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Want to be ahead of your time? Listen to young people.
Tomorrow morning, I have a remarkable appointment to talk about poetry with high school students in the International Baccalaureate program at Tecnologico de Monterrey (PrepaTec). Their literature teacher told me that some are interested in talking to a poet about how he does his work.
What work? At this point, I ask myself, what does a poet do? Trying to answer such a complicated question, I rummage through my mental repository, only to remember the conversation I had this morning with my son. It gives me an idea that, by appearance, has nothing to do with the subject, and yet it will allow me, if not to say what poetry is, at least to say what is not. Given the mystery of that literary genre, it may be a breakthrough.
My son and I left home today to take him to school. On our way, he noticed a pile of trash on the median before us. Disgusted, he drew my attention to it. For me, our conversation became remorseful: What do we, our family, do to contribute to the well-being of the community, humanity, and the planet? I was beginning to sink into shame when an idea popped into my head and inspired me.
“Look, I told him, “human beings must choose day by day how they will contribute to the well-being of nature and their community. A week ago, you and your mom picked up from the street a couple of abandoned baby kittens that most likely would have died if you had helped them. Then we sheltered them, fed them, took them to the doctor, and medicated them – one of them required a hernia operation. One is still in our home, even though we already have a dog and two adult cats. As for the other one, we already found it a home with people who will care for her affectionately. All that was not and will not be easy, so for the moment, it forces us to put aside tasks such as going to the median to clean up garbage. What do you think is more important, picking up the kittens or picking up the trash?
“The kittens,” he replies immediately.
“I feel the same.”
“But why don’t we do both?” He insisted.
“That’s the point! Maybe you can do it, but I can’t. I don’t have time. I have a lot of occupations, including, among other things, earning enough money to keep our new kitten alive. If I stop to pick up the trash, I would have to stop doing some of those other things.”
My son responded with one of his favorite topics.
“If I were president, I’d ban video games so kids would always have time to adopt kittens and pick up the trash.”
I felt like my son was inspired… and I was, too.
“That’s exactly what a politician does,” I exclaimed, “identifying a community’s needs, deciding which are a priority, and establishing laws to address them.”
“And eliminate people who break those laws,” he said, as if it were nothing.
“That’s what a tyrant does,” I said.
“A tyrannical politician, a polytyrant,” he concluded.
Once I dropped him off at school and was alone, I continued to be immersed in inspired intuitions. For example, when a community cannot legally organize itself to assume priorities and abide by specified agreements, the only alternative to the tyrannical system, which despises all kinds of agreements, is a system of corruption like the one that has prevailed in our country historically, i.e., a kind of self-government in which some of the agreements are made between people directly (private agreements, not public ones). These meet some priority needs that the laws do not solve effectively. However, political shenanigans, the police and judicial injustices, the fraud – these are all measures of a still immature society. They resolve societal needs irresponsibly; the people prefer invoking a tyrannical father, a dictator who brings order.
My readers can tell you the value of “my intuitions.” The truth is that, for me, they were brilliant conclusions. I say this without conceit because I myself was surprised by the answers I was not seeking, ideas that seemed to appear without being invoked as if they had a life of their own as if they were the fruits of inspiration.
However, one thing is clear to me: none came from what we call “poetic inspiration.”
I think the main difference is that the appearance of these intellectual intuitions, although sudden and unsought, resolves intellectual unknowns as well. That is to say, they are reasonable conclusions, and as such, when they appear, we have the clear impression that they are pushing forward and that there is progress in our reasoning. Perhaps most important in all of this, however, is that we do not need to be clear about the questions behind these conclusions. In fact, the moment they arise, these answers are like springs that also spurt the questions that trigger them. We may consciously ask ourselves something, yet intuition will reveal our fundamental question. For a moment, everything in our thinking acquires direction, and it seems to have an end. We feel (or think, or believe) that there is a truth at the end of the road. (By the way, this kind of intellectual intuition is supposed to pop out suddenly in the literary genre of the essay; hence, some writers say, “I write to find out what I’ve been thinking.”)
Poetry is like that: pure intuition and not intellectual. With poetry, we do not head ourselves in a single direction but in many. One loses direction, and it makes sense. I say this as something that happened to me a few days ago with a friend comes to mind. While we were eating, the topic of poetry came up, and she explained that it was a genre she did not appreciate (her gesture was more like “I hate it.” “Poets avoid saying what they want to say, expressing openly and directly what they think,” she told me. Our conversation got sidetracked by the arrival of another friend we awaited. Later, the three of us were walking through the streets of Coyoacán, in Mexico City, when the first friend (the intellectual, the reasoning one who doesn’t understand or appreciate poetry) stopped abruptly and, in a kind of epiphany, exclaimed with all the parsimony of her character:
“You saw that this car got unpainted on the sidewalk?”
