Adrián Bernal seeks to (re)write the great epic of ultra-capitalism, tracing the counter-truth and textual basis of The Divine Comedy, an intertextuality that hovers above all discourse from so-called contemporary radicalism. Anti-folk (La garúa, Barcelona, 2021), divided into ten songs and with successive interludes from poetic prose to pound verse, constructs the contradictions inherent in our way of life, thanks to the invention of a poetic subject. The Rimbaudian trance of the poet oracle. Wandering around as someone passing through hell and a present that arises in its different Dantist circles, it’s easy for the reader to feel questioned and summoned to this scene of guts and iron, ATMs, elevators, and subway entrances. “Because this poem does not talk about the city / -the city will fall- / this poem talks about war,” warns the author at the end of “Canto Eight.”
Having an early career from Alicante to Barcelona, Adrián Bernal has had a solid poetic career starting in April and March for twenty-nine days (DisparaLaPalabra, 2012), all the cities of Fire (Difficult, Valladolid, 2015) and Winter. (Books in their ink, Barcelona, 2016). And we particularly want to highlight Todas las ciudades del fuego, which won the Martín García Ramos International Prize for Poetry in its thirteenth edition, because it foretells many Anti-People issues, such as the ambiguity of genres or a pop-inspired culturalism. In addition, his poetic texts have been included in different anthologies such as Brossa de foc. Critical poetry in Barcelona design (Descontrol, 2019) and literary journals (Poscultura, Orsini Mag, Palabra Voyeur, La Galla Ciencia, El Salto, Nayagua or El colloquio de los perros).
But the book that interests us refers to this poet’s most risky delivery with an easy verb and dislocated syntax. Anti-folk brings together a unitary structure based on a wave woven through psalms and liturgies, with a conversational tone and as well (beautifully contradictory, one might say) universal. Although we have defined allegory as a way of bringing the public realm closer to the private, the poetic voice established in these pages disappears into the crowd and bursts into the very heart of the ideological production of our historical individuality. For example, cite a simple syllable that sums up much of the leitmotif the book continues with unusual brightness: that’s all I know about violence.
Confronted with its logic and ataraxia, the experience of the big city can only be ecstasy and exile, literalism without metaphor, ideological thickening of the shop windows, the speed of the metropolis and consumption: «They want to escape. city of pain / but they are both city and pain. They realize that it is their inheritance / and they examine the grooves of their hands with amazement like the listening sibyl / the prophecy on the ear of the rye / the lost topmen realizing / on the remote borders of hunger / on the beaches covered with snow and fog.” As Bernal points out in another true verse, ” Jinns have always spoken their own language.” The problem is that we are that devil and we use that language. The place where our ideological unconscious produces us “freely” within the historicity of everyday life: Hell in Hell.