On Poetry and Culture Shock

Sherlock Holmes stories are fun. Arthur Conan Doyle made him the most misogynistic beast in Literature and here you have, with all my irony, a selection of quotes of the detective talking about gender:

A man always finds it hard to realise that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her. (The Musgrave Ritual)

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting (A Scandal in Bohemia).

When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing she values most… A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. (A Scandal in Bohemia)

Lyrical Neosurrealism is the predominant style for the current generation of Spanish young poets. In Spanish I call it "Neosurrealismo inimista"; "intimista" is a very hard word to translate because the intimacy it refers to has nothing to do with sexual intimacy, so "lyrical" it will have to be. The label is mine and I doubt it will ever catch on, because these poets like to consider themselves very new, very post-everything. Elusive Poet agrees with me, though, in the definition.

I don't have anything particular against the style apart from the fact that it is a default mode: as I have said before, a whole generation of people want to be fresh and original and at the same time sincere, and they all end up as photocopies of Lorca and Pedro Salinas (and in terminal cases, Bécquer, bleh).

Since this style is everywhere, and I adore its wonderfully rich early-20th-century sources, I have used it occasionally. This is my first piece of creative writing ever; early spring, 2000. A professor asked us to do an experiment with automatic writing, that is, writing the first thing that comes to mind, or rather, writing without thinking. The Surrealists liked that.

I never forgot the piece; later, I wrote it down in several slightly different versions. A couple of phrases, and the person I was talking about, belong to my teens. Later on, I have come to despise any writing that is confessional, intimate, or with a strong look of having been improvised, but the first poem is like the first love, isn’t it?

The original is Spanish; scroll down for the English version.

Tengo frío. El frío me sale de dentro cuando Ángel me mira. Cuando está con las demás, Ángel se ríe, pero conmigo no, cuando está conmigo me hace preguntas, o quizá son preguntas que yo oigo aunque él no las haga, y las contesto y hablo sin parar hasta que las palabras sólidas que salen de mis labios forman una cadena, una espiral alrededor de mis caderas, con púas que me obligan a seguir hablando.
Los ojos de Ángel son telarañas pegajosas que me enredan, y yo lucho, pero no sirve de nada, estoy atrapada y siento cómo me observa, soy su presa. Los ojos de Ángel son espejos de mercurio resbaladizo. Me gustaría entrar en ese lago de mercurio gris venenoso, ahogarme, y poder olvidar este frío.
Pero a Ángel le gusta que yo pase frío.

I´m cold. I feel cold comes from the inside out when Angel looks at me. When he’s with the other girls, Angel laughs, but not with me, when he’s with me he asks me questions, or maybe those are questions that I hear even if he doesn’t ask them, and I answer them and talk incessantly until the solid words that come out of my mouth make a chain, a spiral around my hips, with thorns that force me to keep on talking.

Angel’s eyes are sticky spiderwebs that tangle me, and I struggle, but it’s useless, I’m trapped and I feel ho he stares at me. I’m his prey. Angel’s eyes are mirror of slippery mercury. I would like to walk into that lake of poison, drown and forget this cold.

But Angel likes me to be cold.

I'd rather talk about politics, but this is not a "welcome to LaGuiri's opinions" blog. Who ever listen to anyone else's political opinions, and, who cares about what I think? I'm only a poet. The destruction of New Orleans is also tragic for art lovers; so much music, so many stories in a single place.

I might do a series of New Orleans-related song lyrics. Yesterday I found out that my beloved Ani DiFranco was recording what was meant to be her next album; she & her people had time to evacuate, but she has lost her home, her studio and worst of all, the reconrdings that would become that album. The Ani equivalent of my computer crashing with all its poems inside. I know that there are people dying but in a tragedy so huge, only the loss of small things has any measure.

