INTERWIEV - Translated by Barnaby Noone

Interview with joan margarit in the magazine PRIMA LITERA, re-published in PALABRAS ADENTRO BY JOSÉ LUIS MORANTE (4estaciones, ed. Manual lara cantizani, february, 2003).

OF TIME AND ITS DISORDER

With Joana, an elegy of great emotional complexity, poet and architect Joan Margarit (Sanaüja, the Segarra, 1938) spins a web between the raw material of his own life and the literary material at his disposal in a way that has become an aesthetic hallmark of his career. A prolific author in his native Catalan, Margarit has had his most recent work published in a bilingual edition, hereby allowing a wider public to appreciate his discursive sobriety, the single-minded attention he gives to a series of poetic subjects, and the particular way in which the privacy of his writing reaches out to the reader. His voice is confessional but avoids affectation; it speaks of ideas and obsessions that pit reality against dreams.

Prima Lita.- Are poems self-portraits?

Joan Margarit.-Art makes regular use of the self-portrait but we as viewers only see its results palpably in painting and sculpture. As a poet I use it, although there can be greater or lesser degrees of distance between the picture of me in the poem and the person I am, and it isn’t an easy distance for the reader to gauge. But then I don’t think readers need to do this; generally speaking, they simply need to appreciate that this distance is there as part of each poem.

I think we have overplayed the importance of this designed divide between poet and poem – or, to be more precise, between emotion and intellect. If the gulf were as wide as it is often claimed to be, the poem and the novel would share more common ground. The problem is that in recent history many poets have mistakenly supposed that their way of writing poetry is the way poetry should be written, they’ve repeated this and repeated it well; and this act of distancing has become a dogma of faith. As Sartre so aptly observed, Baudelaire is an example of someone who hardly maintained any distance from his writing voice. The only ‘distance’ poetry needs is one that can produce good poems; in the end, this is what counts. And like it or not, there are no rules about what makes or doesn’t make good poetry.

PL.- You lived your childhood in the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the misery and privation this entailed. Did your experience of those times colour your formative years?

JM.-What happens to us in childhood always shapes our growth, emotionally or otherwise. For me, the postwar years were a period of history, not a private experience. During the first years, which must have been the hardest, I suppose what affected me most was our family being constantly on the move: from Sanaüja in the Segarra where I was born, a small village in the heartland of poor, rural Catalonia, straight to pasaje Sant Felip in the neighbourhood of Sant Gervasi, in Barcelona; then three different flats in Rubí, a town near Barcelona where my mother was a teacher. And at the same time I was spending long periods of time just outside Barcelona in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, with my grandparents and the man who appears in my poem Tío Luis, in Estació de França, who worked for Barcelona’s mechanical construction company “La Maquinista” and who in fact I can still remember going into hiding one night, because of how he’d flown a Catalan flag from his roof, and other things before. After that came the towns of Figueres and Girona, where my father worked as an architect for the Department for Devastated Regions…Six different homes in my first nine years, which bring back memories that are chiefly of loneliness, of being friendless.

When I was nine my family moved to Barcelona, to the street Maestro Pérez Cabrero, overlooking Turó Park in what was still the outskirts of the city, on the west side. I started my secondary school studies and this, at least, was the beginning of six years of stability. My life was fairly normal during this second phase, between the ages of nine and fifteen years old, apart from the fact that it was absolutely impossible to learn anything of value in my secondary school the Ausias March, where neither the teachers nor the pupils seemed to know about Ausias March himself, the poet whose name the school had been given. I speak about this school in the poem La profesora de alemán, in Estació de França. As an adolescent I was something of a tearaway, forever skipping school, intent upon sexual discovery, which always involved money, and all this in that repressive environment of the times which I can’t help smiling about, in spite its ghastliness. Although they certainly weren’t “the best years of my life” as Gil de Biedma would say, I don’t have too many painful memories of that first sense of loneliness or of that repressed but rebellious adolescence of mine. Later on, in 1952, my family moved to Santa Cruz de Tenerife and that was when my love affair with that city and its island started, the feelings that I describe in Farewell, another poem in Estació de França. This part of my life is very important to me – more, I believe, than my childhood.

