One cannot read the three collected works of bruno darío’s Lantana or, the Indissoluble Exhalation without also experiencing the tragedy of his early passing. In his introduction to the text, translator, Kit Schluter, depicts darío at the height of local notoriety in Mexico City, citing his theatrical recitation style, his history of punk hijinx, his humorous pranks and fabrications, his affinity for cane liquor at his local cantina (both of which appear in the poems), and most of all a precocious talent for poetry. Schluter’s depiction of darío is lovable, a distilled image of the poet-philosopher––impecunious, peripatetic, and deeply devoted to his practice, living as singly and frugally as possible. One can imagine a Rilkean figure––chaste, hungry, consorting with angels in some abandoned castle, but for darío, this castle is his remote inhabitance in Coatepec or his beloved cantina, La Estrella de Oro. While Schluter discourages an autobiographical reading of darío’s work, it would also be remiss to leave his relationship to terminal illness, his conscious proximity to death, or the quasi-canonical coincidences to other tragic figures (Chatterton, Keats, Lautréamont, et al) completely outside the poet’s legibility. Schluter’s scrupulous care is evident in both his introduction and his translation notes where he preserves the work of darío as close as possible to the poet’s voice, vernacular, and intention. 

“I learned to write,” darío begins Lantana’s first book, feast, fright, which suggests a mutual origin of the writer and the written––the acquisition of skill leading to the formation of identity. After the inception of the author, other forms begin to fall into place. 

Slowly, on the light box, a kiss was developed for the Inconsolable.
I painted my lips red before churches,
the air as my mirror.

My feet licked an impossible ground,
a signless letter
. . . the wind nipping at my ribs.

The world of darío’s poems blur into a surrealism of the ineffable, where the gravity of expression exists as its incommensurable quality. We see the speaker of darío’s poem, the Inconsolable, attempting to reconcile this incommensurability through a delimited language. This feels evident in his mention of the “signless letter,” which feels similar to Barthes’ obtuse image––the signifier without its signified. If all letters, as we understand them, are signs, then the signless letter must be asemic, arriving out of the need to transfer the inexpressible into a material. darío’s infatuation with the asemic or preverbal continues. “With what presumptuousness does the bird mumble his reading of the sky,” he asks. “What does it mean, this jealousy I feel, observing a shrieking newborn?” The bird speaks in order to make the sky legible. The newborn shrieks with the animal urgency to make its discomfort legible. However, neither legibility is arriving from systematic, connoted language. The letters of their legibility are signless. 

The fact that darío’s speaker is Inconsolable may compound his desire for the inexpressible. To be inconsolable is to be unreachable by the language (physical or verbal) attempting to ameliorate the existential processes of great feeling (i.e. grief, anxiety, sadness, et al). To be inconsolable is often to need an asemic register of expression, such as ululation, where semantic legibility is not the goal, but an eruption de profundis. darío further addresses this crisis in “What Comes Before Insufficiency:”

To feel I’m not breaking through the depth of things;
a deep arrow pointing at my emotions’ freedom,
to bleed through the image,

to stab Faust with the blade of my tongue,
to birth children through the eyeballs…
may a sparkle live in mine.

The first stanza orients us in this very inconsolability––the “depth of things” ostensibly limited by our systems of literacy. darío, like Keats, appears to long for the poem’s negative capability––his emotional capacity liberated by the art’s volition, the body weaponized and degendered, his aims simultaneously (pro) and (de)creative. darío’s work continuously returns to the dialectic of destruction and transformation. 

We don’t find much meaning or advantage in relegating artists to particular schools of thought, practice, or era, but, conversely, reading the books of Lantana felt like discovering the poems of a long-lost Romanticist. Like Keats’ dialectic of Truth/Beauty, or Blake’s mystical pantheism, darío’s interest in Love feels ontological––a principle of freedom that gives art its transcendence. This ontology feels most pronounced in the epistolary poems of airsickness. In a poem to an individual simply referred to as “Architect” darío writes: 

I’m intrigued by the force of attraction we call gravity: love motor. A work of art is an act of love that brings us closer to the feeling of Origin itself. It functions like a thruster that lets us move through a chaosmic atemporality, in which the concept of “before and after” doesn’t exist, because it’s unnecessary. 

