“To the person who wrote ‘it’s comforting to know that at least we’re all scared together’ in the comments of Ribsby Lorde on YouTube. Those of us who are afraid together”. A very young 19-year-old Javier Navarro-Soto Egea wrote a very long poem in the summer of the pandemic and dedicated it to an anonymous person on the internet. He says that with this book he just wanted to “let everything go” and for someone to tell him: “Okay, you’re not alone, I think the same way and the same thing happens to me”, and maybe that’s why Until our ribs ache (Cicely, 2023) is also a way of collectivizing the malaise, euphoria and boom of adolescence. In the verses that run through the book, she says nothing and says everything at once. And therein lies the magic.
‘Condensed milk’ by Aida González Rossi to digest adolescence and savor the “poetics of the filthy”
Further
“If childhood is a square where boys play and girls / wash clothes, criticize their husbands, bathe in the fountain as if they were / a herd of mermaids, then adolescence is […] / a burning cathedral that contains in its interior all those years / […] in that cathedral […] we dance, we twerk, we vomit, we do things when we are young, despite not being young anymore, despite being older and older, older and older, closer and closer to twenty and then thirty and then forty and so on until the fire burns out. extinguish disappear forever goodbye bye CHASH! because the grave appears on the road and life withers. An excerpt from the poem by Navarro-Soto Egea seems like an irremediable confession.
That the poetry of the new decade does not need much less the rhyme or the literary resources to which it is accustomed, is a fact. That the youngest poets dare to shamelessly part with heavy words, saturated decorations, and overloaded forms, too. The poetry of today is, according to the historical period of which it is a part, more immediate than ever. Navarro-Soto says that he was never very interested in the poems they studied at school, but talking about the days when one locks himself up at night in his room watching Skins while googling how to vomit, blaming all future problems on Zoey 101, not being “comfortable with life” as a concept” and convincing yourself that there is nothing after nineteen is also literature. It is a beautiful way to present yourself to the world.
“Firecracker poetry” is what Navarro-Soto Egea calls it, and he defends it as a way of artistic creation without training, without too many resources and without any expectations: “People forget that writing is easier than it seems, just you need a pencil and a piece of paper. I defend that you have to do things to have a good time, not with the intention of renewing the canon or marking a before and after”. In the same collection of poems, he wonders with a certain satire if perhaps it is not like “someone who has failed” to write a book “that talks about the same thing he tweets about,” he says, “someone without talent who does not know how to do anything other than cry.” . But what he perhaps is unaware of is that the sincerity, immediacy and impudence with which he achieves a most honest collection of poems is also a virtue that allows the reader to witness an overflowing century: sometimes violent and, other times, dazzling.
Adolescence as a poetic resource
The poet’s tireless insistence on defending adolescence as “first age, true age” —and opposed to childhood, which he describes as “zero age, empty age”— is not only in the mere fact of recognizing those years as the best : in reality, adolescence is also in the speech itself, in the language, in the vocabulary, in the intention, in the naturalness, in the brainstorming, in the disorder, in the daring, in the freshness, in the form of saying things, in the way of interpreting them, at the moment of writing them, in not saying exactly anything, in not claiming anything, in not aspiring to anything. You have to know how to look at it well and get rid of preconceived judgments. Dare to talk to the adolescent and not forget that he is. The prologue by Juanpe Sánchez López already warns that everything is plagued by “indecipherable visual noise”, and he is right. The collection of poems is, in itself, a time of youth.
That’s why Until our ribs ache It might not be entirely a book: it is rather something alive, a permanent memory, an image, a testimony when one is not yet an adult and sees with a very tender conviction the true years, those of discovery, love, conflict, parties, depression, screaming or childhood rooms in the parents’ house. It could be the written statement of the who prevents it of Jonás Trueba —a faithful portrait of adolescents being, neither more nor less, adolescents— or the definitive affirmation of a Self defense that continues with the ‘mamarracheo’, the generational and the defining of a plethoric culture and full of things to tell. Doing it with a poem is one more way.
During the writing of the book, I felt that no one felt the same as I did about the idea of growing up.
