Barcelona Metropolis

Poetry permeates Enric Casasses’ entire oeuvre. Having passed the age of seventy and with a succession of books and prizes, the poet talks about his published work and the work that has stayed in the drawer, tidied away waiting for the right time, and reviews his career, from his family background in L’Escala to his life in Barcelona, including sojourns in Nottingham and Berlin. With the city acting as the stage and character, the conversation follows the path charted by a writer who has always devoted himself to poetry, with brief incursions into theatre and articles, with a characteristic style that dominates the language of print and stage, the more popular or more intellectual references passed through the filter of an uncritical and libertarian vision of the world.

Yes, it is a sin of my youth. My sister Maria was at the Conservatori Arts del Llibre [Book Arts Conservatory] and she had to do a final assignment, including the binding and prints. She made a very artisanal edition and, a few years later, it was republished. It was based on an improvisation discussed with a friend who was ill, but there’s one part I like and some others I don’t like that much… It’s a piece of work from before I started to produce the work.

In the last two years of Franco’s regime I lived as an exile in Nottingham, England, and that’s where I invented that first story. When I came back, in the 1970s, after Franco’s death, when I was already in my twenties and it was the time of the punk movement, I discovered Riquer’s major troubadour anthology in three volumes and I gobbled it up whole. I decided that writing in verse held no mystery if punks and troubadours were doing it; I took the plunge and that’s how I started. I consider all of the above to be exercises.

They were into poetry from the very outset, reading and reciting it, and with the books we had at home… My father, when he saw that I was writing, was thrilled and ended up joining in. He had always written a bit, and when he retired he continued and ended up publishing. One day, when I had published a book called Calç [Shod], which won the Carles Riba prize, he said to me: “Today I dreamt that you wrote a book called Descalç [Barefoot]”. And that’s the title I gave to my next book

That was later on. I started on my own, writing for myself. Sometimes I read it to one of my sisters and sometimes to a colleague, and little else. I wasn’t a writer, I was someone who wrote, and after a few years I did start with recitals, and it all took off from there.

I dreamed of being a revolutionary; it was a war, outrage, and a bit of the youth movement too. And the late 1990s was a time of change.

Yes, it was totally underground, with drawings by me. They were poems in prose, which is something I’ve always done. A proposal came up to republish it in Mallorca, but it didn’t materialise and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. The drawings are the highlight.

After the recitals, they went knocking on the door of Mr. Folch, at Empúries. And it went well, he published one after another of the books I gave him. That’s how I started, in a half-chronological, half-disorganised and piecemeal way, and that’s why there’s still a lot of unpublished work. The poems in the book Començament dels començaments i ocasió de les ocasions [Beginning of Beginnings and Occasion of Occasions] are already a selection, and there is another volume pending, which I don’t know whether or not to continue tweaking, entitled Ànsia vella [Old Longing]. They are all poems from the early years, and after that, from the 1980s and 90s, when I published the No hi érem sonnets, there is much more work that some day I’ll have to sort out.

No, and Soliloquis is like an anthology, a collection, let’s say, of long poems. But I’ve now submitted another book to Edicions 62, called Marramaus, with a compilation of all the notebooks from the last twenty years. Small notes I have on literature in general or on other subjects.

And I still do. Previous ones included Edicions Poncianes, before that Edicions de 1984 and Tria Llibres. At Males Herbes I published El monòleg del perdó [The Monologue of Forgiveness]… And the other theatre book, Do’m [Give Me], also in Accent Editorial, by Ponsatí-Murlà… and De la nota del preu del sopar del mosso [From the Lad’s Dinner Bill] was republished by Edicions Terrícola.

When I wrote the play Do’m, which was commissioned by Albert Mestres, I didn’t have a clear ending. I listened to an unusual song by King Crimson that ended with a bass solo that seemed to unravel, then strange avant-garde piano stuff to explore how they managed to find ways in the world of art to come up with endings that weren’t the typical ones. So I created an ending that ends and doesn’t end, thinking I was making something up. Then I saw that there are popular classics, such as El virgo de Vicenteta [The Vicenteta Virgin], among others, that already used that trick.

