Ignition
Published on
Story by
Jeremy Cliffe
“Poetry is system of shining signals…” asserted the globe-trotter León Felipe. “The verse that came before mine is a torch which was carried in the hand of the previous poet as he searched for me, and the verse that follows me is a light that another is igniting in the dense shadows of the night, observing my signals.
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Thinkers, dramatists and narrators bring together unconnected ideas, unexpected actions, and characters with apparently conflicting destinies. Yet in our imagination Europe is overflowing with theories (this one for example), actions (some not only unexpected but dramatic in their desperation) and conflicting characters. We lack emotion. Well, it’s not that we lack it – it exists -, but that it is decaffeinated, diluted in the tide of the local interests of each corner of the continent. Someone needs to rescue it and return it to the shore of humanity, and this someone, the one who is able to uncover the unsuspected relationships between stray emotions, is the poet.
“What do today’s Andalusian poets feel?” exclaimed Rafael Alberti (close friend of Louis Aragon and Picasso) in the dark night of European dictatorships. What do today’s European poets feel in this solicitor’s Europe? Do they exist? Yes. And they are ready to reveal to us the mosaic of emotions that distinguishes the Europeans from the Chinese, the Africans, the settlers of the New World, and of course the Indians - not in their nature, as the pieces of the mosaic of poetry are universal, but in their projection and scale. They have not disappeared, “because the poem is never-ending and becomes one with the sum of creation and will never reach the final line and varies from one person to the next”, as Jorge Luís Borges, the Argentinean writer of Anglo-Spanish origin wrote.
“Poetry is system of shining signals…” asserted the globe-trotter León Felipe. “The verse that came before mine is a torch which was carried in the hand of the previous poet as he sought me out, and the verse that follows me is a light that another is igniting in the dense shadows of the night, observing my signals.”
With this blog, Cafebabel.com and its contributors are setting out to design a bed of torches that will allow us to access our poets, make contact with them and inhabit their inner worlds, so that we can continue to sketch out the map of the inner worlds of each and every one of us. They seek to put a particular emphasis on the work of young poets, those who have grown up with Europe as a constant presence, those who want to project their work across the continent. They aim to become a key point of reference in the meeting of the cutting-edge and the old, the immediate and the unattainable, in a radical aesthetic journey which will lead us to the “loss of discovery” that constitutes the emotional concert of the heart.
All are invited to this banquet of emotion! Let hearts beat - let the feast begin.