The Poet’s Word

Impelled by a Dream

Poetry isn't meant to be explained. Every poem says what it says and is the result of a not always known or predictable inner process. Besides the deliberate reasons that impel one to give a particular kind of written form to thought, there are other instinctive causes. Faced with the blank page, not even the writer knows how this adventure of naming something that as yet has no name is going to end. The best artists tend to move beyond their consciousness and, when it comes to the crunch, if they have to choose between reality and language they'll choose language. That's what I call authenticity. Bearing in mind that words are no more than fragments of our most intrinsic identity. So we can equally call it freedom. Poetry, literature, is an act of freedom because in giving autonomy to words we give it to ourselves. Yet the whole thing doesn't end here. A good literary text also has to allow readers to reinterpret it freely according to their way of being in the world or according to their needs. This is why I'm not keen on talking about my poems. I'd like them to resemble music. More than answers or a thesis, a powerful stimulus. An explosion of light that illuminates the dark corners of the existential landscapes of those who have opted to read them. I don't need any other complicity from readers, that is if I have any in the country we're forging over scandalous speculation in which what is left of our essences will very soon be what could be summed up in that line of Anselm Turmeda that goes, “Crooked money is the maker of truth”.

Meanwhile, some resistant people, impelled by a dream, remain true to poetry and persist in summoning up the muses so as to find sense in these times of ours or so they'll protect us from the lash of ignorance and the excesses of love and death. Before the dimensions of the universe, before the perplexity with which we contemplate existence, before the mystery of language, we sometimes write or read poetry like someone whistling in the dark to fend off fear. Our grandeur consists in the fact of placing our moral and intellectual survival in the hands of a reality that is ostensibly as inconsistent as the possibilities of the word. Our drama is that of our personal limitations, the battle we shall never win with beauty and the indifference of our contemporaries.

Antoni Vidal Ferrando