The poet who came from far away

Imágen. El Ucabista.com

 When you decide to write you are in a permanent area of search. Of infinite questions and inconclusive answers.  Of creatures that are born from the ductile and profoundly credible that rests in the alphabet and that is structured according to the passage of feeling, of the inside.

My experience, my encounter, and my guide at the beginning of this search was with an extraordinary person: the Canadian poet laureate Mark Strand.

I visited him briefly during a visit to the auditorium at my alma mater, the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas, Venezuela. I could see him from a short distance, surrounded by important figures in my country's cultural scene. His six feet tall stature poorly hid his restless and luminous spirit, there, seated as he was on the podium.

The audience was sparse, a proverbial thing among fans of poetry and literature, yet the auditorium was permeated with a reflective atmosphere, attentive to what the bard brought in his saddlebags to give to us, eager to investigate mysteries elaborated from recounts of our own or other people's lives, seeking in his words as a guest of honor the voracious and nourishing lesson of living testimony.

Surprisingly, I encountered a simple person, totally devoid of that insufferable ego of the famous or those who think they are famous, of that brazen arrogance possessed by some literary critics, renowned poets, or university professors who declare themselves above the human or the divine. No, Mark Strand was a beautiful human being, endowed with an extraordinary sensitivity and a humility that corroborates what I have always thought... the more the tree is laden with fruit, the more it bends.

His eyes shone with satisfaction at the questions of all of us, beardless novice writers or proto-poets looking for the source of a possible paradise, looking for the transit towards those realities that are created from the mind and then amaze. He did not disappoint me.

In his dissertation he opened us to Picasso's premise, affirming that the muse in poetry must find you at work. He gave us transitive elements for the search for the absolute as opposed to the inclemency of concrete time, that is to say, he opened the floodgate of discoveries in the poetic voice to dissipate that search for the privileged in a horizon full of fecundity by dint of tenacity and insistence.

I was extremely nervous and in an English somewhat rusty from disuse I asked him the question that I considered capital; how to face the blank page?

He looked at me with shining eyes in that frenzy that feeds on itself and answered:

- "Just feel". 

There I understood that writing poetry is a cosmovision, poetry is in itself an ethics and an ontology, what the Germans call Weltanschauung, a way of seeing the world and it is not just another way of doing literature.

During my time at university, I met professors who insisted on stripping away the sensible, on making the act of writing something mechanical in a constant and routine exercise devoid of the sensible referent. They insisted on reducing the pure flesh contemplated as a reality alien to the primary substance, where nostalgia, or the very human drama of existing and feeling has no place, taking with tweezers the feeling in the graphemes to sift a thousand times like an alchemist in a glass vial.

Mark Strand, in brief words, showed me that the tumultuous verb comes to the surface when one feels with intensity that which is written. That the inextricable reality is made feasible by the humor and love in what is done. That purity is in the feeling, not in the mechanicity or the cold re-elaboration. The agonizing, the painful, the vital is embodied when endurance is made through feeling and authentic honesty.

I think that the purist and intimate poetics faithfully capture this perception.

That's what I can voraciously take advantage of in those few minutes, when the eyes of an old poet who came from afar, looked at me brilliantly, pointing out the path I had to follow. 

We chatted briefly at the end of the colloquium, and I respectfully asked him to autograph his book "Nothing Happens". He did much more than that. He spoke to me about the gradation from dark to bright. He instructed me to be true to what I feel, even at the cost of multiply searching the intuitive tension. He showed me how to assimilate myself through writing, as a mode of acceptance in the search for concrete metaphysical form. 

He smiled at me, and his hand, as he shook mine...

sealed the deal,

 and I followed the path he pointed out to me.