Introducing Chus Pato

Chus Pato’s poetry travels at breakneck speed, toppling lyric convention and the rules of grammatical civility as it leaps over them to bring readers face to face (ouch) with European migrations, national identity, feminism, canons of literature and commerce, scars of dictatorship, a clamor for justice, and meditation on expression itself.

Pato is from Galicia in the Iberian northwest, one of Spain’s first colonies. The words of Rosalía de Castro, the famed poet of the nineteenth century Galician Renaissance, resound: “Galicians, never call yourselves Spanish.” Its culture is informed by the ancient Celtic migrations, one of which included the Coelerni tribe, who gave their name to Galicia and to the Roman Portus Calle, today’s Porto. Galicia originally extended north from the Douro River. It is not the Spain sold to tourists by Franco, which still persists when we think of Spain. Galicia is not a land of bullfights, paella, or flamenco. Think mist, bagpipes, and pork shoulder!

Galician, a romance tongue (Celtic did not survive), is descended from Galician-Portuguese, which bifurcated in medieval times to become both modern Portuguese and modern Galician. In Galicia, it was suppressed during Franco times, and was never supported by the moneyed classes. Linguistic conflict still exists between those who want a Galician future and those who wish to live in Castilian. Chus Pato, pointing at Franco’s legacy, once said, “My native language is fascism.” She now says, “My native language is linguistic conflict.”

Galician literature is rich and varied, though rarely translated, and Pato is one of its most remarkable poets. Her work has altered twenty-first century poetry in her country and is an oeuvre that, upon entering English, can perturb us and open new possibilities in our own language.

For us, Pato’s work has obvious correlates in language poetry and post-language lyric, and she’s political—though not in the sense of most poets who write in English. In her work, the “I” is multiplied, and voices proliferate; she ignores the rules of form (impolite!) and hurtles forward, breaking poetry’s space/time barriers. This piece, however, the coda to an “autobiography,” talking about writing itself, is quieter.

Reproducing her small fractures of syntax or narrative progression in English without taming them or creating an unreadable text is a challenge. How can one make English move as she makes Galician move? The weight and balance of the phrases are tricky because Galician sentences are formed differently and don’t take on personal subject pronouns, which makes the English pronouns stand out glaringly in translation. Galician sentences emphasize the verb and make gender easily visible when necessary so the feminine can exist (though in the third person, when subject pronouns are absent, the gender of the subject can be deliriously indeterminate).

Chus Pato was born in 1955 and teaches history and geography at a secondary school in central Galicia. Her work has been translated into many languages, and her book of selected poems in Spanish translation was highlighted as one of the best books of 2003 by the newspaper El País.

 

While I Write...

extract from Secession (Vigo: Galaxia, 2009).

March 6

Yes, any ritornello will help me face the night, all the terrifying nights. I sleep with this image of sky that for me matches night sky –the lights of the small city where I live tinge the firmament a brownish colour, almost red,– tomorrow I’ll watch waters run in the muddy fields / like cataracts, the goats, sheep, shepherd, scant plants in the form of stars with tiny flowers that grow between the synthetic paving stones of the garden, diamonds in the buds of the bare trees.

March 17

Today the narcissi flowered; seeing them, the sensation is that of living at the close of the 18th century, soon news will come of revolution in France. A poet crosses the channel from Great Britain, arrives on the continent, sees the narcissi, heads toward a future people, finally on these roads he will find that future people.

April 1

The poem speaks identity, when the star raises us to a power of language that is identity, countering dreams and tombs.

April 3

It could be that the poet is he or she who makes their disposition coincide with the identity of a given language. The identity of a given language, any language, pronounces the world but its declarations don’t converge with the world.

Perhaps (psychology?) being a poet means assuming the caesura, constituting oneself in secession, in the very impossibility that languages can link words and things. A poet asserts I     I is an unpopulated place, a silence, a cut, a distance.

Over this horizon a given language looms, the strings of languages pulse in this freedom (of the lute, echo, wind),  rhythm reverberates. A poet listens to the cadence, the infinite voices of the world –freed and enslaved– that never correspond to, and never will conform with the world. A poet remembers the writings that preceded her, and those to come, those not yet born. A poet admires the images that burgeon from the material velocity that is a chord, a dream, a voice. A poet knows words will never have the power to harmonize. That no poem will ever be its own master, nor will it master the language, or the world.

