Luna Miguel - The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.I like when literature talks about excess. Youth is excess. Excess of beauty. Excess of experiences. Excess of bad poetry

Luna Miguel, Blubird and Other Tattoos/Bluebird y Otros Tattoos, Trans. by Jeremy Spencer, Scrambler Books, 2012.

www.lunamiguel.com/

animalitoinexpresivo.tumblr.com/


Luna Miguel is a poet who can make me cry. Her passion for life and for poetry is uncommon. She makes language concise, supple, and exciting again. Recurring images: of birds, disease, spit, and blood, integral to a mortal, embodied poetry that reminds us ‘Death cannot be experienced neither for the living nor the dead but for the sick.’ Luna writes a poem, ‘The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.’ She writes, ‘I exist, therefore, / then I tremble.’ She writes of the suicidal poets, she writes of all women, she writes of the young. She writes knowing it’s a lie, she lives in the shadow of death. Luna writes of her ‘unprotected life,’ her ‘unprotected diary.’ There is no comfort in this poetry, there is hard beauty. ‘The wind was this. Being born was this. Dying without dying and without a disease was this. To tell you the truth: I am here and I need you.’ Luna. - Stephen Tully Dierks



15 Years


I detested since birth.

I hated throughout my childhood.

At the age of 15,
I began to make love.


Monogamy


Marriage is this mouth
that stinks like affection
and MDMA.


Diabetic Coma


You gave me a mouth.

My mother gave me this pancreas.

Science gave me insulin.

God did not give me anything except fear
   in a handful of sugar.


Lady Bird


Before being a woman
I was a bird
and I was a girl.

Before the evenings of sex.

The mornings of sex.

Before the adulterous days

and adolescents
open to others
that were not you.

I was a bird without acné.
I was a sparrow and blackbird.
I hated seagulls.

Only whispered.

Today, the color of my wings

is that of all women.

For my chest and my hips.
Because I have grown and mutated.
Because I was a girl,
I was a girl:
and forgot that the blood was not
garnet
but white.

And then I forgot my childhood.

As all women.

(translated into English by Jeremy Spencer)



waking up in raval boulevard


translated from spanish by Gonzalo del Puerto

I don’t know if you knew that the entrance to our block smells of meat, that chicken piles up on the pavement in plastic boxes by the container for glass, and that cows and lambs wait lying on the floor whilst some seagull pecks the sockets of their seemingly dead eyes.

- I can tell you as it does not upset me anymore

I`m not afraid of that place where

small flies

swirl dancing

colliding

in celebration of spilled milk

flyes move towards waste

towards excrements

but dance on meat, too

nest on it

forever lingering

in the clotted cavity of their blood.

I don’t know if you knew that cats are hunting beasts, that dogs believe they are men’s equals, only more miserable. I don’t know if you knew that men despise the living and dare to adore invisible icons. the question …

the question …

the question is not what do I do here

But

What do I do now that I have been brought to this place

There are threads creeping along the pavement

- I’m telling you because It cannot be helped



Two poems @ Pop Serial


An interview with Luna Miguel by SJ Fowler.

Though not an orthodoxy, one of the aims of the Maintenant series is to present poets who are truly representative of the next generation of poets emerging across the continent, that is poets who will shape the future of poetry and should be recognised as they begin to reach ascendancy in the English speaking poetry community, as they are developing, and not only when they have reached the acceptance that seems to come with a dampened middle age. So we present Luna Miguel, not yet 20 years of age and already creating a rich and vivid body of work. Ebullient, direct yet lyrical, instinctual, unapologetically youthful and explicit, she is widely regarded across Spain for her remarkable talent and unyielding presence. Undoubtedly she will be a force in European poetry for many years to come and as such, we are pleased to introduce her into the Maintenant series.


3:AM: What seems inevitable is a discussion about your age. It seems in poetry being ‘young’ is relative to other fields, in the sense a poet is still ‘young’ in their late 30s. At 20 are you becoming defined by the unusual nature of your age? Do people focus on your youth, and do you embrace or reject such temporal notions as the poets years on the planet being central to your poetry?

