My name is Isabel Guevara; I am a Venezuelan by birth and a foreigner by choice. I cultivate the poetry genre, essentially the blank verse. To be born, I chose the month of April, spring, and the perfect season to step into life, to give myself a name and validate my mission of out breaking. Each year I have attended to new outbreaks, different in my womb, in my four elements and in my Moon and my Sun. They have shaped a gallery of greens—that I remember and live—from a vegetable kaleidoscope. As Hölderlin, I have inhabited the earth poetically–aprily—from this viewpoint of the soul. I have made of spring the pupil for discovering myself and remake myself each year in a recurrent breakout until the final winter, when my seed succumbs, to be born again in a new and different spring. When I die, they can say about me: she was born, she lived, and she died in the spring. It is a memory that I confess to under the watch of birds evolved into stars—descendants of Atlas, bearers of the pillars that safeguarded the distant earth from the skies—and the Pleiades, those nursemaids legatees of the birds, who sensed my poetics.
Because of the coyness that accompanies me since before my birth (or because you have to assume a public profile, which intimidates me), I have written under various aliases: Abril, Kentia, Kentia Palm, Wak, Freelance, Sanctasanctórum and some others that I forget or choose not to recall.
Wak, I chose some years ago as a pseudonym, and I identify myself deeply with it when writing, as I am not a perennial writer, I am not light, and my verses, although intense, may not be too resistant to decay. My writings are small, green-eyed, with grey skin and paws instead of hands. I do not exalt nor condemn the peculiarity of my ideas. In order not to get tired or not to tire others, I give myself gradually–drop by drop or fruit by fruit. The real Wak or Wak-Wak is a mythological being. Following the legend, it is a tree whose shoots are human beings that, when ripe, fall quickly to the ground and wait there until someone will collect them. The fable of Wak-Wak comes from the unity of the natural kingdoms and the idea of the Tree of Life. Later on, it loses that mystical aspect and acquires the features of what is credible and what is physical. Then the story of children-fruits emerges, of those who once picked and collected turned dry and black in the hands of the harvesters. At the end, I am like him—a tree that gives fruit every so often, sometimes appetizing fruit; some others, a bland one and with an expectation to be chosen, read, devoured and expelled.
With Freelance, I allowed myself some interesting moments, perhaps on account of its humour. Under it I sketched microscopic mini-stories. The whole of its alias stated: “A posture in which only one of two halves of the body can be seen. Therefore, if a profile is an outline, an appearance, a silhouette, an air, an aspect, I claim the statute, and for now I wave my right or obligation to present one. I underline conspicuous head-on”.
Under Sanctasanctórum, I approached the essay and offered support to some young writers, especially children and teenagers or adults attempting the haiku or haikú. Beneath that alias I consented to freely practice what for me has a special value: teaching, which only springs out of the most spiritual, restrained, intimate and deep, a place whose source is not different to that of poetry.
Kentia and Kentia Palm offered me peace in stormy weather. Following Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Kentia is inner beauty, and I cannot perceive the poetic spring under a seed different from that concept.Having overcome the aliases for writing, although they persist in audiovisual attempts, I now sign my name.
As a poet or a writer, I do not see myself as a limited individual, and I understand that it is the letter what seduces, and not the name of whoever is offering it…and if poetry and prose have something in common it is seduction. My writing has no references to rules or principles. It is a sizing and a checking of my vital world, the poetic one. My lyric-expressive argument touches on some imprecise, quiet and sullen moments of the spirit; on ecstasies and vacuums; obstacles that I subdued or that subdued me. Because of that and because of much else, I cannot explain my work where reality and unreality merged. Trying to do it is confusing. I cannot manage to blend the foreseen—or the unforeseen?—with the creation. I sketch images and verses. I continue, yes, between verse and prose and, agreeing with Borges, I reiterate that “prose cohabitates with verse; perhaps, for the imagination, both are equal”. I enjoy contrasting the abstract and the concrete, the verb and the flesh, the idea and the feeling. My parallel inquiries of the coexisting worlds of the beings, of the planes visible and invisible to perception, lead to a poetry of multiple readings. I write because the verb demands it of me. At the end, I only need pencil and paper or a camera obscure—sometimes—and an abundance of desire for my seeds. The rest is harvesting for the reader/observer.