ON LUIS GARCÍA MONTERO
I
am tempted to speak of Luis García Montero in superlatives: He
is, arguably, Spain’s most prominent and influential poet of the last
thirty years and will likely go down in history as such. Yet García
Montero himself is uncomfortable with his description as a man who stands
alone. When I interviewed him about his work in April of this year,
he responded to almost every question about himself with an allusion
to the work of his predecessors, from the Generation of ’27 poet Federico
García Lorca to the avante-garde novísimos whose
movement preceded his own; the role of the poet, in his eyes, is fundamentally
that of a community member. In a broader sense, this commitment to solidarity
and unanimity extends to García Montero’s dedication to his native
city of Granada. Urban space, as a result, plays a significant role
in his work as a setting of constant and spontaneous interaction.
The
poetry movement García Montero and his contemporaries founded
in the early ’80s as students at the University of Granada is called
poesía de la experiencia, or Poetry of Experience. While
previous Spanish movements envisioned poetry as a tool for effecting
political change or as a purely aesthetic, intellectual form, Poetry
of Experience is primarily concerned with locating emotional profundity
within the experience of the common man in daily life. García
Montero writes for his audience, employing a deliberately accessible
language, and — perhaps most interestingly — he writes as his
audience. He is emphatic about the necessity of erasing the most personal
aspects of his poetry in order to create a generalized character upon
which the reader can project his own experience. As a result, his poetry
is distinctly fictionalized and stands out for its reliance on narrative
structures.
The
fundamental goal of this fictionalization is to shrink the distance
between the poet and his environment. We see this in his metaphoric
strategy as well, as García Montero uses personification to give
character to everything from chairs to body parts to the city that surrounds
him, while simultaneously minimizing his own role as a protagonist;
in doing this, he actively rebels against the heroic protagonist archetype.
This equalization is populist in nature, reflecting the political convictions
of García Montero, who last year helped found the liberal political
party Izquierda Abierta (Open Left). His poetry challenges the hierarchies
between beautiful and ugly imagery and the typical false dichotomy between
the specially enlightened poet and the rest of the world.
I
was drawn to Diario cómplice (1987) because it is García
Montero’s work that most thoroughly exhibits his anti-isolation impulse
both thematically and aesthetically. I translate the title as Diary
of an Accomplice, and indeed these poems are the confessions of
a man who sees himself as inextricably linked to all the world’s actions,
but it also means Complicit Diary — the writing itself is an
accomplice. As to what exactly his crime is, he leaves that ambiguous,
but the poet’s admission of his god-like power in I, XXV, seems to hint
at his guilt in the fact that no matter how hard he tries, he can never
completely evade his own preeminence.
This
unresolved conflict between his desire to dissolve barriers and the
stubborn fact of his uniqueness is at the heart of García Montero’s
poetry. His protagonist wavers between declarations of oneness with
his city and abject loneliness, and ultimately he is unable to definitively
embrace the truth or falseness of either. Romantic poetry is given an
unusual twist through this perspective. Not only does the intimacy of
the second-person address allow García Montero to put the relationship
of self to other under the microscope, but he also affirms his devotion
to populism by equalizing relationships of individual to individual
(the protagonist to his lover) to those of individual to group (the
protagonist to nature, city and urban populace). Rather than employ
nature as an ode to the lover’s beauty, he treats the world as a muse
in its own right, giving loving attention to such overlooked objects
as construction cranes and the red tremble of brake lights. Whether
in the political arena or in the realm of poetic imagery, García
Montero’s foremost motivation is to challenge divisions between the
privileged and the ignored.
SIX
POEMS FROM DIARY OF AN ACCOMPLICE
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