Luna Miguel: I think I’m not able to define myself in these terms. Many people don’t trust me since they believe that the stuff I have achieved are only related with my age. My only way to prove the opposite is working on and trying to do it as best as possible, always looking for being comfortable and doing what I want. I accept this notion about youth although I see it more and more distant because I have been publishing on magazines since I was fifteen. Moreover, now there are many people that are the same age and who write in a very interesting way. And this is the reason I don’t feel bad because I’m not alone: Enrique Morarales, Laura Rosal, David Leo García, Ruth Llana, Cristian Alcaraz, Javier Gato, Natalia Litvinova, Marina Ramón-Borja, María Simó, Bárbara Butragueño, Álvaro Guijarro… all of them are under 24. I gain a lot of hope from them and I trust their poetry. Young, yes. And so what?
3:AM: Releasing your debut collection at 18, in anyway do you think your notoriety, your reputation is sold on this fact, the unusual combination of youth and ability? Do you think it might allow you to have a uniquely long presence in Spanish poetic life or do you think people want to attach this label to you that might become permanent in some fashion.
LM: I agree it will be difficult to get rid of it, although every day I try to do it. A lot of people compare me with a sort of Lolita mixed with Rimbaud (and this can happen with good or bad intentions). I hate this kind of comparison, mainly because, as I said before, I am not fifteen. I am a little worried about all this because there are other authors the same age (for example, Elena Medel) who have also suffered this same situation. The most important thing in their work (and I hope it will be so in mine) is not the age but the quality, their ambitions and everything that’s expected from them. Youth is only an added value.
3:AM: Do you imagine your poetry will radically change over and again as your become older?

LM: I think so because it has already happened. If my poems were shorter and more cryptic in the past, right now they are longer, more narrative and in some way fascinated by the body. They will change, but in the mean time they might maintain a particular voice, I believe. Everything depends on my human experiences and, above that, my influences. When I was 16, I read Baudelaire but three years I read David Foster Wallace, a circumstance that obviously means some changes to understand and write literature.
3:AM: How does living and studying in Madrid affect your poetry? Are you a poet of the city?
LM: Madrid has become a very important influence on both my life and poetry. Before this, I lived in Almería, an Andalusian city at South of the South, and indeed I have lived in Nice, France. It’s is possible that in the time I lived in these coastal cities, my poems were more natural and open. Now I place them with closed and urban spaces, public transports and outskirts: absolutely urban, yes, but with some references to my previous contexts.
3:AM: What is your feeling to being a female poet in Spain? Is there a great tradition of poetry from women in the country, or are the figures of Spanish poetic history primarily male, for it might appear this way on the outside? Is there ever a sense of having to establish yourself in a way men would not have to.
LM: I’m afraid that being a woman and a writer is more difficult that being a man and a writer. It seems that readers expect different things according to your gender. Although a big tradition exists, it seems to be hidden, and I don’t know the reasons. For example, if you review the poets from the Generation of ’27 (Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Alberti…), you might ask yourself where the women are. Yet I haven’t read them because even in the University they are not studied. I can tell you some names of contemporary female authors such as Chantal Maillard, Clara Janés or even Julia Uceda. There are many more, but their books tend to go unnoticed. On top of that, anthologies of “Woman poetry” are always been published, but I don’t think it’s a different genre. But, sincerely, I read more poets from the USA and South America, for example, Denise Duhamel, Blanca Varela, Pizarnik…

3:AM: Do you feel the nature of the internet, the ability for anyone of our generation to access and proliferate material, is central to the future of poetry? Do you think poetry has begun to catch up with other media by using the net?

