/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/larazon/T3H4LTVZZBEK3PMC4BUX6LJ5FQ.jpg "Kill Twitter to keep writing")
Juan F. Rivero (Seville, 1991) is an editor and poet, one of those young writers who made Twitter their particular coffee gathering. A week ago, Sunday, May 2, for him there was virtual silence. He left it as one more way to combat the anxiety that has accompanied him since his student years, imbued then in the pernicious wheel of achieving the best grades as a guarantee for the future. Covid has been an ally of that anxiety that finds a bottomless pit in future plans. Leaving Twitter is Rivero’s alternative to get out of “the productive logic” that drags society down: you have to be doing something all the time and telling it publicly is part of it. In Seville, a campaign by the Teatro de la Maestranza for its 30th anniversary challenges you to have such a good time that you forget to tweet it. And that is the contradiction of many young people who, like him, have found in social networks a tool for creativity and for their promotion and at the same time an obligation.
His followers exceeded 5,200 and “that in the world of poetry is almost everyone who is on the networks.” Not even his filters to reduce the level of conflict in the suggested publications – he eliminated words such as Spain, Catalonia and others related to politics, as well as expressions such as “shit” – have managed to curb boredom. “The networks have been a support and at the same time a source of stress. I did not want Twitter to become my third or fourth job, “says someone who has his first job in the literary edition of classics and is also a poet and translator. «Twitter for literature is very interesting because it puts the relevance in the written word. I have found a very active community of writers, “he says, citing members of the young poetry movement who share ideas, argue, many of whom he met virtually and ended up establishing a friendship.
Rivero is for many reasons a “rare bird” of his generation. About to enter your thirties, His first professional assignment was at the Cervantes Institute in New Mexico, where at the age of 21 he taught Spanish thanks to a scholarship that has now expired., an example of how future opportunities for young people are being diluted. «I see in my surroundings how unfair the situation we live in. I have worked a lot and I have put in a lot of effort but I have also been very lucky. I have friends with very difficult situations, with precarious jobs, and measures are not taken to solve it, “he complains. The coronavirus pandemic has been the last straw in the long hangover of the financial and social crisis of 2007. «Psychologically the working classes never came out of the previous crisis. In 2019 articles were read about the economic recovery, they tried to create optimism, but it is a chronic situation, terrible from the point of view of personal development, the future and even the simple desire to live – he regrets -. That wears out a lot. My generation is very tired. Those who entered the 21st century as children are now adults with expectations hardly compatible with reality.
The poet lives in Madrid, has a job in accordance with his studies in Hispanic Philology and a monogamous relationship since 2010. Stability as an island in the midst of so much precariousness. That tired generation is the one that studies and surveys predict will be the first to live worse than their parents. Rivero questions that thesis, but calls for reflection on the sustainability of the level of consumption in society; thinks that the immediacy of wanting and having everything “crushes the present.”
The forced confinement apparently did not affect his professional life, even the day was short for the volume of work he had, while next to him his partner, the actress Ana Rocío Dávila, embraced the harshness of the ERTE and later the strike. The same anxiety that has precipitated a hiatus in the social network reappeared. «The social moment drives us to be overexposed to others. That ends up magnifying the concern about committing a fault that leads us to underestimate the work we do. I have the feeling that I have been in this dynamic for years, ”he reflects. And the confinement fueled that feeling. “It made me really bad. This uncertainty causes a lot of fear, sometimes irrational, and continuous suffering, a floating sensation of regret.
In the midst of all that emotional gale last summer he published «Las hogueras azul» (Candaya), a collection of poems inspired by oriental literary traditions. “What matters most to me is to write good poetry, then I will succeed or not, but whatever it is to get away from that loses interest,” he says, and it sounds like an internal justification to convince himself that virtual “isolation” will have a positive impact on your literary production and even in his ability to do nothing. The news about him will not arrive from now on instantly, but at the rate set by his books, those he signs as an author and those that bear his seal even though his name is not printed.
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