In a recording of a performance from Clemente Padín’s archives described by Jill Kuhnheim, Padín reads a poem to a group of schoolchildren until he reaches the line “‘este verso debe repetirse’ [this line should be repeated].” Taking his own words as instruction, Padín closes the gap between the text of the poem and its performance, repeating the words again and again until one of the children exclaims “‘este verso debe culminar’ [this line should finish].” Rather than an interruption of a prescripted performance, the playful, improvisatory response of the child perfectly completes Padín’s poem.
Syntax, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, syntagma, paramoiosis, redundancy, dictionaries, adjectivization; unifying strophes, determinate semantic groups, the subject, neologisms, verbs, reflexive anomalies, complementarity, versification; paradigms, pronouns, grammar: all in the trash! No more images induced with elements alien to their own nature; enough of metaphors, the indecisive second term of trivial identifications; enough of the elegiac excrement of a man with the face of a duck.
The work depends on the act of the creator-consumer. The work exists as long as it is created-consumed. Once created and consumed, it disappears. The work is the act.
Languages employ signs to substitute objects from the external world to express and communicate messages. One no longer shows a tree, one says “that tree.” The representation of the tree by means of a sign that acoustically sounds thus, and that by social convention designates an object with certain characteristics that differentiate it from other objects that in turn count on other signs being designated, was a factor of progress in favoring the relations of production.