LM: I would say that poetry will be always marginal until it breaks with its forms and its more ancient references; however, I think too that despite its marginal personality, it goes further thanks to the Internet. The user can see the poet as a current person, and this familiarity makes the reader go with some kind of fascination to the work published on the net. It’s impossible to support today the idea of the author as a divine entity… If we want people to approach poetry, it would be better to delete the myths.
3:AM: You clearly engage in the utilising of a contemporary, perhaps postmodern poetic. Your work appears sparse but vitriolic. Are you writing from instinct, or are you deliberately trying to overturn the idea of a precious, ‘poetic’ language by utilising sexual and contemporary media references?
LM: I would say both things. I like writing from instinct. An instinct marked by ambition, corporal expression, reconstructed places and intertexts. I trust the evocation’s power of quote. All of us are made by quotes. Why poetry might be so pure?
3:AM: Where do you influences lie? In poetry, or in music – punk etc…?
LM: My influences come from my own experience and own poetry; also from music, narrative, movies and comics. But mainly narrative. I’m interested on fitting narrative scenes to the poem. Maybe my clearest influences would be Depeche Mode, Alejandra Pizarnik, Lhasa, Daniel Clowes, Trainspotting, Rimbaud, Anais Nin, Betty Blue, Antonio J. Rodríguez, Daft Punk, The Zombie Club, Cinque, Mallarmé, Disney… Everything. Everything that surrounds me is influence.
3:AM: Your poetry seems to combine elements which are truly both elliptical and metaphorical, and beautiful, and harsh, brash, immediate language. Are you attempting a synthesis of the two?
LM: It’s possible. As I said before, I come from a very lyric tradition: Baudelaire, Lorca, Paul Eluard… And later I discovered other works more contemporary but not necessarily from poetry. Eloy Fernández Porta, David Foster Wallace, Tao Lin… I’m also interested in literature of gender, and there are Virginie Despentes, Maite Dono… All this mixing helps me to join form and contents in a way sometimes calm, othertimes surly, depressed, but always trying to search for rhythms and the word’s strength.

Poetry is not dead: An interview with Luna Miguel.

by Ani Smith

Luna Miguel is a young poet from Spain. She already has several books published, has won literary prizes and has several projects underway, including some very interesting translations. I interviewed her because Noah Cicero asked me to. He was excited about her writing, but less so about his command of Spanish.

I’ve never done anything ‘lit-related’ in Spanish except perhaps that I read Garcia Márquez as a kid, so this felt a bit weird to me, even though Spanish is my first language and the language I revert to in my subconscious (I know this because in nightmares I scream for my mother in Spanish.) But I don’t know, I sound different, the questions I asked sound different to me. I think I mainly think and feel in English.
Still, in corresponding with Luna I found a very earnest, bright young woman, a keen awakening, a dewy rosebud, a hungry morning; many overly poetic metaphors for the trajectory of a life. I kept thinking about firsts, and paths and opportunity, and the awesome spectre of potential that hangs over young lives quiet and subtle but unwavering, like a mist which can only be seen as it dissipates.
Youth is funny. Language is funny.
(Click here to read the interview in Spanish.)

