whole world. We will go on with the task of bringing poetry to all Colombians and festivals to new countries. We will strengthen the presence of poetry in the media and in contemporary society. We shall fight for the confluence of Colombian poets to strengthen the creative and liberating imagination, and against provocative censorship and self-censorship. We will participate in the formation of a poetic world force. And I will surely write more and better, without desperation, at the frontier of a new life under a new sky, for the whole sense of existence that brings us together is yet to be discovered and realized.
The long existence of the festival in one of the Colombian and Latin American cities most affected by violence has become something of a fiction and a struggle, and yet it continues sending its messages of peace to Colombia and the whole world.
José Ángel Leyva interviews Fernando Rendon about it.
JAL: What effect do you think the award of the 2006 Alternative Nobel prize to the International Poetry Festival of Medellìn will have on the desire for dialogue, on a potential political pact, on intelligent and sensitive searches for solutions to a situation which divides the country not only between the guerrillas, but among the many components that prolong the local bloodshed?José Ángel Leyva interviews Fernando Rendon about it.
FR: The award of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize 2006 of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín will not have any effect on the opposing Colombian armies’ desire for dialogue at the moment. With very few exceptions, the media in our country has not reported on the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize given to our organization in the Swedish parliament on December 8th last year. This says a lot about the deliberate refusal of most Colombian media not to recognize the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, which in itself is a form of mass media, simply because it cannot be manipulated or bribed.
JAL: I said it has something of a fiction, because it is not political rhetoric but poetics that embodies this longing for peace. I return to an idea that comes to mind from time to time when reading Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas, a novel about the Spanish Civil War. Cercas affirms that he was mistaken in supposing that wars are fed only by heroes, by soldiers, because he had discovered that at the origin of this fratricidal war were poets with their panegyrics and speeches, and their poems inciting to take one side or the other. With Colombia having been at war for many years, do you think that poets represent this possibility and, as Cercas writes in his novel, one of the causes of the confrontation?
FR: Wars are not fed by heroes or soldiers nor are they caused by their wish to be heroes or soldiers. Only an ignoramus would say that poets are at the origin of wars. Soldiers and poets are the victims of wars, they do not cause them. The economic and political interests of the dominant classes of the invading country are the origin of wars of invasion. The economic and political interests of the dominant class of a country are the origin of wars of subjection of one class by another. And there is one more variant: those who push peoples into wars of liberation are the same dominant and oppressive classes of a country. In all of these kinds of wars, soldiers and sometimes poets, take part. René Char, for example, as a guerrilla commander, took part in the struggle of the French Resistance against the fascists. The struggle of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín is for all Colombians to take the side of poetry, of a dignified life, and of peace with social justice, so that the killing that has devastated Colombia for decades stops.
JAL: You yourself are a poet and I know you’re also a man with very clear political ideas. There have been many episodes in which ideology overwhelms poetry, to a point where emotion and reality are absent. What is your view of these situations in a literary plane?
FR: The literary plane is a fiction if it is not associated with life itself. Poetry can never be ideologized. And censorship does not come only from the State. Some poems may contain ideological elements but you cannot bring poets to an inquisitorial trial on account of it. Some have chosen to remain silent in the face of the killing and to prevent others from talking. I think that some critics have a quite restrictive vision of what poets must and can think, write and do, poets being nourished by freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. But I agree that we poets must be attentive so that our poems do not become pamphlets and we must prevent the limitation a poet’s mission to that of an ideological pamphleteer.
JAL: Fernando, tell me how the Festival of Poetry was created, how the idea came about and what the real possibility was of establishing, in the midst of such a bloody situation, a cultural event that involves — I don’t know if this was from the beginning — thousands upon thousands of inhabitants of Medellín and other Colombian cities?
FR: If Mexico City lived in a situation of war and bombs and car bombs exploded on its streets, would you flee? Would you hide every day? If massacres and political genocide were a daily happening in your country, which route would you take? Well, it was in those circumstances that we founded the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, to oppose terror with beauty, to bring poetry face to face with violent death. We interpreted the love of poetry and the will to live of thousands of people, at the right moment. Then we decided to continue and to expand annually this venture that breaks with all political moulds and poetical ways of thinking.
JAL: Why such a massive and popular festival? This question is not harmless or naive. I ask it because I have heard that some poets who attended the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, although moved by the public, have questioned its literary effect. That is to say, they don’t think these public readings promote the reading of poetry or the knowledge of poets, or the appearance of new writers. From your point of view as an organizer and poet, and cultural promoter, what is you assessment of these things, beyond the political effect of the festival?
