Breath has innumerable objective and subjective implications, and so I will focus on the case of poetry, specifically the so-called “long breath poem.” I will take stock of my own experience as an author of a text from this genre, Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes. It is made up of 2156 lines and divided into two books with separate first editions in 2006 and 2007 in Spain, and published together in one volume in 2008 and 2009 in Cuba and Venezuela. The “long breath poem” ends up being, based on this experience, an exercise of liberation, a healthy break. An alternative to the asphyxia of the poem as composition, where a topic is introduced, developed and concluded. First of all, it allows for writing with free rein, with no direction or destination, with no structure. Later on, this freedom of creation is reaffirmed in the process of re-writing, where strict formal principals are followed, like strophic and metric regularity. In this way, the discipline of form reinforces the emancipation of content, the construction not of a subject but of a subjectivity. Undoubtedly, the “long breath poem” constitutes an example of dialogical poetry, of the novelization of lyric.
The notes from Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes were taken in Austin, Texas, United States during the academic year 2000-2001, while I wrote my doctoral dissertation. One September midnight, suffocated by the rigors of the essay, I went out to the balcony of my graduate student apartment, and began to write by hand, as always. I kept doing this every day at the same time, until the one hundred pages of the yellow notebook I used were filled. In those nocturnal writing sessions, for the first time in my life, I didn’t worry about what or how. Rather, I practiced not automatic, but organic writing. In May 2001, I defended my dissertation and got a job as a professor of Hispanic Literatures at Kenyon College, where I still work. When things started up at the university, in Fall 2001, I transferred all my notes from the Texan notebook to the computer. Sometimes, from one page I would only take one line, but other times, from just one line came an entire page. As before, in this process of re-writing I did not impose any kind of objective; I only encouraged myself in the act of writing. In the summer of 2002 I had a manuscript, made up of fragments of various sizes, of over three hundred pages. When I read the material mechanically, I grouped the fragments by familiarity of meaning, and at last I had fourteen piles. That’s when I knew I had written a sonnet.
During the academic year 2002-2003, I gave shape to Actas de medianoche I / Midnight Minutes I, and in 2003-2004 to Actas de medianoche II / Midnight Minutes II. I’d realized that in this boundless sonnet, two positions before alterity had been taken: differentiation and identification. Indeed, the two books revolve around these attitudes in the same vein, without being systematic, much less thematic. For example, love is not the topic of any one poem, but rather, as happens in life, it comes and goes, it mixes with other variables. The Spanish poet and critic, Fermín Herrero, is correct when he warns that in this poem “except for the hint in the initial quotes and a certain semantic continuity, there is no line of argument that lets the reader know what the content is” (394). He is off the mark when he considers it another manifestation of Spanish America’s “irrational, hermetic poetry” (394) in general, irrationalism alludes to alternative reason, and hermeticism, a radical change of discourse. Here, what’s adopted is a dialectical, materialist conception of the world, one critical of itself.
I don’t recall having ever read a reflection on the “long breath poem,” and not out of disdain for theory or for academialike so many resentful writers, and often rightly so. I’ve always thought that in poetry, like in any other activity, the more aware the creator, the better they can do their work. Simply put, in this case it is a fact that is worth mentioning. Remember that the notes for Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes were taken at the same time as my doctoral dissertation. I’d never read so much literary theory, and of such diverse trends, in my life. In other words, this poem was written, in the best of cases, in dialogue with all that literary theory it has to do with various schools without being affiliated with any. It emerges out of the tension between the frustration as a scholar of not being able to get to the very core of the texts I studied, and the satisfaction as a poet of knowing that at least there remained one breath indomitable by modern reason.
If something made me obsessed when writing Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes, it was the questioning of the I, of the universal subject of knowledge. That is how the Argentine poet and critic, Hugo Mujica, sees it. For him, the lyrical speaker “doesn’t seek complacent self-knowledge that confirms and affirms him, no psychological achievements that detain him, looking at his own reflection, no philosophical disquisitions that praise his intelligence; he seeks poetry” (104). In other words, “he renounced his being the author,” the gloating and privilege, through “the greatest detachment, renouncing the desire to only say what is his own, to speak and not listen, to exist and not [...] simply be in the moment,” and which implies too the leaving behind “of his knowing, his understanding” (112). Undoubtedly, there is a radical questioning of solipsism, which is at the center of modern dehumanization. The lyrical speaker “is not enclosed in his identity, in his self in the sameness of his self he can be everything” (Mujica 111). And at the end of the work, according to Mujica, “there is no end, the book remains open, like the truth when it is a question, like these pages where no line flaunts a period” (112-113).