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Tell us a bit about yourself. How old are you, at what age did you start writing and how, because I imagine that you realized you had an aptitude for writing from very early on, no?
My name is Luna and I am 20 years old. I began writing at 13 because I was in love. My first collection of poems was called Cuaderno nepalí [Nepalese Notebook]. At 14 or 15 years old, I began to publish work in online magazines. At 15 I started my current blog and met many Spanish poets and writers. At that age I lived in France, where I also met some writers. I haven’t always liked literature because my parents are a professor and an editor of literature and I would get bored of it. Little by little I started liking it, and I realized that in my house there were books, and books, and books. I realized that almost anything was within my reach and that was fortunate for my upbringing. Although I have always distanced myself from my parents, their support has been crucial. I am very independent because from the beginning I wanted to create my own place in literature, but of course I know that it would not have been the same without them.
Among the books you sent me there was a collaboration called Exhumación (Alpha Decay) [Exhumation] that you wrote with your boyfriend, Antonio J. Rodríguez. Tell us a little bit about him, how you met him and how the process of collaboration was.
My boyfriend is a fiction writer. This coming year, Random House Mondadori will publish his first novel, Fresy Cool. He doesn’t write poetry and is not very interested in it, and one day, while we were drinking coffee, he proposed that we write a short novel together. Though I had never written prose, I was excited and we began writing Exhumación with the luck and coincidence that some months later the editor of Alpha Decay proposed to us to publish something together. She had liked my poems and his literary criticism blog. So we began working harder and in three months we had finished the story. We were not living together at the time, so we took turns sending each other fragments of the story via email. Then we would meet and talk about the book and so on during that time. The book has had a good reception and we are very happy. It is like a son or something like that. Our little son of 67 pages!
In the poems in your collection, Poetry Is Dead (DVD Ediciones), there are references that I associate with the English-speaking world, not only the language, but you also refer to, for example, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and others. I feel like your book is perfect for bilingual people like me, who grew up between two or more cultures. Where do those influences come from, for you, and what else influences your work?
Literature that comes from the US or Great Britain has always been very important to my formation. Among my favorite authors are Charles Bukowski, Virginia Woolf, Sharon Olds, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, TS Eliot, Jack Kerouac, etc. This is why there is a great Anglo leaning in my work, in the references and the approach to the writing. English is not my first, nor my second language, I learned French at school and lived in France to improve it. But I still feel that literature in English has been more crucial in my life, that is why I am interested. Many are of the opinion that only what happens in the US interests us, as if that were the center of the world… I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like the center to me but it is true that there are always interesting movements there. My influences come from the first things I read (at 11 years old I would only read Salinger and Bukowski) and from recommendations from friends (for example, David Foster Wallace is my boyfriend’s favorite author, he’s writing his thesis on DFW, his name weighs heavily on our bookcases and our lives). In addition to these authors I’ve mentioned, I am also influenced very much by French authors: Françoise Sagan, Charles Baudelaire, René Char, Marcel Schwob… I am also very interested in fiction, I think it’s crucial for a poet not to stop at poetry, one has to read a lot of fiction and, in addition to the North American literature, I am also interested in many authors like Roberto Bolaño, or contemporary Spanish authors like Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron or Mercedes Cebrián. Spanish poetry is also very important in my life, especially names that I don’t know if they are known in the US, but that should be translated with the greatest urgency if they haven’t already: José Ángel Valente, Vicente Aleixandre, Chantal Maillard, Miriam Reyes, Leopoldo María Panero, Roger Wolfe, Maite Dono, Ángel González, etc. Apart from literature I like music, film and comics. I am inspired by personal experiences, travels, the body, sex, disease. Everything. Everything becomes important.

