LibreArte August 23, 2021
“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from the music.”
Ezra Pound
Maestro Gabriel and Margarito have organized a free poetry festival, running 3 days and spreading itself through different venues, including LibreArte, Pulquería Mayahuel, Paliacate, and Los Milagros Cafe. This is a strictly Spanish-speaking affair, except when the poet is Tzotzil and the room fills with clutch-chuck sounds. This is when I am first exposed, as I nod stupidly in false comprehension of the Tzotzil the same as I do of the Spanish. What I am trying to comprehend, I hope, is the music of the words, but I am missing the flowers in the forest. Flores de las Palabras.
These old buildings were once family homes, so it is common for there to be many small rooms with fireplaces. Pulquería Mayahuel has a wood-trimmed adobe salon with fine acoustics, and the audience listens with quiet attention in the thin light and smoky air. I nod and simulate rumination through the Tzotzil poems about nature out of balance, and I nod some more when a Chilango poet recalls the sins of the Conquest. I even nod mock-thoughtfully as one woman reads what I later learn was a graphic erotic epic. The poets vary wildly, both in subject and idiom, but my clueless body language never wavers, like a hippie dancing to cumbia, ignorant and ridiculous.
“We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.” Rosario Castellanos, Comitán (1925-1974)
The poet Vanessa Gómez Ortega, de Ciudad Mexico, closes the evening with her 7-piece collection, entitled Vital, in which she draws connections between words and music, between music and dance. It is all about the dance with her. She was going to quote Ezra Pound until she learned that he became an anti-semitic fascist and Hitler-collaborator in Italy. This poetry crowd is thick with Zapatista sympathizers, and they have no tolerance for such right-wing ideology. So the writer gracefully skips around the politics and straight to the heart of the matter:
“En el caos comienza la vida: fuerza inconmensurable en movimiento, danza.” In the chaos life begins: incommensurable force of movement, dance.
Vanessa Gómez Ortega, “El Camino de Regreso”
Maestro Gabriel and Margarito toast each other with 1-liter mugs of Pulque, 80 pesos. The event is deemed a success, and why not? These two are chin-deep in the political art scene of Chiapas, collecting writers and performers and native voices as part of a social movement that may have began in the last century with the iconic feminist poetry of Rosario Castellanos, de Comitán; but it thrives still, here tonight.
As Margarito’s cluttered book store attests, the collecting never ends. Gabriel thinks he may have found a fresh new voice among the readers this evening. We conjure images of 1920’s Paris, in the company of Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Hemingway, when place and time were ripe for fermentation and radical kinetic growth. In chemistry, it is called catalysis. Meanwhile, the Pulque pours and splashes. This place is getting very sticky with Maguey. The fire-juggler has just arrived in the courtyard to apply kinetic energy. Tomorrow promises a hangover for the gods, but tomorrow, as we know, is a long time. Unsurprisingly, Margarito wants to hear another from the poet Bob Dylan, preferably mid-sixties vintage. I think I may have just the selection.