Born into a working-class family in a neighborhood in the south of Madrid, he developed an honest class consciousness from a young age, which soon became associated with poetry. He wrote his first verses at the age of 7, thanks to the raindrops on the glass, and this back has guided both his work and his life since then. His passion for literature was instilled in him by his literary-loving parents, and he learned to be proud of his origins from his grandparents. His head, full of thick and curly hair that can be compared to a lush and fertile forest, is full of poems free from prejudices and ties. He attended the Sorbonne, hosted one of the few television programs about literature in Spain, and in his latest collection of poetry, Cherries in Death, he draws on memories to revive the voices of exile. Mario is a working-class poet who builds and deconstructs.
What is poetry to you?
I think it has a lot to do with the shape of the earth. This is an attitude that prepares us, allows us to see the other half that Lorca talked about, the opposite, the exact opposite, those sheets that make us up, which Benjamin also talked about. Whoever has the vision of this page, whether he writes or not, whether he reads or not, is a poet and lives by poetry.
So how do you exist in the world through poetry?
I think you have your own attention. Not only does poetry help you care, look, listen, but attention goes against a prevailing, homogenizing logic, and there you find an accumulation of liberated consciences, not even hidden.
What is the difference between hiding or saving them?
Hiding is about the one who runs away, as if he were something so weak and small that he had to take refuge in a limited space. Of course, poetry is small and weak, and of course it has always been in the place of the defeated, but it has nothing to hide. The poem, with its smallness and lack of any masculine characteristics, is brave from the moment it dares to look at things differently.
This is an ethical stance.
Very, and poetic courage is very interesting because this is not patriarchal at all, it is not the bravery of someone who came and planted his flag. Poetic courage is the courage that allows you to hear what others do not hear. We don’t even make a sound because it’s such a contradictory thing.
In what sense?
Banks give mortgages, finance companies give shares. I don’t give anything to anyone. When you give your voice, you position yourself at the center because you believe that if you are not the one who wrote that poem, no one will do it, and how good it is that you exist to give a voice to those who write it. no. This phrase is used with good intentions, but I don’t think so. We should speak by hearing, not by giving sounds. Fortunately, when we talk about the authors available in our bookstores, no one mentions Luisa Carnés, Ernestina de Champourcín or Josefina Latorre. They had voices, we just listened to them.
What about politics?
Fortunately, poetic consciousness is not dependent on political consciousness. I can feel that I identify with some struggles, but they don’t make it into the poem because that’s what I decided, because that would be taming the poem and leading it on a leash as if it were a chihuahua.
I’m sure you wrote, are you afraid of losing your freedom?
I don’t like being a disaster expert. If poetry has existed in the prisons and dictatorships of this country and many others, now will not be the time when it will die. If this freedom, this capacity for poetic logic, has historically prevailed at moments when the funnel is most pressing, it will be no different now. Of course, there is fear, one can knit with language instead of poetry, but I am hopeful and when a person enters poetry, he attracts you, cares about you and knows how to call you by your name.
So who is Mario Obrero?
I would really like it if we could say about Mario Obrero that he is happy with his friends, that he has a partner or partners, or that he is a person who sometimes wanders around the temple of Debod and sometimes goes to see the movies. It’s a stupid movie. I would very much like to think that poetry carries nothing from Olympus. Work is important, but I prefer to stay in the poetry that comes out of books, lives in the streets, in the parties, beyond the sociology of poetry, which is a very small, small room on the wings of human thought. It can be done with joy, celebration, and sometimes little more than a piece of paper, a pen, and a prize, a print, a demonstration, a reading, a speech, or a lecture.
In addition to poetry, music also has an important place in his life. For example, what kind of relationship do you have with your beloved copla?
In the last things I’ve written, I’ve been increasingly liking the way all sounds get dirty and filtered. You should listen to the voices without entering the hierarchy. What my grandmother Carmen said is as important as what María Teresa León wrote, because they are talking about very similar things in different languages, and that’s a wonderful thing. If it weren’t for the different languages we would have continued doing Coplas until his father’s death. I’m learning to reconcile myself with the copla, which is something I’ve heard about for a long time but perhaps I didn’t allow it to penetrate certain areas and now it defines me on many levels.
Why does it describe you?
Because copla comes from the Latin copula and translates into copulation. Calling something so popular something sinful implies a lot of good things. It concerns me greatly that we have called it that way, and that the couplet has therefore begun to occupy positions almost of heresy, because I am a heretic in other ways as well. The political discourse that Copla has in this country cannot be ignored. Miguel de Molina was the most listened to singer in Spain in 42. Miguel de Molina was exiled out of this country after being beaten. When we think of Juanito Valderrama, we should think of the anarchist soldier who fought in Córdoba and the person who sang to Franco El emigrante, an exile of half a million people living in concentration camps. Poetry also has the ability to retransform symbols and meanings. If Pessoa said that everything is a symbol and a metaphor, I would dare to say that not only is it so, but we can also recycle it and find its inversion in what is read hegemonic, and understand the copla also as that popular song. Resistance against all kinds of oppression is resistance against fascist oppression in our history.
Sometimes you associated poetry with humus and soil. Considering that humility comes from humus, how can the poet be humble, because this is his root and he has to struggle with his ego?
This is quite complicated. I like to remember what Naomi Ginsberg wrote to her son Allen when she committed suicide: “Don’t get involved in nonsense.” The tension between humility and ego lies in the ridiculous, in everything other than the literary, in the fetishism of commodification. You need to know very well what belongs to one area and what belongs to another. And once you see this review, don’t be naive. Puritanism is not a way of ethical propositions because it has a class status. You should be very proud to belong to the working class, because it puts you in a place in history and society where I will always want to be; where my grandmother was a seamstress or my grandfather was a carpenter.
How important is memory, not only in your work but also in your life?
When a bestselling author featured in El Hormiguero writes a novel about the 16th century, it makes sense to us because it’s fiction and we understand it. When a young person talks about historical memory, the question arises why are you talking about it if you haven’t experienced it? Why is it so contradictory to talk about an event that happened 80 years ago, but is it nothing more than a literary device to talk about an event that happened eight centuries ago? So why does it create so much tension for a young man to do this?
I ask you: why?
I believe this stems from a historiography with a Francoist sociological basis that governs our current relationship with memory in this country, which sees Don Pelayo as much closer to home than Federica Montseny and the abortion law. 1937. I’m very interested in the discussion about the transition, going to 34, 36, talking about 70. As people born in democracy, who do not have to talk from the kitchens of our homes, I am even more interested in what we have determined in 2023 that this issue is no longer a family issue and has never been. This is a country issue and a global issue. To speak of fascism is to speak of the global conflict of the 20th century. But now we need to approach the issue from another angle, and I like to think about the memory of 2023. That memory of 2023, which is in tension today, today removing license plates, abolishing the streets and censoring the laws approved by popular sovereignty, what strikes me the most is the line we get from Sappho, “If only someone would remember.” Memory has always been a poetic discourse. Moreover, in my case, this happens through huge anomalies, such as the disappearance of 114,226 people in my country, during my time, and in 13 mass graves in this country.
Is he still Atleti?
I’m from Atlet, too, so I guess my memory is too. When I was little, they would tell me two stories about my grandfather at the same time: Sometimes he would sneak into the Metropolitano and watch Atleti matches, sometimes they would take him to Yeserías to beg on the street. They shaved their heads and showered with cold water. I experience a beautiful confusion in those moments of my childhood, where I don’t know when he asks for money for sneaking into the Atleti field. There’s a kind of class consciousness that leads me to think that both things have a lot to do with each other.