Illustration by @francisco_____cunha

In these days when everything can be wrapped up as a consumer product, the slipperiness of poetry makes it one of the last bastions of resistance. Martín Barea Mattos (b. Montevideo, 1978), practices, promotes, and studies poetry, on a journey that he describes as a marathon, sometimes traveling in company, sometimes alone, but always using poetry as a way to bind himself to the world he inhabits. As New Braves releases his capsule collection Viva los estudiantes (Long live students), we interviewed this eternal student with his lion’s mane, who can typically be found reading a book while walking the streets of the Old Town of Montevideo.

His influences

As the son of two visual artists, Carlos Barea and Cecilia Mattos, he grew up participating in the kind of creative practice that goes on at an art studio. His first poetic memories involve interpreting the connections between paintings twice his size, through a combination of ecstatic images and spoken words. By the age of 15, he was reading constantly, and since he came from two families of readers, his parents passed their childhood book collections down to him. Ever since those early years that brought together visual arts, literature, and music, he was taken by the idea of art as all-encompassing, not static. He began to find his place in the in-between places.

His early poiesis

He joined a writing workshop in downtown, “when Montevideo still had a downtown.” It was at that workshop that he started to create his own world, away from the worlds of school, family, and his usual circles. There, he discovered, to his surprise, that the language that grew naturally in him was that of poetry—even though at that point, he still didn’t really know what that meant. He traces the roots of this revelation back to the time he spent alone as a child and adolescent, inventing song lyrics that he would repeat to keep himself going through moves and separations.

MARTIN

“It’s about conveying a sense of humanity, so contradiction is welcome and necessary.”

Poetry as a bastion of resistance

After decades of declining popularity, poetry is now having a moment, thanks to the ever-growing variety of ways to access it. “There are still hegemonic arguments that say it’s difficult, it’s boring, it’s complicated. But it’s a discourse, like any discourse. Since the digital era and globalization, can anybody really claim that there aren’t millions of readers of poetry on the planet?” What’s going on, Martín explains, is that poetry, like philosophy, is a watering hole that the capitalist system hasn’t found a way to exploit. Poetry appears all the time in contemporary philosophy, and the curation and texts of contemporary art keep a very close eye on poetry. History, philosophy, and even prose give nourishment that can be brought back to poetry. Even though he's not reading as much poetry as he used to, he still does it to stay attuned to what's being produced nowadays. But lately he’s been veering towards reading novels, like William S. Burroughs’s The Western Lands, his most recent choice. “He’s one of my cult writers; I love his obsession with destroying language and his concept of virality—that language has been inoculated against us, that it’s independent of us.” He admires artists’ ability to predict the future, even things you’d never dream of. In fact, the last poem in Made in China, the book Martín published in 2016, ends with the phrase “we are rats in a laboratory that has already closed.” Fast forward to 2020…

Poetry and artificial intelligence

He admits that he’s not fully up to date on the matter of AI, out of reticence, fear, or even simple disgust for these new tools, which he believes are leading us directly to outright disaster, “like Hal,” not least because they’re managed and controlled by humans. Just like electric cars, which are an opportunity, “but if we’re just going to repeat what we did before, there’s no planet that could support it. Our history—human history—is a history of failure, but we can take heart from the fact that we’re also very creative.” Poetry flies in the face of artificial intelligence, which is produced by a series of commands, meaning a synthesized language. “Poetry believes in a balance that aims to break the univocal quality of language, the idea that things have only one meaning, because poetry champions polysemy—in each thing having as many meanings as there are personal frames of reference.” It’s about conveying a sense of humanity, so contradiction is welcome and necessary.

Long live students

Though he’s an eternal student, Martin doesn’t have any university degrees. He studied for two degrees—Fine Arts and Literature, in the school of humanities—that he never finished, because all of a sudden he found that the books he had to read were competing with those he wanted to read. He very quickly opted for the latter, and launched himself into the marathon of becoming an author, sometimes in intellectual community and sometimes alone. This decision, which he doesn’t regret, has sometimes made him embarrassed, above all at the international festivals where he sometimes performs, where all his peers have master’s degrees by this point. There, he’s presented as “the poets’ poet,” the pure poet. And if on the one hand he enjoys being on the fringes, on the other, he still sometimes feels like an outcast, shunned by a society that punishes those who don’t take the traditional path. “Especially when it’s time to pay the bills, it gets a little rough. But we all live hand to mouth, no matter how much we have.”

The new generations

As a guide to local poetry, Martín tries to meet new members of the poetry community. He sees them as more adaptable and more inclined to catharsis; towards vital expressive impulses, like explosions. Some members of the new generations of poets don’t believe in the value of books, “which is strange, but surely comes down to the fact that they’re digital natives.” Martín listens to them, welcomes their ideas, exchanges his own with them, and then launches a defense of books—an effort of seduction on behalf of books, to show that at the end of the day, books are all we have left.

The poetry scene in Uruguay

Between meetings, literary workshops, independent publications, and major events like Mundial Poético and Ronda de Poetas (Martín is its founder and coordinator), the poetic ecosystem in Uruguay is flourishing. You can follow Martín on his Instagram account to stay up to date with what’s going on.