What did she mean? On the cement, at our feet, were stains of blue paint here and there, already dry, just at the dimensions where a car of the same color was parked. To understand that exclamation required two possibilities: to ask my friend what she was talking about and accept it with an effort of imagination (without anyone seeing, the car had thrown jets of paint on the sidewalk), or to enjoy the same feeling that had been triggered inside her when she said it: poetic inspiration. To me, who is assailed from time to time by these “occurrences,” the one about the car and the stains immediately seemed beautiful. My friend revealed what was already clear to me: she loves poetry (even if she has not practiced the craft of reading or writing it).
Am I getting closer to describing poetry and what a poet does?
*
Abusing my readers, I open this brief detour to explain the following: If I have already declared that the difference between intellectual intuition and poetry is the same as that between direction and sense, I would now like to add where I see the difference between poetry and spirituality. My aside is so brief that I doubt it will allow me to explain myself, but I do not want to fail to point out its relevance and attempt it:
In some ways, it is very simple: While poetry teaches us the meaning of life (and is, therefore, the most sublime pedagogy), spirituality extends meaning to our entire existence. I repeat: poetry teaches us the meaning of life; spirituality, of existence. Obviously, for those who see no difference between our life and our existence, there will be no difference between spirituality and poetry.
*
I continue this text a day after writing the previous paragraphs, having already chatted with students at the PrepaTec high school. I will try to remember some of what we discussed. One of the students asked me if I thought that to write poetry, you need to read many poems. I replied that poetry (as a wise priest once told me about God) does not hinder those who want to approach it. Certainly, reading many poems can, on the one hand, sensitize us to a specific type of expression, and on the other, it can give us experience to know more or less how to approach the reading of a poem. I told the class that many years ago when I began to read Rainer Maria Rilke, struck by the common idea that he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century, I also thought that his writing would be difficult to penetrate and involve much effort. When, years later, I finally managed to “get” his verses, I realized that they were straightforward and that all my earlier efforts had only tensed me and prevented me from the relaxed experience of understanding them.
Neither reading nor writing poetry should arise from an obligation. Forcing a student to read poetry is almost the most anti-pedagogical thing in the world, second only to obliging them to enjoy it, which is as insane as forcing someone to believe in God.
Another student asked me if I thought it necessary to know the era in which a poet lived to understand his work. I told him that this knowledge serves to get rid of prejudices. Every era has its own writing style. If we read those poems now, some may seem stilted and old, preventing us from perceiving the poetry beneath them. Knowing a little about that time and those styles may help us to put our blocks aside, that is, to clear what distances us from the poet. Perhaps we will discover that a living being still speaks behind a style that seems dead.
Other student brought up the subject of rhyme and meter and their disappearance in almost all contemporary poetry. I responded with ideas I had already outlined in a previous talk with young people of another generation. It was not the first time Professor Ileana Reyes, the Spanish and Literature department director at PrepaTec in Metepec, invited me to chat with her students. A couple of years previously, during the pandemic, she did it too. At that time, my talk with the students was on Zoom, and I also touched on the topic of rhyme and meter. To not dwell further in this text, I offer some brief notes on which I based my comments below. I hope its syntax is not too dry.
They are as follows:
- Art has always been linked to entertainment. Those who deny that art should always be fun are pretending.
- Related to art, rituals should be exciting and enjoyable. The same goes for the paintings and music in the churches.
- In times and places when people did not have access to music in their homes, listening to someone play the vihuela or sing beautifully could be quite a spectacle. It was the same when someone could buy or draw a good portrait or a landscape and hang it in their house: it was surprising and unusual. In the same way, hearing a person say things or tell stories with rhyme and meter would have been great entertainment.
- As electronic technology advanced, people had more access to art in the industrial age, even in their homes. Then came photography, the phonograph, radio, cinema, and television. Copies lowered the price of art and its trade spread. With the appearance of photography, people feared that painting would fall into disuse, and artists reacted by painting reality as it was not. The songs on the phonographs and the radio began to compete with declaimed poetry, and in this case, the writers responded first by exacerbating the sonority of rhymes and meters (as in the case of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío) and then by stripping their texts of them to limit themselves to capturing the idea and the image in freer rhythms and sounds.
- Thus, poetry became drastically divided into two categories: popular poetry (associated with rhyming songs and increasingly widespread and cheap technology) and cultured poetry, which was appreciated above all in books.
- Some so-called “cultured” poets took their writing to extreme inscrutability and boredom (at least for the uneducated). In 1957, the humorist Jorge Llopis, in his book The Thousand Worst Poems of the Spanish Language, mocked them in a poem entitled Amor (one of those poems so modern that you cannot know what it means), where he exclaims:
I sing to you in the shadow of this glaucous
awakening of theorems and cimboria,
Like the flying of hispid emphysema,
Like the swift splendor of the mantises,
Like the inane fraud of the petiole
who, sweating incoherent vigils,
undulate the prophylactic cacumen…
- Be that as it may, and despite all the vicissitudes poetry may experience in different eras, it will always belong to everyone and for everyone, whether sung or read, in a low voice or out loud.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this article to the students of the 2019-2022 and 2021-2024 generations of the International Baccalaureate of the PrepaTec Metepec campus. Like life in Violeta Parra’s song, they have given me so much.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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