April 5

A language dances on this blade-edge, howls in the desert, about this independence

A poet is as close to a privation of language as can be settled on. The language passes through a poet –just as we cross an open field– passes through the inorganic, through the vegetal republic, placates beasts, enchants, calms.

I spew out / this drama /       dark flash             (you)

April 8

I read the last pages of No Place On Earth, the dialogue between Karoline von Günderrode and Kleist. I underline (...) Consanguinity as a good, no one had ever considered this. The kinship that attenuates the distress felt before that alien sex to whom one can never surrender. And suddenly I realize that lions don’t strike deals with humans, but that warriors, men and women, do suffer from boundaries: to be lion, lioness, Achilles, Penthesilea, lion, lioness wounded in the hunts of Ashurbanipal, the arrow that splinters the thorn of love (...) sometimes it’s unbearable to me that nature has divided human beings into men and women. To give birth to what kills me, and in the tomb my two Is meet up in surprise.

Even so I think the I of a poet is not a divided instance but is a segregation itself, that the I of a poet (in the new psychology?) fully coincides with the division, thus advances not in a rhythm of contraries but in the chords of an independence.

Wondering if it’s possible to draw a roboportrait of a contemporary poet.

April 16

They wander under bridges. She pointing out the vertiginous arch of the viaduct, says: “our violence was real, a distress at the world, the real is the opposite of the market, doesn’t carry meaning, demonstrates the ferocity of flesh.”

April 20

The words of Literature adapt only to the howl of pain, to the howl of pleasure.

The density of a poem can’t be measured except by this harmony with material.

Articulating the howl, introducing it into words, that explosion. Being incapable, getting close, doing it.

The poem is future politics

The future politics is the real

The real are the inhabitants of the poem

The inhabitants of Literature are anonymous, a future people.

April 22

A writing is an insurrection of the language. It produces itself in the desert by emanation, assumes the real in the insurrection of language, articulates the howl, the howl of a native tongue.

The I of a poet (psychology?) is a secession, doesn’t substitute, doesn’t transport, doesn’t carry meaning.

Aesthetics is that writing which assumes the howl of the animal, the lament of Hades

(rural life interred forever)

April 23

A poet spends her life writing poems, just so that some line, some tiny fragment enters the memory and dream of the language.

As a cataclysm or splendour, her name (Ferrín, Novoneyra, Hölderlin, Rosalía) is remembered, or the title of one of his books, a miniscule portion to reconstruct the vista or the smallest word that renews the sonic key of the language

and the ivy that covers the walls,

the vegetation on the floor of the heart

flourish.

April 29

Like how we walk across an open field

like a bullet that in its trajectory opens air, enters flesh that takes it in and shuts over it like a nocturnal flower

language slips, slips sideways, in the tombs

through the mouth crater

through the esophagus cavern

activates this insurrection

–it’s a problem of civilization, we people already can’t stand the world we live in

–no, I don’t believe my poems are cryptic, I don’t believe legacies are cryptic

September 1

When we say “the entire body of an animal is a prosthesis” we are trying to indicate that it uses its body in its totality. We on the other hand need prostheses, external technology (the voice, articulated language, echo) and large and extensive zones of our body have withdrawn to live in areas of comfort.

The voice, the language, a poem all work on our behalf. A poem is prosthesis, technology for life, for what zone?, which organ(s), area(s) subsist anaesthetized in exchange for a poem?

November 24

That technologies and creatures don’t coincide with words, that words can’t incarnate nor create the world / only stay in it as do the living –a bifacial flint, a goddess, mountains– is the supreme dynamis of a poem (language)

December 30

In a Literature, words are the irremediable absence of objects that, on another hand, are not entirely different from this absence and vice-versa; but this “vice-versa” doesn’t apply because we can affirm “objects are the irremediable absence of words that name them and that, on the other hand, are not entirely different from this absence;” what doesn’t meet the proof of consistency is “in a poem objects are the irremediable absence, etc.” The same goes for emotions, feelings, etc.

