A major and fundamental voice in the current panorama of Venezuelan poetry, Santos López (La Mesa de Guanipa, Anzoátegui, 1955), author of the collection of poems The Tribe Bookis the poet invited to the IV Reading Meeting, organized by the Humboldt Cultural Association and the Eclepsidra Editorial, on June 25 at the Alexander von Humboldt Library, in Caracas.
Iconic title in Santos López’s poetic range, The Book of the Tribe has its origin in an episode experienced by the poet in 1985. The night before the terrible earthquake of September 19 of that year, he had a nightmare while sleeping in a hotel from the Mexican capital: a terrifying sound drove him crazy and he felt like a huge mouth was swallowing him. He sensed then that something terrifying would happen and that morning he went to the airport and took the only plane that left to Caracas. The next day, when he woke up in bed at his home, he learned of the tragedy that swallowed more than twenty-five thousand souls in the Mexican capital.
Based on this collection of poems, published by Eclepsidra in 2014 in the second edition – the first was published by Monte Ávila in 1992 – the fourth Reading Meeting will be held, which is titled “From the shaman to the poet” and whose participants will have a close experience with López , who will guide you in reading and shed light on the multiple interpretations that the work offers.
“It is a book sustained by a line of trance that drifts towards the primitive, something pre-existing, that breathes down our necks in this time of millennials“, its author, the grandson of a shaman, an indigenous mother and a black father who came through the Caribbean islands, has said about this collection of poems, and in whose life a powerful ancestral braid converges that gives rise to his unique worldview and clearly expressed in his poetry.
In the panorama of Venezuelan poetry, this book has been fundamental in approaching the poetic universe of one of the most distinctive voices in our literature. The poet Juan Liscano wrote about this title: “How to endure reading The Tribe Book without getting upset, without throwing or closing the volume, without calling it nonsense, or without feeling dragged into a hallucinatory ritual of anthropophagy, disorienting images, expressions of an unknown cryptic violence? Santos López, between 1986 and 1990, when he opened the locks of the unconscious and pure revealing intuition, operated on himself and managed to communicate with the ancestors, with the chaos generating preexistence felt by Jung in a psychic process ahead of the advent of human families.”
Poet, journalist and editor, Santos López has published sixteen collections of poems. He won the Municipal Poetry Prize twice—1987 and 2001—and some of his books have been translated into Italian, English, German and French. He carried out important work as a cultural manager and in 1990 he founded the National House of Poetry, with which he held twelve editions of the Caracas International Poetry Week and the same number of editions of the Poetry Contest for High School Students, and between 2004 and 2008 He created and directed five editions of the International Festival of Afro-American Traditions—Fita—in Maracay.
Editorial Eclepsidra, a non-commercial civil association founded in 1994 and with more than two hundred titles to its credit, makes its catalog of authors available to the public. Since its founding in 1949, the Humboldt Cultural Association has been dedicated to disseminating and promoting nationally and internationally Venezuelan and Germanic cultures in their scientific, literary, artistic and linguistic aspects.
The activity will be on Tuesday, June 25 at 4:30 in the afternoon at the Alexander von Humboldt Library of the Humboldt Cultural Association, located on Juan Germán Roscio Avenue in San Bernardino, in Caracas. Tickets cost $20 for the general public and $10 for students, and can be purchased through the emails [email protected] and [email protected]. Once registered, participants will receive The Tribe Book electronically.
Source: Eclepsidra Editorial
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