The Dude or Duende?

Is your muse just going along—or insisting on the vital edge?

Photo by Alan Tang on Unsplash

I received an unusual birthday gift this year. I was riding my bike home from the pharmacy when a cyclist cut me off. I swerved to avoid impact, flew off my bike, hit my head on a large landscaping rock (I was wearing a helmet, thank Goddess), and was knocked unconscious. The fall broke two vertebrae in my neck. 

This was in April. In the months since, I’ve come to see it as a “gift” because when life shakes you up that hard physically and psychologically, it can bring vital focus to your writing. (Side note to Universe: Thanks, I’ve had quite enough for now.)

Without some enlivening unpredictability, my muse might be more like The Dude, Jeff Bridge’s character in The Big Lebowski. It just wants to chill. It wants its well warn rug and bowling routine. Why is life messing with it?

Your invite to the vital edge

Breaking up assumed structures (self constructs, comfortable poetic forms) and resisting old habits (keep going, repeat what worked yesterday) is what poetry requires.

Poems need that unpredictable, mysterious spirit of strangeness that Federico Garcia Lorca called duende.

“The duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression."

In folklore, duendes are mischievous, earthy spirits that inhabit a home or place. In Spain, duendes are human-like mythological beings similar to elves or gnomes. In Yucatec Maya cultures of Belize and Southeast Mexico, duendes guard forests. 

In art, says Lorca, duende:

“rejects all the sweet geometry that we have learned … smashes the styles… With idea, sound or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator to the very rim of the well… the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound which never closes lies the invented strange qualities of an artist’s work.”

“The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.”

“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.” 

Courting duende

There are easier and less painful ways than a bike accident to invite duende into our work—other art forms, dreamwork, travel, certain books. What puts you in touch with “the edge … the yearning beyond visible expression”?

A translation of Lorca’s Theory and Play Of The Duende is available here.

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Upcoming Classes

Mapping Territory: How to Organize a Poetry Manuscript

(Zoom class, Sunday November 13, 10am-1pm MT)

You know how to craft a poem that makes a complete journey. Yet, when it’s time to organize a book-length manuscript, you may feel lost amidst your poems’ many themes, images, narratives, voices, and POVs. This session explores useful tools to map a collection’s terrain, including how to identify primary and secondary themes (They may not be what you think!), establish the major legs of the readers’ journey (how to group poems into sections), and use titles to transform a sheath of poems into a book that guides the reader thoughtfully through its territory. 

Check out the new Poet to Poet website for upcoming conversations, classes, and more.

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