EthicalDative

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.” 

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

I’ve been hearing a milestone of modernist prose, if my memory of literary labels doesn’t fail me. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a Socratic tango in which Lust and Guilt swoop partnering in protracted turns about the dance floors of Stephen Daedalus’s excitable young mind. Extended rants about the damnable carnality of dirty boys obsessed with virgins make you want to run screaming from every church you pass. Colin Farrell voices all of it wickedly on Audible, as a good actor can.

At times the reader experiences the stream of consciousness by portage, hoisting canoe on shoulder and trudging past roiled, gurgling waters. They would’ve had him spinning directionless had he tried to paddle them. He puts into the river again when it has a narrative flow that may carry him to his longed for destination, indeed, to any destination. 

Isn’t modernism where most of what goes on is in the character’s head, faithfully interrupted by pointillistic sensory and ambient detail? Snatches of dialogue ensue? A person chews a fig for forty pages, picking his teeth with a match at intervals? Examines a picked seed before flicking it away? The itinerant personae speak in tongues, deal one another rhetorical blows hugger mugger, smack each other colorfully about the chops? The verbal sparring and inflamed revery is the action, not so? Framed by the walking, smelling and staring?

Libido, license, repression, weightlessness, torment, intellect, beauty and filth. Most of all, words! Torrents of them.

I thrilled near the climax to hear the Joycean “silence, exile and cunning” phrase. It has clung to me as a meaty mantra. The ending crafted by this artificer, voluble poet who writes in page breaks, is a wonderful beginning, the more so for seeming remote at times — the ending, I mean, not the poet. He’s in the room and then some. 

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved