The professor, essayist, poet and former counselor will present his collection of poems in Murcia on Tuesday ‘Life was not this. I want to speak to the person responsible’
A verse from him: «When I licked your boots and there was life before death…». It is part of the poem ‘Vintiuno’ from the latest collection of poems by Pedro Alberto Cruz (Murcia, 1972), professor of ‘Latest trends in art’ at UMU, essayist, poet, former minister of the government of Ramón Luis Valcárcel . “Life was not this. I want to talk to the person in charge’ is the title of his new work, published by Lilliputians.
“Love is revolutionary,” says the tattoo on his right wrist. “A year ago on St. John’s,” he says, “my son’s dog died when he was only a year old. I’ve been crying for two weeks in a row. I’ve never cried so much for someone.” Then he posted “a comment about it on social networks and, immediately, Vega [Cerezo] my name is. She and I had met several times on a radio talk show, but we had never spoken through the microphone. He told me that his dog had also just died and that he found what I had posted on my profile moving. We started talking about the unconditional love that dogs show, and at one point in the conversation he said, “It’s just that loving is revolutionary.” And I replied, “I’m going to get that phrase tattooed on me.” And I did it the next day.”
The poet Vega Cerezo will join him this Tuesday in Murcia, at 7.30 pm, in the large meeting room of the Faculty of Arts, during the presentation of ‘La vida no era esto’, a collection of poems – dirty, harsh, complex – that seems not written as ‘a hopeless romantic’. Cruz does this: “I give flowers, I write fiery declarations of love that if I had read them in another person they would have made me blush, I cry regularly, good feelings move me. I don’t know whether I meet the requirements of a good intellectual and an experimental poet or not. I do not give a hoot. I am who I am, and at this point in my life that way of being does nothing but accentuate. I love being a bow tie, a champion sentimentalist. One thing is clear to me: I am not going to suppress one more feeling in my life. I express what I feel, and, who doesn’t like a breath of fresh air».
What did you think life was like?
– Recently I got a WhatsApp from my therapist in which he told me: «I just finished the book, I really liked it. What I loved the most is the feeling that I didn’t recognize you in most of the poems… congratulations!». And you are right. When I wrote this collection of poems, I had a tragic and painful feeling about life; although it is true that in this book I introduce notes of humor and social criticism for the first time».
“I’m a different person now,” he says. “I’ve got rid of my emotional dependence,” he explains, “and a lot of my fears and I look at life from a different perspective. The title of this collection of poems is the verse with which the poem ‘Cinco’ ends. He talks about the Mercadona queue during the incarceration, the absurdity of it all, the loss of my desire to fuck and a lady who wanted to slip in and who provided a beautiful point of daring in a period when we were all automatons».” Life’, he continues, ‘from this point of view was devoid of eroticism, of motivations, it was full of order, fears, guilt.’
“As I say in ‘Cinco’,” he specifies, “if the government didn’t publish in the BOE that you could get hard, I wouldn’t get hard. Of course life wasn’t like that. It seemed like a scam to me. I had lost my libido and had to see the manager to complain.”
“Most of these poems were written during the worst of the pandemic,” he reports. “The book,” he continues, “closes with the death of a person very dear to me at the time. Unlike the rest of my poetry collections -which emerged as a more homogeneous and closed project-, this book is more heteroclite, with changes in format that surprised even me». These are poems ‘for the most part narrative, unrefined, often pretending to be dirty, stained with ashes, semen, with the smell of leather or corpse. For me, sex and death have always been closely linked. It’s strange, but with the panic I have about death, my libido shoots up after a funeral… I tell about that in this collection of poems». Cruz writes “because I need it and it helps me get the shit out of me. Then if a verse can be useful to anyone, welcome.
Now, he assures me, my challenge is to write poetry from a perspective that is completely opposite to the one I’ve proposed until now: that of well-being and celebration, that of an intensity of life that burns. A year ago I considered myself in hell; Today I feel happy.”
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
