The latest (and long-awaited) poetic delivery by Antonio Méndez Rubio (Fuente del Arco, Badajoz, 1967) has just arrived in bookstores, an author who has amassed a long history behind him – without a major marketing fuss – showing his maturity. a serious and recognizable literary proposal. Under the title of Too Much, and thanks to careful printing of the Broken Glass label, Méndez Rubio keeps the literary pulse of his final years (not an easy task right now, by the way). For their recent appearances Right (2013), For Nothing in the World (2017) and Towards Violence (2021), as well as their essays Low-Intensity Fascism (2021) and Threshold Theory (2022).
Settled in Valencia from a very early age, where he taught at the state university, in the early nineties he became known for his involvement in the cultural and sociopolitical activities of Valencian society and for publishing a large number of unforgivable references to understanding ways. what the poem takes in the transition from the prophecy of the end of the century to the new century (recurrent ideological prosopopeia). See its significance in the Writers Guild of the Country of Valencia, or in the book At World’s End, which was recognized by the Hyperión Prize in its 1995 edition. This increased interest. In the same course, for example, Professor Raúl Molina Gil’s ¿Un lugar sin lugar?
So much so that, for its part, it is presented with five chapters (hereinafter, A pulse, Bosquimanía, Alfabeto o damna and Diván de A) and nearly a hundred poems, one might say, that allow for a non-linear reading. To add consistency to a broken syntax due to the fragmentation and even use – not random at all – of punctuation. For, beyond a certain revulsion in the verbal disposition, the avant-garde substratum that promotes all his poetry persists, either through the symmetrical strophic structure (with a certain medieval flavor prone to parallelism) or a brevity of irrationalist aphorism. ramonia gregueria
As a whole, and beyond a very specific idiom and its systematic erotome, we find ourselves facing at least an epic directed against ourselves, our own subjectivity. There, poetry betrays itself or violence lurks in language, as the author noticed in an interesting Turia interview. In this sense, reading presents us with different basic texts for picturing our words. As an example, we cite the following untitled poem: «The pain of the known / to stumble, for the sound / the pain of those who no longer come: // I return to the world for you, / as a negation, / the loneliness that exists» .
And this rejection, forged on an immediate materiality, is completed in a circular enunciation that chases and rejects its referential (the lost reflection in the dialogue of the signifier and the signified), opening an insurmountable pronoun gap where rhetorical artificiality descends. philosophical and metapoetic reflection. “From now,” the first chapter concentrates much of these approaches, from the brevity and fragmentation of reality in the messy body of the poem, where the reader uncomfortably recognizes himself in absence: “No hand/knows what it is. is the value / until another hand is untouched / left». This questioning of love, life, or writing engages in games between sign, referent, and matter-non-existence, that is, that we are not – quite – or can cease to be: “The only proof that it exists is the name. Maybe that’s why. In you / permanent / pretext of a realm / inherited, / returned / to us and / not a language / miraculously survived / under the sky».
The second part, “a pulse,” uses poetic prose pushed by the irrational breath (whether it’s within the confines of automatic writing, who knows) to overflow through a channel of vision traced on the string of existential currents—both thin and thick. It also emphasizes an atmosphere dominated by memories and the topo of fate-time. Bosquimania or Alphabet or deck goes back to midsections, brevity and verse writing. The literal meaning is still clear, and the configuration of the poem acquires integers with a refined resolution. The culturalist explanation seems almost an instructive trap on the fringes of humor, which may well be interpreted as a counterfactual to the immediate and realistic historicity established by social poetry in the middle of the last century. “Cochlear implant” and “Que anochezca”, remarkable poems, show a diluted poetic subject in a (re)referenced world that is constructed through the deautomatization of the sign (and its associative scope). Finally, the Divan de A closes the Tanto es asi with expansive poetry, a confident style, and a lyrical structure, culling together earlier emerging sources and without some concessions to the psalms and a fragmented narrative.