Veracruzan Poets

United in this sampling of Mexican poets is a small selection of six Veracruzan authors born at different stages of the twentieth century. The first surprise that leaps out is the diversity of themes, styles and preoccupations facing the phenomenon of literary writing.

Ramón Rodríguez was born in 1925 in Cordoba, Veracruz. He is a poet, translator, epigrammist, journalist and philosopher. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and worked as a journalist for the daily The World in Cordoba. He was a founding member of the editorial council of the university magazine The Word and Man and at different times has worked toward achieving the editorial goals of the Veracruzan University. He also was a consultant for the Wrapping Paper Editions and Graffiti magazine.

Thanks to his great silences, he has managed to pour forth his own style, which is something unusual among his generation. In his first book, Being of the Distance, he united classic spirit and innovation as he put together sonnets and his "notes for a blues," which in fact proposed a different poetizing. In Winter's Quarters, his second book, the canonical models disappeared completely and his expression attained its own voice and an aesthetic purpose with ties to the English ballad, the Imagist vanguard and what the American Beat Generation used:

I speak as I remember
spread out days that escape far behind
I speak of things of the earth and the water
of imaginations of the wind
of grace and joy
I speak of night.

His poetic thesis can be summed up well as such:

Poetry
golden oil lamp of the street
darkness in your empty house.

In his next book, Old Fashioned Blues, he opened Madam Mallarme's fan, freed his flow and brought to consummation the style he had alluded to years before in This is how Carasucia [Dirty-Face]Spoke. His text "Woman as Idea, as Sport and as Necessity," launched his lucky roll of dice:

Francesca
. . . I say that if you can detach from your thighs
one of Paolo's ears
tell him that in the last round
they have just broken an old record!

Jorge Brash was born in Xalapa in 1949. Besides being a poet, he has been a translator and editor at cultural institutions around the country, including the National Council of Science and Technology, the Secretariat of Public Education, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Veracruzan University, where he currently leads the magazine The Word and Man. He also worked on the writing panel for Return magazine, which was founded and led by Octavio Paz.

His poetic work has distinguished itself for drawing nourishment from classical sources. He is intimate and has undergone a frank evolution until attaining a stylized personal expression, freer every time, even as it is more classical every time. This mature facet is without a doubt found in the works he arranged in Fire of Voices (1983), Useless Water Dance (1985), Rain in January (1986) and in the refrains he wrote—always correcting himself following Valery's dictation—in Persistance of Water (1992). From his study of cultured forms he has created ballads, madrigals, odes, decimas, glosses, sonnets, and even silvas and zejeles whose primordial theme is love, whether in loneliness or exchanged.

Halfway Through the Bridge[Poetry 1992-1994] is a sieve-like book, contained and very original:

Over the back of time,
to look neither back nor forward,
hear the whisper,
feel the creeping of fingers
and immediately lose it
as the step is lost
between the water and the sand.

Brash has been, as has Ramón Rodríguez, a poet of various evolutions. In the latest edition of his book Halfway Through the Bridge he added, alongside previously published poems, some that were unedited. Nevertheless, he made a series of corrections to the ones already published that have resulted in a renewed interest in his work. His latest productions offer a tribute to form and a purification...