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Indio Gris
FUSIONED - DIRECTED - WRITTEN AND CORRESPONDED BY: MENASSA 2003 WE
DON'T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK BUT WE DO IT IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES
INDIO
GRIS, IS A PRODUCT INDIO GRIS Nº 174 YEAR IV EDITORIAL INTERVIEW
WITH THE POET MIGUEL OSCAR MENASSA Carmen Salamanca:
How did you get the idea of producing Poetry
never falls in love? Miguel Oscar Menassa: But,
do you know what happens? It is by chance that within Cero Group (we are talking
about Feature Movie Production), people who saw a lot of films, listened to a
lot of music, read many books, saw many paintings, attended many plays, are
getting together. This is what I'm talking about, an unconscious knowledge about
theatre, image, painting, was beginning to take shape in those people and they
didn't know how to show that lack of knowledge, that is why we thought that
among so many intelligent people who surrounded us (and never think that we are
unemployed persons)… What
it is novel about these productions is that we believe that we do them among all
of us, that none of us happens to think that he might go home alone to do what
we do among all of us. Therefore, we are convinced that each one of us has
responsibility and has performed in the production of the produce, even if he
might not have been there that day. CS:
A
team. MOM:
Well,
a team is people working together at the same time, we are a phenomenon, I might
say, because I think that you also worked the day you were not there. That's why
we can't forget your screams, your publications, how can we not think when we
are shooting that afterwards you will come and criticise everything, then you
were there. I had been in the performance of so-and-so, that I was not, but I
was: she talked to me the day before, and I made an observation about the
character, and then Rosa came and together we
made another observation. We were both within the body of the actress, in her
voice, but what it's the most interesting is that the actress herself also
believes it, that the possibility of playing that part as she did it depended on
her, but it also depended on the rest of the team. It is difficult to accept,
things are not difficult, they are difficult to accept. When
Einstein was in Spain because of the question of the theory of relativity, there
was a Spanish scientist that, when Einstein finished his speech (a conference on
the relativity theory), asked him if he allowed him to come to the board and to
discuss the question of Einstein's theory, he filled three boards with formulae,
then Einstein said to him, no, you are wrong, he took a ball point pen and drew
a circle in the air and said to the Spanish scientist: "see, I went around
the world". The joke was only understood by three people, Einstein, myself
and two more people. CS:
It
is a proof that it is understandable. But then the art video on Poetry
never falls in love, what is it about, about the relations between men and
women? MOM:
No,
look at this art video, perhaps influenced by Menassa considering that it is
Menassa's original idea, we put together a kind of exhibit of his poetry,
firstly, because there is also his painting, but all of his painting is current,
instead in poetry we tried to include poems that go from '75 to 2002, a quarter
of a century. There are intimate poems which are the first, from "I, the
sinner", there are other poems which we could call social ones, where he
talks about the Indians, which have a historical character, and then there are
poems which are eminently educational where a person in the process of growing
up writes a letter to his children and to his disciples. In that video, in
reality not wanting it, we set in motion a discourse. We
are waiting for someone to invest some money to make of it a popular event, yes,
popular, the only missing thing in our work to make it popular is that a rich
person would make it known to the population and then the population will make
it popular, because it is the first time that the opportunity is given to
normal, plain people, to grab music, painting so that they can enjoy them
tranquilly. And besides, the inestimable benefit that is granted to poetry,
because if you season poetry, if you spice it with good music, a good painting,
a good production of the shots of the painting, that is to say good cinema, it
facilitates the divulging of poetry, and you know that the truth of the peoples
is in poetry, it is not in government decrees. CS:
Fortunately. MOM: I say popular in that sense. When I have a problem I read two or three great poets in the morning and all the problems are over, why?, because what is not explained in a good poem, nothing can explain, chao. And when science explains something it is already explained in a poem, what happens is that as poetry it is understood three hundred years later, four hundred years later. But it is not necessary to be so modern, we could live according to last century's poems, which were quite good, and allow our poems to fulfil the function of being published nowadays, to be decorated with painting, music and cinema, but which have to accomplish their function of speaking to the man of the future, about the way we lived, and it's because of this that it is said that the true history of peoples is contained in poetry, because the history that you were taught in elementary school, that history is the history of the victorious, not the history of that people. What we could achieve by making poetry popular is to let the peoples know how they live, how they are dominated, how they are robbed, how they don't let them love freely, and that is very important. And
is poetry able to do all that? the guy asks you. In me yes, if you don't have
the guts I don't have to be blamed for it, one has to have the guts to let
oneself be led by an unknown woman. CS:
I am thinking what all this is about, so that the peoples can learn the real
history, which is like a code language. MOM:
Look, already Rimbaud knew that, he had realised that poetry was only understood
by the individual whom it was meant to reach. He advised women to transmit
revolutionary things through poems, because, in that way, a tyrant would never
be able to know what the woman was planning. However, the fool spent the last
century looking after her tits, instead of taking care of her poetry, which she
is now more or less taking care of. Because it is the only way of transmitting
without being noticed by the powerful, that is poetry. CS:
Aldo Pellegrini said that poetry is a door closed to the imbeciles. MOM:
Poetry is a door closed to the imbeciles, he is right and a dictator is
always in some way an imbecile because he believes that he is by himself the
dictator, that is why, in the end, he ends up being brought down. What happens
is that if you don't believe you are on your own, you are not a dictator any
longer, when you think that someone is helping you with your mess you are no
longer a dictator. CS:
And that tittle, why that tittle? MOM:
Well, Poetry never falls in love, because
poetry has lovers. Everybody who improves the power of poetry is her lover, that
is why poetry loves me, because I took her from the suburbs of Buenos Aires to
the highest peaks of contemporary thinking. Poetry loves me because I increased
her power. Have you seen that all scientists now want to be poets? Now they
won't be able to, because they have been thirty years abhorring it. If they
would have listened to me in the beginning! Well, but poetry also loves you.
Aren't you in charge of editing the 2001 Nights? CS:
Well, yes. MOM:
Poetry also loves you because you try to divulge, according to your opinion
and your director's opinion, the best poets, to turn them popular, while
publishing a poetry magazine free of charge that prints 125,000 copies, anyone
can see that you are interested in divulging poetry. Now,
they are finally going to persecute us, why? Because they will realise that we
propose things which are inadmissible for modern states. We propose to have
great men and great women under the government's wings, and you know, it is
known since Mallarme, that no great man nor great woman can grow under the
government's wings. Well, we will have to be the state so that our theory can
work, so start preparing yourself for the next elections… Indio
Gris
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