By Mario Flores
1. At the beginning of everything, the epigraph is already the recovery of a fragment of a notebook. That is, understanding the book of poems as the result of this exhumation exercise (in the book we find the years recorded). How did – and since when – did this methodology of the notebook or note app (or other support that serves as storage) occur and then form something bigger? Is it an immediate annotation or is there already an implicit write there?
I started writing in notebooks since I was 11 years old, just for myself. And since I was 23, things written in notebooks, also for me but from where things emerged that later became something that was published. In 2005 in Cafayate, on a long Easter weekend trip with my family, I bought a handmade notebook with a green recycled paper cover and a circular openwork in the middle where there was a dream catcher with a pebble in the center. I kept it in the woven backpack that was part of my hippie look at the time and from then on I never stopped writing regularly in notebooks or always carrying them with me. In that green notebook, which is notebook 1, are the first poems that appear in the first book that I published, the year after acquiring it. He also wrote and drew there, in pencil. Especially in college, during classes. I paid attention in class, yes, but from time to time it was urgent and necessary to take out the notebook to write something that someone had said in a nice way without realizing it: a teacher, a classmate, a situation in the classroom or in the busy streets of that moment while wandering, in the free exploration of the city, secretly being part of the group of the two or three famous flaneur poets from different periods in the city of San Salvador de Jujuy. In that notebook there are many titles that are the names of the subjects of the Literature degree, which I was studying at that time: Spanish Literature I, Grammar II. It served me to give it a context and not forget in what situation I had written such a thing or to retain what surrounded that entire moment in which the poetic suddenly occurred and took shape. After the green notebook, all – almost all – of the notebooks were always Rivadavia notebooks with 50 plain sheets. Almost never, anything I wrote in those notebooks, for twenty years, was written with the intention of having the form of a poem from the beginning or of being published at some point. Poetry yes. Because poetry is in the air, not in a written text. Poetry is a constant threat that surrounds everything, that can be in everything, that sometimes we see it and sometimes it escapes us irremediably, but it is always there, lurking and imminent. Notebooks are necessary so that the poetry that we do see does not leave us. So that it does not evaporate. But perhaps, above all, to save ourselves. Notebooks are lifesavers. Poetry is a bright, multicolored unicorn-shaped float in the middle of a murky, angry, churning sea. That’s why poetry in notebooks is an immediate annotation. It’s not a plan. The poems that emerged from things that I had written in notebooks like that were always published just because I felt the need to close something at some point in my life. There are three books that emerged in this way, that keep that same spirit: Poems to get them off my back (2006), Quinotos al whiskey (2008) and The path of kumquat (2025). The three books form a single line that makes life continue from 2005 to 2024. All three are the same book, they are added one after the other, a bit like Whitman, bridging the gaps, obviously and unintentionally. That is why the figure of the kumquat unites them: it is on the cover and in two poems in the first book, in the title of the second, and in the third “kumquat” means kumquat (in French and other languages, “kumquat” is said like that, they take it directly from Chinese). Specifically, El Camino del Kumquat is based on texts written in 8 notebooks, 6 or 7 notebooks, several loose sheets, many Word files and many notes in the notepad of my cell phones, from 2008 (that is, immediately after the publication of Quinotos al whiskey) until 2024.
2. A poem from your previous book, Surfing Poet and Other Successes, which is titled “I don’t like it when they go to Brazil”, presented this idea of an immobile voice in the middle of a naive and sinister structure, an alien feeling both in the city and (now, in this book) a more rural dimension. What is there in poetry about that sense of outsider or role witness that contemplates how the natural becomes grotesque?
