Perplexity, global disorder, Catalonia and Albert Garcia Elena’s poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Albert Garcia Elena’s two books of poetry from 2017, Silur d’amagatotis and Tòtem ordre, constitute an extraordinary aesthetic response to a contemporary situation of permanent crisis. This crisis has many names: among others, global war, the dismantling of the modern state, climate breakdown, the precarization of labor or the full commodification of social and mental life. Garcia Elena’s poetry assembles singular objects that lack most of the recognizable components of the genre. The poems have no specific themes, no identifiable subjective voices and no regular formal conventions. Yet these absences do not result from modern encounters with the sublime, the unspeakable or otherness – elements that we still find in two of Garcia Elena’s possible precedents from the Catalan tradition, Carles Hac Mor and Carles Camps Mundó. Instead, his poems appear as immanent modulations of words that playfully portray a voice talking to itself about the perplexity of living in a world of groundlessness and disorder. I propose to read this voice in relation to two historical phenomena: the consolidation of globalization as a perpetual present of generalized violence and the chronic condition of the Catalan desire for freedom from the Spanish state. Garcia Elena’s ironic but combative, rational but magmatic, poems represent a fresh revitalization of the aesthetic experience in a seemingly postapocalyptic world. They provide a stimulating opportunity to examine the link between aesthetics and politics in the global present.