10 - Lola Velasco's El movimiento de las flores and the Limits of Criticism

Summary

‘A una lectura le pido movilidad, que cuando cierre el libro se haya producido un cambio, por mínimo que sea, en mi interior.’

(From my reading I ask for mobility, that when I close the book a change will have happened, as minimal as it might be, in my interior.)

—Lola Velasco (Benegas, Ellas tienen la palabra 287)

Lola Velasco's poetry offers the critic no immediate “hook,” that is to say, no obvious point of departure for the elaboration of a critical argument. Indeed, critics have been remarkably silent about her work. While Velasco's poetry is not incompatible with the “essentialist” tendency inspired by José Ángel Valente, it is free from obvious stylistic debts to Valente, or to any other contemporary Spanish poet for that matter. It appears to spring, in fact, from a desire to elude classifications, alignments, and ideological alibis of any kind. The epigraph to the 2003 work El movimiento de las flores is from twentieth-century poet and artist Henri Michaux, best known perhaps for his experiments with mescaline:

Soy de los que aman el movimiento, el movimiento que rompe la inercia, que emborrona las líneas, que deshace las alineaciones, me libera de construcciones. Movimiento como desobediencia, como remodelación. (17)

(I am one of those who love movement, that movement that breaks inertia, that blurs lines, that undoes affiliations, liberates me from constructions. Movement as a disobedience, as a reshaping.)