The journalist and poet Alberto Caride offers today in Mr. Witt Café, in Cartagena, a reading of his collection of poems ‘The Guillain-Barré syndrome’
The presentation in Murcia of ‘El síndrome de Guillain-Barré’ (Sudeste Collection, 2022) gave Alberto Caride Brocal (Sewer, 1982) “great pleasure”, journalist of the Europa news agency and poet, founder 11 years ago of the cycle most constant poetic in the city of Murcia: literary Mondays. “I don’t know why, but the fact is that a lot of people came.” One of the reasons is undoubtedly his poem ‘Short Treatise on Love and Desire’:
“Is desire less
where then the love
What makes us a groove?
Is it less necessary
that this lack of air
what makes us echo?
This Tuesday at 8 p.m. Caride in Mr. Witt Café (C/Tolosa Latour, 4, Cartagena) a new appointment with – numerous – admirers of his work, in a recital with the musical accompaniment of Ginés Piñero and the presence of the editor and poet José Alcaraz.
This collection of poems is limited to their last four years, after their divorce. And the poems go in order: the first, furthest back in time, and the last, the poem ’40’, where he says that at a certain age the main thing is synesthesia, “that which encourages / to see the track: with the tips / of your fingers, recognizing yourself in the sound / of another body or that the color of things / is intertextuality and not verse». What has happened in all that time? “I’ve felt like I was my Guillain-Barré syndrome, like I was sabotaging myself, even though I didn’t really know it. I thought I was living life and enjoying it, but something was always wrong. In the way of feeling there was something not working right ».
It wasn’t the duel, he says, “but something broke after that relationship.”
A previous book, ‘The branch never breaks clean from the log’ (Raspabook, 2019), already talks about the feeling of being a stateless person, when they have changed the board and it is time to start again. At one point he talks about exile. The memories of the first part, ‘El hormigueo’, a kind of long poem, are written in one place [el camping naturista Sierra Natura, en la Sierra de Valencia]where Caride is “banished” to think, where he says “every escape is closely connected / with fear, and that’s where your waves / are juxtaposed and cause the solar eclipse”.
Caride, a member of the illiterate collective, says the first stage of this disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, “is also the longest.” There are also echoes of the pandemic in the next two parts, ‘Diplopia’ and ‘Loss of Sensitivity’. Like Tolkien, the poet tries to create “my own map of failure” with his verses, with his cities and sparkles, “which I wish to lose like sunken wrecks, like majestic lighthouses, shining nowhere but in memory.” «For me, nature is fundamental, and when I was drawing the map of my own failure, I was surrounded by mountains and rivers, as in my verses. In the end, my poems drew an unreal map of perfect things, because they were very real things in every way.
What does writing do to you?
–When I start writing, I don’t know where I’m going. But when I read it, it’s an answer. That has always happened to me. Poetic intuition precedes my intuition. If I need to tell myself something, my poetry tells me. Like this collection of poems, I couldn’t understand it until I stopped. The poems gave me signs.
Do you still believe in love?
-Yes! For me, remembering what was always beautiful. There are poems about love when it is gone. I realized how lucky I had been, despite sabotaging myself. It is important to me that love is synesthetic, that I can enjoy it in every possible way. There are desires that are more intense than the feeling of love.
–Besides excellent books, what is the best thing you have done in this life?
–My best work is my son, it is a co-author of the work. From the point of view of love and transcendence, he is above all else. An unfinished work that will accompany me all my life. That’s why it’s ‘the job’.
Is there a need for poetry?
-Yes of course! Of course that’s true. Who is not interested in life?
–What happens in the body with Guillain-Barré syndrome?
It affects the peripheral nervous system. The first effect is tingling, the second is diplopia, which you start to see double, and the third is the loss of sensitivity and dexterity afterwards. In the collection of poems I say that we live under this syndrome constantly, oblivious to the river flowing through us, stubborn in accepting misfortune.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
