In Post from the Other World and The Sheets. On poetry, two collections of essays and columns, David Huerta emerges, rather than as a critic, as an avid reader who does not discriminate between canons and genres, interested in a constant exploration of the possibilities that literary art offers.
My favorite text from Mail from the other world. Sheet by sheet 2001-2008 (UACM, 2019), a collection of columns that the Mexican poet David Huerta wrote between 2003 and 2009, is called “Cosmonaut barking ”. It begins by recounting the history, known by all, of the spaceships Sputnik and the famous dog who was the only crew member of the second mission: Laika, who looked at the earth from space for a moment, and died up there, flying over us. Starting from that image, Huerta wonders about the potential of the literature of imagination, which makes us look at other universes, and ends up asking a question that, seen fourteen years later, seems predictive: “the Berlin Wall fell in good time, Wouldn’t there be some little bones of Laika out there, worthy of treasury, relics of a witness of the world – literally: he saw the whole planet – truly innocent? “
Faced with the apocalyptic drive of literature, of the search for worse worlds, bitter futures and dystopias that have subsisted in speculative fiction, Huerta wonders how to extract those remnants of innocence, of charm, which our circumstance can also offer us seen from outside, as is only possible in art. And he himself partially answers that question, speaking in his columns of authors such as Neil Gaiman or Ursula K. Le Guin, names currently recognized by both the academy and the general public, but which in the previous decade were mainly occupied by booksellers. passionate about science fiction and fantasy. Today, fourteen years after that column on Laika, speculative fiction is at its best: in Latin America, from Mariana Enríquez to Andrea Chapela, there are writers who use this medium to show us the possibilities of a world-other, or of a world adjacent to ours, threatening to visit us; Meanwhile, in the literary hotbeds of the internet, subgenres such as eco-fiction, the hopepunk and transhumanist writings dare to ask themselves, what if the world, seen from another side, could not be worse, but simply different?
“Barking cosmonaut”, like the rest of the short texts contained in Mail from the other world, is a testament to the author’s ability to Incurable to imagine from the criticism, to read not only qualities, circumstances or problems contained in the text, but to extrapolate them and observe the effects of literature in the world, which exist, despite our tendency to disbelieve them. Another example of this is his column “Against Whitman”, where he rebels against an unquestionable model for modern and contemporary poetry by presenting how his epic and nationalist project also contained deep racism, which should not be surprising. These short texts, one or two pages long, show us the first critical facet of Huerta that I would like to point out: that of the avid reader, who does not discriminate between canons and genres, but rather outlines his readings according to a constant exploration of the possibilities that literary art, beyond labels, offers us.
Complementary to this adventurous and curious critic, we have the Huerta that is presented in Leaves. On poetry (2007-2019) (Cataria, 2020), another collection of columns that, instead of giving continuity to the voice present in Mail from the other world, is perceived as a B-side, where the author concentrates and gives free rein to his knowledge of the literary genre in which he is most comfortable: poetry. In this book we see a much more incisive critic, fully versed in the traditions of modern poetry (especially English, French and Spanish), but also able to approach them without paying homage. He proposes a reading of López Velarde’s epically asordinated verses from the Gongorian influence, a vision of the river between Dylan Thomas, García Lorca and Langston Hughes, and a defense against the “eggplant of Platonism, chirle romanticism and intoxicated sleepwalking” that the vision María Zambrano’s poetry, as a great discourse, has been promulgated between generations and generations of poets. In all these readings, as dense as they are brief, the importance that poetry as a way of doing, as a form, has for the writer stands out. More than an entrance to metaphysics, than a “high” form of language, poetry is a way of experimenting with language, of playing at saying things not yet said with a broad, rhythmic language informed by history. His merit is, as the poet shows when quoting WB Yeats, Jorge Luis Borges or Dante, to discover other possibilities of what can be done with words. However, this function is not exclusive to the lyric, and the author recognizes it in the multiple identities of Miguel de Cervantes, in the encyclopedic-novelistic spirit of Thomas Carlyle or in the playful imagination of JG Ballard, with whom he plays to unfold by exercising a host of references to AE Guzmán, a non-existent writer. In this exploratory spirit, rooted in poetry, but not exclusive to it, we see the congruence between the two critical voices that these books present to us.
These two facets of David Huerta, which include his work as a columnist during the first twenty years of our century, complement his poetic work by bequeathing us a vision of the texts that have affected his writing and his circumstances, at the same time that they offer, even to the seasoned reader, an extensive reading list and ways to read. In short, they bear witness to the work of a poet who sees criticism as a playful exercise, a place where different readings and influences can be contrasted and observed that stand out both in his own bookstore and in the general framework of the literary event. In both books there is room for critics, myths and comics, great forgotten poets and writers, discoveries about admired authors that leave a bad taste in the mouth and recontextualize their work. But at the center of everything resides the same concern: what do we read and why? How does reading affect our vision of seeing the world, our closeness to others and their circumstances, and what are the tensions that inhabit, from tradition or from time, in the “joyful (sometimes)” body of the writer? Where the commonplace says that literature is a lonely exercise, The leafs y Other’s mail world remind us that we always write with a multitude of ghosts, from which we cannot hide, because they inhabit our language. To write, after all, is to inhabit two times: the strange and imprecise present, and the continuity of history suspended in our ways of saying, of thinking, in words.
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