Truly Outrageous

It’s no accident that Lorca came to understand the duende as a result of watching and listening to Andalusian Gypsy singers, whose troubled voices defy virtuosity. The best among them drag a spirit of revelation up into the room, and when this happens, the duende has been wrested from his den. And the songs that make such revelation possible in the first place are always—always—about struggle. They are always a kind of serenade to the resilience and the resistance that struggle creates—and offers proof of its success.

Any poet who is honest with him or herself recognizes a struggle very near the impetus to write. The Gypsy struggle might be described as the struggle to subsist, to resist absorption by a larger more powerful culture. It’s a struggle, literally, not to disappear. This struggle is not exactly the case for most poets in American society. But in one way or another, there is a connection with the Gypsy’s plight. There are two worlds that exist together, and there is one that pushes against the other, that claims the other doesn’t, or need not, exist. The duende stirs as a way of saying: you will only stay whole by moving—day after day, note after note, poem after poem—from one world to the next.

-Tracy K. Smith, from ‘Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende’.

Hear the fabulous Ms. Smith read her poem ‘Duende’ here.