Vertical Poetry
By Roberto Juarroz
Translated by Mary Crow
Born in Coronel Dorrego near Buenos Aires in 1929, Roberto
Juarroz worked as a professor of Library
Science in University of Buenos Aires. Intensely withdrawn as a person and a
philosophical thinker , he was the proponent of what he himself called
"explosive poetry", seeking
pastures that goes beyond conventional limits
of poetry and language. Ocatvio Paz called him
one of the most distinguished of all Latin American poets. Paz
wrote:" Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallization:
language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments." This is very true about the subject and form
of his poetry as his poems speak about a speaker's momentary confrontation with
some quandary conveying the brevity of the immediate. Juarroz's goal in poetry
is "the recuperation of the instant". Juarroz's vertical poetry is wise and luminous. As the great Argentinian novelistJulio
Cortazar rightly said, "It's been a long time since I've read poems that have
extended me and exalted me as his have."
Roberto Juarroz called his entire body of verse
"vertical poetry" using this phrase as the title of every one of his
books, each poem a fragment of verticality yet also fragment of the whole
impossible to complete. "Vertical Poetry" plunges deep and soars
high. For Juarroz, verticality presupposed "to break , go beyond the
flattened dimension, the stereotypical , conventional, to search for the
other." It is the opposite of horizontality, the space we see extending
around us of the material world. He doesn't title any of his poems which adds
to the sense that the poems form part of an ongoing flow.
His typical poems, as seen below, are aphoristic, cast as a
riddle or syllogism, mixing abstraction with concrete image. One can find a rare confluence emotion, intelligence and sensitivity here. Autobiographical
elements are absent in his poems and he
doesn't follow history or politics or a particular life . He tries to speak of
an experience outside of ordinary time. Juarroz's poetry expresses a despair of
human condition in its idea that in each
person there's a side that opens towards the void or abyss. His poems attempt a view of the depths and the heights playfully
so that we are prevented from feeling that we are being addressed by a
self-proclaimed prophet. While sometimes the subject is God or the nature of
the universe, the immediate focus is almost always on something small, a leaf
or butterfly , and frequently the voice that speaks to us is bemused or quizzical
, even when it tells us "We have no other remedy, then/but to be
paradise".
Over his lifetime, the style of this poet never changed.
Austere in language and generalized in imagery, his poems employ an
interpersonal tone and archetypal sentiment . They have the spareness of haiku
in their economy and simplicity of language, their reliance on images from
nature and their Zen like serenity or playfulness. However, unlike the haiku, Juarroz's poems
present the interior world.
Poem 1
The most beautiful day
lacks something:
its dark side.
Only to a near-sighted god
could light by itself
appear beautiful.
Beside any Let there
be light!,
Let there be darkness!
should also be said.
We don't arrive
at necessary night by omission only.
Poem 2
Night shuts down sometimes
like blocks of stone
and leaves us without space.
My hand then can no longer touch you
to defend us from death
and I can't even touch myself
to defend us from absence.
A vein that springs up in that same stone
separates me from my own thought too.
Thus night is converted
into our first tomb.
Poem 3
Now I can only wear old shoes.
The road I follow
wears shoes out from the first step.
But only old shoes
don't despise my road
and only they can arrive
where my road arrives.
After that,
you have to continue barefoot.
Poem 4
An arrow pierces the universe.
It doesn't matter who shot it.
It crosses equally fluid and solid,
visible and invisible .
Trying to figure out where it's going would be
like imagining a wall
around nothing
Arrow from the anonymous to the anonymous,
from a void that isn't its origin
toward another void that isn't its destination.
movement not resembling movement
but ecstasy constantly renewed.
I find the arrow in your hand
or you find it my thought.
I can see it entering a cloud,
cutting a bird in two,
emerging from flowers and rains,
splitting a blindness,
penetrating the dead.
Perhaps its model anonymity
summons us to our own anonymity,
to be able also to liberate ourselves
from our beginning and our end.
(for Laura)
Poem 5
He drew windows everywhere.
On walls too high,
on walls too low,
on blunt walls, in corners,
on air and even on roofs.
He drew windows as if drawing birds.
On the floor, on nights,
on glances tangibly deaf,
on death's outskirts,
on tombs, trees.
He drew windows even on doors.
But he never drew a door.
He didn't want to enter or leave.
He knew one can't.
He only wanted to see: to see.
He drew windows.
Everywhere.
From : Vertical Poetry: Last Poems by Roberto Juarroz. Translated by Mary Crow. Publisher - White Pine Press
