Welcome to Colombian poetry - November 2005

18 januari 2006 We were always imitators and were never in the first rank of those who dared get rid of the traditional verbiage to open new ways. It’s as if the waves produced by the most revolutionary French poetry of the 19th century had never reached us or were weakened and filtered by our reading of Spanish poetry. The movement of the nineteen thirties, ‘Piedra y cielo’ (‘Stone and Sky’) is good example, its members being admirers and followers of the work of the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Until Luis Vidales, Colombian poetry seems to have walked on monkish or palatial carpets. Luis Vidales (a revolutionary in more than one sense, he was one of the founders of the Colombian Communist Party at a time in which being a communist in our country was considered almost a crime – just like today), was an exception and a pioneer: he is the one poet who began to talk to us with words that really seemed to be ours. Formally diametrically opposed and also a shining exception, Leon de Greiff was so original and isolated that he had no followers.

Only in the second half of the 20th century there was a fresh start in our poetry, thanks to the publishing of the best European writers of the time in the reviews Mito and Eco, but it was not yet a firm road to modernity. In the sixties, ‘nadaísmo’ shocked society, and although it did not produce great works or poets, it had the doubtless virtue of making us feel that poetry really belonged to us. Although its poets have conformed and been surpassed aesthetically by many others, the effects of the movement are still felt.

There are now many poets of newer generations, favored in great measure by another Colombian phenomenon: the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, that hast put new poets in contact, not only with the poetry written in the world during the last fifteen years, but with the latest tendencies and aesthetic movements: concrete poetry, for example, and other types of experimental poetry.

The result of this is a certain ‘overproduction’, full of dangers. Many of our young poets understandably think that experience and poetic emotion are enough to qualify their writing of poetry. Another danger is an obsession with originality, one of the first visible consequences of which is the writing of abstruse and ‘hermetic’ texts. In spite of all this – and the poets published in this issue confirm it – Colombia has already taken a road of its own, although not isolated, tradition, and has at last entered into the realm of modernity.

Although it is early to make predictions about poets who are at a formative stage, we have no doubt that some of these new poets feel not only a passion and love for poetry, but have knowledge and a transgressing respect for tradition, and also discipline and seriousness, together with that almost indefinable and essential thing we always mention when talking about poetry: poetic intuition.

We are sure that these virtues guarantee that Colombia can maintain a place on the map of world poetry. We are sure that Felipe García Quintero, Andrea Cote, Luis Eduardo Rendón, Lucía Estrada, Darío Sánchez, Clemencia Sánchez, Yorlady Ruiz and others, will keep on writing their beautiful poetry to confirm it.

In this issue we publish new poetry by young poet Andrea Cote, who recently received the ‘Struga Bridges’ award for the best debut book worldwide, bestowed by the Struga Poetry Evenings in 2005; and by Colombian poets José Manuel Arango and Santiago Mutis. Translated by Nicolás Suescún