The attribute of the misfit is to live out of time and against the current. In Postmodern Valladolid the Mexican poet Raúl Casamadrid insists on exercising such a strange way of life. He has stood against the habits of his time (hedonism, the unbridled desire to be right, the urgency of innovation, the vulgar stolidity) and walks cautiously, slowly, by streets that are re-invented instances of memory, along avenues that become circular prisons.
Raúl composes among alleys, empty lots, withered colonial portals, small squares, cemeteries, fountains, hotel rooms, bridges, walls that have seen executions and misery, hidden gardens and sewers. Everything can relate to everything in his city.
His verses do not condescend for, nor profess any specific aesthetic. Raúl composes at his own pace, standing. He refuses to be the demiurge poet, the architect, the little god who ruminates about boring immortality. He has chosen to be the man of the street who writes poems that are not the luxury object of the bourgeois but, as the anti-poet says, they are "a product of prime necessity."
Postmodern Valladolid, bilingual edition, is the sixth poetry book of Darklight's Bridges Series, which intends to connect two different cultures and languages that nevertheless share universal artistic values.
About the Author: Raúl Casamadrid is a writer, editor, teacher and journalist. He has published essays, novels, poetry, short stories and scripts. He is a graduate in Language and Hispanic Literatures from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and UMSNH and he has earned a Master in Studies of Literary Discourse at the Michoacán University of San Nicolás Hidalgo.
As an essayist, narrator and poet, he has won several literary awards. He participates actively in diplomas, seminars, meetings, colloquia and congresses on literature, film theory and Mexican cinema, which are his lines of research.
He is founder of Letra Franca magazine where he is part of the Editorial Board and collaborates permanently in Arts and History México. He belongs to the Editorial Boards of Revista de Literaturas Populares edited by the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of UNAM and Montajes, magazine of cinematographic analysis.
He has been head of Literature in the government of the state of Michoacán and as Director of Culture, with the support of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, he was in charge of the rehabilitation of the former House of Culture of Uruapan, which was built around 1534.
He has been juror in several literary contests and his work has been published in magazines and cultural supplements, such as Nexos, Sábado, Revista de la Universidad, Revista de Bellas Artes, Replicante, Gaceta Universitaria and Cuadernos de Iconografía Musical. Among his publications are Juegos de salón (Premiá Editora); Octavio Paz: la interminable rebelión del ser (SECUM, Premio de Ensayo María Zambrano); El ser insuficiente del mexicano (UMSNH), the anthology Jaula de palabras (Grijalbo) and Litorales (UNAM). He participates in the Inter-institutional Doctorate of Art and Culture and resides in the city of Morelia, Michoacán, México.
