A NOTE ON CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN POETRY
Luis Muñoz

In the anthology The European Caravan (1931), one of its authors, Samuel Putnam, points out in the introduction that, despite the difficulty to identify –due to the lack of historical perspective- the defining keys of European literature of the time, something “in the air” is perceived. Indeed, Putnam refers to the particular “intellectual crisis” that suffered Europe during those years, he refers to the “mal du siècle” of the XX century –in relation with the one of the previous century, pointed out by Baudelaire- and tries, in spite of it, to define a series of common elements in the wavering panorama he faces.

Can we distinguish what is “in the air” in the contemporary European poetry during the second decade of the XXI century? Can we visualize the nexus of our “mal du siècle” with that poetry and identify some common lines?

Let’s note, modestly, common features that we believe can be observed in the selected poets in “Kindred Spirits”, a series of readings and interviews of European poets done at the Residencia de Estudiantes.

On the one hand, we perceive something that, in his book The Other Europe, Czeslaw Milosz refers to as discursive procedure. Through a kind of “telescopic eye”, we have the possibility of seeing, at the same time, lives from different places across the globe and different moments in time showing that no new image seems to have deleted the preceding one. On the contrary, these images seem to coexist on a long film, lingering, stumbling and overlapping one with the other. Consequently, we could say not only that –contrary to what the proclamations of the avant-gardes of the XX century said-, in the XXI century the poetic past has not died but, rather, is still alive just as the present’s, while, at the same time, loading with ammunition for the future.

Another feature is the absence of significant movements clearly delimited around the art of poetry, a manifesto, a group enclosed on a definition of what and how is, of what should not and how should not be, poetry. With all that, the interesting part is that it is not about erasing the past aesthetical movements, but –in other words- about its “reabsortion”. The absence of closed programmed paths have been replaced, it seems, by the presence of precedent movements as bursts, crashes, pulverizations, puzzles and atmospheres. In this way, we find, for instance, surrealistic elements, testimonial elements, civic elements, or symbolist elements coexisting in the microclimate of just one poem, that field where –as pointed out by Adam Zagajewski in his interview in the Residencia- an absolute point of view with regard to the things of the world is declared.

The third feature we can point out is a direct consequence of the intercommunicated and multilingual universe reshaped by the new technologies of the XXI century, although, of course, there are outstanding precedents in every previous historical moment. We are talking about the tendency of reducing the autonomy of the poems, and, at the same time, its verbal density. It refers to the insertion of the poem in a extraordinarily open linguistic angle, interfered by other languages, that reinforces the mimetic function of poetry.

George Steiner, in his article “El silencio y el poeta”, after wondering about the chronological closeness of the Tractatus by Wittgenstein and the parables of silence by Hofmannsthal, defends that the distancing of language emerges from a generalized abandonment of faith in stability and expressive authority of the European civilization. Following the echo of this idea, we could also wonder –without trying to answer right away- if, when these European poets are writing, they place their work at the crossroads between sceptical conscience and practicing reflection, faith and unbelief. If they try to achieve what Juan Ramón Jiménez, in one of his aphorisms about the nature of poetry, defines as “a beautiful expression whose word has the weight of what is true”.