Why poetry?
Because it the best way I have found of expressing what I feel, what I want to invent, what I want to describe. It’s also the best way of lying. Or lying to oneself. The best way of seducing the reader. I want to seduce the reader. I want him to stay in my words. That is very important.
There is something rebellious and nonconformist in your poems. Do you think that writers have some responsibility to their society, culture, or their generation? What, if any, is the role of the poet or writer, in your mind?
Writers and people of culture exercise a great influence over the spectator. I think that a writer is always compromised, whether he talks about politics or not. I do not talk about politics, I talk more about society and about myself as a nonconforming individual. That is more obvious in Poetry is Not Dead than in Estar enfermo [Being Sick] or Pensamientos estériles [Sterile Thoughts]. In this book I talk about problematic neighborhoods outside Madrid and of my position against the current poetic canon in Spain. I also talk about sex, I think it is the base of society at the same time as its taboo. The role of the writer is to entertain, and make the reader cry, suffer, think, react, smile, become happy, etc. If a writer does not “incite something within you” he is not worth it. That is what I think.
How did you find the indie literature online community that is mainly based in the US, and how did you come to the attention of people like Noah Cicero or Scrambler Books?
Years ago I found Tao Lin’s blog and followed it closely. I had also read Ellen Kennedy (one of my favorite young writers). But it was in the summer of 2010 when I started to look for interesting contemporary authors. I learned of Richard Chiem, Kendra Grant Malone, Chelsea Martin… I started to read their blogs or buy their books. In the meantime, Steven Fowler, via another Spanish poet, interviewed me for 3:AM Magazine. When I asked for Kendra’s book from Scrambler Books it turned out that Jeremy Spencer had read my interview in English so we started writing emails to each other, talking about literature. We sent each other letters, too, and we exchanged books. One day he asked to publish me and we made an anthology of poems from all my books that will be published in 2012. It is one of the best things that’s happened to me in my life and it’s all thanks to two or three nights of searching on the Internet and curiosity for other literature. I learned of Noah through Tao Lin and some articles on HTML Giant. With him I am planning a book of US poetry translated to Spanish. I know that he is a great writer and I want to read more of him.
Among your online projects is Tenian veinte años y estaban locos [They Were Twenty Years Old and They Were Crazy], in which you translate poems from English to Spanish, many of them written by young favorites of the moment like Tao Lin, Kendra Grant Malone, Madison Langston and Steve Roggenbuck. Tell us a bit more about this. Where did the idea come from and how has it been received in the Spanish or Latin American communities?
Tenian veinte años y estaban locos was to bring together many young poets of different nationalities. First I translated Ellen Kennedy, then I started to publish young poets from Spain, France, Argentina, England, Italy, Portugal, Ukraine, Mexico, Canada… I spent months searching, translating, speaking with them. It’s been marvelous and from there, other projects have been born. The first is called the same as the website and will be a book published on October of 2011 by the publishing house, La Bella Varsovia, which will contain 26 authors under 26 years old. It’s a risky project because there are many conservatives here and young poetry has never been seen well by many. But these 26 authors are amazing and they deserve to be read. I hope you will be able to read all of them one day. There is another project too, with my parents’ publishing house, El Gaviero Ediciones, and that is the book, VOMIT, an anthology of North American poets (it has to do with the name of New Wave Vomit by Ana C., who I admire) and it will be a translation with authors such as Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Dorothea Lasky, Jake Fournier, Jordan Castro, Cassandra Troyan… Every young North American will be translated by a young Spanish author or translator. All the translations and texts, etc., will be done by young creatives. Tenian veinte años y estaban locos is a stimulating, new project and we are very happy with it. The idea was well received, as you can see. Although the website is not being updated currently (due to school exams and things like that) we will be back with more poetry. Much more poetry. Always. [Ed note: This was back in early June and the website has since been updated.]
What is your greatest wish?
To continue discovering good literature for many years. And to have fun with it.

Excess of bad poetry: an interview with Luna Miguel

Alec Niedenthal

Luna and I have been preparing this interview for five months–or, I should say, I’ve been lazy and bad enough to (with the swerving and errant dedication that is now emerging as my style) let this one sit, short as it is, raveled and incomplete since October, asking a question every few weeks, no doubt irritating Luna in bookish, unpromising bursts. Which is all so stupid, so feckless of me because of how much of a force–a clearly, as you’ll find out, erudite and redoubtable force–Luna is in contemporary literature. Eg, here she is in Elmundo yesterday. As one might expect, Luna writes with the irreverent edge of a Rimbaud, but goes beyond mere edge, beyond what one might call the chintz of aspiration, to the “elsewhere,” not of youth, but of style, which is the earmark of youth; she might be called one of those writers who is not ahead of her time, who in fact has no toehold in anyone else’s time, but rather is planted squarely in her own time, but precisely because she has founded it–not alone, but en bloc with her comrades, who are amply referred to below (in fact, what we have there is a catalogue for the future). Hers is the time of a new world poetry. Welcome her.

So Luna, I think perhaps there’s something inherently–or whichever inward-looking adverb you like–scandalous about our being young and publishing, or trying to publish, what we write. At the same time it’s a wrong that shows up the, in my eyes, probable reality of the situation: that more or less anyone can do this thing, namely write, if they’re invested in it, willing to risk it all the way to this juncture. I mean, as far as artists go, young-ish musicians are pretty commonplace, and filmmakers, etc. But literature, given its fraught and bloody history (and given everyone’s favorite platitude, “everything’s been written,” which is the avant-garde’s sad and cynical capitulation to Harold Bloom, et al.) takes time, patience, especially to actively gather enough from it–that is, one’s life in books–that one would be able to produce a cohesive, indeed saleable work and publish it, unleash it with pride and into receptive arms. Logically it should probably take more time than these 20-21 years. And yet we’re doing it, even as perhaps we ought not to–this time might be better spent “on the bench” as it were, in private study and preparation, in deference.

