Fills auditoriums, theaters…
Yes. I read my poems. I am accompanied by a musician, like Andrés Suárez.
Poetry. In front of how many people?
1,000 people came to Príncipe Pío in Madrid and 5,000 to the WiZink Center.
Extraordinary!
In May I will tour eight Latin American countries: there will be 3,000 people in the Metropolitan of Mexico City.
Poetry doesn’t quote, they say.
Everyone likes poetry, but not everyone knows it yet.
They do not know?
Poetry has been relegated. Let us dare to offer it. There is so much left to do…
Do what?
Poetry recitals require a lot of intention, they are complex… and all of that exhausts me. And no institution helps: they should get involved, commit!
And would it work?
Like the minstrels in the squares, before. Poetry should not be elitist. With support, more and more initiatives would emerge.
What is poetry?
Bécquer sang it. When I was 12 years old I read it, and I was hooked. Poetry encompasses everything.
Did anyone help you?
The poet Benjamín Prado: he lowers his lyrics to street level, reading him makes me want to write.
Recite me a verse of yours.
“I can only be with you or against me.” Benja is generous and kind to young poets, just as Alberti or Ángel González were to him, he tells me.
A poetic masonry.
Poetry illuminates you, inspires you, guides you if a bad day dawns: you open that book and…
“I am a poet on call”: Gloria Fuertes.
Cristina Peri Rossi or Idea Vilariño, Uruguayan poets, are for me: the poets in Latin America are sadder and better.
What do you look for when writing?
Take care of myself. Understand me, comfort me. Poetry caresses. Art is a caress on the back.
“Art makes the invisible visible,” someone told me.
As a child I felt like an old woman. It would be that I transmuted all the literature I had read, so many points of view…
What is your weak point?
Every fragility, if you recognize it, is a strength.
Do you recognize your weaknesses?
I go deeper into my shadows to know they are there.
Show me a shadow of yours.
My drive to care.
To take care of others? That?
Yes, and it is a way of depending, it is a kind of toxic love. They don’t teach us to equalize care, to take good care.
What do you do to avoid reoffending?
Telling me that I can’t save everyone from everything. It happens to me with abandoned dogs: I would adopt them all. I try not to watch painful videos about animal abuse, that makes me suffer too much.
Highly sensitive?
I’ll get out of any place where they treat me badly. I try to treat everyone well and I deserve the same.
The novel he is publishing now is titled Las Vulnerabilities.
The narrator devotes herself to caring for a suffering and abused girl who has appeared in her life. It’s something that happened to me.
It alludes to self-harm, too…
They are a physical response to the inability to master emotional pain: physical pain seems to anesthetize the other.
Anorexia may be there…
The physical is a cry for the emotional. And there is social pressure due to appearance, which is why feminism is an infinite, hard struggle.
Have you thought about throwing in the towel, perhaps?
No, because the other is worse. But let’s look at what we’ve achieved… and give ourselves some respite of satisfaction, right?
Recite me a verse by Elvira Sastre.
“Loneliness is looking into eyes that don’t look at you.”
“I don’t want to make love to you, I want to get rid of your heartbreak.”
There I deromanticize romantic love. I also don’t romanticize family. My parents embraced my sexuality, but that doesn’t happen in every family.
“The pain never ends. We just learn to look at it.”
You silence it… But the pain ends up coming out somewhere: see our Civil War…
“The opposite of truth is not lies, it is mystery.”
Before I penalized lying. But lies are a twisted form of truth. The truth is interwoven with lies.
“I want to do with you everything that poetry has not yet written.”
My verse that in 2012 I uploaded to the networks… and it went viral: they asked me for a book to publish and everything I do started.