Pedro Casariego: new and old verses of the poet dressed in blue

• Pernambuco: a tale of before dying

It is not that Pedro Casariego Córdoba was a poet but that he lived poetically. He put his "blue workers" to work daily in writing or painting, "all his cells and cartilage" ready to express his insides, even in the way he showed himself to the world, with the color that dressed him or the shape in which he walked. Tomorrow he would have turned 65 and the legion of followers that celebrates who signed as Pe Cas Cor has been celebrating it since January 1 of this strange year, when his family and friends launched a network project to publicize his work .

This is what Pe Cas Cor Sociedad Imaginada has been known for decades . On the day of his wedding to Ana Ruiz de la Prada, in 1989, his sister-in-law, the novelist Berta Vias Mahou, gave him a collection of boxes with huge tubes of acrylic paint. Two years later the club was born, and another two years later the poet committed suicide. Although he recognizes it, this is not the only reason for the fascination exerted even now by this artist, according to his brother Antón. "Pedro fascinates by his work and also as a character," he recounts as a birthday celebration. " Of course there is suicide, but there is an enigmatic and attractive personality behind , powerful, typical of someone with unusual and very firm ideas, which he maintained throughout his life with brutal consequence."

Shortly after the Imagined Society began to fill Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with verses, clippings and pictures - "mixing the tragic and the humorous," says Antón, who serves as a spokesperson - the Seix Barral editorial joined the project and decided reissue Chained Poems , "a cornerstone of its catalog since 2003", in the words of Elena Ramírez, its editor. “We wanted to celebrate Pedro's 65th anniversary, something we usually do to bring the works of great authors closer to new readers. We changed the design, we enriched it with great collaborations, and in this case including six unpublished poems, ”he says.

Each of these volumes, which include six books ( Van Horne's Song, God's Laughter, Makeup, Mallick's Voice, K and Dra's Seaplane ), will be prefaced by a different author, including Vila-Matas and Ray Loriga , and also the publisher Belén Bermejo, recently deceased and who, in her Twitter biography, said she was always with a Pe Cas Cor book in her hands. Because she always left home with them. Perhaps that is why this reissue will be dedicated to Bermejo in memoriam .

She is not the only passionate one. Antón says that, from the beginning, “the project was followed by old acquaintances, Espido Freire, Esther Cabrales, Marta Sanz, U-minúscula ... And Belén, especially, helped us in the dissemination. Against the bad reputation of the networks, gained freehand in the slums of politics, we have found very generous and enthusiastic people, "he says.

In «fragments, like sparks in which the irony, the pain and his virtuosity with the language were evident, what we wanted was to reach an unknown audience, to go beyond the number of faithful followers that Pedro has traditionally had. And it is being achieved ».

For example, through the networks Pedro's family has learned that the poet "appears on a Trivial Pursuit card", and also that some of his texts were part of contests on Twitter. Suddenly they saw that " comments were emerging in Arabic and, by downloading them into an online translator , they found that some of their poems had been translated into this language." They received dedication photos of Peter in second-hand books, and were forced to add the word "official" to their accounts, as there were many others created by followers.

Pedro also had hobbies that, as Antón says, "give color to the portrait, such as his identification with the color blue, which he always wore on his clothes and which he associated with purity, in the same way as those new Arab and Muslim followers do the ones I was referring to before. As he was not a public figure in life, few photographs are preserved in which he appears, generally made with greater intention than the purely journalistic one, so the image he transmits is anything but bland. ”

But what is important is the work, and what the Imagined Society wants to highlight: «Its ability to create in the literary and pictorial field in a short space of time». A very fine intellectual, Pedro wrote powerful, he was original and his records many, as he even wrote children's stories, such as Pernambuco, the white elephant , written the night before he committed suicide as a legacy for his daughter Juliet.

Tomorrow, in addition to his birthday, family and friends celebrate the reissue, as it means that “Pedro's work is still alive, interesting readers and editors almost 30 years after his death, and updated by a prestigious publishing house that will interest grows. Six books of chained poems in which "each one connects with the previous one to form a whole united by an argument and by the same epic and lyrical breath."

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