Roberto Juarroz
Born in Coronel Dorrego near Buenos Aires in 1929, Roberto Juarroz worked as a professor of Library Science in University of Buenos Aires. Intensely withdrawn as a person and a philosophical thinker , he was the proponent of what he himself called "explosive poetry", seeking pastures that goes beyond conventional limits of poetry and language.
Ocatvio Paz called him one of the most distinguished of all Latin American poets. Paz wrote:" Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallization: language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments." This is very true about the subject and form of his poetry as his poems speak about a speaker's momentary confrontation with some quandary conveying the brevity of the immediate. Juarroz's goal in poetry is "the recuperation of the instant". Juarroz's vertical poetry is wise and luminous.
As the great Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar rightly said, "It's been a long time since I've read poems that have extended me and exalted me as his have."
Vertical Poetry
from First Vertical Poetry (1958)
I think that at this moment
maybe nobody in the universe is thinking about me,
I’m the only one who’s thinking me,
and if I were to die now
nobody, not even I, would think me.
And this is where the abyss begins,
as when I go to sleep.
I’m my own support and I take it away from me.
I help to curtain everything with absence.
That may be why
when you think of someone
it’s like saving them.
translated by W.S. Merwin
Ocatvio Paz called him one of the most distinguished of all Latin American poets. Paz wrote:" Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallization: language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments." This is very true about the subject and form of his poetry as his poems speak about a speaker's momentary confrontation with some quandary conveying the brevity of the immediate. Juarroz's goal in poetry is "the recuperation of the instant". Juarroz's vertical poetry is wise and luminous.
As the great Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar rightly said, "It's been a long time since I've read poems that have extended me and exalted me as his have."
Vertical Poetry
from First Vertical Poetry (1958)
I think that at this moment
maybe nobody in the universe is thinking about me,
I’m the only one who’s thinking me,
and if I were to die now
nobody, not even I, would think me.
And this is where the abyss begins,
as when I go to sleep.
I’m my own support and I take it away from me.
I help to curtain everything with absence.
That may be why
when you think of someone
it’s like saving them.
translated by W.S. Merwin
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