First author of poetry and gradually of diaries – the first poetry collection was Abandonada ment, from 1977, and the first diary, Quadern venecià, Josep Pla prize in 1989 -, the work of Àlex Susanna (Barcelona, ??1957) is fed of all the culture at his disposal, also of the work he has done in recent years at the Vila-Casas Foundation, of which he was art director until a few months ago. Vital has just published a new diary, La dansa dels dies (Proa), but already has more books in perspective: “It would be ideal if the new book of poems, Tot és a tocar, came out in February, and before that, the last volume of the diaries, The most unexpected year”.
He goes to work…
The diaries form a kind of quadriptych, a series, which ends with my cancer diagnosis. It’s a closed series, although it’s unpredictable what the future holds for me, but the mix of vitality, curiosity and passion that was there has been damaged by the trance I’m going through, and I won’t be the same as I was.
He wrote this diary without being ill, but death is a frequent theme…
Yes, I’m very clear about where I want to end up, and even what music… It’s good to be preparing, to be anticipating, because life is very nasty and surprises you at the most unexpected moment. I am now struggling to move from terminally ill to chronically ill. Imagine the moment I’m in, everything I could have foreseen, as if to say, job done.
But it responds to treatment.
It seems so, but very cautiously, the doctors are already warning that I can take two steps forward and then one step back. I spent two months with a sword of Damocles on me, and I came to internalize it and believe it, but then I regained my spirits, and at the moment it is difficult for me to think that this will end soon.
In the diaries there is conversation, reading, art, music, walks, landscapes… concentrated life.
They are still a celebration of conversation. For me, the diary is a kind of thanksgiving, it allows me something I need, which is to be grateful for life. It is to thank him for the wide range of experiences that await us, from the most sensory and tangible to the most intangible and metaphysical or abstract. Between the two extremes there is a very rich range.
The reader enters the world of a person who is dedicated to art and culture.
It reflects the world of someone who for many years has lived fundamentally immersed in culture, but from the utmost curiosity and interconnection between all fields. Usually you see writers locked in literature, artists locked in art, and for me it is as important to feed myself with literature as with music, art, architecture, theater or cinema. It’s a very cultural book, yes, but also very airy, and what’s more, I try to reflect the experience of culture from a point of view as vital as possible. Culture helps me understand life and live more intensely. Life and culture are communicating vessels, I am not a wise scholar locked in a tower.
It is not a collection of meetings and appointments with people, either.
I practice dieting almost as if it were a transgender that allows me to go from one tone and one register to another: there are fragments that are micro-stories, micro-narratives, others that can be philosophical digressions, rather journalistic chronicles, prose poems, aphorisms… And this allows me to modulate the writing for each of the experiences I reflect. I feel like a fish in water, very comfortable.
He can jump from one topic to another without having to justify himself as would happen in an essay.
Because here the narrative voice has full freedom. It’s all there. Everything that interests me in literature I find in the diaries. And, on the other hand, the fact that there are no dates or that there are very few also gives it a rhythm. I don’t force myself to write every day, I write when I feel like it, when I have time, without an obligation that I find burdens diaries.
Do you rewrite a lot, to turn the diary into a book?
Not much. There are experiences that I transcribe the same day or the next day or there are those that I wait a few days for. I think that this diary has a difference compared to the previous ones, at least I as the author experienced it that way, and that is that the stroke, speaking in pictorial terms, is freer. I have no inhibitions, always being respectful.
Criticism is not spared either, but…
Yes, I say what I think about Porcel or Margarit, for example, and if they were alive I would have said it to them, too. Margarit dies and I take the opportunity to make my portrait. I say about Porcel that someone can consider that it was an explosive cocktail of ambition, egotism, capacity for work, etc., but I’m not criticizing him, on the contrary, there should be more, of characters who wanted to eat each other world, and that they got to eat it.
You can’t be accused of egotism?
Basically, I don’t care. What interests me is capturing the reader through a narrative voice, through a tone, through the creation of a world, in the same way that a novel can. Let’s not get confused, they are literary, narrative diaries, I already write knowing that it will end up being published, and for me, each fragment must have value on its own, the whole must be something more than the sum of all the pages, like a mosaic image that the reader has just completed. The what is as important as the how, when I write, and not so much if I talk about one or the other, this or that. Sometimes there are fragments about apparently insignificant things, and the fun is to say, “let’s see how I get juice out of this”. I can’t help but always be fully aware that I’m making literature.
