Urban Reality and Classical Antiquity

A Conversation with Luis Alberto de Cuenca.

- Diego Doncel

Luis Alberto de Cuenca (b. 1950, Madrid) is perhaps the one Spanish poet today who has influenced most of the younger generations of poets. He recently received the National Poetry Award for his latest book of poetry, Cuaderno de vacaciones (Visor, 2014). His poetry combines urban reality, pop culture, and classical antiquity while maintaining his own identity through irony, elegance, and a tone of lightheartedness. Cuenca is capable of having Tintin dialogue with Shakespeare in his poems, or Homer with a streetwalker in Madrid. Urban poetry, pierced with film noir by either the fantastic or the comic, has been able to reflect today’s sentimental iconography and create images, capturing a society whose culture (in times of consumerism) is geared toward the myths of daily life—poems that aspire fundamentally to express love, sentimental wandering in a changing world, nomadic man, nightlife, or the open field of culture—all by utilizing an extremely natural language that embraces the reader in an emotive, colloquial, and intelligible way.

Diego Doncel: Could you explain to the North American reader the meaning of the aesthetics of “Línea clara,” which begins with your book La caja de plata, published in 1985?