This Ani song has nothing to do with anything; it's a coincidence that it mentions a wave. It's just a beautiful love (sex?) song that I'm listening to a lot lately. I admire the way she defines two personalities with three words.

today we are only whatall is nice about us
today we turned on in the blue light of dawn
and made love
and you were not a dot dot dot
waiting for me to complete you
and it was like i just forgot
to measure everything that i do

we woke up with the notion
that enough is not enough without more
and then we pushed with one motion
like the ocean heaves a wave at the shore
and you were not a dot dot dot
leaning forward expectantly
and i was not in such a rush
to insure my autonomy

Hoy hemos dado sólo lo mejor de nosotros.
Hoy encendimos la luz azul del amanecer,
y hemos hecho el amor.
Tú no eras una línea de puntos
esperando a que yo te completase
y para mí fue como olvidarme
de medir todo lo que hago.

Nos despertamos pensando
que "suficiente" no basta
y entonces empujamos en un solo movimiento
como el océano que empuja una ola hasta la playa
Y tú no eras una línea de puntos
esperando ansioso
y yo no tenía prisa
por asegurar mi independencia.

Carboanion says that posting song lyrics is blogging degree zero; she considers it lazy, a form of cheating. But I can't think of anything but Hurricane Katrina, and of the destruction it's bringing, and I don't want to do any political rants. So, song lyrics about New Orleans it will have to be.

This is one of the earliest Sting songs I remember. I was seven when the album came out, and my father was already a Police fan, so I became a Sting fan more or less at that time. Many, many years later I found out that the song was inspired by the book "Interview with the Vampire".

I can't accept that the places the song and the book mention don't exist any more.

Moon Over Bourbon Street.

There’s a moon over bourbon street tonight
I see faces as they pass beneath the pale lamplight
I’ve no choice but to follow that call
The bright lights, the people, and the moon and all
I pray everyday to be strong
For I know what I do must be wrong
Oh you’ll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there’s a moon over bourbon street

It was many years ago that I became what I am
I was trapped in this life like an innocent lamb
Now I can only show my face at noon
And you’ll only see me walking by the light of the moon
The brim of my hat hides the eye of a beast
I’ve the face of a sinner but the hands of a priest
Oh you’ll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there’s a moon over bourbon street

She walks everyday through the streets of new orleans
She’s innocent and young from a family of means
I have stood many times outside her window at night
To struggle with my instinct in the pale moon light
How could I be this way when I pray to God above
I must love what I destroy and destroy the thing I love
Oh you’ll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there’s a moon over bourbon street.

I wonder what the average citizen of the United States would think if they knew that in Spain, “American” is a bad thing to be. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have anything against people born in that country. There is plain old American-in-origin and there is the negative American-in-style.

So if we say that something is “very American”, especially something to do with entertainment, we mean that it is simplistic, even cheesy, and extremely commercial. “Very American” food is too sweet or too rich or too much or all three at the same time. Something “American” is always over the top. A fake. That does not mean we believe that all things American-in-origin are like that.

Something similar goes for patriot. Spaniards are not patriots (noun), ever. Even though the word exists, we don’t use it. Some people are patriotic (adjective), but again, that’s a bad thing to be. I would use it only ironically. You just don’t make a display of being proud of your country, although being proud of your region, which corresponds roughly with American states, is normally OK.

I pity all those Americans going on study programs in Spain and getting the third degree on American foreign policy from everyone they meet. Someone should tell them this sort of thing before they cross the ocean.

I haven't given you haikus in weeks, so here's a handful.

Intertextuality is the technical name to refer to quotes and allusions from one work of art in another. The texts don’t need to be written down: for example, Boticelli’s Birth of Venus is inspired by Ovid, and movies copy each other all the time. Every poet is a thief, me included, and sometimes I steal bits that I like from other writers. These are most of my poems that contain a quote straight out of someone else’s work. Naturally, almost all my poems are inspired by someone else's; these are only the ones with textual quotes.

The autobiographical bit: I wrote “Stirring memory and desire” and “Don’t give in without a fight” because those lines had seven syllables each, something unusual in either Spanish or English poetry. “Giving up laughter” came out of my fascination with Old English’s capacity to create compounds: “morning-ceald” expressed effectively something that I can only say with a clumsy phrase like “as cold as the morning”, and it doesn’t even refer to cold: in the original context it means “with a desperation and sadness as bleak as the cold of the early morning”. And the gorgeous understatement: “giving up laughter” in its original context didn’t mean “the end of happiness”, it meant death! Less is more. Then I wrote the graffiti one because the Chapina Bridge area is one of my favourite places in Seville and I like to see the kids skating in the park that’s covered in graffiti. Finally, “How can we know the dancer from the dance” was born after two years trying to finish a cycle about going out dancing on weekends, what is now The Friday Cycle, together with my intention of writing a poem about dancing for somebody else to see.

