Bartomeu Fiol

A Few Points to Clear the Way a Bit

Poetry is not exclusive to anything or anyone. We might define it as a special way of seeing or perceiving reality. It can therefore be found in all the arts and in any personal experience (although it should not be confused with good feelings).

Normally, we consider poetry to be a literary genre. Strictly speaking it is that, a literary genre, but not only that. One must stress the fact that poetry can be found in music, painting, drawing, engraving, design, theatre, cinema, dance, mime, the novel, sculpture, architecture, and so on and so forth: in brief, in all the arts.

As a literary genre, it is the most eminently and radically oral. Epic poetry was shaped, took on a form, before writing existed. The first depositary of poetry is memory. Metrics facilitates memorisation.

There are many kinds of poetry and, accordingly, there are really countless definitions of poetry. Without a doubt, the most widely understood conception is that its goal or primordial purpose is to create or produce beauty. The poet would then be a kind of silversmith working with carefully sought words and syntagms, with images and myths to create verbal jewels or gems that would end up as poems. For me, poetry is not just a means of creating beauty but it is also a way of trying to know a little more about reality, a method of acquiring knowledge, in the way science and philosophy might be.

Whatever the case, the language of poetry is always a language in tension that requires a certain effort of understanding from the reader or the listener. Looking up a word in the dictionary shouldn't be a chore. Neither should the necessary re-readings, the repeated probing of texts that, at first sight seem strange and that we don't understand. A poem is precisely that text that begs to be read again. Among other reasons, this is because its language is never unequivocal, as mathematical language is and as scientific language is always striving to be. It needs to be said that a poem doesn't have a single and exclusive meaning. Poetic language always lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and, even if the poet is the best person to explain his or her intentions, each reader has every right to make his or her own interpretations as to what results have eventually been achieved.

In brief, no text will come properly into existence if the reader or listener does not take it as his or her own. The intervention of this presence, it needs to be stressed, is never - whatever appearances may suggest - totally passive. On the contrary, it is always decisive. Without the contribution of the receiver, there is no text that really functions.

P.S. It is clear that I conceive of poetry more as an action - a perception, a cognitive action - than as a result. To participate in this action is possible but it requires effort.

Bartomeu Fiol

They Have Said...

Bartomeu Fiol's cultural stance was revealed as being more like the opposite of what Llompart called the "epigonic bent" of the long shadow cast by the Mallorca School. The endangered scene, in both poetry and painting, called for urgent renovation, and this took place through the 1950s and 1960s. In the particular case of poetry, the collection Entre el coral i l'espiga [Between Coral and Wheat] (1952) by Blai Bonet, L'hora verda [The Green Hour] (1952) by Jaume Vidal Alcover and Poemes de Mondragó [Mondragó Poems] (1961) by Josep M. Llompart - which included poems dating from the 1950s - reveal a process of stylisation of the landscape by way of metaphor and metonymy. This had an absolutely unheard-of ring in a cultural milieu that had too easily forgotten the poetic adventure of Rosselló-Pòrcel, the real initiator of the contemporary cycle of poetry and indubitably the first writer to transform landscape poetry at the different points of its production, for instance with his prodigious evocation titled "A Mallorca durant la guerra civil" [In Mallorca during the Civil War]. Continue reading...