In Defense of Poetry and Freedom

The idea that poetry can save a city and change the image of the country, can only be the product of those who believe in dreams within dreams but who are also quite awake, as Rilke reflected, or as Borges could have thought.

Nothing else comes to my mind when I consider what the International Poetry Festival of Medellín has been and will go on being: this wholehearted undertaking of poets who understood that if the word controlled by the forces of power was the destructive weapon against Colombian society, that same word, wrapped in poetry, could be constructive no only of a dream reality but of life.

Joined by the efforts of other men a women as brave as them, these poets of Medellín, with the tools of verses and metaphors, raised up the city, gave it a spinal chord where only a human mass lived humbled by its own misery. In this way, the International Poetry Festival of Medellín was not only an undertaking celebrating beauty, the soul of the people in the poem, but the decisive presence of that light that helps to dissipate the clouds under which our country has unfortunately lived for so long. There is no more conclusive proof of this than the fact that the world community has recognized it, and that today hundreds of poets from all over the world celebrate the reality of poetry in Medellín. I think it is convenient to point out that last year was published in Italy Mappe Colombiane by the poet Alessio Brandolini, a beautiful book that I had the fortune to prologue and that was a product of his attendance to the Festival. This open book, directed to the heart of the country, would not have been possible without the roads always kept open, thanks to the Festival, by the poets of Medellín. It is in this way that many poets have written and will go on writing about Colombia. Some months ago, in Athens, the Greek poet Tassos Denegri told me about his love of Colombia and the happiness of his days in Medellín.

It is because of this that I see with deep sadness how some Colombian poets have unjustly and unreasonably thrown themselves against the Festival, wielding political differences as circumstancial and light as the fact that these poets were until a short time ago defenders of the same ideas they now abhor. One of them, I recall, celebrated then the Complete Works of Mao, indifferent to the horror of the Cultural Revolution.

Just yesterday I saw on TV the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, talking through his millions as if he were a saint, about how he was ready to save the world from famine and sicknesses. By contrast, I observed at the some of the poorest men of earth, those poets I have mentioned, used the media like demons against the Festival, prepared to save the world from the same poetry they defend and write. What a terrible irony, in a world upside down, that cannot bear the richness of ideas, the freedom that men as well as poets deserve to live in poetry and love.

Personally, I have never defended any political idea, I have never followed a leader or a commander. I hate the ease of what is circumstancial. I stick to the ever living poetry, to that grain of sand that cannot crush that which is vilest in man: the poverty of being. Because of this, from my house by the Ohio River, I raise my hand to greet my friends of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, and to celebrate with them the freedom to think, to create, which is our freedom, the freedom of poetry.

Armando Romero
Colombian poet in Cincinnati