Beowulf.
“Giving up laughter”,
river-misty, “morning-cold”,
Monday begins.

“Poniendo fin a la risa”,
Como río neblinoso, “mañana fría”,
empieza el lunes.

Wiliam Butler Yeats.
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Do I dance better if you watch?

¿Cómo distinguir el baile de la bailarina?
¿Bailo mejor cuando me miras?

T. S. Eliot.
Tenderness has died.
Two fierce young bodies,
“Stirring memory and desire”

La ternura ha muerto.
Dos cuerpos jóvenes y feroces,
“Removiendo el recuerdo y el deseo”

Pink Floyd.
Leaf clings to the tree,
Chill autumn.
“Don’t give in without a fight”

Una hoja se aferra a la rama.
Otoño helado.
“No te rindas sin oponer resistencia”.

Graffiti anónimo en el puente de Chapina /Anonymous graffiti on Chapina Bridge.
“Presos del suelo”,
Me envidian si patino.
¡Mira cómo vuelo!

“Prisoners of the ground”
they envy me when I skate.
Watch me fly!

I didn't want to talk about politics but I can't resist the temptation any more. I think the paralellisms between Hurricane Katrina and the Prestige disaster are an interesting lesson.

Everyone knew that New Orleans was by the sea AND below sea level. The possibility of complete disaster was there since 2001 (my source is in Spanish). When disaster does happen, it gives a two-day warning, but even so, evacuation is anarchic. The president is on holidays, then he goes to the other end of the country to meet millionaries, then he goes back home, and only a few days later, after half a hundred people are confirmed dead, he goes to look at the mess from the distance. His subordinate in charge of managing national emergencies is a useless idiot with zero experience in the field, and had been fired from his last job. The Vicepresident is nowhere to be seen. When well-known "liberals" get involved in rescue efforts, their intentions are questioned as "a publicity stunt". And the country asks for foreign help. Fucking Hell. The richest country in the world has the nerve of asking my government for help!?

Now let's look at the Prestige. The Prestige was ship who happened to have one single layer of metal between the sea and a few thousand tons of oil, which means one teensy leak and you're doomed. The Prestige had an accident at a distance from the Spanish shore that would have made it advisable to get it even closer, so that it ended up in a harbour and destroyed one beach. With the boat in the middle of the ocean, the currents would have sent oil everywhere. In fact, the oil reached all of Spain's northern coast all the way to France. A similar accident in the same area of the country ten years before should have meant that there was an emergency plan to avoid the same thing happen allover again, right? Yeah, right.

The day the Prestige started to leak, the regional president had gone hunting with the minister responsible of doing something about the ship. When it became clear that this was a major emergency, the Spanish president was having fun in Rome with his friend Berlusconi. Basically, both the region's government and the national one, both Conservatives, said that there wasn't a crisis, that the oil would be picked from the sea easily quickly and easily, and two weeks later, when it was obvious that it wasn't so, and the ship was still leaking out oil in the middle of the ocean, in a mad exercise of doublethink the president accused the population of being "alarmists". The guy appointed by the national government to solve the crisis after the accident had already taken place was a businessman in the proccess of being chosen president of a system of satelite/cable televisions (it is always good for a goverment to have friends in the media, oh yes). The Prestige eventually sank down to the sea bottom, but not all of the oil came out. One day, the sea water will finish corroding it and the remaining hundreds of tons of oil will drift into the Galician coast. I don't know if taking it out before that time is technically possible; it was technically possible to drag the boat ashore when the captain asked for help, but he didn't get any.

Maybe I see similarities because I want to see them; to me the moral is that you better pray there aren't any major natural disasters on the years you have a Conservative government.

