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For Raúl Zurita a few dozen pages in a magazine were enough to leave an indelible mark on Chilean poetry.
The magazine was called
Manuscript
and the recently installed dictatorship (it was 1975) resulted in a strange breath of fresh air.
The magazine only reached one issue, but no one stopped knowing that, with
Áreas Verdes
, by the rigorously unpublished 25-year-old engineering student Raúl Zurita, something unexpected had happened.
Chilean poetry had until then traveled from the telluric and total word of Pablo Neruda to the perfectly mathematical irony of Nicanor Parra.
Zurita, who knew as much mathematics as Parra, but who drank in the dark waters of the Neruda de
Residencia en la tierra
, tried to reconcile both possibilities, creating a third, his.
Raúl Zurita: "We live the agony of language"
Raúl Zurita, Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry
He searched for space and found it.
The cows from
Green Areas
that would later become deserts, skies and cliffs, came to try to reconquer a lost territory that was none other than a country subjected at that time to a rigorous state of siege.
Perhaps that is why Zurita escaped from the blank page and wrote in the sky of New York and the desert and cliffs of Chile.
Of all those attempts to remove poetry from the blank page, perhaps the most moving are the verses she wrote about her EEG.
Poem by a man who faces perhaps the most invincible demon of all, that of those electrical impulses that we later call ideas, words, images, dreams or nightmares.
The whole of Zurita's poetry is a combat inside a being that inhabits itself with all the discomforts of the world.
A man forced to give everything to speak about what is not named, which is of course pain, but which could sometimes also be love, which, as in Dante, appears only to disappear better.
Zurita is also the current Chilean poet who has best collected the inheritance of his elders: that of the citizen poet.
The poet who is even a poet for those who have never read poetry.
Reciting with a rock group behind him or drawing attention on Facebook to the impossible statements of a Minister of Culture who fell due to the force of moral indignation, he has assumed with all his risks the role of total poet and totally poet, beyond and more here of his verses.
Rafael Gumucio
is a writer.
