Amador Palacios remains imprinted in my memory like a still photo to which I always turn to seek the consolation of youth. This is a family photo dating from the 1980s, in which he appears with his first wife Charo and his two sons Nathanael and Miguel. No matter how many times I have seen it, it always appears that way to me, before recreating it in another way, as a wardrobe staple in my imagination. They lived in the noble district of Santo Tomé in Toledo, in a sort of attic without a corridor where the rooms, a living room and two bedrooms, were connected together by a curtain, having to cross one room to access the other. From that time, I keep from Amador a phrase that he refused to me, but which I keep for his own in my possession of witty and memorable phrases that he pronounced with a circumstantial smile: “what absolute misery”.
I studied journalism in Madrid and what really matters is that when I arrived in Toledo, his house was my house and that Amador, present or not, visible or not, was always there, the poet and the friend. Charo, like painter Xarodied this year with great sadness on my part at not having seen her enough; At that time, she was intelligent and with a marked personality, small, with a strange mix between modern, hippie and La Mancha sari. Amador was beautiful, a beauty that he still retains, without neglecting the passage of time, and he then had the same look between sad, meditative and tenderly cynicala look that continues to accompany him, a writer’s look, a poet’s look. I always thought that Amador had a cynical, or rather ironic, mocking gesture, with this contained half-smile and these eyes with a tragic and innocent expression which laugh as if to ask forgiveness for lack of respect, despite the sad and lost that he usually has. present in their published images. What works for me is this half-smile with which he invokes your mischievous complicity. Perhaps the expression I am talking about also has to do with this intention that Alfonso Armada prologues in the last book published by the poet, the journal Healed Confessions (1924): “confuse the imbecile, the one who finishes his sentences without rhyme or reason, without stopping to think of humor or poetry, which are traits that make us more human” or with the poem that ‘Amador translates from the Heteronymous People: “The poet is a pretender/ he pretends so much / that he comes to pretend that it is the pain / the pain that he really feels.
Amador Palacios is an authentic Castilian-La Mancha poet, territorial, as I cannot overcome them, I transcribe the words spoken during a poetry reading in 2023 by his friend, the journalist and member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Letters from Conquense (RACAL), José Ángel Garcia: “Although recognized at the national level, and although this autonomous community did not exist at its birth, Amador is a pure Castilian-La Mancha: Born in Albacete, grew up in Toledo, lives and works in Alcázar de San Juanmaintains a literary and emotional relationship with Cuenca, where he resides and, from time to time, wanders to Guadalajara to visit his cousin. It is the same with his literary career: it is a eminent specialist in postismthe avant-garde movement that emerged in Spain in the first stage of Francoism, with important Castilian-La Mancha connections.
Amador is the biographer of one of the attractions of postism, the poet Angel Crespo(Ciudad Real), and although the movement was created in Rome by its ideologue, the painter and poet Eduardo Chicarrohe did it according to the painter’s photomontages Gregorio Prieto (Valdepeñas). Chicharro was a professor of drawing pedagogy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, and his disciples were famous artists like the painter Antonio Lopez (Tomelloso) or the painter Amalia Avia (Santa Cruz de la Zarza). A movement which inspired the playwright then postist painter, Francisco Nieva (Valdepeñas) and others who, without completely becoming one, wanted to revitalize it as Carlos de la Rica (priest of Carboneras de Guadazaón, Cuenca). Already out of postism, but on the move, Amador Palacios is also the poet’s biographer Dionisio Canas (Tomelloso).
An image from the 80s in the hall of a Lisbon Fado. Amador Palacios (fourth from left) appears alongside the poet Eduardo Pitta and the painter of the Alcázar de San Juan, Xaro, his first wife. The author of this article, Mari Cruz Magdaleno, also appears in the right row, alongside the Toledan poet Jesús Maroto, to his right.
Although Amador Palacios Not so long ago, he lamented that he was writing less and less poetryand his last publication dates from 2018 (Words are harmful), Amador is a total and self-confessed poet, who reveals himself as such in their Healed confessionsa compilation review of articles in the digital magazine FronteraD (2020-2024). Amador has published 15 books of poetry and two anthologies and although he ultimately does other things, it’s all focused on poetry or has it as a thread or other things as a side effect. Amador, philologist, is as well as a poet, translator and essayist. In Healed Confessions, in prose and verse, his prose is almost always about poets, poems and poetry. And he admits to having kept verses to publish another diary, but only poetic.
There is no poet who does not sublimate poetry, who does not saturate himself and herself with it, who does not suffer or make one suffer from this innate obsession with each verse, this addiction to a genre which can lead almost madly when he slips into it. his fingers and he pursues it exhausted without fully possessing it, the precious, cainite, cursed poetry. But it’s this madness that ultimately brings you closer to it, as Amador argues: “Madness, although it can be an extremely bitter feeling, can be greatly nuanced by its astonishing creativity.” A few months before publishing this journal, in the context of a conversation with another poet who criticized, after a presentation, that now everyone publishes poetrydue to the large editorial production without any quality filter or perhaps during an exhibition of a sculptor here in Toledo, Amador confessed that he hardly wrote poetry anymore, that he was apathetic, that he didn’t want to. However, in this book he does not abandon the beacon of poetry.
Two books by the author, the last published poetry Las Palabras son Nocivas (2018), and the last published, an essay Confesiones cured (2024), which the article discusses.
In Healed confessionsAmador Palacios presents himself as an avowed poet, gives power to poetry above realitybelieves that it goes beyond and precedes it and that any poem can be valid in another space and another time: “reality can reside in the poem, more than in reality itself, because of its capacity to ‘adapt to it’ and defends poetry as “the substance of literature, its essence”as “the most special speech”, because it is “endowed with art and resources to be so”, and gives advice on its use: “words are harmful if they search the memory, arousing resentment” . As a philologist, he also defends poetic language: “I am happy that Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Occitan, which was the poetic language of all Europe.”
Amador continually quotes poets in his journal. In addition to maintaining a fruitful friendship with them, sharing events, getting angry because they do not defend their postulates, including them among the “bad people” or feeling their loss, Amador advises his foundations, translates his works and his biographies and makes them the subject of his essays and conferences.claims his figures, buys his books or deplores his affliction: “The bridges maintain a certain nobility / by hiding the unfortunate poets.” Poets inspire him, he likes to read them (read, read, read / until the eye drops run out) and he even invokes them in his ouijas (in one Neruda appeared to him dictating a poem: “L ‘love is in your room/The demons walk/the enemies lie in wait/but they are silent at the singing of your name.
However, I don’t think Amador has fully healed his wounds.its contradictions, its comings and goings with so many things. With himself: “the conflict between the gentle and the other/obstinate/irascible and absurd; with life: “life is tiring, it is a condemnation from birth, random, unsolicited, / of uncertain duration, / doomed to very certain limits”; with the world: “avoid the chaos of the world/where everything happens without meaning/the miserable search for gross pleasure”; with love: “love wears out, ardor fades, it changes into customary dull affection, if it does not become sentimental bankruptcy”; with religion: “religion is nothing other than the worship of literature, the search for God camouflaged in the rhetoric of the Bible”; with drugs: “hashish does not console like wine”; with ideology: capitalism is destructive”; with the thought: “philosophers are writers”; with the system: “politicians in a democracy agree among themselves to form a caste”, with the language: “words are harmful, a double-edged sword”. Not even with poetry, which he denies three times while practicing it without stopping. No, he is not completely cured even if he admits it in his diary. You don’t even have to do it.