I take back some of what I said yesterday. Conservative governments not always behave the same way in a national emergency.

I apologise for not giving any sources. Yesterday's news said that the security forces that forcing people in New Orleans to evacuate, and keeping control of the refugee camps, are also in charge of detecting illegal immigrants in order to kick them out of the country.

Very soon after the terrorist attack in Madrid's trains on March 11th, 2004, the Spanish government had the only humanitarian gesture that I know of in their eight years in power. All the illegal immigrants in the trains that had been injured or dead, and their closest relatives in the country including unmarried couples, were automatically made legal residents.

Once again the American government has lost a chance of doing something kind. Why am I culture-shocked... but not at all surprised?

A lullaby for everyone who is waiting for better times. And it comes with a little story, too.

Once upon a time there was a young woman who had done many different creative things, always as part of one collective or another. One day she got tired of the well-known faces, she thought she needed to find her own voice, and forced herself to change. She moved to a different country where everything, language, climate, everything, was different. The culture shock was extremely painful, or at least that is the way she remembers it. She made few, but good friends. Our of her pain and homesickness she created with their help something beautiful, unique, that at the time seemed small. Being a sincere and original work, it became (relatively) successful. I’m talking about Björk.

Björk has done few things that were as good as her first album. Some of her later songs are better than any individual song in "Debut", but as a whole this is probably the best one. This is my favourit song out of it; it’s so straightforward that I don’t think it needs a translation.

one day
it will happen
one day, one day
it will all come true

one day
when you're ready
one day, one day
when you're up to it

the atmosphere
will get lighter
and two suns ready
to shine just for you

I can feel it, I can feel it.

one day
it will happen
one day. one day
it will all make sense

one day, one day
you will blossom
one day, one day
when you're ready

an aeroplane
will curve gracefully
around the volcano
with the eruption that never lets you down

I can feel it, I can feel it.

and the beautifullest
fireworks are burning
in the sky just for you

I can feel it, I can feel i.

one day
one day

I still don’t know if I like Charles Bukowski: I haven’t read enough of his works. I recently bought a book, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit. It’s second hand, and only after coming home and browsing quickly through it I saw this note on the table of contents, in soft pencil, next to the title “5 dollars”:

Gave to Steve Daniels on eve of move to Bulgaria at the Ritz. Aug 1995

Someone could write a novel starting from this volume of poetry. Who was Daniels? The syntax is ambiguous. Who went to live in Bulgaria: the owner of the book, or Daniels? and what made whoever it was go to live in Bulgaria? (Steve, have you googled your own name? Hi!)

I have googled for that poem "5 dollars" with no luck. I'm very curious about it. As I say, I still don't know if I like Bukowski. The legend is bigger than the poet and that's normally a bad thing. I've looked for a short poem so that you can judge too. I've taken plenty of liberties

40,000 flies.

torn by a temporary wind
we come back together again.

check walls and ceilings for cracks and
the eternal spiders.

wonder if there will be one moe
woman

now
40,000 flies running the arms of my
soul
singing
I met a million dollar baby in a
5 and 10
store

Arms of my soul?
flies?
singing?

What kind of shit is
this?

It's so easy to be a poet
and so hard to be
a man.

40.000 moscas.

Destrozados po un viento pasajero
volvemos juntos, otra vez

inspeccionamos paredes y techos en busca de grietas y de
las eternas arañas

me pregunto si volverá a haber una
mujer

Ahora
40.000 moscas recorren los brazos de mi
alma
cantando
"Conocí a una tía de puta madre en un
todo a
cien"

¿los brazos de mi alma?
¿moscas?
¿cantando?

¿Qué coño es
esto?

Qué fácil es ser poeta
y qué difícil es ser
hombre.

A lazy poem about a lazy Muse for a lazy day. And I have a dance lesson this evening! All I want to do is go back to bed. It's all Zifra's fault.

The Muse is on holidays,
The Muse is on sabbatical,
The Muse is on sick leave.
The Muse is on strike.
The Muse is uncooperative,
The Muse went AWOL,
The Muse went out for a packet of cigarettes,
The Muse is scared of commitment.
The Muse left me for the Next Big Thing,
Who dares saying all poets are thieves and liars?
From the muse we learn to be so.

