Juan Calzadilla / Barbarian's Alchemy

 
Barbarian’s Alchemy

by Juan Calzadilla

     Rimbaud discards his poet’s investiture to assume his Eurocentric condition. In the African colonies he finds, oh, his next plunder. What follows isn’t poetry. 

     On the other hand, Blaise Cendrars is a reclaimant of the colonialist Rimbaud. In his adventures in Africa he goes in search of a photographic alchemy of the verb. For him poetry starts to be something that’s not exclusively in words, but in the glance, in his Kodak and in journeys.

     As for me: I’m one of those who thinks of his work as something exterior to myself. I’m not much of a protagonist. The place where I find myself, in relation to my work, isn’t very defined, not even in a journey to the interior of my own self.

Juan Calzadilla 

Libro de las poéticas

Caracas, Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006

Juan Calzadilla / Del texto

Of the Text

by Juan Calzadilla

     Some have experienced the feeling of poetry to such an extreme degree that the fact of having expressed it in their lives with the same intensity by which they would like to have written it, has incapacitated them and, for that reason, exempted them from putting it into words.

     But doesn’t the nature of poetry consist of the act of living it? No. As it doesn’t consist of the act of writing it. It consists of writing itself. This is why the true poet doesn’t have a real existence.

Juan Calzadilla

Libro de las poéticas

Caracas, Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006