political poets

The Spanish press has been full of politicians making comments about poetry recently.

Or perhaps not. More exactly, Esperanza Aguirre (Partido Popular, presidenta de la Comunidad de Madrid) picked up on something I think Gallardón (her closest rival, also from the PP) said a while back, and referred to herself as el verso suelto dentro del poema.

“The unconnected line in the poem.”

What exactly does that mean?

It seems to be the unrhyming line within a poem, and presumably she thinks it applies to her because she’s willing to go out on a limb. Or maybe she’s the discordant one, the string that’s out of tune with the rest, but I don’t think that’s the sort of thing most people would brag about.

Whatever, the expression made all the headlines and the poetry idea was taken up by other politicians. A party spokesman described the PP as, “modern poets, cutting-edge, and we don’t much like the ‘closed poem.'” He went on to say that, “the PP isn’t a sonnet, it’s an undefined number of lines where the unrhyming lines are usually the most important, left unlinked to draw attention to the argument.”

Which is all very well, and probably quite enough on the subject, except that Rajoy (the PP leader) was encouraged to play at finding rhymes for some of his colleagues’ names. Gallardón might rhyme with ilusión racional (no, ilusión doesn’t suggest delusion in Spanish, it’s more the idea of a dream or hope) or perhaps with ambición pero siempre que ésta sea sana y controlada – healthy ambition.

Aznar (ex-leader of the PP) was rhymed with no estar which actually made some reference to Aznar’s own comment that he is no longer part of political life, but, at least for me, seemed the most assinine choice possible. If it rhymes with no estar it sure as heck also rhymes with estar. It’s not as if there weren’t plenty of other options as the majority of verb infinitives in Spanish end with that same stressed “ar”.

Of course Rajoy didn’t manage to find a rhyme for Aguirre – perhaps bolstering her belief in her individuality.

It just seemed strange to have politicians speaking as if they had some kind of interest in poetry and poets. Somehow I can’t imagine British politicians descibing their parties as “cutting-edge poems”, though maybe Boris Johnson thinks of the Tories as some kind of homeric epic.