On February 16, writer Carlos Esquivel Guerra will receive the Nicolás Guillén Poetry Award at the San Gerónimo University College in Havana, a major event for literature in Las Tunas.

The poet, like a passerby of time, wanders through cities, their protagonists, and history. He takes on other masks, and reinvents himself, in that incessant search for what is real and substantial. Along the way, he can find any number of fascinations: Dogs Barking at God, Cursed Epigrams, The Kamikaze's Children, and The Book of the Banished...

Then he embarks on a lyrical adventure, conversing with personalities of universal culture, and wins the Nicolás Guillén Poetry Prize, the most important of its kind in Cuba. The reaffirmation is evident: letters bless Carlos Esquivel; he deserves it. Today we talk to the author of "La guagua de Babel", the winning book of poems. Join us on the journey.

I imagine "the bus" for the journey (or journeys) and "Babel" for the fragments of pieces in a universal puzzle, which converge despite their different nature. However, what is your truth, what lies behind such a suggestive title?

"You get what you say right, that, and little else," describes this travel book, a kind of poetic novel that reinvents landscapes and then leaves them behind; a puzzle, but assembled, and disassembled, on a slippery avenue (the cultural one), very full of potholes, detours and, above all, debauchery.

"The poet is a pretender. He pretends so completely that he even pretends that the pain he feels is pain," said Pessoa. Somewhere in your work, you express: "There is no poetry that does not threaten to devour itself". What is your definition of poetry? How much of yourself do you bring to your verses?

"Everyone is a poet until the moment when he must apologize to language. What poetry does is take words to a strange dimension and then bring them back. I have written very different books, about literature, cinema, war, sexuality, soccer, and baseball, and in all of them, as minimal as it may seem, there is my ductile and rooted self, my inescapable compatibility with the ravings that happen to me."

From my point of view, it is an obsession of yours (bittersweet perhaps) to converse with characters of universal culture, to move you to their time and context, or to move them to your reality, as you do in this collection of poems. Is it something fortuitous or intentional in your way of creating? Why?

"Perhaps it is not so much an obsession as the framework of my literary architecture, my 'combative technique', my factory of games (in the manner of Paul Valéry). In any case, all my paths go to Rome, to Paris, to London, to Havana, wherever my idealizations and dreams go. In an unconscious way."

The authors you embrace in your verses I believe are the same ones that have marked your poetics. Which of them would you have liked to converse with in real life?

"I would be very conversational then, because the number of authors with whom I would appreciate having dialogues, communion, and complicities, looks very much like an almost infinite number, and not only writers but also filmmakers, musicians, philosophers, painters, sportsmen. I think we would try to change the world a little bit or change some things in the world."

Do you have a strategy or mechanism for writing? What are your motivations and paths?

"Writing is almost a penance, an unglamorous profession many times. I write to version a reality from a backward or undeserved reality. Years ago I had rituals, more discipline, and strict schedules for writing. Now it seems impossible. Now I have fights everywhere, those inside, those that a writer glimpses in his fight against dead or unborn words, and those outside, those that force us to go out to find sustenance or survival."

Could you end the sentence? The angels that inhabit as leitmotiv in my poetry are...

"My angels are disobedient, but of a civil and lyrical disobedience, committed to the idyll towards feverishness and honor, the honor of those who lost all the wars and still see to it that the battlefield does not end."

Although your lyrical subject travels the world, you do not fail to land realities that concern us all on the Island. Sense of belonging? Existential condition? Necessary dialogue? How would you catalog that?

"What I can, with humility, and nothing of arrogance, will be to recognize a privileged place among those who offer testimonies, at times hurtful, at times heartbreaking, of a social and cultural reality that is not the same for everyone."

You are also an excellent storyteller. In that sense, what interior spaces (inner skin) does poetry fill that narrative does not?

"They are two Siamese twins that get along well at times and, at others, get along very badly. I'm not interested in separating them, I prefer that they remain in that game of shared rivalries. As a poet I am more intuitive, as a storyteller, I am more concerned about what is outside me, what I have to falsify. The fascinations can agree in the same direction, the results as well."

Tell me about the process of creation of the book of poems. Planned birth or not? Difficult or easy? Sweet or bitter?

"Difficult what surrounded the writing. Difficult its time of emergence. During collective chaos, going through the pandemic. Then I wrote a travel book without moving practically from home. I conceived a corrosive, ironic artifact, with too many sadnesses above. Poetry makes any mask improbable, especially one's own."

Why did you prefer to travel to La guagua de Babel through free verse?

"I love the décima, I published books that were recognized in several directions and I recently wrote another one under that poetic mold, but I must admit that I am afraid of the décima because it chains and corrals, it irresistibly suffocates you. I prefer fluidity, donosity, the alluvium of what cannot be imprisoned. The Babel bus seeks that territory that knows no borders, no epochal limits, or of any kind. It is an unstoppable route, a stampede."

How do you manage to be original in a land of so many poets?

"You are original when you are not too much like your contemporaries. However, no one is completely original. Originality is a matter for the damned of each epoch. It is martyrdom and a joy. Plagiarists and imitators do not invite you to their parties, or their groups because the load is heavy and because their luggage is light. The only way you can be novel is by walking backward, into a cave full of indestructible masters."

What does your inner voice tell you, satisfied or dissatisfied with what you write?

"Dissatisfied. I am a fighter. A pessimistic fighter and very overwhelmed by the struggles. Still, I look for a provocation in each book to thread the next trajectory."

What garnishes will the reader find in the text?

"A poet's honesty, his storehouse of nonconformities, his inextinguishable cultural food."

Winning the most important poetry prize in Cuba... what a joy, huh?

"A prize won by great and admired poets in this country. To savor that list is a banquet of high privilege. One does not write for awards, but it would be insincere if I did not recognize that they are indispensable. For what they legitimize, hierarchize, or visualize your work, and for obvious economic reasons."

Which current collections of poetry do you recommend reading?

"I recommend reading as much as you can. If it is good, the entire better. If it is extraordinary, so much the better. I recommend looking among contemporary American, Irish, Latin American, Russian, and Cuban poets, of course. In addition, always go back to the classics, which are never in the same place. They hide and you have to go out to find them."

How do you assess the state of health of contemporary Cuban poetry?

"Excellent. Cuba has right now several of the most illustrious poets of the Spanish language. With such an assertion, very much my own, it is not difficult to recognize an ultra-distinctive literary landscape. Perhaps Jose Kozer is (many consider him so) the greatest in our language, and there are names with insurgent and audacious poetics, in a too glorious team: Carlos Augusto Alfonso, Leymen Pérez, Frank Castell, Oscar Cruz, Legna Rodríguez, Alberto Garrido, Israel Domínguez, Damaris Calderón, José Luis Serrano, Jorge García Prieto, Nelson Simón, Laura Ruiz, Soleida Ríos, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Javier L. Mora, Jamila Medina, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and a few others."

What are we lacking to fan the flame of poetry at the country level?

"Poetry cannot be taught in a seminar. Poetry cannot be learned. The legitimization of authors is another thing. Promoting efficiency and sensitivity has to be a daily subject for many. Almost always good poetry is written from untamed happiness, from tragic renunciation."

Why does a writer of your caliber remain in a shadow city for many, when he could have opted for a more cosmopolitan one? What magic do you see in this land of Opuntia and healthy people?

"I love with enough fidelity Elia, my town, which later was called Colombia, and I love, with promiscuous reverie, other endearing places: Guáimaro, Las Tunas, Pilón, Pinar del Río, Puerto Padre, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba, but I don't have more territories than those occupied by the people I love. In many places, far away or very close."

What book projects are you currently working on?

"In many, despite the little time left to me by the multiple survivors I inhabit. Four unfinished novels, a book of short stories, and another of essays.

If you were a poem, what would you like to be?

"A very irrational one (although they all are in the end), a shocking one, one of the good ones written by my good friends, one that travels through the English romantic landscapes, any of those of César Vallejo."

If your poetry had the power to change something on the side of the written page, in real life, what would you like it to be?

"I believe that poetry is not going to change anything worse than itself. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it will be. But if poetry could change something, I would dare to hope that it would stir up many people and turn them into other people: tolerant, equitable, kind, full of justice, peace, and love for others. But to my sorrow, and yours, surely, we must recognize that these people carry the most infamous powers, those of insensitivity, grievance, and intolerance."

...

And the poet returns accompanied by other voices. "I travel because I cannot wake up far from me," he says to himself. The shelves thank him for his about 40 published works, but more so does the reader, the indispensable traveler of the page that shines. Thank you, rhapsodist, "poems must recover that feeling".