Where’s that poem?

In the week that we publish the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, Ollie Brock writes on the Granta blog.

Accidental art 1.0

I learned what a ‘found poem’ is by mistake – as you would, I suppose. In an English class at school we were asked to write a haiku, pass it along; the next person would write one in response, fold down the first so that only theirs was visible, pass it to their neighbour, and so on. Unwittingly I started a class-wide chain of musings on cell-splitting and reproduction – the very moment of life’s random creation – by mistakenly using a scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled some biology notes earlier that day (my neighbour failed to turn the sheet over). The unpunctuated incoherence went something like this:

cytokinesis
anaphase II begins then
a diploid cell splits

... Well, it saved me from the far worse embarrassment of my earnest attempt. But more importantly, it pushed creativity down a blind alley.
 
So there are circumstances, like the papery chaos of schooldays, which simply make it easier to stumble on the poetic. Other popular methods involve train timetables, the magnetic alphabets on your fridge door, or arranging book spines into a pleasing sequence.
 
But sometimes just being in a place does the job. Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, is such a place. Only the main roads have names. Any other destination gives real meaning to the Spanish word for address, ‘dirección’ – it really is a set of directions for getting there.
 
All addresses start from a commonly recognizable landmark – a government building, a statue, a major roundabout. You start with that, then give the vertical displacement followed by the horizontal, or vice versa. And none of this pedestrian ‘East’ and ‘West’ – they’re ‘rising’ and ‘falling’ (for the sun); North is ‘to the lake’, and until recently, South was ‘to the sea’. So to meet your sweetheart of an evening, you might have gone ‘From the bust of the general, three blocks rising and two to the sea.’ Can any other street address boast such virility, rhythm, hope and a fresh breeze?
 
(When I lived in Managua, I pulled the short straw. My landmark was a cinema that specialized in, yes, the ‘adult’ market. I lived two blocks south of it, too. A typical scene had me asking a taxi driver, ‘You know the ... you know the Cine July?’ (He would acquiesce.) ‘Well, I'm not going there, I’m going two blocks south of it. To my house, OK? So go there. But make sure you go two blocks south as well.’ If I wanted to feel poetic, I needed to stick my nose in a book when I got there.)

Political pen-wielders
 
The president, of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, has said that every Nicaraguan is a poet until proved otherwise. And evidence supports the claim: Tomás Borge, Gioconda Belli, Ernesto Cardenal and Ortega himself were all scribbling away long before they fought the revolution which toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. And we’re talking literary novels, short stories, feminist poetry; Bush and Blair, with their memoirs of power, can’t hold a candle to them.

Perhaps the best way to get to know the country and its writer-politicians, though, is a slim book by Salman Rushdie called The Jaguar’s Smile, inspired by just a two-week visit to the country in the 1980s, when the left-wing Sandinistas were ruling the country, being fatally weakened by the counter-revolution which was funded in part by Ronald Reagan. To date, it is his only full-length work of non-fiction – and it gives a vivid, absorbing portrait of a country torn apart by war and politics. (The literary world eagerly awaits, of course, his memoir, which he talked about at a Granta launch event this summer.)

There are no Nicaraguan writers on our Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list, but the country isn’t without a healthy literary scene. Escritores Nicaragua is a good place to start, and they have just launched a literary magazine, El Hilo Azul. Sergio Ramírez, another political veteran, blogs regularly on the literary site El Boomerang.
 
What I’m Reading

The issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story that was dedicated to Latin American writers last year. Daniel Alarcón and Diego Trelles Paz hail the arrival of the ‘post-post-Boom’ in their editorial. It was guest-designed by Guillermo del Toro – he illustrates the issue with drawings taken from his journals, unrealized ideas for set design and film stories. Ghoulish bodies and little unidentified creatures haunt the multi-coloured paper stocks. The stories are in English in the first half of the magazine and their original Spanish in the second. The translators have nowhere to hide.

Granta’s new issue is available in both Spanish and English – contributors in common with this issue of Zoetrope are Patricio Pron, Rodrigo Hasbún and Alejandro Zambra.

Previously on the Granta blog... Adam Thirlwell on lists of writers (why do we make them?), and Patrick Ryan on a Catholic education.

Buy The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists now.