Guayaquil, Ecuador: Fondo de Animal Editors. 2022. 76 pages.
From my perspective, the poetry book Acta de fundación presents a poetic view of the impossible with an essential premise: the invention of a new language, paradoxically, through its breaking. The author foregoes prepositions, conjunctions, and articles and flows as a kind of seer who skillfully points out and brings together nouns and verbs to his own literary composition, without unnecessary additions or linguistic archetypes and with an unfailing ideological-literary conviction that amazes and makes one shudder because of its striking discursive organization. This fracture adds surprise and delight to the poetry book that the reader experiences in the face of unbelievable images and the uneasiness due to the unknown: “la materia dispersa al interior del rayo/ sepultada en la falsedad de todo himno […] irrupción// lo no habido/ en espacio/ espacio crea” [the material scatters inside the ray/ hidden in the falsity of an entire hymn […] bursting in// what didn’t exist/ in space/ space creates].
Each declaration in the book-poem (whose pages are unnumbered because of a playful multidirectional effort) points to the platform of the page from a premeditation and contemplation of what is said and what goes unsaid, in a sort of ultra-sense that is expressed in the agency of the text, meticulous and musically available in a poetic pentagram. In a poem, the space/gaps of the landscape are the landscape itself; a western worldview, hyper-Latin American (the identifying and traveling baggage of the author’s self-exile in Ecuador, Peru, and now the United States), where the thing is what surrounds the thing: images separated from themselves in their own time. Practically impossible. There is also the sublime impression of philosophy through the main points: reflection and contention or the economy of the beauty that exploits the senses like a haiku from the Andes in the violent and refined reverberation of tropes. Words delight in transporting the reader to a literary transmutation that lights up the corners of that sarcophagus/time capsule that Victor Vimos wanted to create as if it were a huayno: a pre-Columbian ancestral and syncretic style of music and dance.
In the metaphysics of the poetic subject, the child/inventor of unforeseen worlds can be found. Its travel reveals impenetrable and unknown maps that seem to say Hic sunt pumas or “here be pumas,” situated in a deep and seductive lyrical cartography that leads the reader on a unique poetic journey in which synesthesias show the pre-Hispanic path to senses lost in modernity (like smell and touch), to the foundational act of the adult who touches the back of the neck, thereby bringing color to words or to silence (does silence have color?), and to the miracle of the body that births another being from the infinite through writing or sculpture with the calligraphic gesture of the seer. The impossible is possible.
The text recovers a strange but simultaneously endearing cosmogony of language, imagined in the original clay of man, which embraces the tree, searches the universe, and appoints it from a vertebra of its lost totality, like a strategy of language that reclaims the incapacity of written language to describe the unspeakable.
The exquisite leaps that the poetic voice makes towards the emptiness of the pauses are evident. When it finds weaknesses in its own voice’s syntax, it writes like it breathes. The reader goes to the edges of a mobile poetry, astonished, with body and territoriality.
The rhythm is a metaphor, a ceremony of words, stunning from any side of the page, as if it were a superior organism set in the poem where body and flesh are intertwined in an unpredictable, aesthetic, and literally fabulous coincidence to show the unattainable (but closeby) lyrical entity of the poetic composition and that blood which flows within.
No haphazard writing went into these poems’ construction. The use of limited passages that might appear prosaic operates, instead, from the friction of the words and their asterisks as a story whose possibilities become endless.
There is an anthropological transversality which repairs the fingerprint of the very lyrical scribe with the goal of recovering his own worldly memory. Immediately thereafter, the reader is almost forced to reread the book, to make it their own based on their own experience: like a possibility to discover, in the kingdom of vestige; the feeling and smoothness of an insect, for example, that is ready to fly from the fingertips to connect with the author or its poetic subject that gives itself up on each page, giving the reader the keys to their multiverse.
There is also a political entry to the poem when it alludes to Lázaro Condo, an indigenous activist who was murdered while fighting to recover his community’s lands in Chimborazo, Ecuador, in a place that occupied the margin of the imaginary and that transcends the epic or the mere exaltation of a personal or collective figure. Condo is an irreverent outlying noise, a body and communal life with which to vindicate his community facing a domesticated central power.
This noise establishes a poetic thought and tells the poet’s story. Vimos’s voice comes in part from others but also from his own in his literary invention, perhaps the echo of his native land that outlines the sublime condition of his existence and learns to disrupt poetry by turning it into a new archaeological/literary destiny, worthy of being found and spread. In this niche, it is possible to say the impossible, with the boldness of a bard who fixes his otherness under the original poetic engineering of a broken and unique power.
