Poetry, yoga and uprooting. Kikidorinen and a search that gives it unity

I lived the uprooting of my country as the uprooting of my writing. As if pulling up by the roots a vital power that had no fertile ground in another language. After some time I developed a personal writing in English, that I was able to keep expanding thanks to this website.

However, the power of my literature and my poetry -that delicate and unexplanaible bond between the words and the unknown- is in my mother tongue. I can be a good writer in English, but never a real poet (at least not for now). So from all that mess comes this present: launching a book in Spanish on a website written in English.

Does it make any sense? Well, as long as I can find meaning in it, it does.

Soon, I will be sharing for free download the book “Kikidorinen. The action of searching for something that doesn´t exist”. It gathers my poetry written (and yet unpublished) between 2017 and the beginning of 2025. It is in Spanish, and if you are a non-native speaker, a C1/advanced level is needed.

Although they are five separate units, written in my different lives during that period of time, the book itself could be described as a migratory journey: a movement of looking for something and not finding it, or rather, of discovering something different from what the expectations were looking for.

Human lives are volatile. Social and generational crises set limits on their forms. Real possibilities are arbitrary and fortuitous, like the simple fact of being born here or there. Survival is one of the most creative skills of the human species; language is part of that struggle, and writing is a way of being alive. As the left and feminists have pointed out, personal experiences are shared collectively, engendered in a social system. At what point in this intersection does poetry arise?

Writing and yoga

Writing and yoga are two practices that I´ve been holding for long years and make the way I live in the world. In fact, yoga has helped me to rethink my relationship with writing: the practice has meaning for the only act of doing it, without expecting any fruit from it.

Literature, on the other hand, has that thing that it needs someone to read it. That complicates everything a little bit: a series of mechanisms and market logics get into the game, creating a whole field of inclusions and exclusions. They can be very frustrating if you do not have the contacts that open the doors to materialise personal projects, that put literary productions in the place of “that which deserves to be read”.

So yoga philosophy has helped me to revise the meaning of writing in my personal life and the ways in which I can reconfigure it to free it from frustrations and, above all, to make it a sustainable lifelong practice.

At some moment I was a bit ashamed of talking about yoga in a few poems, as if it were a kind of trivialisation of an ancient wisdom that I greatly respect. Now, revisiting the texts after some time, I recongnise that actually they are more a question about poetry than about yoga. Yoga is something different that cannot be there, embodied in a verse.

Building community through poetry on the move

The fact of having migrated not only once but many times gives perspective to observe local communities from a totally different perspective, plus the fact that physical presence at poetry festivals and social spaces is no longer possible.

The book condenses a possible experience born of impossibility, materialising something real once ideal expectations have been shattered and categories have shifted. What makes someone a poet? What makes someone an Argentinian poet? Can my displaced and migrant poetry be considered Argentinian poetry? It can, as long as one of the experiences of being Argentinian is being a migrant.

The book is also a question about the possibility of building community at the intersection of experiences and beyond physical encounters, when belonging to a defined space is no longer possible.