Professor Fernando Arredondo, who knows the most in Spain about the poetry of Joaquín Antonio Peñalosa, tells me that what happened to him was what happened to me: first he began to know and admire the enormous lyrical quality of Peñalosa's poetry -it was the reason that led him to write his doctoral thesis on him- and then he discovered what many Mexicans discovered before us: his joke books, that is, his healthy religious humor, based on four foundations: grace, truth, goodness and poetry.
It is enough to take a look at some of his little books such as Humor with holy water -with more than 30,000 copies sold in his country-, or to his Manual of the imperfect homilyto realize that, as he himself said: "There is no love without humor, nor humor without love. Because love without humor, pure frozen respect, would establish distances, abysses without bridges, blocking the encounter between two beings". If we add to this what the French writer Georges Bernanos expressed: "The opposite of a Christian people is [...] a people of sad people", we define perfectly the poetics of this author whose lyrical work has more and more followers every day.
"To the list of works of mercy," he wrote, "we would like to add the one most needed by an anguished and crestfallen world: to make the sad laugh, as urgent as feeding the hungry". Thus, Peñalosa's complete literary work is a faithful reflection of his foundation in optimism, in good humor, which in no way means that he is oblivious to the conflicts and difficulties of modern man. On the contrary: if there is a written production rooted in existential issues of the human being, whatever they may be, that is his. "Humor" -she points out- "is a phenomenon only for adults, a literary genre for serious readers, a flower of the spirit for mature souls. Only they know that humor is not offense but sympathy, not wound but balm, not lack but surplus of love. Love, humor: just a sound of difference".
Belonging to what is known, specifically in San Luis Potosí, as the 50's generationPeñalosa is, above all, a practical man, an exemplary priest, as joyful as the next man, aware that his was to live rooted in God and to make him known, not only with his life, but also with the gift he had for writing: "One does not write on the margins of one's own life. Writing is a way of living, of self-realization, of giving meaning and fullness to the ephemeral and transcendent fact of being a man. Being a writer and being a man are not two more or less parallel lines that sometimes touch. Everything merges in an essential synthesis".
Poetic Franciscanism
With an intelligible verse, of clear line, without adornments or moralisms, he manages to provoke in the reader an approach to God and his mysteries, and he does it from what scholars call Peñalosian poetic Franciscanism, that is, starting from an endearing look at the universe where God, maker of heaven and earth, is conceived as a loving, provident Father, and all beings, animate and inanimate, as brothers and sisters.
This vital and lyrical worldview allows him to defend a constant planetary environmentalism while at the same time it leads him to a position of commiseration in favor of the underprivileged, the excluded. In Peñalosa, of course, everything is song, a song to creation, to the Scriptures, to material or spiritual beings, because what comes out, or has come out of God's hands, is always beautiful: "And why should they be ugly / the lame dogs who prefer jazz / the sculpture decapitated by guarantee of antiquity / the freckled girl dotted like the milky way / the phosphorescent bald man adding neon to the urban night [...] / the one-eyed girl with the sailor vocation of lighthouse / the hunchbacks of the golden lineage of camelids / [....nothing is ugly / ugliness is beauty in G minor", this is how he expresses himself in Teoría de lo feo, one of his many compositions in which, on the basis of a somewhat irrational imagery and an enviable expressive simplicity, he manages to capture the reader's attention, arousing delicate emotions, without ever bordering on sentimentality.
In this way, his interest in people with some kind of handicap or social conditioning is evident, including stutterers: "Cuando le preguntan cómo se llama / igual que el agua que hace gárgaras / en los canales de piedra / contesta que jo-jo-sé" (When they ask him what his name is / just like the water that gargles / in the stone canals / he answers jo-jo-sé), the hunchbacks: "Stretch of elusive and golden camels / all for carrying life we are hunchbacked." or the lame: "what a joy to be a lame girl / and turn the whole earth into water / undulating earth and in perpetual swaying" -sample examples of characters that he looks at head-on-, sometimes having them as the protagonists of his poems, drawn to the measure of the cordiality of his poetic creation.
Attention to the futile
At other times the object of his inspiration are tiny beings such as butterflies, ants or snails, presented at times in beautiful everyday prints such as the one he offers, in the form of a gregueria, in Garza dormida en un pie (Heron asleep on a foot): "You don't require two stems / because you know you flower / and up go the corollas / in an elevator." or vegetal like trees, or man-made like paper bow ties. He makes this very clear in Benedicite de las cosas pequeñas, a composition from his first book that recalls the biblical psalm of the prophet Daniel (3:57-88): "Let us sing the hymn of the light things / of the little creatures that reached the last breath of God / [...] Bless God all things, the smallest things that Lugones sang, the works of the Lord that Daniel sang in the song of the three children. For the Lord is great among his great works and greatest among his least works.".
With everything in his favor, Peñalosa knows how to make the most of any element, whether natural or artificial, seeing in the former -natural elements- the indelible imprint of God, as reflected in his Recipe for making an orange -by the way, one of his most inspired and well-known poems-: "Don't touch this orange yet / get down on your knees first and worship like angels, / it was made for you exclusively, / for no one else, / like a small immense love / that falls ripe, / that is delivered round", and in the second ones -the artificial elements- his opposition to consumerism, of course expressed with wise irony, as can be read in Hermana televisión: "Llegas e a casa con honores [...] / buscando el mejor sitio [...] / fuereña entrometida / se adueó de la sala, aquí me quedo / cómo no, señorita de 23 pulgadas [...] / luego escogió habitación exclusiva / desplazando espejos y una tía con artritis [....] / and there you have us all / with square eyes / connected to your big cold pupil / brainwasher, your pollutant / mangy bitch growling in the corners / since you arrived no one talks in this house [...] / alas, sister television".
For another occasion I will leave for now his specifically religious poetry: Christmas, Marian or biblical, also very valuable and abundant, where the transcendent, the supposedly unattainable, is treated with immediacy; this is the case of the angels, so familiar in his verses.
However, these lines serve to give visibility to such an excellent Mexican poet, who is worth reading and from whom, surely, so much can be learned. A colloquial, direct, entertaining poet, to whom -as the Latin proverb written by the comedian Terence says-, nothing that is human was alien to him.
