Who would not be interested in poetry and its form and the way in which the form of a poem pervades its age at scale, and the way in which some poems provide a glimpse of, or opening to, the next one? And who would not want to read five hundred pages about one of the most vibrant moments of poetry created inside and outside books, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the other limits and consensuses of the political and aesthetic order were being broken and reconstructed? And if almost all poetry or intensified verbal forms that are not mueslified sounds weird, difficult, slow and problematic, what does this mean for our ways of reading, being, relating and understanding today? And wouldn't this appearance of difficulty (or ideology of transparency) be one of the obstacles that today define our doing and our knowing: what we can do, what we do to know and/or what we can know?

Based on El momento analírico, by María Salgado, published by Akal, professors Selina Blasco (Complutense University of Madrid) and Virginia Trueba Mira (University of Barcelona) talk with the author about language not only as a material for poetry and art, but also as a luxury discarded by neoliberal economics, about the change bought about+ by the presence of text in painting, about a possible alternative history of poetry written in Spain that breaks with some myths of canonical Hispanicism, and about a transfeminist reanalysis of the archives, histories and genealogies that overhauls the neo-avant-garde movements of the 20th century  that are discussed in the book. 

El momento analírico, by María Salgado, offers an account and a poetics of the rupture of written forms that occurred in Spain between 1964 and 1983. From a collection that includes works of a Fluxus tendency, concrete poems, initial attempts at performance art, publications by conceptual artists and works by Aníbal Núñez, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina and Rogelio López Cuenca, she is building a reading of the change in sound of the verbal arts of the 20th century in opposition to the lethargic melody of postwar lyricism. This operation can be read as a history of the second wave of expanded writing of the century or, rather, as an expanded history of the poetry carried out inside and outside the literary field in a period of innovation fever in which the world was able to change its bases (and the counterculture dreamed of doing so). It is a moment of lucidity about what a poetic artifact can be, an incision in the way in which what is there is seen, which, as Gertrude Stein said, depends on how it is being done: on  how those who are doing things are doing things. Anything. A poem, for example.

Maria Salgado is an artist. She combines essay writing and performance as part of an investigation into the language that still uses the file called “poetry as a pole of magnetization”. The investigation has been taking shape in collections of poems such as Hacía un ruido (Towards a Noise, 2016), Salitre (Saltpetre, 2019) and REKORD (2023), the performances De lengua. Trois (three) pieces (MAC Montreal, 2019) and the theatrical trilogy Jinete Último Reino (Rider First Kingdom) created with Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca and premiered at the 39th Autumn Festival (Teatros del Canal, Madrid, 2022), in addition to academic articles and texts in catalogues and the press.
https://m-slgd.tumblr.com

Virginia Trueba Mira is a professor at the University of Barcelona, where she teaches in the departments of Hispanic Philology and Theory of Literature. She forms part of various research projects in which she considers the current transformations of literary and artistic practices, taking into account the relationships between aesthetics and politics. She is the editor of the magazine Aurora. Papeles del Seminario María Zambrano. 
https://webgrec.ub.edu/webpages/000013/cat/trueba.ub.edu.html

Selina Blasco is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid, attached to the Department of Art History. She began teaching there by chance, and it has marked her way of being together with art and artists. She studies and writes, often in company, on topics related to research based on artistic practices, university artistic communities, peculiarities of museums, and materials related to the universe of books and textiles.
https://www.ucm.es/historiadelarte/selina-blasco