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To Be A Poet
…not even for a man is life easy, you know. Because…they will laugh if you cry and even if you need tenderness. They will order you to kill or be killed in war and demand your complicity to pass on the tyranny they installed in the caves. Yet I hope you will be a man like I always dreamed of: sweet to the weak, fierce to the arrogant, generous to those who love you, ruthless to those who command you.
— Oriana Fallaci, Letter to an Unborn Child.
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I distrust writers who didn’t start making verse. Leopoldo Marechal used to remember that, for Aristotle, all genres of literature are genres of poetry, and Ray Bradbury advises to read a poem every day before starting to write a story or novel. Every true writer is essentially a poet.. When one says “poet,” think of Gongora, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo.
…But there’s another type of writer who gets to verses through prose, like Borges, like Quevedo, even like Poe. And there’s still a third guy, the great proist, who can’t write verses, although he surely started doing so in his adolescence. William Faulkner confessed to Jean Steen: “I am a failed poet”…
Poetry is not a way to write, it is rather a way of living, of perceiving the world
— Abelardo Castillo
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