In a Literature objects don’t exist, nor emotions, nor feelings, only words that are the irremediable absence of the aesthetic they provoke

January 1

Later and for a friend, she notes: “the way I see it, a poem is a double quaking (aura, fracture); from the expansion of physis language sprouts –a language quickly codified in the tongue of the social majority; when this language overflows, a poem is born. A poem is the largest possible distance between creatures and names, perhaps this is why these words, despite their phantasmal condition (desire) can speak (capture, frame) the creatures of the world.”

February 27

Finally and on fragments: “that she can’t imagine them traced in a circle around her, but visualizes them scattered and later hanging between sky and earth (aerolites), yes, like cromlech stones –the grey sparkle of granite and deep blue of basalt– which she places not in a circle but in a sort of enigmatic disorder.”

March 14

We’re up early and light can’t yet conquer darkness, it’s a penumbra in these entrails, the blinds over the windows a pastel blue, almost the texture of chalk in the mouth, and we’re in the north. It’s not a dialogue: it’s an external voice that addresses an auditorium and an internal one that tries to establish an order in the dispersion, in the exhaustion. Later, in the south, this same voice will query: where is the mind?

this voice is interested in figuring out the difference between remnant and fragment; both, it sustains, are part of a destroyed totality, but the remnant fits in the future.

it’ll ask: if the literary word is a remnant, is a poem a conjunction of ruins?

the literary word is that which places itself in the site of a remainder, which writes from the remnant (the hand with difficulty keeps filling a page: draws symbols, schematizes). A remnant emits signals that the poetic word perceives; the calls are sensorial and in language (symptoms), are also impulses that translate into thoughts. A vestige is an impossibility of writing, an emotional ruin (fatigue, the mind assumes the position of this poignant rubble). Remnants related to the literary word are not classical (acanthus-topped capitals, pediments) though may still be inorganic: what begs clarification is that they don’t register to sight though they may be prophecies, they’re affective ghosts, scraps of a past or a destroyed future that craves to be written and that can’t write itself because it is crumbling, so the poetic word takes its place, in the situation of a dead language or of one living as if dead, of razed productive forces, of means of production from the past (Galician rural community life, the factories of Europe, the mentalities of a given historical period, any personal or collective happening or what never happened). The literary word amasses the passions that differences emit; a vestige of annihilation is an implant of future, it wants to take place and be inscribed in what’s to come; a remnant of a collapse founds a tomorrow; a remainder of devastation is an origin along with other earlier and multiple departures –each human being, each plant, each animal, each inorganic discrepancy has so many beginnings that are remnants of demolitions which implant themselves in the future– from this we can say that a snippet both founds and names what’s to come; but these specks of destruction are intangible, and thus have the condition of fantastic beings –they aren’t disconnected from material but energize it– and through them, through their spectral condition, we still persist and are visible

a poem is a conjunction of ruins, but these ruins are drives of the language; they belong to imagination and from there emit their signals which are desires for writing –these ruins are really our very selves navigating and being born into life–

thus a poem is composed of fragments of ruins that are remainders of an earlier collapse or of one still to come, or that never happened, that are ghosts and despite this memorable

the unforgettable are ruins, sensitive and in language (symptoms) that gather and found us, are meaning because they are genesis, are political because they are mind, intelligence (open)

 

and they are metaphor because they are dislocation, praxis that unites what is dislocated

sometimes the ruins scare us and so we say “I want the ghosts to have hearts” / grass and lichen and always, always birds in symbiosis with horses

it’s beauty

and the velocity of the otter’s wake, though we, humans, are not very fond of otters

March 15

Emotion is the key to three kingdoms, through it we dissolve and are soluble in the cosmos. Emotion is dialogical always and its sites are bright, the light of a winter morning: with emotion we travel and restore ourselves a damaged kinship, the feeling of belonging and non-inclusion –anthropology; through it we’re free and can endure radical orphanhood (identity, identifications), we mark the native tongue with this overwhelming damage and the native tongue proliferates, disseminates itself and makes itself much more true. Emotion lets us relate to each other, establish intense and random affective links with groups and persons we’ll never see again, lets us understand that for a Saharawi poet of the “Friendship Generation” the trip south, alongside the families of the book is a way of resolving difficulties derived from one’s individual trajectory and the conditions of one’s nation of origin (refugee camps). We dine in wayside hotels, we talk, we enter the long corridor like Shelley Duvall in Kubrick’s The Shining and head to our rooms, after driving round and round the HH hotel in circles due to roadworks. Through it, through emotion we access the murmur –windsong in our inner trees; we know about cut peat, understand laughter, prophecies. Through emotion we know we must not disturb the sphinxes that are uteruses (mothers) apotropaic beings

