Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Followers (21)

Raúl Gómez Jattin

Born

in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

May 31, 1945

Died

May 22, 1997

Genre

Poetry, Romance, Gay & Lesbian

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Born in 1945, Raúl Gómez Jattin desultorily studied law for some years, became an actor, and left the stage to live and write poetry, a barefoot destitute even when, after publishing his first book and giving some readings, he became a fairly well-known poet. Of the theater he said that he loved using his body to express emotions; of poetry, that he tried to “achieve clarity, to show reality”. He was a true poète maudit, having received from poetry as he said, “madness, poverty and loneliness”; but, he added, also “idleness, a great happiness, and friendships”.
Homosexual love and even zoophilia have a sort profane sanctity in his poems (“The great religion is the metaphysics of sex”) because for him everything is part of that nature which h Born in 1945, Raúl Gómez Jattin desultorily studied law for some years, became an actor, and left the stage to live and write poetry, a barefoot destitute even when, after publishing his first book and giving some readings, he became a fairly well-known poet. Of the theater he said that he loved using his body to express emotions; of poetry, that he tried to “achieve clarity, to show reality”. He was a true poète maudit, having received from poetry as he said, “madness, poverty and loneliness”; but, he added, also “idleness, a great happiness, and friendships”.
Homosexual love and even zoophilia have a sort profane sanctity in his poems (“The great religion is the metaphysics of sex”) because for him everything is part of that nature which he evokes in a pantheist delirium. One of the distinguishing features in his poetry is his love of the river Sinú, the valley and the mountains near the Caribbean sea where he was born and lived as a child, and from where – its fruits, its animals, its heat – he never seemed to get away. Its people, on the other hand, were the ‘arrogant’ multitude that wanted to instil in him “a truth not made to my measure”, a multitide far from whom he wrote – or rather “lit up” – his poems.

His first book, Poemas, was published when he was thirty-five years old, after a period of great suffering, in which he realized he was a poet. Marijuana gave “wings and air to [his] artistic imagination”. Eight years later, in 1988, he published his Tríptico cereteano (Ceretean Triptych), made up of three separate books: Retratos (Portraits), a series of portraits of friends, relatives and acquaintances; Amanecer en el valle del Sinú (Dawn in the Sinú Valley) an evocation of the Sinú valley; and Del amor (About Love), a look at the erotic world. He said that this book was like a novel, he being the main character in the plot, telling of his land and of what he had seen of his contemporaries.

After that, he published Hijos del tiempo (Sons of Time), a recreation of certain Greek myths and something of his own life story. It is a book, he wrote, dedicated to “death’s anguishing presence throughout the whole of life”. The last book published in his lifetime was a slim volume of short poems, Esplendor de la mariposa (The Splendour of the Butterfly) in which he announces his “flight to death”.

Of his last years he said that he had spent them “begging on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, and spending more or less long periods of time in a series of psychiatric clinics.” He died under the wheels of a bus in Cartagena, in whose path he had thrown himself to end a sacrifice he had begun when he started writing his first poems. No other Colombian poet had laid himself bare – and consequently defied society – as much as he had. ...more

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Raúl Gómez Jattin’s books

Average rating: 4.45 · 343 ratings · 54 reviews · 14 distinct works • Similar authors

	Amanecer en el Valle del Sinú: antología poética 4.55 avg rating — 240 ratings — published 2004 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Almost Obscene by Raúl Gómez Jattin, Katherine M. Hedeen (Translator), Olivia Lott (Translator) 4.38 avg rating — 24 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poesía: 1980-1989 (Colección Poesía) 4.16 avg rating — 19 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Esplendor de la mariposa (Poesía) 3.93 avg rating — 14 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poemas 3.79 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 1980	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Collected Poems by Raúl Gómez Jattin, Pablo Vélez Valencia (Drawings), James Rumsey-Merlan (Introduction) 4.22 avg rating — 9 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poesía Completa it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 5 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Qué te vas a acordar Isabel, poesía reunida it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Amanecer en el valle del Sinu/ Dawn in the Valley of Sinu by Raul Gomez Jattin (2006-02-26) 4.75 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	El libro de la locura really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Raúl Gómez Jattin (?)

“Son palabras tan íntimas como mi propia carne que padece el dolor de tu implacable recuerdo”
― Raúl Gómez Jattin, Collected Poems

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“Ser poeta es más que un destino literario
Tú lo sabes
Entonces por qué -me pregunto-
esas flores de papel descolorido y sin gracia
a la salida de tu barrio de ensueño”
― Raúl Gómez Jattin, Amanecer en el Valle del Sinú: antología poética

tags: filosofia, inspiracion, poesia

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