PL.- Can relection upon architectural theory work as a communicating vessel for the writing of poetry? Does it provide you with writing tools in some way?

JM.-I am more grateful to have had formal training in architecture as a science – I spent thirty-five years as professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona’s Escuela Superior de Arquitectura – than as a discipline of Fine Art, inasmuch as this has helped me to develop me a very useful mental disposition. With it, I can create the order and clarity I need for my poems. Considering my poetry and my particular area of architecture, I believe it is no petty coincidence that Structural Calculations strives to achieve a maximum state of resistance and stability for a structure using material as sparingly as possible (usually steel or concrete): in a sense, poetry attempts to say as much as it is able in as few words as it can. Apart from this, I consider the experience gained from that part of my professional work given over to the structural repair and reinforcement of inhabited buildings is of priceless value. The poems Recordar el Besòs in Los motivos del lobo or Arquitectura in Estació de França both speak about this.

PL.- You started your career in the seventies with four books in Spanish, and from 1981 onwards, you wrote in Catalan. In a bilingual community like yours, what attracts writers towards one language and literary tradition or the other?

JM.-Everyone’s reasons are different. In my case, on the one hand I had the weight of Catalan as my family’s native language, although it was simply that: a language, somewhat the worse for wear in the aftermath of the Civil War, unaccompanied by any kind of hidden cultural, literary or political agenda. And on the other hand, I had my studies and cultural education in Spanish. But as I see it, the decisive factor was the period of my life between the end of my adolescence and the beginnings of young adulthood in Tenerife, where I spoke Spanish regularly and well, and was surrounded by the beautiful sound of Spanish with a Canary Island accent, which indeed I am sorry to have lost. These years were followed by others in which I studied Architecture in Barcelona in particular circumstances: I was a young man from Tenerife who lived with friends who were also Canary Islanders in a hall of residence where most of the students were not from Catalonia. In such a complex situation, a fair amount of risk is involved: one can either hit upon the beginnings of a poetic language or then again, never find one. I had the conviction that I could learn to write poetry but I also found myself repeatedly coming up against the frustration of not being able to say in Spanish what I wanted to say; and this made me try to use Catalan to take my first step out of the magma and onto higher, dryer ground, linguistically speaking, in this embryonic stage where one begins a poem with the question of its language. I go into this in some detail in the prologue to Estació de França. Of those first books in Spanish, the only work I still consider to be of a certain interest are passages in Crónica, published in the Ocnos series in 1975 by Joaquín Marco, who was the first person who believed in my poems.

Writing a poem in Spanish and in Catalan during what in my case is a long period of time nonetheless provides me with the means to locate and remove all those unnecessary elements. In poetry, each language has its way of detecting the superfluous, whether this be words, images or lines. Layering Catalan and Spanish together helps to strip down a poem so that only the most essential words remain. Of course, though, this whole process is not indicative of some desire to step out of the light; it’s simply taking the work to another kind of stage.

PL.- The physical spaces in your poetry are protean cities, corners of vaguely defined interiors. Are these streets in some way the moods of the self?

JM.-They always are. Subject and object have coexisted in poetry since Romanticism, and I don’t think poetry will ever shake this off again. Certain experimental poems attempt to exclude emotion, but although some poets’ efforts are genuine, this style is more commonly the result of inexpert writing and of poorly composed pieces masquerading as the poetic avant-garde. How to handle this coexistence of subject and object is quite another thing, however; how to give either of these prominance. Even in my most subjective poems, I generally want to leave the feeling or subject of the writing as bare as possible, so as to allow the reader a certain sense of objectivity. I don’t know if I manage to do this, but I can assure you it’s what I try.

PL.- Can fruitful reflection be made about every kind of poetic journey, however random its path? In your work, for instance, what can you say about those recurrent elements the sea, the Mediterranean landscape, or the awareness of time?