La Musa se fue de vacaciones,
La Musa se ha cogido un año sabático,
La Musa se dio de baja.
La Musa está en huelga.
La Musa no quiere cooperar,
La Musa está desaparecida en combate,
La Musa se fue a por tabaco,
La Musa tiene miedo al compromiso.
La Musa me ha dejado por otro.
¿Quién tiene el valor de decir que los poetas somos ladrones y mentirosos?
De la Musa aprendemos a ser así.

Zifra gave me that cute little button on the sidebar that takes you to my other blog, the one about belly dance. And it was his birthday on Tuesday, so I told him I would give him a poem as a bithday gift. Considering what I know about him, a poem that hints atheism on the author might be to his taste.

Technical nota: this is a Ghazal. It is a Persian-then-Arabic form with a series of 6 to 12 couplets. Lines 1 and 2, and all even lines, end with the same word. Lines should all be the same lenght. The author must mention herself (either by name, "Nia says, Nia does", or in the first person). Everything else can be nearly free. Scroll down for the English version.

Luz refractada da color al cielo.
Del negro al rosa, misterioso cielo.

Demasiada luz roba las estrellas,
Las ciudades se han quedado sin cielo.

Posponer los problemas tomando el sol,
Prohibida la pena si está azul el cielo.

Gris plomo de nieve, gris claro de lluvia:
No hay otro destino escrito en el cielo.

Si existe un Dios, nos mira desde lejos.
No es un consuelo imaginar el cielo.

El granjero no ve ninguna nube.
A sus plantas secas las mata el cielo.

El exiliado ve las constelaciones.
Alumbran su casa desde otro cielo.

Los aviones vuelan de aquí al futuro.
Yo no los alcanzo, mirando al cielo.


Refracted light gives its colour to the sky.
Black down to pink, mysterious sky.

Too much light steals the stars.
Cities have lost their sky.

Put off your problems and sunbathe.
Banish all sorrow if there is blue in the sky.

Dark grey for snow, light grey for rain:
Don’t read any other destinies from the sky.

If there is a God, He’s so far away.
No comfort from an old man in the sky.

The farmer looks in vain for a cloud.
His dry plants are killed by the sky.

Exiles gaze at the constellations.
They light up his home on a different sky.

Airplanes fly from here to the future.
I cannot reach them as I stare at the sky.

I bought Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America thinking that it would resemble essays such as Fast Food Nation or No Logo, but it turns out to be a personal account: the writer, Barbara Ehrenreich, took a succession of bad-paying jobs to see if it is possible to survive on them in the US. Surprise, surprise: it’s not. You can either buy food or pay rent, but not both.

My first reaction was that she was almost a century too late: George Orwell wrote a similar book, Down and Out in Paris and London, about his experiences when he was accidentally out of a job teaching English private lessons in Paris. So he worked as a cleaner in a fancy hotel’s restaurant kitchen, and then he had to live as a tramp in London for a few weeks. Highly recommended reading.

I have mixed feelings about the situation Nickel and Dimed describes, because at times I relate to it. I remember my summer as a counter assistant at a chip shop in Glasgow, on the minimum wage, my first attempt at being economically independent. I could afford rent in a shared flat, groceries and some luxuries like books, but I could not have afforded my own flat, paying a mortgage, or a baby, had I wanted to have them. At Cornell I lived on the local living wage; the difference between the living wage and the minimum wage is that minimum wage is arbitrarily fixed by the government and the living wage is an estimate of how much it costs to afford food, rent, health care, transportation and other necessities. Again, if I was in this country for more than a year I would resent the fact that I cannot afford luxuries like buying clothes without making a careful budget or buying a house, but the statistics that pepper the book suggest that Cornell University did quite a lot of math to ensure that I was at a very precise level of austere comfort.