I don’t identify much with the idea of the sinister in the things I write (at least in the ones I publish) nor with the idea of the grotesque. I don’t feel that there is anything in that direction. On the contrary, I think I consciously seek to distance myself from those places. Yes, there are things that can pass as naive, perhaps, in what I write. I like how genuine there is in the naive. The simple and the direct and the unpretentious. I like the poetry that always exists in everything naive. But it never, I think, remains naive for the sake of naivety. In pop for pop’s sake (sometimes they told me that I write it as “pop”. Well. Maybe not without success). Maybe that is a form of the sinister: that something else is actually happening downstairs but that I show it to you as if it were light. Some see it. Others don’t. It is also not necessary to see it or see it all the time. Maybe a poem full of metaphors does the same but taking a very complex detour, replacing things on purpose to say while hiding and without showing. Maybe the metaphor is also something sinister. Don’t know. Probably. But everything always points to the same thing: creating whatever it takes so that the world does not collapse or so that the world is different so that you can live it, so that you can be somewhere, in that world that you invented because this one, the real one, the only one that exists, seems to you – in addition to being tremendous – insufficient, and you don’t want to die of anguish. The naive, the light, the pop, the banal, the naive, the humor, the irony, all of that is almost a mask to take some weight off the deep and dark abyss that the world itself sometimes turns out to be. Afterwards, feeling like an outsider in this world as it is, almost always. And the natural, the “countryside”, as you say, nature is not a conscious search in this book, either. Images of the countryside appear a little because the countryside has also been part of my world, always. I am a little from the country and a little from the city. And both things appear in this book. And they appear due to vehicle trips made with certain frequency between El Carmen and San Salvador de Jujuy along the prettiest and most rural road: San Antonio-La Almona, and they also appear due to the feeling of confinement in the city during the pandemic. And I hadn’t realized they appeared. And I like that to happen. (That both things appear and I have not realized it).
3. Sometimes there are landscapes that are confused and become a nexus at the same time, as in this kind of Africanization of the settings, and of the characters that reveal the terrible in the minimum, such as cashiers or building administrators. Is it a joint scenography or is the book built by the accumulation of these effects?
If there are links in the landscapes, they occur alone. The natural architecture in these three books made of notebooks is always a joint thing. Everything is a continuum. Everything is a set. Everything is a line that begins being written in 2005 (Poems to get them off my back) and ends – or continues – in 2024 (The path of the kumquat). If there are characters that reveal the terrible, the only one that comes to mind as in a sudden horror movie is the administrator of the Las Linas building in San Salvador de Jujuy, and the building itself: that “new”, “large” and “modern” building on Fascio Avenue between Necochea and Balcarce. Fascio 886. Know the address well. Don’t ever think of going to live there: that building is diabolical. The worst place I ever lived, with the worst neighbors in the world. With huge hunting dogs locked up barking in desperation 24 hours a day in the apartment below. With people upstairs dragging furniture across the floor all the time, at all hours, and denying it. If there is something truly sinister in this book and in my life and in the life of my French partner and in our 13-year relationship as a couple, it is that building. The girl who places the tempered glass in Doctor Celular, no. She is saved. It’s not terrible. She is divine with her long nails painted fuchsia with golden stones. On the other hand, if you want to see Africanization of a landscape in South America, go to that exact point between San Antonio and La Almona where trees with flat tops grow in the middle of yellow savannah-type grasslands. We saw him passing by with Sébastien, enjoying riding in a truck and listening to beautiful music on the route between San Salvador de Jujuy and El Carmen, and vice versa. It was our escape landscape from confinement in the building of terror. Everything connects. In life and in the book.
4. There is a constant humor in the general tone of your poetic guidelines, whether ironic or natural, but there is no response of sadness or depressive reflection in the texts. Is this something that goes through the selection that was made for “The Path of the Kumquat”? When considering an archival treatment, did you also find opposing fragments?
