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Our critique of “Sisma: documentary poem”, by Paul Guillén

One of the most interesting and dissatisfied poets of the litter that emerged at the beginning of this century is Paul Guillén (Ica, 1976). “The transformation of metals” (2005) or his challenging “Historia secreta” (2008) showed an author with pretensions to tread the hidden paths of tradition. As far removed from the busy highways of conversationalism as from the infertile swamp of empty experimentation, Guillén has forged a work that draws on the substrate from the rich margins of Peruvian poetry, without disdaining the less noticed achievements of our canonical voices; a work that refuses to bask in its findings, always ready to destabilize and break established meanings and music from its particular creative back room.

This latest incursion, “Sisma: documentary poem”, radicalizes Guillén’s work to unforeseen limits: taking as the cornerstone of his project the earthquake that semi-destroyed the cities in the south of Lima in August 2007, he has extrapolated that violent and destabilizing movement to an extensive text made up of parodies of newspaper chicha news, school sheets intervened by questions of sad irreverence, devalued banknotes that are the subject of multiple choice questions, as well as poems themselves that evade any conventionalism by allying themselves, through unusual correspondences, with the material eccentrics described. The result is a labyrinthine mosaic of literary quotes, references to popular culture and historiographical notes that rethinks the national reality through the expressive debris of a metalanguage in which, immanent, inhabit the pain and the tearing of a look that, at At the same time, it rests on the suffering neighbor and on the most intimate orphan.

“Sisma” owes a lot to “La Nueva Novela” by Chilean Juan Luis Martínez, a founding company with which it shares a fragmentation that unrealizes and at the same time hyperrealizes the facts and situations presented, which plays through decontextualization to develop a deeply critical perspective. of our community history, which always ends badly. We are facing a poetry of knowledge and positivist evidence, supported by the social sciences, a vein that Pablo Guevara and Antonio Cisneros inaugurated among us, alluded to on more than one occasion in this book, although as Guillén himself warns, to said position he adds the urgency of “problematizing identity”. Equally interesting is the proposal of quotes that are interspersed, by means of a refined trade, in the tragic speeches of those who survived the oscillation that generated a terrifying light (that triboluminescence to which Guillén dedicates the vigorous initial poem) that sheds light on the eyes of the world “all that effort with the poor salaries of Peru / the families burned like rocks”.

These quotes thread themes and tones of poets with whom Guillén has a special prestige. This is the case of Juan Ramírez Ruiz (another builder of vast identity and transhistorical projects) and even some lesser known ones such as Fernando Castro García, author of the rare and experimental “Cinco rolls de plus X” (1978), which combines dislocated verses -inspired by Oquendo de Amat- with photographs of an urban universe convulsed by the telluric movement of misery and injustice. We close “Sisma” with the conviction that Paul Guillén has taken a big, risky leap over the emptiness of a broken and groaning homeland.

The token

“Sisma. Documentary poem”

Author: Paul Guillen.

Publisher: Featherweight

Year: 2022

Pages: 91

Relationship with the author: cordial.

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 possible.

Source: Elcomercio

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