Esteemed readers, this post is part of a series of essays on the work of the Venezuelan writer Armando Rojas Guardia (1949), one of our most important contemporary poets. He is the author of a first-rate poetic and essay work in our literature. In the first genre we can highlight I who knew of the old wound (1985), *Poems of Ravine of the Virgin * (1985), Towards the night alive (1989), The nothing watchful (1994), The splendor and the wait (2000), Homeland and other poems (2008). In essay The God of the inclemency (1985), The kaleidoscope of Hermes (1989), The Chronicle of memory (1999), among others.

Preliminary

In 1985 is published the book of poems I who knew of the old wound by the Venezuelan writer Armando Rojas Guardia. Beyond the phenomenon of institutional reception provoked by this work, its appearance marks a place in contemporary Venezuelan poetry; it introduces reflection, from the speech of the body, on the condition of poetic saying and its possibilities. We could conjecture in I who knew of the old wound a special, complex and contradictory expression of the course of Venezuelan poetry.

Before, in 1979, the poet had published the book Of the same burning love; at that time it was considered among the "young Venezuelan poets", as the authorized opinion usually catalogues the new voices due to a poetic tradition. In this book, Rojas Guardia insinuated the lines of a search in poetic language and an ethical concern for the relationship between poetry and life, or reality and literature, which will acquire in I who knew of the old wound a more defined and open configuration, until reaching a radical presence in his later books.

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The voice of the wound

From what voice does I who knew of the old wound? What subjectivity is made in the word that constitutes it? How is it different from the voices of Venezuelan poetry known until then? These are some of the questions I ask myself about Rojas Guardia's work, questions aimed at understanding it as a specific contribution to Venezuelan poetry.

What determines his voice is the demonstration of a desiring and agonizing subjectivity, of an "affected and critical sensibility", according to Carlos Brito. Like few times in Venezuelan poetry, we experience the speech of an "I" that is lived in the tearing and enjoyment of desire. Moreover - and here it manifests its difference with the Venezuelan poetry published until that moment -, the speaking subjectivity is that of the body inhabited by the homoerotic desire. Perhaps never before in our poetry, the masculine poetic subject tastes, as the Greek poet Cavafy had done in his work, the presence / absence of a loving body also masculine.

The poetic word is filled with the greed for a "very exact and concrete flesh": vivid embodiment of the poem, carnality felt by the other possessed, lacking or lost. A language that does not mask enjoyment and pain -masks that merge into the same libidinal coin-, that dares to declare itself in images of fresh and shameless beauty, as we can read in the poem "The Night of Desire":

This afternoon, as I sink my avid face
in that lukewarm flora
that sprouts at the junction of your thighs
while the oblique moon
(raw night of language)
illuminated my presence
in the last regions of the bodies
-our bodies-
where gods and animals copulate,
I suddenly realized
that only the dirtiest words
would do justice to the myth that unites us
(...)

Hearing and feeling this voice, its imaginative force, very few are the textual references of our poetry with which we can establish affinities for the moment. Perhaps the erotic force present in the almost ignored poetry of María Calcaño, a certain air of the work of Juan Liscano, the amorous pregnancy of Rafael Cadenas. However, we are familiar with the resonances of Whitman, Cavafy, Cernuda and Ginsberg, to cite the authors that our reading training can associate. Thus, this work by Rojas Guardia is offered to us with a certain discontinuity with respect to the tradition or dominant line of Venezuelan poetry, with the inclination of poetry it is charged with crude and vehement corporeality.

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The wound of the poem

The subjectivity that is spoken of as the body of desire, corresponded or not, is erected in its own referent. Reality of the self that recognizes itself in another and in the other. An imaginary reference and confronted as reality from the I that worries and questions itself in its precariousness and plenitude. Subjectivity that is (dis)made in the word.