FR: Why not a massive and popular festival? Shall we close the doors of poetry in the face of a population that flows toward its source? The question is certainly not harmless or naive, as asked by some of our poets who would like to have ownership of the ineffable and drool for poetry to be the privilege of the elite. That is as if love and poetry were destined for the chosen ones and not for the whole human species. These poets say they are moved by the public of the Festival, but they deny the poetic intelligence of youth and doubt the effect of poetry on the private life of persons and the collective sensibility. The people that applaud, do they not read? No new poets will come from the People? What proves it? Today Lucía Estrada is considered perhaps the greatest female hope in Colombian poetry. Since 1991, since she was a child, she has been part of the public in most festivals. And she has also read her poetry as an invited poet. Our public have been nourished and strengthened by this vast poetic fire. This public looks for the authors, talks to them about their poetry; it is the people who talk about poetry on the street that feed poets. Let’s not forget it.
JAL: The organization of a Festival of such dimensions as it has now reached, necessitates many factors, but above all it needs the firm conviction of a cultural manager that he is going right direction in an adequate context. How have you, with your small organizing team, obtained the financial resources, persuaded politicians and bureaucratics, resisted the attacks of groups of intellectuals and sometimes the bad faith of many colleagues who want your efforts to fail? How have you experienced and managed these problems common to all cultural ventures? How have you taken advantage of criticism and how have you confronted political battering?
FR: Prometeo is made up of a group of poets who share common principles, purposes and a work method which aims at the creation and promotion of poetry. We have overcome all kind of obstacles, a lack of financial resources, pressure, scorn and threats. I also realized that poetry can generate hatred between humans. Many writing colleagues, as you call them, with their backs to the killing, have wished our efforts to fail, lacking all generosity and greatness. Deep down they think that poetry is just a literary genre. They would like the Festival to disappear. Their uneasiness is just another expression of human nature. Human clay is fragile. But meanness is one thing and criticism another. We have built the Festival based on a daily dose of lucid self-criticism. The Festival is now considered a model in the world, and we have a whole chain of complementary projects: The School of Poetry of Medellín and the poetry workshops, the publishing of the Prometeo review (76 numbers in 25 years), the making of documentaries for TV and of DVD’s containing the audiovisual history of the Festival, and a digital anthology of world poetry. Further, we have developed a solidarity action for the foundation and support of new poetry festivals here and there, all over the world.
JAL: Which have been the main obstacles you have had to overcome and which have been the not only the stimuli but also the elements that have helped you in the process of creation and expansion of the Festival?
FR: The main obstacles we have had to overcome are products of the ignorance of the State about the nature of life and poetry. Our State is generous with war and death, and mean and indifferent towards the life expectency of the population. The army grows while the population wanes because of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and poor health. Poetry is useless for bureaucrats because this is a pragmatic and utilitarian society. The state cuts funds for culture and increases taxes for everything. We are close to social organizations because we have understood that it is very difficult to realize a poetic action on a grand scale, because we have to offer the population a breath of new life under the current conditions of war, and we have seen that the road to peace must be cut out. We are convinced that there no present or future is possible without poetry. Poetry is the life of all, mysterious and open, inviting us to plunge into ourselves and into others, for we are the other.
JAL: This year’s will be the XVII Festival, which in the course of past years has invited 747 poets from 131 countries, what does it mean to have this network of contacts with poets of a very high level? How could you take more advantage of their presence in the country in the interest of the culture and peace of the Colombian people?
FR: We rely on the tacit support of hundreds of poets from all over the world. Many of them have written articles on the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, which have been published in countless media in more that 50 countries. It is, in fact, a network of advisers, guides and brothers from all over the world. I am sure they will be fundamental allies in the near future and help strengthen the vast Colombian poetic project and reach a definitive peace in our country, which will transform Colombia into a country for poetry and for life, materially and culturally important in contemporary history.
JAL: Finally, Fernando, two more questions. What next for the Festival after this great international recognition; what are its aspirations? And you, Fernando, as a poet, following in Hölderlin’s footsteps, what sense do you see in going on writing in desperate times?
FR: The Festival will go on existing with ever greater energy and will be a lighthouse visible in the whole world. We will go on with the task of bringing poetry to all Colombians and festivals to new countries. We will strengthen the presence of poetry in the media and in contemporary society. We shall fight for the confluence of Colombian poets to strengthen the creative and liberating imagination, and against provocative censorship and self-censorship. We will participate in the formation of a poetic world force. And I will surely write more and better, without desperation, at the frontier of a new life under a new sky, for the whole sense of existence that brings us together is yet to be discovered and realized.
© José Ángel Leyva
Translator: Nicolás Suescún
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère