Jaime Sabines: 100 years of Mexico's people's poet

Do you remember the first time you read a poem and thought, this was written for me? That's what happens with Jaime Sabines. It happens to the cab driver. It happens to the schoolteacher. It happens to the person crying on the bus who can't quite explain why. The poet from Chiapas — born March 25, 1926, who spent his life building verses like soft punches — turned one hundred this week. Mexico and Spain celebrated together at the Chamber of Deputies, which is both the most unexpected and most fitting venue imaginable.

Luis García Montero, director of the Instituto Cervantes, spoke of Gaza and Iran and bombed hospitals in the same speech where he quoted Sabines. There's nothing accidental about that. Sabines always knew that poetry and politics share the same root: both are born out of the desperate need for someone else to understand you. «The best politics has a poetic reason,» García Montero said — and Sabines would probably have agreed, though with a more ironic expression and a glass of mezcal closer to hand.

The centenary brings good news: the poet's daughter, Judith Sabines, is working with her family and essayist Marco Antonio Campos on Poemas rescatados, a collection of previously unpublished texts from 1948 to 1968. Twenty years of writing we haven't read yet. This is what separates great poets from merely dead ones: they keep talking. They still have things to tell you.

If you haven't read Sabines yet, the ideal entry point might be Adán y Eva / Tarumba / Diario semanario y poemas, which includes the Tarumba (1956) that Chiapan poet Efraín Bartolomé recited at the tributes. Or go straight to the heart with Poesía amorosa — no disguise needed. And if you want the beginnings, Horal / La señal shows the Sabines who was still inventing the language that would make him eternal.

Some poets write for posterity — they're thinking about statues, anthologies, the right photograph for the postage stamp. Sabines wrote for the person who was going to open the book at two in the morning because they couldn't sleep. García Montero calls that being «a poet of the people,» but I'd put it differently: he's the poet who stayed home while everyone else went to the museum. And sometimes that is the hardest thing to do.

A hundred years, a packed Chamber of Deputies, unpublished texts still to come, and the same pulse in every line. Question of the day: which Sabines poem do you carry with you without knowing it?

Jaime Sabines Turns One Hundred: The Poet Who Stayed Home

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