JM.-Those are precisely the images that, by overuse, are most in danger of losing real meaning – of becoming barren. Managing to work with them again and again successfully and without recourse to irony or cynicism is one of the most difficult poetic tasks I face.

PL.-Can you talk about the importance to you of music? It would seem to be very important. Does it act, in any sense, as a way to find yourself again? As a mirror that can provide stability?

JM.-After the people that I love, music and poetry are my principle sources of inner stability. For example, since my daughter’s death, the closest I can come to being somewhere near her is with certain pieces of music. The Bach Cello Suites, played by Lluís Claret; the Goldberg Variations or the English Suites played by Glenn Gould.

PL.- Luis Cernuda speaks about a fundamental kind of music which existed before and after musicians discovered and played it. Is this how you feel when you listen to live jazz?

JM.-In fact, Cernuda is using Pythagoras’ diatonic scale here. I understand the temptation of considering all music as having emerged from a primal ocean of some kind: even someone as unsentimental as Cioran is able to consider such a thing. However, for me music what I listen to and what I remember having listened to. This is all I need to contemplate the complexity of its meaning and message, both outside and within the imaginative process.

And live jazz is endowed with one great virtue: it was born in humble circumstances and in spite of those attempts to take it to the concert hall, it continues to be played in places where listening and speaking are not incompatible. I sometimes find rather stifling the elevated solemnity in the performance of classical music, as it emerged from the drawing rooms of the upper classes: its performance in such conditions refuses to accept the idea that listening to music involves a constant process of drawing near and then standing back; it ignores the many, subtle changes of mood that the listeners experience, either because of the music or because of themselves.

PL.- Another motive for the resonance in your work is the question of personal relationships with others. It seems the passage of time always leaves traces of rust in these relationships.

JM.-The passage of time rusts everything. I think I say this more severely in the last poem in Joana. And funnily enough, of all those poems this was the most removed from my emotions at the moment when I wrote it, the least ‘real’ in the book. But it was also poetically necessary.

PL.- Do the reflective spaces that open the poems work as existential reaffirmations? Are they warning signals to the mind about the pliable nature of reality?

JM.-I believe that one of the ways we have to consciously approach art is by lifting aside the veil that everyday life drops over everything we do, even over our feelings; and by attempting to look at things around us as if this were the first time we saw them. In poetry, this is what is sometimes called the surprise factor, and some measure of this should always be there.

PL.- In the eyes of the poetic self, do life’s horizons offer less? Are poets people without faith or idealism?

JM.-As I see it, it is not the poetic self that limits those horizons but something in modern poetry itself, drawn especially from a particular feature of poetry in the English language which delimits the space in which a poet’s words are valid. Indeed, the formidable manner in which twentieth century poetry has widened its horizons owes itself to a poetic willingness to set foot on new terrain. There are so many varieties of poetry that it is essential to establish the limits of each kind. I don’t think this affects one’s degree of faith or idealism. Apart from anything else, this doesn’t just happen with poetry.

PL.- In the course of reading a series of poems, every reader finds a different place or point to linger. For me, it’s Los motivos del lobo. The symbolic importance of the pairings there are exemplary, I feel: the hedgehog and false security, the jellyfish and the failure of myth, or the man who desires and the lone wolf. Do the ethics of traditional fable colour your poems in any way?

JM.-Fable has always been present in poetry. When you think about it, doesn’t Jorge Manrique’s Verses on the Death of his Father use just that? But the tendency towards moral consequence – although in practice this is often actually counter-moral – helps to make the modern poem somehow resemble a fable, especially longer works. I think it would be truer to say that there are certain cases – again, in poetry in the English language, with poets such as Carver or Frost, for example – where the narrative is brief and the poem’s boundaries are ill-defined. In fact, this was foreseeable. There have been many twists and turns in the road to identifying a text as a ‘poem’: if we allow for a certain leeway, we might say that in our prehistory, the absence of anything but oral literature meant that everything was poetry. At a subsequent stage in history, all it took to decide if a text was poetry or not was to consider its theme – its characters and story. And at a later period still, poetry finally freed itself from thematic restrictions but continued to be characterised by its use of rhyme, syllabic metre and stress metre. In its most recent phase of history, I believe that all we can say with certainty about the substance of a poem is that it has rhythm and concision.

