“You will come and recite”, the publisher and poet Pau Vadell told Maria Sevilla (Badalona, ??1990) after publishing his first book, Dents de polpa (Bernat Vidal i Tomàs 2015 award, AdiA). She did, and now she is one of the most sought-after poets: this Friday she is performing at the Poesia i festival with the electronic duo b1n0, she has recited in the United Kingdom as part of the Institut Ramon Llull’s Spotlight, in November she will go to the Veus en Madrid, has participated in the International Poetry Festival of Barcelona, ??among many others… and since 2019 she is one of the three programmers of the Horiginal cycle, with Laia Carbonell and Raquel Santanera, classmates with whom she shares some references although “There are poets of the same age who are very different. I have Dolors Miquel as a reference, which is for many people more or less my age. Maria-Mercè Marçal and Enric Casasses were also important, and younger ones like Maria Callís or Joan Josep Camacho Grau, although I met him later, when I had already published”.
His was not a childhood or adolescent vocation, but the discovery of writing was linked to learning: “Deep down, I have a very unsexy training, and it seems ungenuine to say it, but I have a very school and academic training. ”. That is why he vindicates his “school education, because everything I have learned about literature comes from public school and university,” she explains. “Public education – she develops – is one of the few antidotes to avoid reproducing symbolic and cultural dynamics and capitals and repeating the same surnames everywhere”. When she began to publish, when she was working on a thesis on La passió segons Renée Vivien by Maria-Mercè Marçal, “the two worlds mixed up, the creative and the academic, and I didn’t know how to find the balance”. But she did not completely distance herself from academia, as she works as an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. However, “working conditions in the academy are very precarious. The entrance door to the university is so precarious that it is even a privilege, in the sense that those who can dedicate themselves to it one of two, or are people who do not need to be paid to work, that is, people who already they come with some privileges, or, as would be my case, they are willing not to pretend to have children, not to pretend to have a car, not to pretend to pay the down payment on a mortgage. That it is a totally valid option and it is the life that I have chosen and it is very good to revisit the ideas that our parents had about life. But in any case it would have to be a choice, it would not have to be an obligation to be able to dedicate yourself to intellectual or creative work…”.
A reflection that is present in her poetry without shying away from experimentation: if the axis of Kalàixnikov (Ciutat de Manacor 2017 award, Món de Llibres, published in Spanish by Godall) is feminism and theories of desire, if true: false; else: true (Carles Hac Mor award for subversive plaquettes 2020, Fonoll) was born from an action with the musician and mathematician Joan Martínez, and his latest book, Plastilina (Fonoll, 2021) is framed in a criticism of salaried work and against the dynamics of precariousness. “I try to articulate it with the resources that poetry offers you, but to say things that have a social impact for me,” he explains.
Drugs also take place in Plastilina’s speech, because “they are a double-edged sword. They have subversive potential, if you take more from the area that is prohibited, which is the area of ??leisure. On the other hand, drugs are legal if they serve to make you more productive or to fix you as a worker. A lot of people go to work drugged. Many people need to fix themselves chemically to be able to endure an 8-hour workday, but at the same time there is pleasure, and there is this ambivalence.
A world, that of work, that the pandemic has disrupted quite a bit, in his case, because “there are many people who say that they took the opportunity to write, but I was caught in the trap of teleworking. I used to teach at the university but the rest I did at home, and during those two and a half months I saw evidence of this inability to find transit time between vital practices and work practices, which at that time completely unhinged me. ”. But he also helped refine Plastilina’s speech, which was already half written, “against the dangers of creative work, of mixing life and work and not seeing limits, not finding spaces beyond the world of work. The book ended up taking all its meaning with the pandemic. Because “just as I don’t believe in the genuine way of being a poet, at the same time I vindicate the profession when it comes to writing, that is, you have to put on and you have to review and you have to redo. The discourses of the genuineness of inspiration are elitist and classist, because they pretend that you already have it from the factory. A poem is also a work, even if it seems not very genuine or not very sexy”. And he knows the solution: “That can be solved with a universal basic income. Why do we have to pay to live? Plastilina is the defense of the universal basic income”.
Regarding the experimentation with orality and the incorporation of technology, Sevilla explains that he tries to go beyond the simple music of the poems: “I quickly felt like thinking of texts that came out of music, where the plaquette if true comes from: false; else: true, with the aim of creating a piece of sound poetry on the idea of ??error, on the idea of ??glitch. They are texts based on sound, not already written texts that have been put to music. You have a sound and then you try to make a text and some rhythms also stick to you, you do metric tests, it is very experimental in this sense of the game. You put aside this need to get your muse down and to say something supertranscendental to give yourself more to the playful part, which is still the essence of experimental poetry. Understand the word from this more playful point of view”. He has also added the use of loopers and delays (sound effects that play with repetitions and allow the creation of sound layers) that allow him to play “with the voice, take fragments, syllables of what you say and reconvert that syllable or that phoneme or that sound on a base that never ceases to be the language, the same language converted into music, and allows you to mark metric feet… and the fact is that in Catalan poetry experimentation also goes hand in hand with metrics, as can be seen in Foix or in Brossa. There is a very deep sense of form in Catalan”. The challenge of experimentation is always this, he says: “Let one plus one equal three. If one plus one equals two, I already calculate it at home”.
When it comes to technology, you can’t help but think about social networks, because “it’s very difficult to leave spaces that are apparently public, but aren’t. You see Instagram or Twitter and you think it’s an agora, a public square, and no: it’s a private company with some algorithms. For me the challenge is to try to make poetic creations that incorporate certain interfaces with which we work every day but that do not depend on the algorithms and dynamics that these same interfaces have”.
Catalan version, here