March 19

Remnants were never part of any totality just part of the gust that dispersed them, the totality of remainders is not the totality of the gust, the gust exceeds the remains but finds itself contained in each and every remnant; a remnant is a dilation of light in the gust, a tremor, an amplification of limits, as if the edges if the remainder had frayed and through the holes in the weave a light enters even brighter than a halo

March 21

A horde is when we weren’t yet humans and after; the horde opens time –primogenital time– it’s the ape with its affirmation of future, pre-paleolithic, yes; a horde is a glob of shelter that harbours a multiplicity of glands, of knowledge; a horde is an idea of maximal sonospheric and iconic cohesion but that transits and moves in every direction, is permeable and osmotic with all it encounters, drags, polarizes and gathers into itself materials that come into being outside it; hordes are a fold continually unfolding.

This concept of horde starts too from the Deleuzian rhizome but has passed through nation (identity, identifications) and is stateless; finally the horde is a measure, a non-authoritarian rhythm of transport and dislocation (metaphor), of displacement dizzying or very slow, it produces itself as if in waiting, in suspension, in a void, in a desert; hordes are a process that strides toward a greater freedom of practice and vital poetic theory.

Hordes communicate with our (lost) animality, bring zones into the present that are common to us and other mammals, we travel with them to a night in which dreams, pain and expressions of pleasure can’t be masked and connect us with areas of shamanic density; they mount the heart of the empire as if the names of empire are spoken, and time governed in their favour; they are difference, that which is always truth and the empire can’t contradict them and they are destruction for the empire.

Just as emotion in its own time is the turbulence of the equinox, a bright seminar, intense happiness that recalls old militancy, against Francoism, dialogued in youthful conversation; in the north because these entrails-cloud take place on an island in the Atlantic, and encompass a commonality of three continents and the nation and the refugee camps of the Saharan struggle (Galicia).

The horde is a womb or native cupola permeable to the world.

Singular and without peer, the horde inscribes itself on a base that can elect to be navigation chart, helicoidal column, lichen, bubble, barrens.

The native tongue is a being of the horde, the poem conducts it into its own confines, and to its extremes which is how the language is spoken.

A horde is more than the void, more than destruction, but before this, before this there was no world, the language is how the world is spoken

Metaphor is when the signified/signifier barrier explodes in the air

The mind is outside with love and the cosmos

The mind is a literary spectre.

April 6

I started this new poem A horse for the muses yesterday struck by a work by Kounellis (untitled): a musical instrument, perhaps a lute, altered by the artist. The top cover of the box was removed and inside it the artist had placed the bony wrapper of a goat cranium, in such a way that upon seeing it I thought of a cerebrum inside a mandorla which reminded me of a pantocrator. The strings are, how could it be otherwise, broken and the instrument dangles from the very top of the metal plaque above which, on a butcher hook, is displayed: the animal, god, death, victim, the sacrificed –lamb of god– inside the mystic almond, inside the mother (the animals we eat to nourish us are replaced by this lute holding the bones of a goat), the butcher shop is replaced by the museum, in this case by an exhibition hall. The artifact’s shadow on the metal plaque made me think of a clock pendulum, thus of time, time’s passage, of its compass, of the hours.

I wrote:

The Earth fabricates itself in art, in art we build a nest, in the nest we speak words. Words are not subject to death for they are chimaeras of the voice, though subject yes to disappearance because we can conceive of the extinction of the species.

It’s an animal but it’s a god, it’s a god but is death, the almond, the animal, god, death is music; its shadow is time.

But the void, the void is a thing

still / world.

I composed the poem out on my walk this morning, my physical state was and is one of somnolence.

