Luis Carlos López,  'El Tuerto" (1883-1950)

When talking about poetry from Cartagena de Indias,  I necessarily have to think about Luis Carlos López.  Many years after his death,  his work is still vibrant because his poetry has a universal flavor. López's  poetry is about  daily life in Cartagena, its people and their agonies, the city and its culture.

During López's time, Cartagena was a dormant city; Its past was glorious but its present didn't seem to be hopeful. In López's view, the city didn't deserve the kind of leadership that was running City Hall. In  A Mi ciudad Nativa, the poet offers an alternative,  perhaps to quiet his own feeling of abandonment, he opts to be loyal to his town by loving it the way one loves a pair of old shoes.

Lopez's style of writing poetry never overused the adjectives, nonetheless it is beautiful. This kind of beauty is different from the writing of his contemporaries in the Américas, particularly Ruben Dario,  who had a passion to see American places with a  European attitude, as the center of the universe; on the other hand, Cartagena was Lopez's universe, its reality. The discourse of people from Cartagena gets to the point quickly, and Cartageneros don't like to hide what they have in their mind. "El Tuerto," as Lopez was called,  was, afterward urged to write about the reality of his surrounding, and he had no other choice.

Llovía

The nikname

Finally, but I don't mean this has been enough to analyze his poetry, since López was cross eyed,  thus acquired the nickname "El Tuerto." Who in Cartagena could escape the art Cartageneros have for giving nicknames to people? Commonly, when someone dies in Cartagena,  you read the  nickname of the diseased person typed on high characters on the mortuary cartels,  and in parenthesis or on a second line his or her name; the nickname is part of Cartageneros' life.

Gustavo Benedetti

LOS QUE LLEGARON DE PARIS

Daniel Lemaitre Tono (1884-1961)

Daniel Lemaitre Tono  represents a rare case of a man who was a very successful industrialist and a talented poet; how could a person so involved in creating business have space to write poetry? In order to understand this dualism, we perhaps need to understand Lemaitre’s time, the way Colombian society used to behave regarding materialism. Benjamín Moreno Torralvo tries to explain this paradoxical theme: “Generations from that time were not rigidly dependent on money; spirituality was more important… merchants used to enjoy the way society appreciated their honest conditions, and nothing else.”

Lemaitre was also a prolific writer, an avid painter and a composer; his multiple talents had one purpose, to illustrate his city and his people. As a columnist in the El Porvenir newspaper, he delighted his readers by writing about the city’s everyday events with fine humor. There is reason to believe that he developed his poetry from this kind of writing, with the difference that in a poem the author can express the beauty of his surroundings, the poet has a passport to tell us everything. The music he wrote was very popular and my grandparents and parents danced to. I myself even still dance to his music. I only need to hear it performed by a “papayera” band and sooner than even I expect I will be dancing.

Jorge Artel (1909-1994)

No discussion of the poetry of Cartagena can neglect mentioning Jorge Artel, a writer of his both Native American and Black races, the sea of his city and the struggle of his people. According to Guillermo Tedio "The themes and feelings of his first blood came to him from his black father and his Native American mother, thus he felt to be a member of the Indio Mestizo. The sea and port side came from Cartagena and his travels. Early from his childhood, he was able to communicate with the sailor's world...And finally,  his political views and his social extraction placed him in the side of popular fights."