Front & Center
A lyrical WORLD For Spanish poet Fernando Valverde, Charlottesville is a global stage By Erika Howsare
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TRISTAN WILLIAMS
I
n one of Fernando Valverde’s poems, “Ellis Island,” he imagines would-be immigrants to the United States, gathering in European cities like a swelling tide: “The future / sold in first and second class tickets / in the ports of Naples, / of Trieste, / of Constantinople, / grows on the haze of Bremen / or the drizzle of Hamburg / or the loneliness of the Liverpool docks.” Valverde’s own route to the U.S. from his native Spain has little in common with the fraught journeys of Ellis Island-era newcomers, but he sees his own life in similarly poetic, and global, terms. Now a visiting distinguished professor at UVA, Valverde’s themes cross cultures: suffering, tragedy, nostalgia. And he has tackled the subject of the U.S. head-on, both the promise it offers and the ways that promise fails to manifest. Born in 1980 and raised in Granada and Almuñécar by his mother and grandparents, Valverde says his early life was marked by the Mediterranean Sea—in his words, “the oldest sea in the world, the sea of Ulysses and Shelley.” In his first memory, “My mother rescues me from the waves. Perhaps it wasn’t the first one, but in some way it installed itself in my mind as the beginning.” His mother couldn’t save him from the pain of missing his father, who was mostly absent from his life. But he says that as he grew into writing as a way of understanding the world—he started writing poems seriously at age 18—the difficulties of his childhood were an essential ingredient. “It is possible that pain and anguish have been my best professors of poetry,” he says. “I saw my family destroyed very quickly, my father kicking my toys around when I was a child. Poetry has been an insufficient effort to change the world, a failed attempt. But it hasn’t been a bad attempt.”
A visiting distinguished professor at UVA, poet Fernando Valverde was once named "the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970."
