For the Vast Minority

18 januari 2006 My title is borrowed from a dedication included in a book of poetry by Jimenez. As far as the life force of poetry goes, the essence of poetry, this is perhaps the best answer one can give. As far as the majority of poets goes, this is the best expectation a poet can have of her readers, as well as the best dedication she can make.

This is the end of another century, and we must get used to the different streams in our readership; we must also give over some of the space of readership to television, newspapers, public discourse, best-sellers, rags-to-riches stories and even fiction. Poetry will get used to such a positioning: for some people, it will have no meaning, but for other it will be full of significance. To put it another way, there where the mass of people are indifferent, poetry will still receive a favorable reception from some people.

My poetry as always been offered to the minority in my heart. They may be strangers whom I have invented in my mind, but more often they are specific friends I have around me; my poetry seems to be written for them, as if my heart had, at the time, something it urgently wished to discuss with their hearts. This may also explain why my poems always have a dimly visible “third person” in them, a hidden person who is at the centre of an attentive listening. For this reason, my poems bear no relation to the latest trends, nor to urgent currents of thought in the contemporary world. They are merely the products of my watching over a changing era from the site of words and the backs of pieces of paper. In fact, they are of little importance and are not appreciated and recognized; the wonderful thing is that they are understood by myself, as well as a minority of people who like and who understand things that “have absolutely no meaning”. If, by chance, they get classified and filed away, this is not my concern and has no connection with my writing.

A minority, then, and yet a vast, unlimited one, by Jimenez’s logic. This is because this minority structures an exchange between myself and quiet and language, and constitutes the axis of my poems, spurring on the circulation of poetry’s blood, causing language to become like living red blood cells that breed, multiply and increase the various elements in poetry that seem like the ravings of a mad woman but which are, all the same, the gains of intuition. It is for the changes and the protracted gazes of this minority that I write, and when I sit down at my desk, it is they who are watching me and making demands on me from their various spaces and points of view.

And so, as far as I am concerned, unlimited implications are contained in one’s self. A friend once said to me: “Repetition is a force” but, in my case, repetition implies limitation, while change alone provides a concept of an eternally inexhaustible unlimited. I hope that my poems manage to create the following kind of space: one not restrained by the knowledge that already exists, and one not confined by the history that has already happened. In a vaster space, it will be freely experienced and accommodated.

Sometimes, I hope that my poems won’t be like my oversensitive nerves, feeble, chaotic, imbalanced. I would prefer to put in order certain substances on the basis of the appearance of things. In fact, I believe even more that certain plain things are more worthy of interest than their exteriors would suggest: we neglect their deeper levels. I hope that with the spade of my poetry I can dig past the surface dust covering images and vocabulary, and keep on digging until I reach the core of things, a core that resembles sand and pebbles: hard, forceful, drained of excess moisture and therefore the most reliable foundation for the great building of aesthetics.

However, on some occasions, when the particulars in a poem flow and permeate, language is monstrously exaggerated, expressing an uncertainty about the system, a dislocation of the existing language. When this happens, you have no choice but to respect the implications organized by this language, a language that goes beyond what you are capable of thinking. It’s just like music: when the music flows inside you, it awakes your limbs and every bone in your body, contorting your rigid and shrunken torso, but this does not mean that you have to love the performance and style of any specific musician.

Sometimes I am inclined to think that even if I had only one one reader left to me, my poetry would still have a purpose for this one member of the unlimited: to seek out vitality, extend beauty, to seek an unlimited intense emotion in the face of a limited reality. This is because that “one member” is like the image in a mirror reflecting back at me my own endless desires. What’s more, I believe that the only contact is between readers and writers—history and events will forever vanish away. Only poetry and those things which it represents endure here eternally.

Translated by Simon Patton