By: Sandra Beatriz Ludena
Today I want to share this thought from Alejandra Pizarnik: “I write so that what I fear does not happen; so that what hurts me is not; to ward off the bad guy. It has been said that the poet is the great therapist. In this sense, the poetic task would imply exorcising, conjuring and, in addition, repairing. Writing a poem is repairing the fundamental wound, the tear. Because we are all hurt.”
When a poet is submerged in nostalgia, it is difficult for him to escape unscathed. Making surreal poetry, like Pizarnik’s, requires managing a mental and emotional force that does not capture him. The terrain of feeling is dangerous, I would say swampy. It begins by extracting feeling and extrapolating it to writing.
However, poetry can set a trap for us in this descent of memories and evocations. The art of writing poetry should allow us to heal the tear as Pizarnik says.
But, if when feeling everything darkens, this self-prophecy will be fulfilled, and therefore, it is preferable not to try to heal by extrapolating feeling. The ideas of forgiveness, self-love, self-acceptance, can give us the relief that is not found anywhere else, however, from the ashes you are reborn only if you have learned to understand those depths.
In some cases the wound was fatal, let us remember the Decapitated Generation, an Ecuadorian literary group, made up of five writers who lived in the first decades of the 20th century. Medardo Ángel Silva, Ernesto Noboa y Camaño, Arturo Borja, Humberto Fierro and Félix Valencia Vizuete.
These great writers are the forerunners of Modernism in Ecuador, and it is believed that they were influenced by Rubén Darío’s Modernista movement and French symbolist poetry. In life they exchanged creations and poetry, due to their affinities, however, although the study of Literature united them in the Decapitated Generation, in reality they never formed a literary group.
They were included in this group due to their premature death: Medardo Ángel Silva died at 21 years of age, Noboa at 38, Borja at 20, Fierro at 39, Valencia at 32; All these poets were wounded, they had a death wound, they fell into the trap of feeling. Three of them committed suicide.
The Headless Generation was attributed to these characters by journalists and historians who, when reading their poetry, found similarities between their poetic expressions; and properly the distinction “Decapitated” comes from his sad end, having chosen to die at such an early age.
Finally, Pizarnik, with whom I start this comment, also took his own life. This is why the process of writing can have a high price, knowing that we are all hurt. Feeling is feeling.