Structured Poetry

Structured Poetry Cecilia Pavón (bio) Translated by Kit Maude Buenos Aires is many things, including a city for walking, snapping photographs, and writing poetry in notebooks while nibbling a medialuna in a coffee shop. Porteña writer Cecilia Pavón lets us peek into her notebooks as she wonders, Why can't life be just drinking coffee and writing in notebooks with soft covers? It occurred to me that this notebook ought to be called Structured Poetry after I was walking down Calle Florida and bought a pair of pants made from rubbery black fabric, lovely pants that made me want to start wearing clothing with contours again. No more loose-fitting, unstructured clothes like the sweatpants I wore for years. During that time, I was completely won over by the "ath-leisure" trend, a portmanteau for what used to be called "gym clothes. " Today I have decided to restore stiffer fabrics and "structured clothing" to my wardrobe and also to pay more attention to the structure of poems. I shall start writing "structured poetry. " ________ I don't know what "structured poetry" means exactly, but I've set myself the challenge, in secret, without telling anyone. I will assemble the poems like scaffolding rising into the air before transforming them into a portable heart. ________ What if, instead of "structured poetry, " what I really meant was a "structured life"? Yes, I've always used poetry to structure my life, not the other way around. At the age of fifty, I've finally come to this realization. To begin with, using poetry to structure your life gives you a different perspective on time. ________ Personally, I don't really believe I'm fifty because in the world of poetry, which I first entered at age seven when I wrote an ode to the sun, one doesn't have an age. Or we're eternal children, reciting rhymes and counting syllables after laying our heads down on the pillow before going to sleep. Just now, over breakfast, Claudio, the love of my life, told me that the only ethical thing to do in literature is to ensure that a love of books is preeminent over everything else. Or something like that— the old familiar idea of poetry as a space where one has no interest in mundane or earthly matters. I really don't know what my opinion is. I have mundane interests, and I won't deny that I've always dreamed of earning money from poetry. I'd like to combine a disinterested love for the words and syllables and tones that poetry creates with living well. And to live well, you need money. Money with which to buy free time. Because to have a different perception of time, to escape the earthly sphere, you need to have free time. Really, you just need enough time to go out and wander the streets with a little notebook, on the hunt for poems. ________ By hunting for poems, I mean that I believe that the poems are out there, living in a kind of fifth dimension, and poets just End Page 40 need to go out looking for them. Not that it's as easy as it seems. . . . The tricky part is finding the right method for entering that unknown dimension. To open up the lid of the chest where all the poetic treasure is to be found, you need to live in a special way that no one can teach you. For each physical body and soul there is a specific way of switching on or opening up to the fifth poetic dimension. I don't know if I'm a poet or not, but I possess dozens of handwritten notebooks full of attempted poems, and that makes me very happy. ________ The street is horrible. Week after week, more and more people gather to sleep on my block. From Alberti to Rivadavia, it's full of trash and crumbling sidewalks. . . but that's how it is. Today I went out with five old notebooks in my handbag, notebooks from another time in my life. I keep all the notebooks in which I once tried to write. . .