A review of 'Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul'
Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it.
Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it. But in quoting it, nobody tries to argue for some distance between poetry and politics. It’s more like the question of whether poetry (and art more broadly) is or is not political has been answered by the movement of history — it is.
Ni uno más
Siempre hay más
Hay que hablar de cobardía que es la manera en que se entiende aquí el aire.
Hay que hablar de miedo.
Es decir,
hay que hablar de historia.
We must speak of cowardice which is the way to understand the air here.
We must speak of fear.
That is,
we must speak of history.
Juan Carlos Bautista, “Cabezas” (“Heads”)