The harsh message for the poets of Facebook by Enrique Sánchez Hernani

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He confesses that he and the poets of his generation have always lived bohemia, hit the streets, without thinking about the future. It is when poetry was most vital, when it seemed to be written by immortal men and women. However, immortality ends when one begins to think about death. And a few years ago, due to the absence of very dear friends, Enrique Sánchez Hernani (Lima, 1953) began to take his arrival seriously.

He thinks, for example, of his great friend Tulio Mora, who died in January 2019 from lung cancer. His absence prompted him to write poems that had nothing to do directly with the friend he regularly visited, but with words like illness, plague, pain, hospital. And in the process of writing a pandemic surprises the world. How not to bring up the helpful idea of ​​Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious genius of symbolist poetry, who underpinned the poet as a seer, an entity capable of glimpsing the future by provoking a disorder of the senses.

Sánchez Hernani was scared, he confesses. Puzzled, he called Jorge Pimentel, his colleague and also an accomplice of Tulio Mora. “He has a theory that poetry never lies. Pimentel does believe in poetry's ability to predict”, recalls the poet, commenting on a long, crazy and surreal conversation on the phone. Two veteran poets exchanging experiences in the midst of uncertainty out there. With the pandemic already installed in our daily lives, Sánchez Hernani began to write the poems for the second part of the book. Thus arises "Parable of impure ideas", wise and moving book of self-fulfilling prophecies.

The pandemic did not come all of a sudden, but came to us like a rumor of distant news. How were your first glimpses?

Like everyone, what the media gave. The initial bewilderment, unable to know the magnitude of the event. No one could predict it. Then the lockdown the government put us in to prevent the spread of the plague. The news was very unclear, based on rumours. The first moment I got scared was when the walkers appeared, migrants who had arrived in Lima who, seeing all their possibilities closed, decided to walk back to their land, carrying their humble belongings. Also, I was used to living very close to my granddaughters, and by fate, they spent the quarantine in a beach house in the south. And I stopped seeing them. Just like my grandson, who came every Friday to see me at home. They were my spiritual support. But I tried to be brave. Fortunately, there was the phone to see their faces.

Does living in uncertainty allow or make it impossible to write poetry?

I had already made a decision. From being an omnivorous reader I had become a selective reader. I only read poetry. My retirement funds do not allow me to buy books indiscriminately. And with the help of booksellers friends, I began to discover American and Canadian poets. I always liked Anne Sexton and the poets of her generation. But then I discovered Anne Carson, the great Canadian poet, and I was absolutely amazed. I also admire the beatnik poets, little read because the men were the best known, I think of Mary Fabilli or Joyce Johnson, for example. When the pandemic came, I was already with the discipline of writing, I already came "with a life" to put it sportingly. I tried to calm down, but the confinement caused discomfort, of course. The separation from friends, from family, produced nostalgia and pain. Knowing that people were beginning to get sick, while the president appeared as a compassionate father. All this was an atmosphere of shock. I come from a generation that has lived on the street. A lot of bohemia, long walks through the streets of Lima, and from one moment to the next, the running of the bulls. But I was able to write this book because I had the initial thrust and because poetry, unlike narrative that requires more technique and control, often doesn't require a plan. One thing suggests the other. Reality throws you questions and ideas that are transformed along the way. When the book was already in the press, I added three more poems. And since then, I decided not to write about death anymore. I canceled the topic. You cannot always be thinking about this permanent hostility.

The book is marked by a visible contemplative attitude. The poet always has a window (or a screen) to see the world, constantly listening to the birds in the street. Does this attitude suppose a change in your poetry?

Your assessment is correct. Contemplation has to do with accepting the 69 years that I am. I don't consider myself an old man, but I am an older person. The episodes of my personal history have served me to reflect. The profession of journalist has allowed me to meet countless people, dramas, joys, and that feeds you. I am aware of the finitude of life. And having discovered a new world of poets has made me reflect more on the word. Now I write slowly, I read and reread. I am more careful with the language, now without the pressure of the job.

“For what purpose does anyone make an inventory/ if not to see oneself face to face or head down/ all patched up with useless miniatures...” you write in the poem “Enigma de las misceláneas”. Is poetry for you a way of writing a personal inventory?

I wrote that poem for that reason. I realized that in all my life I have collected nothing but books and records. I have never worried about clothes, having a car of the year, eating in fashionable places or collecting watches. I start to think why one makes those inventories. People ease their sorrows by buying. The idea of ​​accumulating for some people is a kind of balm, to mitigate pain.

“Everyone hesitates to write something that has any sense / at least a little grace / hardly a shred of wisdom... you write in another poem. How scarce these days are these values?

Perhaps because I was close to the poetry workshop that Marco Martos and Hildebrando Pérez gave in the 1970s in San Marcos, I seriously understood the craft of writing. That reflection is born about two things: a great friend of mine told me that, due to the confinement, he had dedicated himself to writing poetry. "I'm writing a daily poem!" he told me. And he sent them to me to read, until I asked him to stop. They weren't really bad, but they had the mistakes of someone who doesn't have great poetry readings. Those who do not read much make many mistakes. Reading Campoamor is not the same as reading Pound. On the other hand, I see in the networks the number of boys who want to be poets and who applaud each other. It's amazing! I don't know why they do it, well sanch. I don't know many novelists who go out and brag that they are on Facebook, it must be because that does seem to be a lot of work. But you think of poetry that it is about organizing a few short verses. To write, you must have something to say. Otherwise it's just empty.

There is a very funny poem in your book. In “Sobre el encierro sedispersa”, the poet talks about himself but also about how his friends experience the pandemic in his own way.

Pretty much everything that's written there is real stuff, just rewritten to work in a poem. With the group of friends with whom I communicated, we talked about how things were going, how the confinement made us see things. For example, my friend the painter Enrique Polanco calls me one day and tells me "I've seen flying saucers two days in a row." “What are you sucking on!” I said. "No, I already stopped drinking!", He answered me (laughs). Like me, he also has a grandson whom he stopped seeing due to the pandemic, and who he was only able to hug six months later, very emotional. The art of writing poetry, apart from reading, being very self-critical and looking for the right words, has to do with the disorder of the senses. The narrative imagination has to maintain plausibility, on the other hand, the poetic imagination is in chaos: it allows you to do any barbarity, it is the product of the disorder in your head.

To finish, you finish off the book with an optimistic poem, where you affirm that the pandemic will go away, that life will continue. Is one condemned to be optimistic?

This health crisis makes it necessary to be optimistic. I can't be pessimistic and condemn my granddaughters to die. I am forced to be optimistic. Fortunately, there are hints that there will be a medicine for this disease, although we do not know the deadline. Personally, it's been years since I stopped worrying about myself. I only worry about my grandchildren, that they may reach old age like me, having reached a certain fulfillment. That is what I want.

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