Javier Navarro-Soto comments that he now feels “quite distanced” from the collection of poems: he is no longer a teenager. And that is also valuable. Three years have passed since he wrote it and he explains that his style has changed and he is not too convinced not only by the way he wrote many things, but also by what he told. He no longer believes that the world collapses when he turns twenty, but he has learned to respect “the Javi of the past” who despaired just thinking about it, “to reconcile with him.” That is why he has not altered the text, despite the temptation that years of maturity always deposit in one. To do so would be to kill the teenager.
“The poems of that time were poems that I didn’t even think about. They were very intuitive, I was guided by the rhythm. It was the first time I had done it and I took it as a game”. Navarro-Soto Egea discovered poetry in the most zooms possible, account: through social networks. When he left Lorca (Murcia) to study Psychology, he found himself with an immense circuit of references that he tirelessly touched and for which he began to write poetry “more seriously.” And while he likes things “much more contained, slower, calmer,” he explains, “the process of this book was like a torrent.” That is why the interesting thing is to perceive it as it existed. “I see eighteen-year-old people discover everything that I discovered when I went to study in Granada and it excites me. During the writing of the book, I felt that no one else felt the same way about the idea of growing up. I think it’s cool that people of that age, who are now overwhelmed by ceasing to be a teenager, can read this book and access it, find out about all this.
mamarracha poetry
The writer recounts that in his first year of college, while everyone was studying for finals, he couldn’t stop reading poems “all the time on the internet.” A sick fever. In the era in which people publish on Medium.com and cultural circles are created on Twitter, the fact that content is available to everyone makes “literature not a closed thing,” Navarro-Soto defends. He fears, perhaps, that for the Academy it is still not the same: “For example, when the kings meet with some poets influencers and they say that they are with the Spanish poetic panorama… It is better that they call the people who have won prizes like the Hiperión in recent years”.
No one seventeen years old speaks saying “The angel told me that the moon was reflected in your beautiful pupil”
But he acknowledges that, despite this, he never felt afraid that his poetry would not be understood, because he knows the public he is interested in reaching. The first verses of him had already been published in anthologies When It Stopped Raining: 50 Freshly Cut Poetics (Sloper, 2021) y and barked (Ucopoética / Bandaàparte Awards, 2022), and had been a finalist in the XIII Jordi Sierra i Fabra Novel Prize and the I Letraversal Poetry Prize. What he regrets is that he and other colleagues still have to present themselves for experimental poetry prizes and that their collections of poems cannot be understood from a more global sphere: “It’s cool, but I would also like to be able to send my book to other sites and know that the people are going to be able to read it as something that has value beyond being firecracker and chaotic. Nobody at the age of seventeen speaks saying ‘The angel told me that the moon was reflected in your beautiful pupil’, so a more sincere, less faked poetry seems much more interesting to me”, he says. “I sense that in a few years, when the panorama is regenerating and the names are changing, everything will be different. Wait”.
He doesn’t want to be closed to anything. The poet says that right now he is writing theater and that he does not intend to define himself in any style, despite the fact that the publication of his first book seems to do so: “I want to show that I can do more things apart from this nonsense. I want to keep experimenting.” Perhaps that is also continuing in defense of youth. For the frankness, the indifference, the breath of fresh air.
There is a moment in which, after the tangled thoughts, the feelings going out of the prism and a summit of shouts that claim a radically different transit of life, Navarro-Soto Egea finds the best of parallels. After the burst of voice, rest. Like a flash of light. And he ends by saying: “Adolescence is a Church in which / Lorde’s music sounds / but in the Church there are also crying goodbye to the low / that all drunks feel / at an exact point of the night / —and it is this moment— / Paquita Salas is a very willing forty-year-old lady who / works as a representative of actors and actresses in Madrid / and lived in Navarrete / and met, according to what she always says / all the great actresses of the early 2000s / or maybe even before / the fact is that Paquita Salas always does things / all the time all the time she never stops / and things always go incredibly wrong for her / but she doesn’t give up / she asks for a glass of larios a cane of chocolate screams a little and he says / I am / Paquita Salas and there was a time when I / was enormous”.