PL.- In contrast to those who say that writing poetry requires an act of distancing in order to palliate the effects of the circumstantial subjectivity, in Joana your poetic choice is to leap right into the fire, as it were; to be where the coals burn the flesh and where the answers to questions have to come fast.

JM.-The most important thing to decide here is whether or not we’re talking about a book of good poems, not how they’ve been written. Some poets obsessively insist that they have distanced themselves from the voice in their poems. This tendency falls in line with private concepts of modesty or propriety which have themselves always varied according to place and period. For this reason discussion of the whole matter can lose all sense of proportion, as it did for some time with regard to the question of homosexuality, for example. I’m thinking of poets such as Jaime Gil de Biedma or Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop went to painful extremes to protect her privacy in her poems. And yet she was able to write letters with an eye on their possible publication and sale, which is something she actually did during her life – and did, incidentally, immediately after having accused Robert Lowell of allowing his marital life too free a rein in his poetry. And it was Lowell who helped Bishop sell her letters. So I don’t think it’s a problem of poetry so much as of personal morals. But what sometimes happens is that people suppose that the manner in which something is done is the way that everyone should do it. Another area where there’s a certain amount of confusion is the fairly irrelevant question of output – of whether a good poet should be one who has written very much or not. It’s certainly true that some of those who write little will say that this is an indication of the quality of their work. This may or may not be true. I personally would like to write a lot and write well; and write better, the older I get: if my intuition is that I have a good poem in the making, there’s nothing I want more than to get on with it.

Coming back to Joana, I may well have used this book as a means of personal salvation. During those six months, narrowing the divide between emotion and conscience almost to nothing forced me to observe myself grieving for my daughter’s death and, in this way, to exercise some kind of self control that would keep me from going under.

PL.- There is a certain pattern of textures in your latest work. The voice there has become barer, more natural, practically devoid of any mis en scène. Is writing an exercise in airing out the cupboard, as it were?

JM.-I believe it’s an advantage for the reader if a poet writes clearly and can use the language that people of his or her time normally use to speak to each other – at least for the kind of reader I would like to think I have. It’s also a way to try and avoid the perversity of writing poetry just for other poets or for academics. In this area of how we should go about understanding a poem, one thing seems to be clear: if you have liked a poem, then you’ve understood it.

I do my best not to succumb to this downward spiral I’ve noticed recently, an unthinking return to the classic approach of former years but without its attendant virtues. The way dramatic characters had to behave was determined by their social class and category within that class: good, bad, ruthless, corrupt, and so on. And we’re still dragging this along, as shown by the noire novel, for instance, where although the labyrinthine plot must by definition offer some kind of surprise, the moral behaviour of its characters invariably does not; where, from the genre’s detectives and straight or crooked policemen and their informers, to its prostitutes and gangsters, every person is portrayed according to a varied but well established series of stereotypes. The example of noire fiction is quite relevant here too, because many of the characters who speak in modern poetry owe a great deal to Hammett, Chandler or Ross McDonald. Typically portrayed as lone, late night barflies or the patrons of dead-end hotels, these characters lament lost loves with a kind of feverish drama that is often difficult to understand or empathise with; we don’t even know how they earn a living. And the predictability of their moral reactions has created the same type of standards as in the noire novel.

All points of departure seem reasonable to me, but every poem must take a risk. It is surely true that a few years of concentrated practice and some kind of poetic culture can bring you to the point where you write halfway decent poetry. This is what was done when Europe was the cultural centre of the western world: people studied how to do it in school and they even did it in Latin and Greek. But this meant following the mainstream rather than heading for the rockier tributaries, and the really special catch was waiting elsewhere. Good poems come from walks along the edge and from the danger involved there. Falling off it is ridicule, and all great poems are written just a false step away from ridicule.

