Literature has to do with the impossible. Fernando Pessoa intuited this when he wrote in his Book of Disquiet that the literary effort consists of turning life into something real. It seems like a paradox: isn't life the only truly real thing? And yet, Pessoa was right. Only through words can we understand, order, and, in a way, inhabit what we have lived. Turning the everyday into literature is a form of salvation. The small and essential things in life are non-transferable... Unless they become literary.
Last week we celebrated Book Day at the Island Library with that immense and humble goal: to make the real manifest through words. For this, we had the presence of two essential poets from our archipelago: Isabel Expósito Morales and Antonio Martín Medina under the mural dedicated to the unforgettable Leandro Perdomo. It was a gift to listen to them: their calm voice, their thoughtful words, the depth of their speeches reminded us of what Marguerite Duras wrote about the writer's craft: "a writer is something strange, a contradiction and also nonsense. He is someone peaceful, who listens a lot." And we, in that comfortable and beloved space that is the Island Library, had the opportunity to know what a writer feels, to listen a lot.
T. S. Eliot, one of the great poets of the 20th century - whom we are reading this month in the Book Club - said that poetry has an almost intuitive power: it moves, even if its rational meaning is not fully grasped. There is something in the rhythm, the image, the structure that goes directly to the soul. For him, poetry was not just a matter of ideas, but of aesthetic experience. In his essays on metaphysical poets like John Donne, Eliot introduced the idea that in the past poets were able to unite thought and feeling in a single expression, which he called a unified sensibility. He felt that modernity had caused a "dissociation of sensibility", separating the emotional from the intellectual. Eliot believed that poetry should be intellectual, complex and at the same time deeply emotional. He thought that the poet should recover the old union between thought and feeling, and that poetry was a form of knowledge. Perhaps that is why poetry moves us: because it does not overflow, but contains itself. Eliot also spoke of
tradition, of how the true poet does not invent from scratch, but inserts himself into a chain of voices that precede him. That happened in the library: the voices of Isabel and Antonio were new, but also old, woven with echoes of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Cadenas, Raúl Zurita and many others, and also of the skies of Arrecife.
Isabel Expósito Morales, born in El Hierro and marked by the island geography, has traveled a solid literary path, from her first poem under an unexpected rain during her childhood in Arrecife (inspired by the verses of the poem "Water Bird" by Juan Ramón Jiménez) to the recent publication of Instancias del agua by the prestigious Pre-Textos publishing house. For his part, Antonio Martín Medina, a professor at IES César Manrique, a passionate reader and scholar of Zurita, has woven his work with a critical, reflective voice, in tune with the unease of our times, of which his latest sample is the book De la incomodidad published in the Faro de la Puntilla collection of the Mercurio publishing house directed by Eugenio Padorno. In this latest collection of poems, Martín Medina uses, like Eliot in The Waste Land, language as a tool to express the decadence of the contemporary system, moving away from conventional clarity.
Listening to the poems of Isabel Expósito Morales and Antonio Martín Medina was like observing a literary bonsai, such a delicate art, an image that Alejandro Zambra reminds us of in his novel Bonsái: "writing is pruning language until the essential is revealed." Perhaps that is poetry: not saying everything, but saying just what cannot be said in any other way. As Marcelo Pellegrini said: "To read what I want to read/ I would have to write it/ But I don't know how to write it/ No one knows how to write it."
In that Café de Escritores, between verses and questions from the attendees and the members of the Book Club, between the music of Esperanza Martínez Riquelme and Daniel Castañeyra and with the memory of the recent rain, literature became —for a few hours— that real thing that Pessoa spoke of.
Two unforgettable phrases. "The perfect poem is the one I know I will not write," Isabel Expósito told us. "Arrecife wants to be the city that will never be," Antonio Martín Medina stated. The Island Library: a common space where words are not spent, where each verse opens a possibility. Because the book, reading, poetry... are not just culture. They are also tools of listening, understanding and equity. And in this world every
increasingly noisy, remembering the value of written silence is a form of resistance. After the storm of the previous week, after the intense rains on the island, we needed a little of that calm that only poetry can provide. Water bird, what do you enchant, what do you sing?
