Inner experience

“The nakedness of words haloes that devastated blood, unraveling the darkness and, between flashes, digging the hidden, clotted clot, speaking in the purity of the verve of the words,” reveals the poet Alejandro Cesario in the brief text on the back cover of Subjective Blood, a book of poems that doesn’t evoke that “ravaged blood” but rather invokes a devastating and, ultimately, unbridled and unleashed flow toward a mestizo language, a hybrid of magnificence and rusticity, of cultism and popular orality, among other techniques. Because the poetic art of Luis O. Tedesco is also shaped by the dissonant musicality of chords and cadences, of broken melodies, of miraculously harmonious counterpoints, of emphatic and polyphonic notes. Breathing, however, endows this syncopated dance with layers and strata of sound so profound that it resonates and reverberates in cavernous echoes and vibrations, in visceral accents and intonations. That voice, absolute yet distant, whose breath is heard like the poem's deep undercurrent (its unspoken power), is the only thing, in short, that intangibly weaves together the unfolding of the words.

These, in Tedesco's vocabulary, have been freed from any metalanguage, from any social or ideological affiliation, from any mystification. The order in which they are arranged—even in the disorder of truncated and even suppressed meaning—obeys a musical legality, a mode of expression, feelings and passions, politics in the most immediate and evident sense, veiled affinities, never linguistic or idiomatic correctness. If you will, the extravagant lexicon or arbitrary idiolect, which includes "joda" and "piélago" (or "chamuyo" and "dolo") without any inconvenience, operates on and with language to obtain from it an image or a map of its indigenous essence, situated, spoken and unspoken. In this sense, the gaucho and tango tone, the eccentric baroque style, the popular syntagma, behave only as instruments of probing, contact, or recognition regarding a feeling, a way of life, of being, of loving, suffering, or dying.

Tedesco's scheme in these poems is classic and consists of variations on a repetition ("Let her go") or, to put it another way, multiplying the possible and impossible meanings of a phrase. At first glance, what is let go refers to blood, of a manifestly untamed and carnal character, though also stormy and warlike. On a second level, it is no longer about blood, with all its wounds and traditional symbols, but what is let go are the words, or rather, their vibrant energy, whose texture and tonality suggest they flow alongside or within the blood. The fact that it is rarely mentioned does not obstruct the metaphor; on the contrary, it makes it peremptory. The most superficial alludes to a bleeding wound; the least—perhaps—says that in that bleeding, the diverse, plural languages ​​of a people also bleed. That of the same poet.

Subjective blood

Author: Luis O. Tedesco

Genre: poetry

Other books by the author: Landscapes; Private Life; The Lady of My Mind; Body; The Objects of Fear; Political Poetry

Publisher: Cartographies/The yoke, $12,000