The laughter of Irene Gruss was not an easy task… happy tribute to the great poet of irony

There is a photo in which Irene Gruss she is leaning on her right arm and her hand. Her short hair, a sweater, the blurred background, all make a very good portrait. It’s from Tony Valdez. However, what the painting highlights is her. You could say she’s serious, but also sad, fed up or, in fact, a bit of all of that. His face is relaxed and his gaze is fixed on the camera lens. You can see, even though it doesn’t stand out in the frame, that he’s looking at whoever captured the image. Now, in the Federal Chamber of the Kirchner Cultural Center, projected on a screen, appeals to the public. as if asking “What do I care about?”this questioning that he throws at the poems, his own and others, so that they pass the test of going out into the world.

It is five o’clock in the afternoon this Thursday, February 10, the sun is raging outside and inside, sheltered, the place, with a capacity of 150 people, is sold out. In its third edition, the Poetry festival now! has the event in its grid (the party, the meeting) “The Bliss: Tribute to Irene Gruss”. To remember her. Like an invitation to read it. Thinking and thinking about his poetry. Or simply being there, letting yourself be invaded by doubts, a belligerent spirit, curiosity, tenderness, emotion, a certain joy, a lot of nostalgia.

“Always ironic, Irene preferred to die in Christmas», says his great friend the poet and publisher edward milleocommissioner of the meeting with the teacher, publisher and poet Gabriela Franco. December 25, 2018 was a Tuesday. It was also deafeningly hot. The weather, unexpected news. He was 68 years old. Two children already emancipated. Two cats that don’t have one. Friends who adored her and with whom she also fought. Students and disciples of the workshop without any formality.

“Ever since I arrived, I remember his laughter,” says the poet, essayist and teacher Alice Genovese when he goes on stage to read a selection of poems by about asthmaa little book from 1995, author’s edition, almost in fanzine format.

the laughter of Irene Gruss it wasn’t turkey booger. It could be ironic, bestial, self-parodic, loving, provocative. But still authentic. It’s recorded. The photos keep scrolling across the screen. NOW Irene Gruss smile. His slanted eyes are completely slanted. Leans on a railing, holding a cigarette. Behind is a big wheel. It was during a trip he made to the United States, a few years before his death. She is happy. There is happiness, the one that recalls and title, in addition to the homage, to his book, initially published by the Bajo la luna editorial staff in 2004.

Now all of those poems that are read in the tribute are – along with the rest of his work – in one huge, accurate volume of his complete poetry edited by Gabriela Franco and Eduardo Mileo (Ediciones En Danza, 2021). Eleven books published during his lifetime, two personal anthologies, found manuscripts, a collection of photographs and a preface to Susana Villalba arm the nearly 600 pages.

Irene Gruss in 1975 he won the Municipal Prize for Poetry awarded to unpublished works. Although his career began a few years earlier in the mythical “Grand DeLellis” with Daniel Freidemberg, Jorge Aulicino and Jorge Asís at first (later also Genovese), his first book only dates from 1982: the light in the window (The Golden Bug). five years later came the incomplete world (Libros de Tierra Firme), the title he also gave to one of his blogs.

“Irene brought doubt, irony, contradiction to poetry”, says the poet, narrator and essayist Osvaldo Bossi when it is his turn to go on stage. “If I were there, I would discuss what I say about her”, he laughs while reading what is for him, he assures, “one of the most beautiful poems, not his, from Argentina”. The garden is a kind of love letter, between quarrelsome and affectionate, that Gruss wrote for Diana Bellessi when they were friends It is a zigzag text, which turns in a finite way on the page and does not cut the stanzas, it lengthens. At one point he says: Are you full of memory, of a sense of travel, Diana? Do you want to eat with me to tell me? Did you get hungry during the stay, Diana, were you hungry? Were you drunk? Have you ever had dizziness from travelling?

Irene Gruss He was born in Buenos Aires on August 31, 1950. He wanted to be a singer and participated in choirs. He also started and left the careers of Medicine, Biology and Letters. He trained in workshops, by talking. In his early days he collaborated in literary magazines such as “El escarabajo de oro” and “El Ornitorrinco”.

She was a meticulous corrector for editorials and forged herself in newsrooms such as, among other media, those of the newspapers “Clarín” and “Perfil”. She has coordinated workshops since the mid-80s, she has done individual clinics with a privileged few, she has been a teacher of poets. He won more awards, anthologized books, smoked countless cigarettes, drank numerous coffees in the bars of Almagro, his neighborhood, on Avenida Rivadavia.

Aulicine written in the foreword of The wall (Ediciones Nudista, 2012): “If we had to go to the quintessence of the poetry born in the seventies in Buenos Aires and its deployment, we would have to read, among a few options, the poetry of Irene Gruss”.

In the last book he published during his lifetime, between sorrow and nothing (Dock Editions, 2015), the poem There pull: “Between hope and faith there is a dune full of thistles, dry reeds, wasps in the afternoon”.

His posthumous book, I came to feel pity (Ediciones En Danza, 2019), ends with a poem entitled memory notesand in the prologue, still by Aulicino, his close friend, he says: “The problem that Irene Gruss solved in excellent terms was not how to make the trivial important, but how to shed some weight on the important without making it seem trivial. The work was not depersonalization but transpersonalization. And that’s why it’s important.”.

In the tribute, the happiness was present, and also the tears. Among the audience were his children, his friends, his colleagues, his peers, his students, his readers. And she, who according to a photo on the coast, one of her favorite places in the world, grabbed a bundle of cigarette butts with her curlers in the wind and smiled.

Poet and bookseller Melina Varnavoglou also took part in the tribute, which read a selection of poems and a fragment of Irene Gruss’s only novel, a familiar letter (Under the Moon, 2007).

Also contributed, from the critics, the Doctor of Letters, Conicet researcher and professor of literary theory at UBA Lucía de Leone, who out of all formality expected with such a title, in affinity with the energy of the winner , made an exhaustive analysis of the tone that marked the pulse of his work, which “builds from the incorrectness”, he noted. “I ask for elm pears, I savor them:/ they are delicious”, Wrote Irene Gruss in Who takes away the dancea poem originally published in contralto solo (Conference, 1997).

His laughter is present in his poetry like the waves of the sea, his tone of voice firm. There are epigraphs from Emily Dickinson, Richard Yates, Maximo Gorky. And when the reader lets himself be carried away by these waves, floats, then takes off: he diverts the anecdote from a raw observation of the world, of himself in the world, and even of an existential quotation from Mickey Rourke, with which he opens Notes for a tanza (Gog and Magog, 2012): “The decisions you make have the weight and responsibility to include the possibility of failure.”

absurd love

We lacked facts.

We didn’t make love or get comfortable

to drink coffee.

We do not organize any camping

the Canary Islands, and

in Puerto Madryn

we didn’t even recognize each other; the only witnesses to this

It was the cormorants. ugly insects in themselves,

the cormorants jumped

they shouted

our lack of facts.

unusual lovers,

We never met, even by chance,

feel the rain, nor wave the flags

do not close the windows

not invent, not even

invent

something real.

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