tlf news

Vol. xxvi #2

June, 2005




Tangled up in Blue
Poetry blooms in El Progreso





"...The poet must learn from others. No solitude is impregnable.
All roads lead to the same point: the communication of what we are".

--Pablo Neruda



Midway through the year 2003, teatro la fragua began to support the idea of a group of young people to use the teatro space as a forum to read poetry, their own and of others, in a setting of words and guitar chords. The poetry project Atrapados en azul was born. These restless youth wanted poetry to have its own tribune from which to raise its voice and awaken dormant sensibility and spirits from the stupor which daily routine imposes on them. Bit by bit a space for artistic enthusiasm and creativity took form, a space whose verses invoke the memory of those poets who have sung hymns to love, to human solidarity, to fragile but so necessary hope. The project has completed two years and continues growing, nourished by the conviction that if the voice of the poet is silenced in a society, life itself will eventually be silenced.

Last year the world celebrated the hundredth birthday of Pablo Neruda. While that message is still warm, it is fitting to reflect on the meaning and importance of the fact that a group of young people, some of them musicians, some of them apprentice poets, have united their restlessness and their talent, their naive faith in the power of poetry, and have given birth to what is now the "movement" Atrapados en azul. Their audacity stands out boldly in an age more seduced by the practical and the mercantile than by the inner adventure that is poetry.


In Poetry shall not have sung in vain, Neruda's acceptance speech when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, the Chilean poet said:

I have never learned from books any magic formula for writing a poem; in turn, I won't leave behind any printed recipe or mode or style from which young poets can imbibe drops of my supposed wisdom.

It is noticeable at the poetry readings of the Atrapados that the formula from which their verses spring isn't the fact that they have read one or another book. They have found their own recipes in the humble content of their experience and in a restless urge to rebel against the reality which surrounds and overwhelms us, an urge which finds its medium of expression in poetry.

The members of Atrapados en azul arrived at their destination by very different roads; some from urban high schools, some from coastal or rural villages, bursting with images and sounds of the countryside; some from universities, some from the asphalt, from the heat and the dust. Young men and women united by friendship and by a restless longing to create an expressive space that did not exist in El Progreso. Their creations may not be perfect, and their verses, in this stage of tentative first steps, may not reach the level of an esthetic standard that would merit distinction in the demanding, difficult and frequently capricious universe of literature. But they have worked a miracle in the cultural desert of a society openly hostile to artistic expression: daring to write poetry, poetry that does not blush in the face of criticism, shining in solitude and offering itself as a basic and modest sustenance to the audience which has slowly formed around them, and which has identified with the variety of restless impulses expressed in the nocturnal stammer of youthful verses.


In another section of his speech Neruda says:

The poet is not a "little god".... The best poet is the one who gives us our daily bread: the neighborhood baker, who does not consider himself a god. He fulfills the majestic and humble task of kneading, baking, browning and delivering our daily bread as a community obligation. And if the poet manages to arrive at that simple consciousness, that simple consciousness can be converted into the foundation of a colossal handicraft, the simple or complex construction which is a society, the transformation of the conditions that encompass mankind.

That community commitment is very present in the Atrapados en azul collective: to create poetry that is the food which nourishes sensitivity, which supplies spiritual energy to challenge all of those elements of our times which kidnap and degrade our humanity. Neruda compares the art of poetry with the profession of baker, an anonymous but vital work. The job of that artisan who is the baker is not an easy one: working in the heat of the bakery, hands and muscles tire as the product is kneaded over and over; rising early while the world sleeps; awaiting the voices of the dawn to deliver the product to our tables. Sacrifice and patience have also been constants in the work of the atrapados, starting with the very act of forming the collective; the solitary work of each one elaborating their materials, outfitting the teatro space with their own paintings, creating an intimate atmosphere with low lighting, all the way down to the detail of the appropriate table for the banquet of verses, music and song. No one in the collective aspires to fame, as no baker is overcome by professional vanity; rather, they seek to open up a way for other young people to approach that necessary poetical exercise, which allows one to see and experience the world in a whole new way.


The Atrapados poetry shows the influence of older brothers like Bennedetti, Shakespeare, Neruda, Amaya Amador, Indira Flamenco. In the light of these older siblings, the poets of the collective have found a style. The Atrapados poems speak of love and falling out of love, they celebrate life; they denounce, with beauty that goes far beyond political propaganda, the lies and injustice of the world around them. The verses are breath and spirit which emanate resistance, joy and optimism; they illuminate a different path for those of us who live in this region of eternal heat and fleeting downpours. This is the militancy for which these muchachos of El Progreso have opted. As Neruda observes:

"And although my posture may raise bitter or friendly objections, I can certainly see no other path for the writer of our wide and cruel countries (unless we want darkness to flourish) but to nourish the hope that those millions of persons who have not learned to read or to read our writings, who still do not have the skill to write or to write to us -- to nourish the hope that they may find a space to live with the dignity without which it is not possible to be an integral human being."

Faithful to that tradition, the collective is taking its work to rural areas of the country, where illiteracy holds sway, to motivate rural youth with the importance of reading and the arts. They give poetry and music workshops in those very places where human dignity is banned and where the most elementary education is grossly deficient. From these experiences of wandering troubadours, springs a new life which then is newly expressed in other verses, in committed songs.

Thanks to the initiative of the Atrapados, poetry has pitched its tent filled with hopes and dreams in El Progreso. Young voices are raised, the voices of persons who still believe that a simple and modest verse has the power to transform the one who writes it and the one who receives it. If these young people persevere along that difficult path, they might make it possible, for this time and this circumstance, that poetry's song will not be sung in vain.

Carlos M. Castro


Copyright © 2005 por teatro la fragua





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