Do you ever feel that way? Do you have that internal voice contradicting you? Like this: “I haven’t read enough, I haven’t had enough time to develop a voice, a style. Am I still writing juvenilia?”
I believe it’s impossible not taking into account books like Less than zero, by Ellis, V., by Pynchon, the always quoted Rimbaud and Claudio Rodríguez, or, here in Spain, the bright verses from Elena Medel or Carmen Jodra (while the first one published at seventeen, the second started with 19, and both works are amazing, and very sold and read in my country). These are only a few examples, but I think that the history of literature is full of authors that publish their first texts between 17 and 25. So being young is (necessarily) bad? It is necessary that the authors have lived and lived and lived many experiences to write something acceptable? It is not brilliant the way that Fante catches the youth, for example, in The Road to Los Angeles? We do need authors in their twenties, thirties, forties, fities… Every age is different, every age has his own topics and symbols. What we do need are good authors: if the text is brilliant, so why should the author’s age be important?
Drugs, excess, a sort of nihilism–all of these seem to be timeless equipment for a young writer (with a few exceptions), from Rimbaud to Bret Easton Ellis to Tao Lin–to, in a quite different way, the young David Foster Wallace. Why do you think that’s so?
William Blake said: the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. That’s the first quote of my first book. I don’t write (all the time) about drugs (I mean, it’s clear they appear in a certain way, but I try not to make it explicit ), but I like when literature talks about excess. Youth is excess. Excess of beauty. Excess of experiences. Excess of bad poetry. And here we come back to the first question you make me. Perhaps, as we “have lived less”, we tend to exaggerate our experiencies, texts, verses… I’m conscious of the contradiction, but I would say that an adequate dose of excess is always good.
Well, how do you think your style has changed since the first book? Because young as we are, the more we write our styles have to–by some hidden law of nature or something–shift, explode, deliquesce, harden, forget their past only to recover it accidentally, etc. I know you’ve been asked this question, but I want to know how your objectives in terms of style and production have changed since your first book of poetry. What are the new themes and experiments? New modes of expression, ideas? Are there new motors to your work, new foundations?
My voice has changed pretty much from my first collection of poems. Between 2005 and 2007 I wrote Estar enfermo; in that time I read other kind of things and I had other obsessions, other musical tastes, other lovers… A different life, briefly. My first book was very related with the body. My second book speaks about literature, urban feelings, and further on, but, however, there are some echoes that refer to those old obsessions with the corporeal; then I speak too about pornography, which is a very important topic in Poetry is not dead. In my second collection, indeed, poems are longer, as if I had lost the fear towards long verses. Moreover, I would like to underline that if some time before I was more visceral, right now I want to be more conscious and make deeper corrections on my work, and, I believe, you can note that easily.
Luna, what’s the status of contemporary literature in Spain? I assume it’s more or less similar to America’s national literature as it stands (I don’t think I’m mistaken in suggesting that the very possibility of an objective national literature is on its way out), and I understand that I’m asking an abstract question here because it’s such a complex phenomenon to gauge especially when you’re directly in the midst of it as you are–but maybe I can specify a little with a few mini-questions. What stake does contemporary Spanish literature (fiction, poetry, or the Spanish intellectual in general) have in the national identity? Where do you think you fit? Do you think that Spanish literature is grappling with distinct problems? (I ask because American literature certainly is.) I recognize that there’s never a national “literature” as such, but maybe you could describe the climate for us.
The biggest difference between USA and Spain is that here in Spain we’re obsessed with everything that is done in USA. To young authors like us is very difficult to find contemporary writers in Europe, but it seems that in USA there’s an equal or greater movement of “in progress” literature. I mean, here we have a lot of people writing and publishing since they were very young, unlike other european countries (with some exceptions, or some foreign authors like Annie Katchinska (1990), a poet I admire).
