a few weeks back, i was doing some research on my favorite Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I stumbled upon his brilliant lecture 'theory and play of the duende' and was giddy with excitement after reading it.
Here is an excerpt from the lecture:
The duende…Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things
When Lorca brought the dark creative force he called Duende into the open, he articulated what many of us, who committed to making words our daily, lifelong pursuit, ironically have no words for. Duende is what Lorca calls ‘a power and not a behaviour…a struggle and not a concept… of blood, of ancient culture, of creative action.’ It is that elusive, often erratic pulse that I want to capture in my poetry and which I feel artists go insane chasing after.
