The story of the future

I close the booklet containing the essay Es mengen els gats (Arallibres, 2026), in which Míriam Cano explains, in accessible and lucid prose, how the 'narrative' has become a key concept in political communication; and warns that the mythical or hyperbolic narratives of the far-right –based on perceptions, rather than facts/truths– have great reach because, today, “messages must awaken an immediate emotional reflex”. At first, it seems that this displaces poetry as a political artifact to a position of disadvantage: the act of reading or listening to poems requires time to grasp their truthrequires a committed attention of the senses and the intellect. Then I become aware that, no matter how much we insist on claiming them as literary resources, in addition to being used in political propaganda, the linguistic tools we have pointed out are also widely used by commercial advertising (an instrument of capitalist power). In the end, I note another observation from the author: “Imagining a future without fear is also an act of faith in the word”. Let us insist on it.

For example, over the last three months I have worked with singer-songwriter Lídia Pujol to achieve a version of People have the power (composed in 1988 by the American Patti Smith) that stimulates the imagination of a constructive and collective narrative of the future, while singing. “The democratic future demands responsibility, creativity and empathy” and, just as Míriam proposes in the essay, taking care of language. In the year 2026 and in the Catalan Countries, the words 'power', 'people', 'together' and the expression 'the government of the people', among other direct translations of the original poem, do not represent the concepts nor refer to the ideas of Patti Smith and her potential listeners. In fact, Smith's composition took up John Lennon's Power to the people (1971), reordering the syntax of the claim and giving it the form of a statement: tired of claiming power for the people, she made the people assume it. It is from this attentive observation of language that, in a beautiful, stimulating and very fierce negotiation, we have decided that the verse that constitutes the anthem in Catalan, in the 21st century, sings that: “Love is what rules”. If the godmother of punk had chanted this back then (‘Lo-ove has the power!’), it would not have moved anything because, decades earlier, swarms of hippies in robes had recycled the idea of Love as a tool of knowledge that would lead to universal peace.

To the manipulation of language by political parties is added the manipulation of image: with communication strategies that have become a spectacle, not even the looks are to be trusted. There is also a media poetry, made of cardboard, just for show. However, when this past October 10th, at the presentation of the anthology Veu de poeta, by Antoni Gost, Curro, the rhapsodes who were paying tribute to him wore a paisley scarf around our necks (as the poet wears), we were representing a truth—a poetry that is made of facts, not propaganda. Lluís Maicas expresses it very well in the book's prologue: Curro's poetry “is himself dressed in words, as if words were Sundays”. A work written with a seventies-style battle scarf (like a sign of a faction, in a war that has been turning invisible), but without the “mental uniforms” against which Míriam warns. That of the poet from Sa Pobla is “a proposal that seeks to jolt the instinct, not common sense”, says Maicas. Precisely, Antoni Gost is one of the poets I know with the most faith in the word: his obsession with giving space to and making divergent, contemplative, and/or young voices coexist moved him to create the Poetic Classroom at the ACA Foundation in 1996, and later the ‘Summer Solstice’ project or the Crestatx poetic festival.

Míriam Cano's capsule ends by speaking of nostalgia as an artifice typical of the modern and postmodern political narrative of the far-right; and reminds us that the past should serve to learn from it, and not as a milestone in a return they label as 'safe'. That is why true poetry is political precisely because it is not a pamphlet: it works with imagination and memory, and grounds language in the present so that other meanings are activated. When Antoni Gost writes, in one of his great hits, that “if you open a box of Alpino crayons / and sniff deeply / you will smell childhood”, he invokes a mantra that binds the present and previous experience to summon the future. It is a good metaphor, which does not fall into the falsification of memory: the facts are that a box of colors contains the aroma of as many possibilities as tones and combinations we dare to try, effluvia of creativity, the scent of the trees that were—and the trace of a future that one feels like living.