On poetry
Anna Aguilar-Amat:


Poetry is an endless game we play in order to break through the limitations of language and conventional and accepted ways of thinking. Poetry is not confined to the field of the verbal and can be found in every kind of genre. I would say that it is the art of combining and recycling: the abilty to relate things which exist separately and which together amount to more than the sum of the parts, the gift of sublimating the painful aspects of life through aesthetic objects that are able to impart beauty to the author herself or himself, as well as to her or his readers. That does not mean that the artistic manifestation often has a dark aspect. As the Cuban writer, Reinaldo Arenas, said, “I write in order to avenge myself”, and thus it is that the poet is often, in some ways, a being who is a lucid failure, something which makes her or him terribly human under his or her assumed divinity.


Poetry is without doubt the most impoverished of the arts, and the most democratic in a broad sense. It is built on capital that is as free as sweat or spit. We inherit language as we inherit the body, and whatever our situation or the place in which we find ourselves, it is possible to construct lines of poetry. Poetry has led me to live poetically, which means building a way of looking that is, sometimes, humorous as well as painful and fearful, but which, trained as though it were an animal, saves me time and again from the vertigo of the dividing-line between the marvellous and the shock of being alive..