We met with Miguel López Ramírez in the theater room of the Padre Manuel cultural center in Estepona where he feels like a fish in water. In a few days he will present his first solo collection of poems to a large audience that will be eager to see and hear the new creation, Winks in the Soul, by a multifaceted author: writer, actor, singer, photographer…
After many years of writing and reciting your own and others’ poems, did you feel the need to publish your first solo collection of poems?
Yes. I love writing. It is true that having so many disciplines to occupy my time, my literary production has not been as prolific as I have always desired. I have killed the “worm” by publishing books in collaboration with other authors, who also have their own. But yes, it was time to have my first solo child. Now that I have retired I hope to have more opportunities to write and catch up on expressing my feelings on paper. I am satisfied with this first collection of poems and I hope to improve the quality for the second. Life will tell.
You are a lover of photography and in Winks in the Soul you mix your photographs with your poems, why?
Photography is another of my passions, it’s true. I enjoy capturing the beauty of the things that surround us. This is what is called contemplation… And what I contemplate I like to leave captured, not only on the retina, but as an image. Many of those photographs that I take, sometimes, speak in my ear, they suggest ideas, feelings, reflections… And it seemed nice to merge image and word in a book. That is to say: the photographs that appear in the book are not my best images, but they are some of those that inspired me with those poems. That’s why they go hand in hand; each image with its poem. As if it were a couple in love.
In your collection of poems, time is a very important axis. Are you obsessed with getting on the last train or is saying the last goodbye also poetry?
Yes, it is very important. I value it a lot, perhaps because I haven’t had as much of it as I wanted. You know, work issues. That’s why now that I can I want to value it more. You never know what your last train will be, of course, but I want to be prepared so that when it arrives it won’t be a trauma for me and I’ll leave with the terrible feeling of having wasted my time. The last goodbye is something that is expected, that we know has to come to all of us. The sooner we assimilate it, the less we will suffer. That’s why I want to take advantage of the time I have left by thanking and asking for forgiveness for any damage I may have caused. And it can also be done in a beautiful way, of course: poetry.
In addition to being a poet, you are a singer, photographer, short film and theater actor. Will we see a work related to your hobbies someday soon? A song, a play… For example, theater?
Well, I like to say that I am an aspiring to all that you have mentioned, because you never finish learning. And in my case it would take several lives to be able to perfect all these disciplines. Can you see some of what I do soon? Well luckily I’m always doing something like that. At Christmas I have sung a lot, it is what I do most, not because I am a better singer than an actor, but because I can do it alone and I don’t have to depend on other colleagues, as happens with theater. But yes, we have an appointment already made to do a sitcom at the Felipe VI Auditorium for this February. I still can’t say anything more. It will be with my Farñandula group and it will be done if there are no setbacks that prevent it. You know… life.
And so, on stage, with the curtain fallen, after our little talk we can only congratulate Miguel on his “first child” predicting total success. The curtain will rise again, we know that the show must go on.
