Maria Sabina

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There’s nothing spontaneous, naïve, automatic or unconscious in María Sabina’s poetic praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting.

Sabina represents a critique on those who believe (like Paz and most mainstream poets) that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, "inspiration" or the unmediated unconscious, an ahistoric otherness, those who consider poetry is an individualistic practice by essence or solitary compromise. She challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible, of those who try to produce a voice without a context, an impossible purity.

But Sabina's is also a critique on those who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing or see the poet as a sophisticated specialist whose social role is just writing, those who act in the mere sphere of literature and who don’t break up the boundaries that separate the different domains of their own culture. "Poets’" without radical wisdom, wisdom that comes from the roots; "poets" who don’t go to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice, and poverty.

Sabina was without a doubt a poet. She was not only a poet, but more importantly poetry’s wholeness. Her activity’s goal was totality. She reached for the impossible. Searching for a book-beyond-the-book. Having a new poetic body. Breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing, and silence. Removing pain from others. Fighting for the survival of a great culture. Investigating sounds, meanings and languages. Increasing wisdom. Teaching. Being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.

Being a writer is easier.

Heriberto Yepez

Posted over on Poems & Poetics