Sometimes I think the best work is handwritten, where all the nuances are. In more subtle ways, Gabriel Ferrater already did that. If you look at the first editions, book by book, or Les dones i els dies [Women and Days], the same poem is always on the left and on the right. He had it all worked out, and he instructed the publishers what it was supposed to look like. But he had problems with the censors, they would remove one and then he would have to change the pagination and he was snowed under.

More or less, each page is a page, yes.

I made it so complicated for them that, in the end, they took the document and reproduced the PDF as it was. It’s my computer font.

A bit, yes, there are things by Marta Font and some of those miscellaneous volumes by different authors published by Margalida Pons in Mallorca. No thesis, as far as I know, but some work, yes. There is also a whole study by a professor from Warsaw, a Catalan, on Dona’m corda [Get Me Started], who quotes Aristotle, Plato… And a couple of years ago there was a symposium in Tàrrega, with a good talk by Jordi Cornudella, something by Albert Mestres on the theatre… Cornudella has a broader vision, because sometimes the scholar focuses on a tiny little aspect.

Between recitals, lectures, proofreading, translations, my own publications, poems set to music… I’ve been getting by, but I’m on a tight schedule and I try to spend very little. And I’ve also done other things, like theatre and essays…

Yes, I play around, and, in fact, the essays I’ve written are in verse.

The line is very much a marker.

…there is a breath. There is a rhythm that drives you onwards and forwards.

The outside world, be it L’Escala or Barcelona, is character and stage at the same time. We are spectators and actors simultaneously. Barcelona is very much present in my poems. Then there are moments from other things, like “Som a l’era” [We Are in the Threshing Floor] from Bes nagana [colloquial Russian for “without a gun”] (also collected in Soliloquis), which is a long poem, about all the mountains behind Moià. Oló, a farmhouse called El Paré… It is all about the mountains.

Yes, based on some photos taken by an architect, the City Council commissioned me to write the text. There are four or five photos selected for each gargoyle, and a poem which is what the gargoyle says in that position.

The spiritual base is the mountains between L’Escala and L’Estartit, in El Montgrí, like Víctor [Català], and in reality I’m here, in Barcelona.

Yes, and another part also takes place in El Carmel, Barcelona, seen from above.

It’s centred in Barcelona. Do’m is tibi dabo, Latin for “I’ll give you”.

No idea. Every city is an experiment.

Yes, but around 1974-75 I was in Nottingham, with the anarchists and with a history that was very typical of the time. And so on and so forth. They’re different places, but not that different. And then Berlin, in the 1990s… Each city has different forms of madness. Spontaneous grassroots art was happening in parallel all over the place.

Yes, we could manage somehow or other. But the question should be “if our culture were not subjugated to a different state…”.

It’s just that here the institutions hold so much sway, and the spontaneous or individual content is sort of hidden behind the big publicity stunts. In Berlin you don’t learn about the institutional stuff unless you seek it out; there’s a great deal of it, and it’s all on an equal footing.

…the institutions weren’t here, although they did hold Poetry Week once a year.

Bit by bit a little festival was held here and there.

Yes, but after that the ordinary folk come out and follow the tried-and-tested approach that works.

Yes, but it worked for me.

No, no pressure. At some point I’ve thought: “Why are they copying this? But, on the other hand, the real strong connection has been positive since the time of Pope, Comelade, Blanca Llum Vidal, Núria Martínez-Vernis, Martí Sales, who is also closely related, Víctor Bonet… They are not from my school; they are colleagues.

And the youthful, ground-breaking work of Dolors Miquel.

It’s a big change, yes.

There is a form of influence, so to speak, which is to have been, myself and others, at the forefront of this movement. And now, seeing people who have nothing to do with it directly, but who are there, like Guim Valls, Raquel Santanera, Camacho… each in their own way, pursuing this approach.

