What if everything I did was a contemplative practice? Reading poetry, watching birds, playing piano? Not to mention meditation itself.
In this light, it would be interesting to return to Claudio Rodríguez, subject of my first book. What poet is more contemplative? My idea for this book was that CR had two conflicting concepts of language. In one, language separate us from the real. In the other, language is the mode in which the participation in reality takes place. I continue to think I am right. CR is the greatest Spanish poet after Lorca. He actually does what Valente claims to be doing.
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I participated in a Zoom lecture about "the point of poetry" last night with Joe Nutt. He suggested that poetry "tests language to its breaking point" and I asked whether that wasn't both too radical ("breaking point"?) and not radical enough (only "language"?). Couldn't poetry just be what I think it is: the art of bringing precision to our emotions through language?
But even as I said this I realized we were probably both right: language breaks relatively easily and, when it does, we reach the emotion, which is the real difficulty.
CR's two concepts of language seems to be another way of saying this.
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