Here love and art act as a dialectic that allows darío to surmise an originary locus of being. Once again, the concept of freedom is foregrounded by the poet’s longing to get outside of the structural manufacture of observation, i.e. where one (subject) exists in relation to the spatiotemporal––or, as he later states, “Things happen and they’re free until the subject perceives them, captures them.” This expression is consistent with Kant's own distinction of the Subject/Object relationship, however, darío’s interest in the metaphysical possibility of art provides a momentary relief to the irreconcilably tragic nature of our perception. Furthermore, in this poem darío uses the concept of nakedness as a way to explore this originary state. “Oh, but only by dying can one achieve nudity,” he states. Or, “To be unclothed is a state of the soul.” Or, “An idea can be naked if it’s unimaginable.” Each one of these lines arrives like an aphorism. What darío means exactly by naked is not geometrically developed, but its essence feels cogent––nudity being the state the observer (subject) takes when they achieve this transcendence, which we can take to mean that they become completely unified and, thus, inexpressible. 

darío’s awareness of death, particularly his own, leads and often invigorates his metaphysical investigations. This could very well be the result of reading retroactively, the poet’s death having already occured, its past tense forcing a narrative upon the subject. It’s true that we all ruminate on death long before we are dying. Still, darío’s reflections on death feel imbued with the wisdom of its nearness rather than the loftiness of its distance, which can feel naively hypothetical. The imminence (and immanence) of death lead the poet to a preponderance of art’s inherent purpose and potential which he navigates through dialectical relationships of the observer/observed, writer/written, lover/beloved, signifier/signified, et al. 

Where darío arrives is a conflation of Poetry and Love as a unified metaphysics. 

The love I practice pales beside the love I write. 
Wherever there’s a poem, verse achieves the embrace. 
The poem spreads its wings and caresses us. 
Poetry, as could be said of God and love, is everywhere. 
Oh, untrappable, infinite possibilities. Anything. 
Uncaptive poetry captivates. 

It is interesting that darío separates love into categories of practice and writing, noting the contradictions of the practical and the ideal. This tension feels evident of love, which we can easily dream but so rarely integrate or stabilize. Yet darío answers this problem with poetry as a pure ontology. Spinoza says God is everywhere, Pharoah Sanders says love is everywhere (likely also meaning God), so the infrastructure is already laid for darío to build his extension. Poetry makes known to us what feels impossible to reconcile like all experiences with sublime or ineffable impressions of reality. However, if the holistic infinitude of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura can only be understood through two limited attributes (thought and extension), how do we then read darío’s pure ontology of poetics if it is to be read alongside the omnipresence of a Spinozist God? Perhaps, this is already answered in darío’s problematic of practice and writing, which ostensibly offers two similar attributes, or two modal applications. Poetry then, to darío, exists even without its being written, in infinite possibilities, and is delimited by our use of language. This calls back to the need for the asemic to express the inexpressible. The sound of the cascade has no letters, yet we know it is poetic. Ditto, the wind in the trees, the rain on a tin roof, the birds at dawn, etc. These elements captivate the poet because they are outside of captivity. However, when we attempt to express them, to put them into a system of language, we place their essence in captivity; or as darío later states: 

The word conceals 
what it states. Poetry is outside, in the nerves,
buried under the text, awake. 

The books of Lantana face a paradoxical motivation to get beyond what their language conceals. While this may be the case for all poetry in practice, darío’s work inexhaustibly contemplates this problem, making the viewer’s limitations continuously known while shifting to achieve parallax. darío’s strength exists in his ability to meaningfully resolve this tension to the reader, his every approach mindful of its incommensurable gesture, of his Barthesian obsolescence as an author, which all work to comfort a larger existential awareness of our own futility. darío’s proximity to death ostensibly places him nearer his own pure ontology where he can awaken in complete unification with Poetry/God/Love. This, he knows, will make him eternal. The poems of Lantana’s last book, raze, close with this acknowledgment: 

You can’t avoid me. 
Look for me in time. Give them my message: 

If I am dead, I still am. 

Reducing myself to the irreducible. 
I end myself in order to fit, at last, in every moment. 

The reduction to the irreducible would ostensibly be the body’s transfer from the organizing semantic systems of poetry to its supraholistic unification within the universal. Through this holism, the poet cannot be minimized into a taxonomy, or worse, a commodity, and in this way cannot die because he is rendered through the eternal rather than the material. darío’s closing is a beautiful Whitmanian gesture, a counterpoint to the biological limitations of life and death, an enormous, preeminent belief in the poem’s ability for such transcendence. 

Lantana is a lasting work of poetry which reads as if it arrived completely outside of time––an impossibility that feels all the more plausible, if not necessary, the further darío takes us into the formulations and interstices of his gradual philosophy. His are poems that grapple with the gravity and grace (to steal from Weil) of immeasurable Truth so as to selflessly bestow an edifying world where death is not an ending, but an opening.