There was also Víctor Nubla, on the other hand…

Yes, like Comelade, with alternative music, but then he increasingly got into the world of writing, and he also wrote in Catalan.

From the very start he plays with the languages that sound familiar… “Your Labios as Tulips” is the name of one song… He plays this game, also in French… Or another one, why is it called “Promenade des schizophrènes”? Because it’s a double step. And Pascal has graphic and written works too…

…de la música catalana [of Catalan music], exactly, is very good.

Bob Dylan is also ultra-American and has reached the entire world.

Going abroad really helped open up my vision of the world, but now I get the feeling that my work is in Barcelona. It is still the capital, or one of the great capitals, of culture and of the Catalan world. We are one of the most unique and richest voices in Europe.

I have always improvised, or let myself go with the flow, and, rather than going abroad, I found myself there. Once there, I’ve always tried to immerse myself in the dynamics of the country, that is to say, in Germany I mixed with Germans and I didn’t hang around with Catalan exiles or emigrants. Sometimes I was fleeing: fleeing from Franco’s police, fleeing from the uncontrolled merry-go-round of love affairs… Rather than playing the role of a Catalan in Berlin, I played the role of a Catalan Berliner, and I have also been a Montpelliérian, and in Nottingham I joined the small group of half a dozen anarchists who were there.

I don’t know, I suppose so. But I still have my spiritual nomadism…

Yes, I was expecting a revolution to break out and, when I got good reviews, it came as a surprise to me.

And the Critics’ Prize and the Serra d’Or, and the Lletra d’Or… There came a time when I was already on a roll with my work, and I sort of carried on as before, I suppose, I don’t know.

There’s no need, no…

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but there is a famous book about Gràcia, La plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves) by Mercè Rodoreda, and mine is Plaça Raspall, a different kind of language.

…and the non-gypsy side.

There are parts of the book that seem to stray off the beaten track, but basically there is a portrait, a landscape with figures. It’s a description of the place, and the bar, and the people.

It’s complicated. Maybe Canaris fosforescents [Phosphorescent Canaries], it’s special. It was a real struggle to have a black cover.

It was an invented genre, the poem in prose with a nonsensical twist. And immediately after returning from Berlin, Coltells [Knives] came out, when I moved into the flat where I still live. “A l’entrada de cada casa / per robar bitllets de mil / hi ha un comptador que desfasa / i amb més xapes, un pernil”. (At the entrance to each house / to steal thousand-peseta notes / there is an obsolete metre / and with more tags than a leg of ham). That was the installer putting in the new meter. “That’s ‘insurance’, isn’t it?”, and he said: “It’s got more tags than a leg of ham!”. It was a very contemporary book.

I mix up the two published by Edicions de 1984 and a series by Empúries, so it’s good to keep changing. Now I have several projects underway, Marramaus is going to Edicions 62 and I also have another one yet to finish, which has to be illustrated by someone else. It’s going to be called La policia irà de bòlit [The Police Will Be on the Lookout], and it’s stuff from 2018 and 2019.

Some emerged in some independence movement or other, but not that many.

Yes, and ultimately “we wholeheartedly hope the pro-centralists achieve independence”.

No, I don’t know. I could ask Documenta, maybe. This one I’d like to have in monochrome, not in colour, like El nus la flor, which was also illustrated with drawings.

It is still not the time, and then some. I’ll start looking at it one day. First of all, after the lockdown, there was a time to sort things out and arrange the order of Soliloquis. I also have a folder from the 1980s and 90s… I have to take a look at it.

I don’t know if all this is going to last long. The tweet is a new form, which almost seems closer to speech than to writing, but it is written. It’s interesting, it’s a new genre.

Atomic chemistry helps us to understand atomic chemistry, and economics helps us to understand economics, and, on the other hand, from poetry “comes knowledge that is not negligible under any circumstances”, as Vinyoli said.