Self-Portrait on Convex Mirror. On Autoría by Julieta Valero
In the quotation chosen by Julieta Valero to conclude Autoría [Authorship], Miguel Casado points out that “the continuous thread of the voice has provided the subject with the only possible space for existence”. “Once concluded,” he had previously written “it all falls apart again”. Anyone who chooses to interpret Autoría in a linear way, without taking chance or omission into account, will wonder whether Valero wove the “only space for existence” for her discourse, or whether her voice can be heard, hesitantly, at ground level and ironic at times, rough and twisted at others: “at present, The Sublime is a membrane between words and the multiplicity of the bazaar”, suggests Valero in Ashberiana, a dialectic she establishes with a poetics of the writer and philosopher Alberto Santamaría, which we could perhaps see as the nucleus of Autoría, as well as, undoubtedly, a major footnote in the literary choice of Julieta Valero, not just because of the explicit reference to the North American poet (“all so Ashbery now”, she humorously, and accurately, pointed out in that text).
However –and Autoría meanwhile–, let us return to the words of Casado, and ask ourselves whether Valero establishes that the world is created by writing, or whether it emerges from the chaos unleashed by the “continuous thread of the voice”. Valero’s expressive torrent, the uniqueness of an imagery (look out for Siddharta en Google) between Gamonedian hallucination and the sideways glance at the everyday: does it function as the initial big bang, or does it simply jostle what already exists? Autoría brings together the obsessions found in her previous books of poems (Altar de los días parados [Bartleby, 2003] and Los heridos graves [DVD, 2005]), and adds some new ones: the customary research into the identity of the individual in the context of the collective, and the questions aimed at a subject which is more us than I, are joined in Autoría by the awareness of the passing of time and the knowledge that one is accompanied, at the same time as we find a reflection on the change of that us, the mutation of that place which was occupied, is occupied and turns into something else, and we also add the beautiful doubt regarding the role of writing in our environment, in our –again, inevitable– world, a questioning regarding the purpose of writing when life is there.
Despite life being there, or because it is there, Julieta Valero writes. World, we repeat, world, and it is here that we find the purpose of Autoría: there is a space for love, for travel, for questions, for oneself and for others. It all falls apart when the voice is stopped, and it only regains its harmony through writing. Some references (we are surprised by the social reflection of Sustrato de invierno, hitherto unexplored by Valero) anchor Autoría to custom. During a conversation with the magazine Nadadora, Pablo García Baena claimed to see himself as a realist poet: ultimately, his poems speak about what happens, about what is real. At the other aesthetic extreme, although sharing the same and paradoxical certainty, we find Julieta Valero. If Eduardo Moga suggests in the back cover note that the author’s irrationalism “is, in fact”, and this note seems more to me than an innocent nexus, “another realism, one which is more incisive, less linear” she herself writes: “in a moment she will wonder whether she still believes in the beauty of shipwrecks //and the need for classical orders.// (…) She thinks that this is not a metaphor, but the demand for an explanation on the part of the audience”. She does not play with words; she explains us with them. Or she confuses us. In any case, she stirs us, in pieces, and different from what we are: in Autoría, Julieta Valero draws a self-portrait –and draws us along with her– on a convex mirror.
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