Because of this, the current status of spanish literature is hard to explain. We are very (too much) influenced by foreign literature, and at the same time seems like we have no willing to share our own. Because of this, a lot of young authors have decided to communicate with our equals from your country: to share, not only to admire; that’s essential. But that’s a common problem. We tend to think that what’s done abroad is better, that’s whay authors seem to attach themselvs to trends and styles with a heavy delay.
I think we have very good authors, and even if they are translated, they don’t become more known. I can’t understand that. That makes me think that other countries’ lack of interest may be the problem too. Because these writers are indeed very good. And, where are they?
I don’t think there’s a “national literature”, either. In fact I believe I share so many things with Ellen Kennedy, David Fishkind or Jake Fournier as with Laura Rosal, David Leo García or Ernesto Castro (also spanish poets younger than 22).
And in the work of your contemporaries, your allies, those to whom you feel your work is close–what have you noticed about tendencies in, not the styles themselves, but the way that those styles develop?
Yes, for the third answer I said that my work has been changing since I started to write at the age of 13/15. I felt the deepest change at the age of 18, I started to try longer texts, I started to play on words and such. Maybe this attitude came from my job in Público, a Spanish newspaper: the fact that I had to write in prose, in a journalistic way, showed me more ways to work the poetic writing. Between my 19 and 20 I’ve been trying to mix these two tendencies. Along with time I made my own voice, and now it’s all about strengthening it. I guess my poetry will be different in the future, I’m now interested in poetic prose right now, a genre I should learn to develop.
As for our contemporary Spanish poets, I’ve been able to notice some changes in the work of many of them. Elena Medel (Córdoba, 1985) is one of our most interesting and important young poets. The three books she has published, Mi primer bikini (2001), Vacaciones (2004) and Tara (2007) are very different to each other, and they show a clear and brilliant progression. Now is time to wait for her new poetry book, and the many more she’s going to write. I can think about other poets that have changed like this: Begoña Callejón (1976), Javier Rodríguez Marcos (1970), Ana Gorría (1979), Juan Andrés García Román (1979), Carlos Pardo (1975), Maite Dono (1969) are some of the most important authors of their generation and they’ve changed their style from one book to another, and they’ve done it for the better. If we talk about Spanish narrators, it’s the same: Javier Calvo (1973), Antonio Orejudo (1962), Mercedes Cebrián (1971) or Alberto Olmos (1975). I like reading their books and their blogs and I can see their hard progressions. And… If we talk about the US (poetic) scene, Dorothea Lasky comes to my mind, I can see in her as well a clear change from Awe to Black Life. But that’s just the personal tendencies of each author.
I’ll focus on the youngest authors in order to speak about “general” tendencies. I see a lot of differences betwen the Spanish and the US scenes. From the States I’ve read carefully authors like Britanny Wallace (1987), Steve Roggenbuck (1987), Ana C. (1985), Kat Dixon (1990)… I love them so much. I percieve in them a strong leaning to the “ego” as an engine, to the anecdote. They have a narrative-like style. Even with them having their deep differences, they look strongly linked between each other. You can easily see their common authors of reference, like Tao Lin, Dennis Cooper, Charles Bukowski, Miranda July, Joshua Beckman. Among Spanish young authors the difference is wider. Cristina Fernández Recasens (1984), Odile L’Autremonde (1992), Julio Fuertes Tarín (1989), Marina Ramón-Borja (1989), Ángel de la Torre (1991), Laura Casielles (1986), Jorge Brunete Gil (1991)… These Spanish writers are more lyrical, less anecdotic, more concerned about the form. Anyway, in the end there aren’t a lot of thematic differences between the US and Spanish poets that I’ve read. Can’t deny that. So, to sum up: I think general tendencies do exist, but what really binds us all is youth, that we share a learning stage and our willingness to have a lot of fun.

 

Luna Miguel, whose spanish biography can be found here, is a poet, journalist and the authoress of several poetry books: Estar enfermo (2010), Poetry is not dead (2010), Pensamientos estériles (2011) and Bluebird and Other Tattoos. A selection of her poems has been translated into English by Jeremy Spencer (Scrambler Books, forthcoming, 2012). She has also written the short novel Exhumación (2010), together with her boyfriend, the writer Antonio J. Rodríguez.
Thank you to Julio Fuertes for translating Luna’s answers.