How was it that I made from more than three hundred fragments an organic whole, Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes? By freely renouncing the content’s coherence and freely accepting some rules of form. For the latter, it was crucial to use the sonnet as a strophe and as a principal of the structure in general. It is a book of sonnets arranged like a sonnet, composed of 14 cantos with 11 sonnets each. Sonnets made with verses of 7, 11, and 14 metric syllables, but where rhyme is avoided at all costs even changing the meaning if necessary to maintain the colloquial tone. Enjambment is used not only in verses but in strophes neither are receptacles of meaning, but a thread or a knot of movement, of the poem as weaving. Punctuation is not used either. What is sought is a writing without borders, with relative shores like those of an unchanneled river with no more control than what it imposes on itself. Indeed, in the relationship between content and form, by being dialectical, form becomes as active as content.
In Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes what is opted for is dialogical poetry, which distances itself from romanticism, symbolism and above all realism, along with their contemporary reappearances. It does this fundamentally by using a language that does not try to be transparent, a simple instrument of communication; it begs to be noticed, it even becomes a protagonist. A language that at every moment reminds the reader to not have any illusions, to open their eyes wide and breath deeply, that the text isn’t reality but representation. Yet it’s also a language that is not just reflection but matter, and ultimately with the agency to change things, with the capacity to transform. A language that, furthermore, is not limited to poetic tradition, does not discriminate words, is open to marginalized lexicons, is democratized. A language that combines tropological density modernism, the avant-garde, the neo-baroque with prosaism postmodernism, antipoetry, colloquialism in search of a discourse with a greater power of representation.
To write “long breath poems” implies, among other things, a reconsideration of the relationship author-reader. In this respect, the Cuban critic Carlos Espinosa Domínguez affirms:
In his earlier books, Rodríguez Núñez had achieved a writing that despite being sustained
by suggestive, forceful images, always retained the capacity to communicate with the reader. It is a clear, warm-hearted poetry, that doesn’t renounce mystery, capable of transparent expression and a softly conversational language, without losing intensity or lyrical energy. In Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes, however, its author opts for a discourse that proposes many difficulties in accessibility...
Furthermore, texts of this kind are generally exiled from magazines, avoided by anthologists and feared at recitals. Yet it’s worthwhile to run the risk, ignore academic custom houses, disappoint the traders in literature, challenge all the guardians of discourse. It’s worthwhile to surmise an active reader who participates in the creation of the text, who inspires with their presence.
In sum, from my experience with Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes, I can draw a few conclusions. The “long breath poem” allows for the search for the text not as a unity of sense, with an integrity of meaning, but rather as a dispersion of sense, with a fluidity of meaning. This way of writing poetry for me has been a liberating practice, a breath of fresh air. A true alternative to the poem as composition, where oppressive coherence reigns. To be able to write in the most absolute freedom possible, without imposing a thing, without beginning or end. Then, to figure out the form of the very poetic material, and be consequential with that form. All this I owe to the “long breath poem,” which I’ve now cultivated for more than a decade. After Actas de medianoche / Midnight Minutes I’ve written six books in the genre, three are published: tareas / homework (2011) reversos / reverses, (2011) and deshielos / thaw (2013).
I think the essential difference between the common poem and the “long breath poem” is not in the length. One could say the length isn’t the cause but the effect the result of the always arduous negotiation between content and form. I should clarify that in either case only synthesis is accepted, in the message as well as in the medium. And that this case does not constitute a return to epic poetry but a step toward the novelization of the lyric. One could establish, at this point, an analogy with the more documented difference between short story and novel. In the ordinary poem, the author has more control of the subject, he hardly ever lets it go, and in some way subordinates it. In the “long breath poem” the author has less control of the subject, and at a certain moment, he does let it go. In other words, here the lyrical speaker becomes independent from the author, it breathes on its own and raises its own voice. And with subjectivity, its material support, its body: form, poetic language. As a poet, I haven’t worried about this. In fact, it’s the opposite: I’ve achieved my maximum goal, to cross over to the other side of night, to finally be another.
Works Cited
Espinosa Domínguez, Carlos. “Con olor a buena poesía”. Encuentro en la Red, May, 14 2007. http://www.cubaencuentro.com/es/cultura/articulos/con-olor-a-buena-poesia-35566
Herrero, Fermín. “Veinticinco años del Premio Leonor: Un panorama plural”. Premio
Leonor de Poesía: Antología 25 Aniversario (1981-2006). Ed. Santos Sanz Villanueva.
Soria: Diputación Provincial de Soria, 2007. 359-397.
Mujica, Hugo. “Todo está al otro lado de la noche”. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 736
(October 2011): 103-114.
Translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen