Cuaderno de un editor

I edit a small literary magazine called *Papalote*. We publish twice a year, when we have paper. That is not a complaint. It is a fact about how we work, and the constraint has shaped what the magazine is: dense, careful, nothing wasted. Every poem earns its space or it doesn't go in. I have been writing poetry since I was nineteen and living in a room near the Malecón that flooded every time there was a strong norte. That room is where I wrote most of what I still consider my real work. In the evenings I read and wrote and argued with the two other people who lived there about Nicolás Guillén and whether *Son Entero* holds up. It holds up. One of them disagreed and is still wrong. The poets I read: Guillén for obvious reasons, but also Roberto Fernández Retamar, and then outside Cuba, César Vallejo, who I came to late and who rearranged how I understood syntax. Vallejo's *Trilce* does something to Spanish that I don't think Spanish had agreed to yet. Writing here is strange. The connection is not always reliable. I save everything locally first. But the readers are real, and that matters more than the medium.