I cannot stop comparing the situation on the book with the Spanish one. We are better off in Spain because in Europe, minimum wages are a little bit closer to a living wage. Public transport is generally better. Child care is more affordable. There are national health systems, which is more than you can say about the parody of a democracy Americans have. Now the problems: rents in Spain are insanely high because the only people really willing to live in a rented place are students, so landlords are used to charge by the room. That means that you can forget about renting a house or flat for one person or family. Buying a house? For a couple of young professionals, paying the mortgage can easily swallow up one complete salary, and I’m taking long-term mortgages, of about 25 years. Babies? Until about five years ago when immigrants started to come in masse, Spain had the lowest natality rate in the world. The way Spaniards deal with low salaries and overpriced housing is by living with their parents until they find a job that pays enough to leave. It’s not the best solution but it’s the only one we’ve found.

I guess this also happens in other parts of Spain. I have only lived in Seville, so this applies to Seville.

Meeting friends does not happen at a certain hour. You just don’t say “five at such café”. The correct (yes, not "usual": correct) way of making arrangements is to make a half-hour bracket. “I’ll see you at seven to seven thirty”. “I can make it at six thirty to seven”. No one blinks. Spanish good manners say that unpunctuality starts ten to fifteen minutes after the appointed time, so if you said you’d be there at seven-to-seven thirty, no one can complain if you get to the place at 7.40. The fifteen-minute rule does not mean that Spaniards are unpunctual as a rule: people are as much or as little as everyone else in the rest of the world, but it is rude to give latecomers less than a fifteen-minute wait.

That means that when a group of people is going to meet in a public place, everyone who will arrive on their own will try to be there as late as possible without being rude, so that they will not have to be just waiting there, alone. I’m a reasonably punctual person; if I say I’ll meet you at “five to five thirty” you won’t see me there before 5:10. We only do this when meeting socially in situations where we don’t mind waiting. For example, if one friend and I are going out for dinner, we’ll be punctual because making someone else wait alone isn’t nice. The only remotely similar thing I’ve ever seen is the very relaxed attitude some Scottish people have when they go to pubs. I’ve gone out in groups in which some people, especially the men, said “we’ll be at the pub at four”, not expecting anyone else to say at what hour they’d be there. They got there early and got a table for the group, and didn’t care much how long they’d have to wait for the others.

Having said that, I don't think Spaniards are impunctual. In Scotland, Ireland, Spain and and the US I have met big communities of international people (mostly students). The only person I have ever met who made a point of strict punctuality was German.

I have met Jaime Galbarro once or twice. He corresponds with the stereotype of the young Spanish poet: has studied a Humanities degree (in his case, I think Spanish Literature and Linguistics), is influenced by Spanish surrealism and Spanish romanticism, and his poems are confessional, intimate, personal, lyrical, and erotic. The differences between these young poets are given by the balance between how much Surrealism and how much Romanticism they have. Too much Bécquer-like romanticism and they are booooring and even cheesy. Too much surrealism and they are not enjoyable, but locked inside their own incommunicable poetic language.

I dislike these poets because they are interchangeable and predictable, and because, as I have said so many times, I don't normally like poetry that gives an emphasis to content over form, specially if the content is real, intimate feeling. Jaime Galbarro is an exception, and I love and treasure the book that I have from him. Maybe it's just that I have read him with patience and care. The English translation is a bit free.

Tenía sin saberlo la vida por delante
pero el miedo era una palabra
pesada, demasiado grande para
llevarla siempre dentro de la boca

I was unaware of having life to look forward to
but fear was a heavy
word, too large to
always be carried inside the mouth.

Spaniards (and some foreigners) think that the Spanish Administration, or Spain as a whole, even, is an inefficient country. They think our bureaucracy is the slowest in the world and our "funcionarios", the civil servants, spend their days taking coffee breaks. Nothing ever works well in Spain in the understanding of some people. I'm no patriot, but I think this is of course a mistake (there is inefficiency in Spain, sure, but no more than in other places), and I can give several first-hand accounts of American inefficacy (and one or two British ones too).

Today I read something surprising about England. There is a tax there that charges not what you own, not what you earn, but the value of the house where you live. Many (most) people rent their homes, so this is not a tax on property. I can't think of an unfairer tax. So, lately, people's pensions have grown much slowly than the prices of houses, which means that there are old people who cannot afford to pay council tax. and at least one person has gone to jail for not paying her taxes. Yes. Jail. Not for fraud, not for forgery, not for theft. Jail for not paying taxes.

