I arrived at CIC El Almacén de Arrecife with the feeling that something intimate, almost secret, was about to happen. “Everything in you is shipwreck” was the title of the event, but it was also a promise, an invitation to let ourselves be traversed by the fragility and intensity of love, that unstable territory where poetry finds part of its most fertile material.
The initial moment was the round table that I shared with Lana Corujo and Juli Mesa, moderated by Guacimara Hernández. A powerful excuse brought us together: to revisit Twenty love poems from the present and to put it in tension with current love poetry. We talked about inheritances, discomforts, new sensibilities. About how to write love today without repeating formulas, without ignoring what has already been said, but also without getting trapped in it.
The love we read in Pablo Neruda —especially in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair— is permeated by an almost absolute intensity, where the poetic self loves from possession, idealization, and, at times, from a solitude that turns the other person into landscape or absence. Today, on the other hand, love is written and lived from a territory much more aware of its limits: power relations have changed, the way of naming desire, the very idea of a bond. We have moved from a love that aspired to the eternal and total to another more fragmented, negotiated one, where doubt, consent, diversity, and also rupture as a natural part of the process fit.
And, however, there is something that persists: the need to say it, to try to fix in words that which always escapes, as if between yesterday's verses and today's the same unanswered question continued to beat.
The conversation flowed naturally, and in it, an idea that permeated the entire event appeared recurrently: the importance of bringing poetry closer to the public, of taking it out of closed spaces and valuing the shared experience. In that sense, the reception was revealing. There was a large attendance and, especially, a very significant presence of young people. Seeing so many people listening, asking questions, and getting emotional with poetry was, in itself, one of the greatest achievements of the day.
The talk by Literature professor and poet Sonia Betancort was another of the key moments. Her intervention not only provided context and reflection, but also ended up deeply moving us with several readings. Among them, Hernán Casciari's text on mobile phones and literature, where he addressed how waiting and lack of communication have been fundamental for a good part of the works in our literary tradition, or Raúl Zurita's poem dedicated to his wife Paulina, which she read —recalling the moment he was awarded the Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize—.
Sonia left a charged silence in the room, the kind that isn't easily broken. It was a reminder of poetry's ability to pierce us. And then I thought, almost out loud, that that moment also contained an open question towards the future: wouldn't it be wonderful if Raúl Zurita came to Lanzarote? The idea remained floating as a possible continuation of the project, as a shared desire that perhaps one day will find its form.
The inauguration of the art installation “Seven love poems and a song of despair” marked the end of that emotional journey. Curated by Guacimara Hernández, the proposal brought together Rubén Acosta, Elena Betancor, Rosalía Díe, Sergio Erro, Flora González, Isabelle Mathieu, Imara Rêvasser and Fernando Robayna, who freely interpreted different poems from Twenty love poems and a song of despair. Each piece was an expanded reading, a rewriting from the visual and the sensitive that confirmed that Neruda's verses continue to generate dialogue. The installation opened and overflowed the book.
As the days went by, I revisited the installation. It seemed to me that the works had changed, or perhaps it was I who had changed after talking and listening about love from so many different angles. “Everything in you is shipwreck” ceased to be just a metaphor to become a living experience: that of assuming that love —like poetry— remains a territory in transformation and profoundly necessary.