April 13

In my notebook I record the following phrases: the time of the poem is out there where simian non-time and mother-time join without mixing, a time prelinguistic and, at the same time, that of the inauguration of language, it’s embryo time, is and is not culture, is and is not a time. The time of the poem is a fissure in the linear story of the pact of civilization. All in all, for us, time is a father, but the poem is not time’s child. The time of the poem is that empty instant, inconceivable, without personal subject, without identity, definitive; not everything, but not fully either and at the same time, yes, fully.

The protagonist of Villa Amalia (I’m reading Quignard) explains to little Lena “Everything in nature, birds, tides, flowers, wind, the hours of the stars, tells time its time.”

In another book, Quignard writes

“In time there is always a before, without language; this is time.

Foetus, infans: before acquiring identity, both are without language”

The tear in my left eye persists and won’t go away, I have to go to the ophthalmologist.

May 20

I know the void extends to the edge, where my breath breaks apart. The void is my mouth, the tremblings of the flesh enter by mouth. Something, someone opens my mouth, extends the void, enunciates the unpronounceable, a subject, I. Something, someone, emits a prohibition.

My position in the desert is that of one situated outside the pack, outside the flag, outside the placenta that makes community life possible, its reproduction. I don’t know if others share my fate. Something, someone, every day, every thousandth of a second, emits the prohibition.

What politics, the one that germinates from Literature, from the drives of the native tongue, from a subject that can’t be restrained and unpronounceable extends (psyche, life) to the edges of the Earth, that sees itself as one spectre among many and assembles itself in the multiple organs of the territory, up to the finis terrae where dreams break apart, ideologies, pneumae, the dead? What politics is there, outside the pack, outside the flag, where breath breaks apart?

May 31

The language of consensus is as spectral as that of the poem, what distinguishes them is the type of ghosts they conjure; in the first case the apparitions emanate from authority, in the second they are the drives of the language. Goddesses and gods inhabit both.

The totality of the language is spectral, as the articulations of a voice are the incarnation of the air’s incorporeality distorted by the organs of phonation or by the materiality of an alphabet. The emanations enter and leave by the mouth, incarnate themselves in writing.

Any language is spectral because a language is the void of the living world in the extension of a body.

In each particle, in all and each, the void is the visibility of death.

The language of pact-makers, even when the political is sabotage, is split open, pierced by the poem.

It is the poem that originates unforgettable politics, a nation of prophecies, of the dead, of letters, of apparitions, not subject to existence (birth or death), rigorously phantom.

This void, the contortion of the mouth, every day, every hour, every second, that clothes itself as poem, as future politics; this void sustains bodies, extension, world.

The poem is unpronounceable; to this unpronounceable, we belong.

But my void stays out there, at the finis terrae where the breath breaks apart.

All atoms, all and every one of the atoms, each day, each hour, each rotation around the sun, around the visible, the audible, around meaning, in all the directions of meaning: threads of silver, of void.

June 6

The last time I was in the city of Ourense, I went back to the boxer’s house; it was being restored and at that moment both facades were still standing; the inside was an enormous pit and machines were excavating a deep basement for an eventual garage. I looked down and contemplated the building from the lip of San Marcial Plaza. Suddenly the words propelled me to open the huge front door which though much deteriorated still retained its majesty; I quickly entered the emptiness and was sucked upward, to the height of the second floor where, upon a floor of cloud and gardenias, invisible but perceptible to the senses, I felt the studio reproduced exactly and was able to pierce through each and every one of its walls, even though it was a bit hard to walk on cloud-cotton, but no harder on the other hand than walking on riverbanks where they meet with the sea.

I spent that evening with M.O. on a terrace, it started to rain and we didn’t duck under the awnings, we interned ourselves in the rain; M.O. protected his head with a rain hat and I fended it off with a flowered scarf, we walked not totally corporeal through deserted streets

“and what if identity were really all we are not? I asked: a river, angelica and algae and bridges that cross this river and the viaduct; in the past month, the voice went on, I suffered various episodes of levitation, in one it was a god that subjected me; in the helicoidal rotation, slow and sculptural ascension, I wrote: flame is the baroque fold. Our faces were reflected in the steam of As Burgas, in the transparent and slow combustion of the embers”

“I think you should say that they imprinted themselves like marks of blood in a shroud.”

-translated 6 December 2008, revised 12 March 2009 in Montreal