I just find that amazingly culture-shocking. And what is even more culture-shocking is that Spaniards think we should look up to countries like the UK. Wow.

Somebody lent me Botikin ("First Aid Kit") a poetry book by Iker Garai; I was curious about whether this young poet from northern Spain had any similarities with the young poets that I know, mostly from the South. Let’s see. He’s not Neoromantic or confessional/intimate. He is Neosurreal, and writes erotic poetry. Two out of four. Of course, free verse is his metre of choice, but that is so frequent that it can hardly be considered a characteristic of the major trend of Spanish young poets: Lyrical Neosurrealism.

I don’t like Neosurrealism in poetry because I find it unnecessarily hard to understand. I don’t get it, the same way that some people don’t like broccoli or Korean movies. And I rarely like political poetry because it is too easy to let the message defeat the artistic expression. One of Iker's political poems makes clear that his political views and mine couldn’t be more different, but I still like the poem because the rhythm is good. There is another poem I agree with, but I dislike the poem itself because I think it’s unoriginal.

I've picked two poems from the compilation, probably the two erotic/love ones with less surrealism. Word of warning: Iker is from a part of Spain where people are bilingual in Spanish and Basque. Basque writes the sounds in "Cat" and "quick" always with a K and Iker adds that to his Spanish spelling. The effect is of someone writing nevah, evah, strongah instead of never, ever, stronger. And also: in Spanish, "hippie" is a dress code: hippie girls (or women) are amazingly fashion-conscious, often snob and the assumption is that they are politically progressive.

PRINCESA JIPI

allí estaba ella
con sus brazos cruzados
sobre sus trozos de barro
en otra noche de taberna

estaba como puesta
entre los demás,
pensando más allá
de ser diferente.

es ke ella no corre,
se arrastra,
no ríe,
se lo guarda, lo engulle,
y casi nunca lo habla;
y al final,
entre risas y vasos
de la calle en mitad,
lo llora a balazos,
ella sola.

y yo soy el espectador lunático
sentado a ras de suelo,
en pleno teatro escenario
jugando a no ser yo.

HIPPIE PRINCESS

there she was
with arms crossed
over her chunks of clay
on another bar night

she seemed alone
in the crowd
thinking beyond
being different

The thing is that she doesn’t run,
she crawls,
she doesn’t laugh,
she keeps it in, she gulps it;
and eventually
among laughs and glasses
in the cleft street,
she weeps shooting bullets,
by herself.

And I am the lunatic in the audience
sitting close to the ground
right in the theatre
playing at not being myself.

I met Del Doughty, a professor at Huntington College (Indiana, US), at a James Joyce conference. Being shamelessly nosy, I googled him later on and found out he wrote haikus. I emailed him about my love of very small poems. Today I'm very excited because Doughty's book Flow came in the mail. It's small and gorgeous.

I can't controlmy excitement until I read the whole pretty little thing and pick favourites, but I like these two: a teder one and one with humour.

1
my wife shows me
a small bloom
on the hyacinth
by the light of the snow

mi mujer me enseña
una florecita
en el jacinto
a la luz de la nieve

2
Leaves at their peak;
everyone I meet says "Hey,
you got a haircut!"

Hojas en su momento álgido;
todo el mundo me dice: "¡ey,
te has cortado el pelo!"

Los Planetas are a Spanish rock band. The singer is awful, he has the worst nasal voice in the universe, and he can’t vocalise. The music is stolen from older, better bands and the lyrics are often bad and vague. But I still like Los Planetas. Corrientes circulares en el tiempo, “Circular time currents” is yet another song of hate and need for a woman who has abandoned the singer. These guys have filled all quotas of break-up songs, seriously. I don’t have enough hate haiku, so I’m stealing their ideas to compensate for so many poems about hands and clouds and pretty things.

Es mi venganza:
Tu mente espiral,
Girando a mi alrededor.

I want this revenge:
Your spiral mind
Spinning around me.