Yes that’s how it is. That tone is a decision in the selection of poems I made for The Way of the Kumquat. There was a lot of material and the biggest challenge for me was making a cut of all that. The edition, as author, of all those notebooks. I realized the personal need for all the years from 2008 to the end of 2024 to be represented in some way in the book as a whole and decided to choose one, two or at most – and only in some cases – three poems per year. That those chosen poems were significant for me in relation to the general feeling that floats within me when I evoke each of those “seasons” in my memory and, clearly, that the fragments chosen to become poems were not the most “low” ones, which abound and I would tell you that they gain in quantity in those notebooks, notebooks, files, loose pieces of paper. But these types of fragments belong to the order of the cathartic, they fulfill a rather therapeutic function for me. For me they do not enter – or not so much – in the order of poetry, or at least not in the order of poetry that I am interested in transmitting. Because I believe that the downturn, the depressive, the -let’s call it- “truculence”, the low blow, the solemn, the serious and the dramatic are the most direct and effective output of the poem and of most of today’s artistic expressions. (And please forgive me for making these strong statements. They are not against anyone in particular.) Tragedy has dominated the field of arts for all time and when it is done well, I love tragedy. But, returning to our time, I do not personally identify with that atmosphere in my writing style, and I continue to maintain that humor, irony, the naive, the naive, the “light” tone and even the banal and the apparently “pop” serve to say much deeper things than the direct route of drama. It happens that there, in the non-direct exposition of the dramatic, of the tragic, the reader is required to manage a code in common with you, an understanding of that (of humor, of the light, of the ironic as vehicles to say other things that are “veiled” on a deeper level), a much closer complicity, a greater reading commitment as well. The direct exposition of the drama is fast consumption and without much need for processing. Humor, irony, lightness, on the other hand, appear to be easy and direct things but they are not. And that’s the game I like to play. Because a poem written like this can make you smile or laugh as a first reaction, but deep down it leaves you itching – or it should leave you itching – that something bigger than that is happening on another plane of things. And many times you don’t need to know what it is. Perhaps all this is better seen in Surfer Poet and Other Successes because the poems work separately, each one is a little world closed in itself. In fact, the poem called “Alan Pauls”, which is at the end of that book, works for me – also unintentionally – as a “manifesto” where a kind of “poetics” (the way of operating from the aesthetic and perhaps above all from the ethical) is exposed in my way of approaching art and poetry. The path of kumquat perhaps requires a little more effort in this sense, because you have to read the book straight starting at the beginning and ending at the end, neatly in that order, to be able to finish reconstructing the general feeling that the whole thing leaves you with.
5. This time it is Almadegoma, the label that publishes your book (previously you had participated in the collection 15 Minutes with You but never a whole book), which after so many years (of editorial work and your work) is something more than welcome: what was the publication process like and what do you see in the final result both in the sequence of the poems and in this methodology of now publishing the files?
For me it has been a huge pleasure to work with Pablo Espinoza, with whom we have understood each other perfectly throughout the book editing process, from the day we both made the “commitment” to publish a book of mine with his publisher (that was having a coffee in the center of San Salvador de Jujuy, chatting about life, a couple of years ago), until the day when, in that same cafe, a few weeks ago, Pablo gave me the “zero copy”, as he He called it, so that I could give it the last revision before printing the first print run (that of the books sold in pre-sale), and my tears fell when I saw an enormous gesture of love concentrated there in that object, when remembering all the work and the very human and close bond that the two of us had during the entire editing process from March to June of this year. For me, this book had to be published no matter what in Jujuy, because for me they are poems that function like an intimate diary. And, as I have been saying, they are a continuity of Poems to get them off my back and Quinotos al whiskey (both also published with Jujuy publishers). And I don’t know if Jujuy is my place in the world, but it is my place of origin, the place where I lived most of my life, the place where I am still trying to figure out what it means to me, the place where my family and friends are and, without a doubt, the secret lair that I have if I start to not feel too good in some other place that I have gone or continue to go to. In Jujuy I know – or learned – how to ward off depression and in one way or another this place always ends up surprising me. That is why publishing this book with Almadegoma, the publishing house of my friend of more than twenty years with whom we have lived and gone through different moments of different types within that bond throughout all this time, means a lot to me, and it reaches me deeply to realize the immense love that both of us have put into the creation of this book. Pablo’s work as an editor is enormous and is impeccable in every way. He assumes all the roles himself: he designs the cover and the interior, layout, prints, puts together the books one by one, creates divine things that accompany it (in this case a mini-poster to put together the cover as you want, with stickers that he himself designs, prints and cuts out one by one with a scissor), he spreads a lot by creating quality content on the networks, he puts the books in his backpack and gives them to them. to the people who pre-order them, distribute them by taking them to fairs, festivals, soon also bookstores, and many times in book circulation spaces and independent publishers whose existence he himself promotes. I recommend to all the writers in the world that, if they can, they always have a genius editor friend like Pablo Almadegoma close to them.
In the final result – which was polished in the back and forth of archives between Pablo and I reviewing different types of things – I see that, although I had to leave out many poem-moments that were important to me when making the selection and that meant making difficult decisions, a set remained that allows me to see clearly, from a biographical point of view, the path traveled through time and space in this entire stretch of my life. For me the book (this type of book made of notebooks) means that. And a big change in cycle or life stage too. That these poems are published implies, as always, that there will be people known and unknown who will read my life. From those people, from those readers, I hope they can accompany me on that itinerary as if they were friends who suddenly appear to tell you with all the affection: “Hey, Meli, will you put on your Wonder Woman t-shirt and let’s go together on Friday to this party in that bar over there, which is going to be great?”