Indeed, the body of the other is also the body of the objectified word, that is, the poem. The known wound supposes desire in the poem as in the flesh. And greed and lack then become doubt of and in the poetic word; uncertainty loved as the lover longed for; enjoyment of instant that remains desire, or what is the same, unattained reality, blurred in memory and oblivion. Like the body and the pleasure desired, the poem escapes, and is, in the present of writing, shining precariousness, a place that is constituted as an open wound, unwanted matter. We read in the poem "Microjazz":

The poem is today
the empty lucidity of this space
that leaves the pain uncovered.
I have nothing in the words
to glorify suffering
(...)

Self-consciousness of poetry that we could identify with the intelligence that the body experiences as incomplete and unattached amorous matter. Poetic lucidity leads to self-reflection on the reality that gives it meaning, that is, the word, reality of the senses and the sense, to which the poetic subject approaches knowing of its elusive but pleasant inherence. The poem is a pretended and neglected body, gained by the memory of the lived and lost thing. The poet says in "Early morning":

I know I'm looking
your smell in words: it's your body
breathing in the letters of desire.
But in vain. Today only the eviction names you
and in this shipwrecked fourth army
the autopsy of the memory.

The poetic subject comes to question the character-inherited, expected- of poetry as a finished and self-sufficient reality; like love, poetry can not be an action that closes and consumes itself; rather, it must be a stripping away of security, a recognition in its word poverty that needs the other, and perhaps it is only that relational nature that gives it its meaning. Poetry would therefore need to withdraw, to abandon its pretensions to the exclusive word, to listen to the other:

If contrary to what was foreseen
out of the tribe
the one that gives its purest meaning
to my words.

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The daily sustenance

The poetry in I who knew of the old wound is composed and nourished by an unavoidable substratum: the transcended daily life. Poetic experience is gaze, "ardent cleanliness", as the poet says in "Secret office", title that reveals the closest and most disturbing metaphor of poetic work. To unveil and reveil the mystery, the reality, implies to be attentively with the living. The essential reality is not just another, a foreign and pure substance. We could argue, with Cadenas and Rojas Guardia, that all reality is essential. Hence the search and nodding of the real that we can find in poems such as "Annunciation" or "Sandino of Genesis", to name only two especially representative.

The everyday is the foundational matter of the poetry of I who knew of the old wound. Simple, direct images, lost in the bustle of daily life, forgotten by a superb perspective, diluted in urgency, emerge as illuminations to inhabit the word, with their unavoidable humility and crudity:

this filthy paper where I glimpse
a monotonous syntax of days
in which I will go to the cinemas (of course, alone)
to see how lovers kiss.

Realm of lived experience and astonishment, the ordinary, as Carlos Brito well notes, is revelation, epiphanic event, in front of which only the nakedness of the spirit is possible.

The poem was today that half bottle of Ron Plata
drink in the kitchen by eight pawned friends
in which each of us received
the same exact dose of joy

We observe in the poetics of this work the palpitation and validity of the fundamental strokes of that vindication of the everyday manifested in the declaration of the group "Traffic", led by our author, whose manifesto required "a poet who returns to the world of history, to the diurnal universe of the very concrete life of men" and a poetry that contained "the blood taste of all the words of the tribe". Also present in the poetry of Rojas Guardia is the breath of a certain Latin American poetic production: José Emilio Pacheco, Ernesto Cardenal, particularly the latter, in which the ordinary is transmuted into transcendent experience. Thus, the experience of writing in the work of Rojas Guardia is daily life exchanged into felt spirituality:

Then I come to the machine, tired
of so much slime and dandruff from the days,
and I sweat this poem where at least
I summon, yes, the serene god of your body.

Discourse of the daily life revealing the divinity ignored, the poetry in I who knew of the old wound confronts us in the splendid encounter of religiosity and profanity. The words of María Fernanda Palacios are valid when, in the Prologue to The kaleidoscope of Hermes by this author, he postulates that it is "the inner unity of the soul and the body, that living centre where we sense or feel that God listens and gives...".

Bibliographic references

Brito, C. (1993). On the edge of God. Venezuela: Secretaría de Cultura del Estado Aragua, .
Rojas Guardia, A. (1985). I who knew about the old wound. Venezuela: Monte Ávila Editores.
Rojas Guardia, A. (1989). The kaleidoscope of Hermes. Venezuela: Alfadil/Trópicos.