We tried to find the key the other day at the meetings organized by author and professor Ignacio Fernández Perandones at IES La Asunción in Elche, where every month a writer tries to decipher the poetics of Ángeles Campello (An Yi). what mysticism is in literature. After various views, we were able to define what truth-seeking is. Machado affirmed that there is a universal truth and that individual truth does not exist, so poetry is a mystery to be solved. There are still hawkers and card dealers as to what is poetic action: they believe their individual truths prevail over the collective.
Encountering We Don’t Know What, published by the Madrid publishing house El tailor de Apollinaire and written by Santiago Úbeda Cuadrado with a foreword by Ramiro Guardia, delves into this search for truth. The work opens with a poem entitled “The road poem”, a pretty self-explanatory statement of intent: “I’ll dedicate myself to writing,” he told me. / Satisfaction before us / Your finished poem, perfect. / And sometimes the joy of the process? / I will devote myself better to observing, / Later, I swore to myself, without much faith / As someone who just lives / or only sees and feels and does not think / or perhaps thinks without the certainty of thinking, I will observe without expectation / to think about almost everything without a heavy burden of consequences …”
Santiago Úbeda’s poetics, although everyday, contains a depth in his speech that takes us to the universal themes of poetry. In his poem entitled Holiday Day, Gil, like Biedma, draws on the second person who helps him paint a portrait of what has happened to him: “Alejandra I came to see you and she caught you. surprise. / Because you don’t have anything to drink, you go to a bar near your house. / You start at the bar, Alejandra with a beer and you with rum. / You also talk about the latest readings, / the cosmic boredom of master classes, / work, that inevitable epidemic, / in short, the shadow of smoke». Santiago’s speech is hidden in moments, in those little things that make up his universe among all, in a world that starts from the local and expands to the universal.
Al encuentro de no sabes qué cosa is divided into four different parts: Somewhere along the way, Encounters (and disagreements), Transcendence, and Some results. In the prologue, Ramiro Guardia tells us: «We can say that the protagonist has become alienated from his surroundings, which he finds, in the Marxist sense, to be contemptible and full of boredom. In part, we are faced with social condemnation of what has happened to us. Because social oppression is a scourge, Santiago reflects this very well in his works: that we end up being who others want us to be is the maximum point of this alienation».
Úbeda Cuadrado concludes the work with a poem that has been several times dreamed of: «Something is as it has been dreamed of several times. / Few things are as one imagines; / and even if they match, they are not exactly the same. / It is the person who believes that they are imagining things colliding, / or even imagines that they collide. // In one’s imagination reality and imagination merge, / in the boundless depth of one’s imagination». This poem sums up that sense of truth, like every writer’s search for every poet’s work. Not all storytelling is fiction, and not all poems contain all truth. Everything is brushstrokes of the prism of each.