The Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik
“My ambition is to turn everything into poetry, to cultivate the art of unreason, and to break the barriers between the solitary soul and the world.”
—Alejandra Pizarnik
The great Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik was born on this day in 1936. Below is a brief commentary by the poet’s translator, Cole Heinowitz, followed by one of her uncollected poems. I hope this sparks curiosity about her work. She was an amazing poet who deserves a wider readership.
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was born to Russian Jewish parents in an immigrant district of Buenos Aires.
During her short life, spent mostly between Buenos Aires and Paris, Pizarnik produced an astonishingly powerful body of work, including poetry, short stories, paintings, drawings, translations, essays, and drama.
From a young age, she discovered a deep affinity with poets who, as she would later write, exemplified Hölderlin’s claim that “poetry is a dangerous game,” sacrificing everything in order to “annul the distance society imposes between poetry and life.”
She was particularly drawn to “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” and, perhaps most importantly, to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering” (“The Incarnate Word,” 1965).
Like Artaud, Pizarnik understood poetry as an absolute demand, offering no concessions, forging its own terms, and requiring that life be lived entirely in its service. “Like every profoundly subversive act,” she wrote, “poetry avoids everything but its own freedom and its own truth.”
In Pizarnik’s poetry, this radical sense of “freedom” and “truth” emerges through a total engagement with her central themes: silence, estrangement, childhood, and—most prominently—death.
An orphan girl’s love for her little blue doll pumps death gas through the heart of her avatar. The garden of forgotten myth is a knife that rends the flesh. A grave opens its arms at dawn in the fusion of sea and sky.
Every intimate word spoken feeds the void it burns to escape. Pizarnik’s poetry exists on the knife’s edge between intolerable, desolate cruelty and an equally intolerable human tenderness.
From her historical essay on “The Bloody Countess,” Erzebet Bathory: “the absolute freedom of the human is horrible.” From a late interview with Martha Isabel Moia: the job of poetry is “to heal the fundamental wound,” to “rescue the abomination of human misery by embodying it.”
The uncollected poems presented here (written between 1969 and 1971) are drawn from a 17-page manuscript Pizarnik entrusted to the poet Perla Rotzait less than a year before her suicide.
She wants to speak, but I know what she is. She believes love is death—even if everything devoid of love disgusts her. Since her love makes her innocent, why should she speak? Mistress of the Castle, her fingers play upon mirrors of pronouns.
With every word I write I remember the void that makes me write what I couldn’t if I let you in.
I stand by the poem. It takes me to the edge, far from the homes of the living. And when I finally disappear—where will I be?
No one understands. Everything I am waits for you and still I hunt the night of the poem. I think only of your body while I shape and reshape my poem’s body as if it were broken.
And no one understands me. I know that life and love must change. Such statements, coming from the mask over the animal I am, painfully suggest a kinship between words and shadows. And that’s where it comes from, this state of terror that negates humanity.
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