The poet Diomedes Daza he is born January 28, 1943 in Patillal, on a night pampered by the smiles of the moon and the breezes of La Malena. She lives the candid time of her childhood among landscapes, spinning tops and kites. In adolescence she manifests her inclination for the literaturein the skin of the trees he falls in love with the verses and investigates the face of his ancestors in the clouds near the hills.
These reflective vigils that from youth transit through the mind of the poet Diomedes, allow him in the maturity of his literary creationclaim: “I collect all the influences that I receive from my environment, all the presences that agitate me or frighten me, and I carry them into the poetic text. It is my vital itinerary, it brings together and collects all my biography, those of the man inside and those of the man outside, those of the trial lawyer and those of the philosopher who reflectively looks at himself, looks at his environment and tries to understand himself with others ”.
The first publications of his poems appear in national supplements and magazines in the years of 1970. In 1973first place in the Fiftieth Anniversary Poetry Contest of the Free University of Bogotá; at this university he received a law degree, and at the National University He studies philosophy.
Later he traveled to Mexico and was included in two anthologies: The Latest Latin American Poetry (1978), and Latin American Rebel Poetry (1979). He returns to Colombia, and in the decade of 1980 He fixed his residence in Barranquilla and held the university chair. In 1992 y 1993 He completed postgraduate studies in Latin American Literature at the Javeriana University, and then decided, definitively, to live in Valledupar.
In 1995 participates as a special guest in the International Poetry Festival, in Medellín, together with the poets José Emilio Pacheco, from Mexico; Eduardo Sanguinetti, from Argentina; Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, from Cuba; and Piedad Bonet from Colombia.
From rigorous discipline for more than thirty years dedicated to the wonderful journeys of reading and writing, leaves an extensive poetic work, which was widely known in the literary circles of Barranquilla and Bogotá. among those unpublished booksis it so: ‘The delusions of La Purísima’ (novel), ‘There, the sky opens’ (stories), ‘The Law and cultures’ (essays), and poems: ‘Celebration of time’, ‘Potros in the heart of the witness’, ‘Epic sieges’ and ‘Claims for the Popano trees’, (Popano was his mythical territory, his Macondo).
For Diomedes, literature was an obsession that he shared with the profession of lawyer and the provincial tradition of roosters and horses. His circle of friends from literary sieges in the Valledupar Pottery Literary GroupThey knew him as a substantive poet, who brought the methodology of literary workshops and the imaginative sculptures of metaphors, the assonances of phonic games and the abyssal investigations of being and its vital contexts. His great friend, the journalist Hernando Mendoza, wrote the epitaph: “And few people knew that he was a poet.”
“Through poetry I feel, I try to make an exorcism against death, I propose to remain, as far as possible, through poetic expression”said Diomedes. But bullets are deaf to the clamor of life and to the vegetal voice of the wind, the poet’s eyes closed on September 3, 2001.
THREE POEMS BY DIOMEDES DAZA
HABITAT BOUNDARIES
To the north, two old shelves,
graveyards of distorted books.
To the south, a wild bunk,
haunted by nightmares and sleeplessness.
To the east, a chipped curtain,
mosquito friendly
and the aggressions.
To the west, in a door
sin cerradura in the parade
foreign interference in my life.
The zenith, two or three leaks
They warn that I am not eternal.
Shoes navigate in the nadir,
and remnants of the bravery wander.
I live here. I write on the cot
and I celebrate the slaughter of the offerings.
///
VALID
The wolf convinced me to be a sheep.
I told the sheep to be the wolf.
If I hear bleating I’ll know I’m dead
///
BODY ll
The word that distinguishes me
of the rock and of the beast.
The word that redeems me
from overcrowding and noise.
The word that reveals
to God and to the Hero
in the gloom and nothing.
The word that brings me closer to being
and to the other word.
the word of the other
incendiary of monologues.
the unwritten word,
the printed word.
The smallest word that names
the elusive word to name you.
The fragile sound that
makes me a survivor
By Jose Atuesta Mindiola