She wrote, I’m tired of taking advice from people who are more lethargic than me. Raphael Chains, born in Baquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1930, is recalled in this passage from a broader collection where defeat is explored in its most human, civilian register. The poems speak of being ostracized for the sake of others who suffer more, and of a deep depression that settled when he was still in his thirties. Although not all of his work can be boiled down to that period, those lines keep resurfacing, especially as readers wonder what the poet might share at his next anniversaries. His 92nd birthday is marked by a broadcast linked to the Cervantes Institutes in Bogota and Madrid, where his verses were read from Caracas, connecting his voice to a broader cultural frame.
Paradox governs much of his work: concise yet exuberant, realist yet Orphic, verbal yet reflective, with a shimmering, matte clarity. This tension mirrors the fate of those who resist oppression. Originally a Communist militant, he endured five months of imprisonment under a dictatorship, followed by four years of exile on the island of Trinidad in the British possessions. Later, the arc of his life intersected with political turmoil in Venezuela, and since the Chavismo era there has been a perception that he is seen as anti-patriotic and at odds with the Bolivarian ideal. He has described the national ego as something dangerously fragile, and he has characterized the regime as propagating a fictive nationalism built on euphemism that masks truth.
In conversation, Cadenas speaks slowly, with a calm, sincere cadence and the watery, thoughtful gaze of a noble, shy companion. He is a professor of literature at the Central University of Caracas and has long argued that the crisis in modern society stems from degraded language use. He points to the late Ezra Pound as a cautionary example: when language corrodes, society sinks. When asked to define the mystery at the heart of his poetry, he emphasizes his own intimate knowledge of what his writing expresses, while remaining open to a nuanced mystery enriched with aphorisms—truth, he suggests, can be touched by error; and he often poses questions about presence and absence in verse.
Nietzsche is invoked to describe poetry as an art of dancing with chains, a concept he relates with a half-smile and a quiet, almost obsidian look. He has always felt such premonitions, he notes, and he uses metaphors about identity and voice to describe how a poet can create heteronyms, each with a distinct name and persona. Alfonso Reyes is cited as saying that poetry is the dance of speech, a line that resonates with the idea that poetry moves through language as if it were music with footsteps and pauses.
Paradox, even in the realm of poetry, remains a stubborn companion: poetry can be both powerful and insignificant at once. He explains that every book emerges from a concrete situation, refusing to offer a single, universal version. He confines himself to observing truth and approaching confession because public confessions grow rarer, and poetry nourishes itself through honest observation.
He describes himself as a willing mystic who still distrusts easy explanations. He admits a cautious belief that life is a mystery and that thinking, once it recognizes its limits, finds room for the mystical. Yet he resists abandoning truth. His stance is not simple optimism or pessimism but a disciplined pause that seeks to align language with truth, accepting that meaning must be earned through careful treatment of words.
Paradox, when examined in sequence, even one book after another, reveals a desire to reclaim earlier melodic tendencies. In the poem Fracaso he confesses that what seemed to be victory was merely smoke, and he praises a lover of failure who makes life more human: thanks for the fearlessness that love sometimes brings. Across his touring collections, poetry often functions like a healing practice, a form of homeopathic remedy that reveals that real defeat is only meaningful if a life has lived it.
Another recurrent theme is the bittersweet truth of love and heartbreak. He writes of a former lover who remains a potent presence, even in imagined moments of being together again. In the collection beloved, published in the late eighties, the poet’s heartbreak becomes a kind of ethical, almost clinical lesson about desire and memory: the lover’s mission may involve burning away distractions to reveal what remains. A recurring emblem across anthologies is a compact, almost surgical description of marriage, a stark, unadorned examination of daily life, stripped of rhetorical embellishments, where ordinary lines create a sense of ancient continuity and the plain essence of everyday existence, like people who simply begin their day at the usual hour.