The Poet's Word

A Few Points to Clear the Way a Bit

Poetry is not exclusive to anything or anyone. We might define it as a special way of seeing or perceiving reality. It can therefore be found in all the arts and in any personal experience (although it should not be confused with good feelings).

Normally, we consider poetry to be a literary genre. Strictly speaking it is that, a literary genre, but not only that. One must stress the fact that poetry can be found in music, painting, drawing, engraving, design, theatre, cinema, dance, mime, the novel, sculpture, architecture, and so on and so forth: in brief, in all the arts.

As a literary genre, it is the most eminently and radically oral. Epic poetry was shaped, took on a form, before writing existed. The first depositary of poetry is memory. Metrics facilitates memorisation.

Palma de Mallorca, 1933-2011. Poet

There are many kinds of poetry and, accordingly, there are really countless definitions of poetry. Without a doubt, the most widely understood conception is that its goal or primordial purpose is to create or produce beauty. The poet would then be a kind of silversmith working with carefully sought words and syntagms, with images and myths to create verbal jewels or gems that would end up as poems. For me, poetry is not just a means of creating beauty but it is also a way of trying to know a little more about reality, a method of acquiring knowledge, in the way science and philosophy might be.

Whatever the case, the language of poetry is always a language in tension that requires a certain effort of understanding from the reader or the listener. Looking up a word in the dictionary shouldn't be a chore. Neither should the necessary re-readings, the repeated probing of texts that, at first sight seem strange and that we don't understand. A poem is precisely that text that begs to be read again. Among other reasons, this is because its language is never unequivocal, as mathematical language is and as scientific language is always striving to be. It needs to be said that a poem doesn't have a single and exclusive meaning. Poetic language always lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and, even if the poet is the best person to explain his or her intentions, each reader has every right to make his or her own interpretations as to what results have eventually been achieved.

In brief, no text will come properly into existence if the reader or listener does not take it as his or her own. The intervention of this presence, it needs to be stressed, is never - whatever appearances may suggest - totally passive. On the contrary, it is always decisive. Without the contribution of the receiver, there is no text that really functions.

P.S. It is clear that I conceive of poetry more as an action - a perception, a cognitive action - than as a result. To participate in this action is possible but it requires effort.

Bartomeu Fiol

They Have Said...

Bartomeu Fiol's cultural stance was revealed as being more like the opposite of what Llompart called the "epigonic bent" of the long shadow cast by the Mallorca School. The endangered scene, in both poetry and painting, called for urgent renovation, and this took place through the 1950s and 1960s. In the particular case of poetry, the collection Entre el coral i l'espiga [Between Coral and Wheat] (1952) by Blai Bonet, L'hora verda [The Green Hour] (1952) by Jaume Vidal Alcover and Poemes de Mondragó [Mondragó Poems] (1961) by Josep M. Llompart - which included poems dating from the 1950s - reveal a process of stylisation of the landscape by way of metaphor and metonymy. This had an absolutely unheard-of ring in a cultural milieu that had too easily forgotten the poetic adventure of Rosselló-Pòrcel, the real initiator of the contemporary cycle of poetry and indubitably the first writer to transform landscape poetry at the different points of its production, for instance with his prodigious evocation titled "A Mallorca durant la guerra civil" [In Mallorca during the Civil War].

Jaume Pomar, "El realisme simbòlic de Bartomeu Fiol" [The Symbolic Realism of Bartomeu Fiol], Prologue to Camps de marina i suburbials [Fields of Sea and Suburbs] (Barcelona, Proa, 2000).

Bartomeu Fiol has called for this process of freeing and modernising Catalan poetry and he does this by way of a very rich system of versification based on an original rhythm produced by the effects of timbre (alliteration, assonance and rhyme), vocal quantity, intonation, intensity, diversity of diction, diversity of tones, ideological division of the discourse in strophes, syntactic and grammatical division of the lines, and so on.

This rupture with traditional versification contributes towards understanding this "peripheral" writer I have mentioned above. In brief, Bartomeu Fiol is doubly peripheral. First, he is peripheral in being a Mallorcan poet who is physically removed from Barcelona, the metropolis. Second, he is peripheral with regard to the Noucentista and neo-Noucentista aesthetic values that have prevailed, and still prevail, in modern Catalan poetry. Fiol is still peripheral because of the originality of his work and the fact that he represents one of the few peaks of present-day Catalan poetry that is sufficiently lofty to connect with the international poetry of his times.

Sam Abrams, "De quan la precisió no vol dir claredat" [On When Precision Does Not Mean Clarity], Prologue to Cròniques bàrbares [Barbarous Chronicles] (Barcelona, Proa, 1999).

Stubborn through and through, gloriously big-headed or pig-headed: like Bartomeu Fiol's statement that he fashions poems that are conscious of their independence with respect to the desires of their author, who wishes to be as unobtrusive as possible while insistently engaging in blowing his horn (and, it must be said, we wish it would sound a few times more to confirm the provisional nature of this book of complete works that, for the moment, have been finalised herein). It is this honourable stance, always distant and a tad offended, of the poet who throws himself into the rigour of his task, able to resist the temptations of Arcadia and throbbing sentimentality in favour of higher ethical gain, capable of recognising in the lamentable debacle of the land of his birth, a milieu that is, nonetheless, apt for engaging in such an uncertain task as that of writing poetry.

Sebastià Alzamora, "Matèries finals i materials de demolició" [Final Matters and Demolition Materials], Prologue to Canalla lluny de Grècia [Rabble Far From Greece] (Barcelona, Proa, 2001).