While Shakespeare’s plays must have stemmed from some personal experience, they take the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and, through an act of artistic creation, fashion them into something endlessly inspiring and strange.
(Drew Lichtenberg)
Inspiring and strange. The “strange” part looms large in contemplation of poetry. Azurea20 brings the inspiring in her short poem “Déjalo” (“Leave It”). Here’s my reading:
First it says, “Throw away the poem (Tira el poema).” There follow three instances of the stressed (accented) qué used in Spanish for interrogatives and exclamations:
qué no arde
qué no camina
qué se ha perdido.
At first I wanted to read it as “Tira el poema que no arda, que no camine, que se haya perdido.” But there are those accents, plus the verbs are in indicative mood in the poem, subjunctive only in my head. Ay, there’s the rub. This is where it brings the strangeness. It’s not a screening statement, which the moody subjunctive would convey.
Three questions standardly posed with ¿por qué? are implied by the stressed qué: “Why, why, why?” I haven’t seen this strategem before, but all’s fair in war and poetry. The answering verbs in indicative mood state fact, not desideratum, doubt or conjecture: “It doesn’t burn, it doesn’t walk, it has gotten lost.”
— “¡Maté a un hostelero! — ¿Por qué? ¿Cuándo? ¿Dónde? ¿Cómo? — Porque cuando donde como sirven mal, ¡me desespero!”
(I forget which Spanish play this is from)
Then she says, “Leave the poem which…” followed by a descriptive, subordinate clause introduced with the unaccented conjunction que. The poem marked for leaving in the record, bequeathed to readers, allowed to persist, is the one “which roams full of horror through the abandoned factories and through the wounded suburbs.”
Here again, stuck in the wrong mood, I had longed for Deja al poema que vague…, posed as a standard to achieve, but Azurea20 is jolting me into a non-kneejerk mindset. The poet locates signification where difficulty and deprivation abide.
Here’s a telling detail: The second main verb, deja (“leave”) is linked to its direct object (poema) with the “personalizing” preposition a (combined with the definite article el it produces al). It’s a treatment reserved for objects which are human and, sometimes, for individualized animals such as pets. The enduring poem is granted the status of a living entity, in contrast to the one that should remain a dead letter in the poet’s notebook. The three-word conclusion, emphatically italicized and lineated, drives the distinction home:
Deja
al
poema.
Leave. The. Poem.
That’s how the signals reach me, and such is my intrepid hypothesis. If my receiver’s wonky, I own that, too. Dare large, fall hard, and leave a beautiful memory.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 