He has never stopped writing poetry, however.
Poetry is closely linked to experiences that involve some kind of revelation, enlightenment, epiphany, and we will agree that as time goes by the chances of having revelations are lower and this explains that the rhythm of ‘poetic writing decayed. On the other hand, unlike the diary, which I write when I want, the poem is rather the one that knocks on the door, so, and I have been saying this for many years, if at the end of the year I have managed to write 4 or 5 poems, I consider myself satisfied. It’s just that you don’t need more. Faced with authors who fall into a kind of incontinence, especially towards the end of their lives, I am of the opinion that on the one hand an excess of production can damage the poetic voice, as Montale said, and on the otherwise, as Gil de Biedma used to say, for every five or six poems you stop writing, maybe you’ll write one good one. I want to avoid this incontinence or verbiage into which great poets have fallen. I have no interest in that.
Maybe a single book would be enough, or even a good poem would be enough.
Exactly, like Joan Maragall’s Cant espiritual, or Salvat-Papasseit’s Longing for Tomorrow. The poets we like best, for how many poems do we like them? Let’s be aware of it. I really like Vinyoli, but mainly because of 15 poems that shook me and that I still like very much today. This does not mean that the rest is dispensable, but it means that the goal should be to write this handful of good poems, these few good poems, for which maybe someone, one day, will remember us. There is no need to insist, insist, insist, it ends up backfiring.
Cut, cut and cut?
Yes, and shut up and only write when you really can’t help it. In this I am a bit Rilkean, I think that one of the main pieces of advice he gives in the Letters to a young poet is “stop writing, write only when you can’t stop writing”. Between a poet and his readers there should be a certain abstinence syndrome, because I have seen the opposite in very powerful names, such as Estellés himself, Brossa, Miquel Martí and Pol, or even the last Margarita There comes a time when you think: “Calm down”, because I’m not excited about a new book, if I’m still thinking about the previous one, that doesn’t make any sense. Ferrater, Gil de Biedma, Larkin or Kavafis, four poets who have gone down in history, wrote three books and a hundred poems. More than enough.
The names of Feliu Formosa and J.F. Yvars are constantly repeated and the reader follows their evolution as characters.
It is significant that they are the two references that cross this whole series of diaries, they are the most present. If there was an onomastic index, they would be among the ones with the most entries, yes, and Òscar Tusquets and Carles Casajuana are also coming out…
It claims some half-forgotten artists…
It’s one of the problems we have as a culture, we have more talent than market and that talent is often lost. There is an excess of attention towards emerging voices and on the other hand, after a certain age, 55 or 60, you are practically considered dead and you are invisible.
Between the emergency and the patum.
Exactly, but here in Patum we create few, because we are also a small country, and then there is a whole wide range of creators, writers, artists, composers, who suddenly find themselves in limbo, and this is not normal and should motivate a reflection on the part of those responsible for culture of the Generalitat, of the town councils, on the one hand, and of the public institutions on the other, because it is not possible for an artist to die without having had an exhibition, which does not have to be too big, to close his work, in which the city and the country thank him for a lifetime dedicated to art. The same goes for writers, many of whom can also end up totally forgotten and in misery. I think there are very simple ways to remedy this. It is a problem of political will and awareness of the problem.
Feliu Formosa himself, is a great creator but sometimes it’s as if he’s not even there…
Exactly, it’s a case that cries out to heaven. That he has already won everything, yes, but he is very active, even if from the margins.
If poetry is already on the margins…
Clear, and he is also a translator, playwright, dietitian… And he is aware that he writes from the margins, and he does not deserve that, he deserves to be treated as what he is, a great personality of Catalan letters.
In his work the emotion is always contained.
Feelings are dangerous and I’m not interested in literature, since it’s the most fungible and most deceptive thing there is. I’m very reluctant about it, a lot of people still talk about literature as a kind of repository for your feelings, and it’s not. There are very few feelings here. Rilke already says in Quaderns de Malte Laurids Brigge that poems are not made with feelings, they are made with experiences, and then comes an apotheosis paragraph in which he says that to write a single poem you must have experienced 400 nights of love with 400 different bodies, having visited many cities, having observed the diseases of creatures, etc. And in the end, you must have forgotten everything. And once you’ve forgotten it and all this is within you, you might one day write a verse worth your while.