In the poems I write as I grow older, casting out all unnecessary ballast has become something of an obsession for me; I need to get rid of whatever is not essential, whether at the level of lines, words or subject matter. One of the things that made me think I was making progress and becoming more mature was when I started to remove lines which I’d worked on very hard and considered very good but which were not absolutely necessary.

PL.- Although the critics propose that realism is reaching its natural end as a literary genre, in the last few decades there has been a lot of new writing that might be described as realist, not only by the Spanish but also, I believe, by such poets and writers as the Galician Ramiro Fonte or the Catalan Pere Rovira. Do you feel part of a new aesthetic movement?

JM.-The two names you mention are of great poets who I admire and who am proud to consider as friends – in the case of Pere Rovira, a very good friend. I think our writing shares a great deal and they would both agree with what I’m saying here, but I’m not sure we form part of any kind of aesthetic movement. We’ve never spoken about that kind of thing. The truth is that when different poets do formally get together to speak about aesthetic tendencies or generations of writers, this has usually been organised by other people with commercial ends in mind.

The two most usual ways that I work towards a poem are either by the active contemplation of my emotions or by letting the poem itself be the hand guiding me towards this emotion and eventually pointing to what is there. Joana might be an example of the former and Primer amor and El oráculo, of the latter. At any rate, I’d say that there is always underlying emotion in my poems; my task is to make its presence tangible to readers so that when they read a collection of those poems, they feel as if they were spectators at an autobiographical staging of sorts. Even in pieces which examine subjects unrelated to my own experience, like Tío Luis or Estació de França, I try to create ties between the tale and the teller.

As for realism, I don’t know of any poem that does not in some way use the features associated with the word, just as I have no knowledge of any poem that does not use aspects of what we call symbolism. I don’t like the appropriation of very general and rather vast terms like these to describe small, individual pieces of writing.

PL.- “Helena is every dream that life has gathered.” If time is the great leveler, what legacy remains behind words?

JM.-Poetry is somewhat like religion but more complex. Today the higher senses of order that religion once offered are disappearing; that particular notion of order to which a person might subscribe to find inner peace is no longer available. But now the concept of order – and not higher order – can exist on other terms. That order in which peace of mind can be found, or in which people can find themselves to create a semblance of peace between the different, often conflicting forces they feel, is something we each have to build for ourselves. The more rudimentary this order is, the less effective and durable it is; the more sophisticated the design, the greater its demands on our intellect and sensibility. There are not many tools for building such a haven of order. In fact apart from love, the only ones I know of are poetry and music.

In Plato’s Banquet it says that humans were originally hermaphrodites but when the gods saw these beings’ happiness, they were jealous and separated the male and female parts into man and woman. Occasionally, however, a man and woman who were once one find each other again, and this is the beginning of what we call a great love. Perhaps this is what happens with words. When words in a poem describes something to us that we had imagined indescribable, in that place and moment it is as if they had occupied the position they once had in some golden age of languages before Babel, before languages were haphazardly cast across the earth in the beginnings of a long process of destruction that culminated in dictionaries, academies and other varieties of misery. Poetry has had to take on a role in which it exercises nostalgia for that golden age in an eternal struggle to help words recover their meaning and force. If one is prepared for a moment to consider poetry this way, then it would follow that such poetry would not attempt to build lexical structures that had never existed before; rather, it would aspire to the miracle that with one poem the reproduction of an entire lost order might be recovered. To use an analogy with music, in these circumstances the reader of poetry might become more like a musician who plays and interprets rather than a spectator who passively listens. This is why there are so few readers of poetry but also why those readers continue to read. Whoever has made the effort to learn to interpret a poem and to listen to the fundamental order contained within its words has broken through to a world that is difficult to leave. It’s clear, of course, that Plato’s story was a fable (like that music by Cernuda or Cioran); and yet I admit that for me, everything at the edges of poetry happen as if it were more than that.