By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer April 3, 2002

LAS PALMAS, Canary Islands - Peering through a haze of schizophrenia and other turmoil, chain-smoking as he drifted from one asylum to the next, Leopoldo Maria Panero wrote poetry.

It is dark, hard-hitting verse laced with enigma and mangled syntax. In Panero's world, the dead chat to one another in shared graves. The moon bleeds, angels ride turtles and the night sky rains birds.

He has won no literary awards in his deeply troubled life, marred by alcoholism, bouts of depression and two suicide attempts before age 21.

But at 53, as he lives in yet another psychiatric ward and spends his days clutching a gym bag filled with books, Panero is often praised as one of Spain's best poets.

Even critics who can't stomach his violent, in-your-face brand of writing say he oozes talent. Fans say Panero's work is the stuff of Spanish literary history.

"The process of canonizing an author starts when they appear in anthologies, and Leopoldo Maria Panero holds an undisputed spot," said Tua Blesa, a literature professor at the University of Zaragoza and a Panero expert.

The Sorbonne's Marie-Claire Zimmermann said that although French academics tend to prefer poets who are dead, a growing number are waking up to Panero's dreamlike imagery and linguistic acrobatics. Some of his work has been translated into French.

"He is a magnificent poet," Zimmermann, a professor of Spanish literature, said in an interview from Paris. Read Panero aloud, she recommends: Hear how he tinkers with words and meter, rendering staccato a language known for steady, graceful flow.

Panero has written some 20 books of poetry, plus numerous essays on everything from politics to mental illness. He is part of a generation that broke with the realism that dominated Spanish poetry in the decades after the 1936-39 Civil War and made verse an event, divorced from reality, with its own intrinsic meaning.

His themes go against the establishment and focus on the individual immersed in a hostile world. His sense of rejection, distance and removal can touch on life itself. Thus, the dead speak — they're on the outside looking in. 

Madness and madmen are other staples.
___

"The man who only ate carrots

"was capable of killing, and robbing, and they say

"he got rid of his wife

"for just one carrot." — "The Man Who Only Ate Carrots," 1980.
___

Panero pecks away by night on a cranky old Olivetti. Editors get wrinkled drafts punctuated with cigarette burns, coffee stains and scribbled corrections only they can decipher.

But he has limited access to the staff office he uses as a study. After all, he's just another resident, albeit a famous one, and a self-committed one, of the Psychiatric Hospital outside Las Palmas in Spain's Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa.

Home is a drab complex where patients doze on concrete benches in a weed-infested courtyard.

Panero, his clothes ragged and his body a hunched-over wreck, acknowledges his digs with a seemingly apologetic shrug. "This place is hell," he says, dragging on a butt that's part of a five-pack-a-day habit.

And, as if to set the record straight, he explains that he is not insane. In fact, he doesn't even believe in mental illness. "It's just an excuse for putting away people labeled as dangerous," he says.

Legions of writers, artists, musicians, scientists and others have suffered from depression or other mental disorders, including Marie Curie, Lord Byron, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Robert Schumann, Georgia O'Keeffe and Edgar Allan Poe.

One of the most commonly researched links is the one between creativity and anic-depression, or bipolar disorder, in which patients undergo wild mood swings that range from debilitating apathy and hopelessness to states of hyperactivity and euphoria.

Research suggests that in their up phase, people with bipolar disorder drop
the inhibitions that play a role in organizing thought processes and
experience rushes of mental associations. For writers, this can ignite a
creative spark and tremendous productivity.

Cases like Panero's — creativity entwined with schizophrenia, a brain disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions and an absence of social inhibition often mistaken for bad manners — are less commonly observed.....
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Panero grew up surrounded by words. His late father Leopoldo was a minor but respected poet with many literary friends; his older brother, Juan Luis, also is a poet. As a youngster, Panero was a prodigy, dazzling his parents by
reciting poetry as it came to his head before he knew how to write.

Little Leopoldo's performances in the book-lined study of the Panero apartment on Calle Ibiza in Madrid were so remarkable that family friends would bring tape recorders along, according to J. Benito Fernandez, the poet's biographer. What no one could expect back in those heady days was that as a young man Panero would end up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital two blocks down the street.

It was one of many such facilities he has inhabited since his first suicide attempt in 1968. Over the years, Panero was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has lived in asylums nonstop since 1986. He has never married and has no
children.

Panero began a recent interview, lunch and hike around Las Palmas in a chatty, jocular mood. He tells his American visitor he's never been to the United States but would love to go.

He flashes a largely toothless smile and in a tired, gravelly voice gives "West Side Story" his best shot in English: "I like to be in Amer-ee-ca."

But as the day wears on, Panero slips back and forth from bursts of lucidity to rambling, mumbling and barely intelligible stream of consciousness to abrupt silence. Rubbing his face and running his hands through his thinning,
gray hair, he seems unfathomably sad.

He is at his best when talking about poetry. His verse and discourse are dense with allusions to poetry in any of the languages he speaks or reads: Spanish, French, Italian and English. "My poems are a homage to the written page," he says.

He is asked about the source of his creativity, and his answer is brief: literature itself. "My father always said that in order to write you have to read," Panero said.

Of his gritty, obscure style, he is unapologetic. If roses aren't red nor violets blue, that's the reader's problem. "I like poetry that is impersonal and difficult," Panero says.

Nudge him and poetry positively spills out. Out of nowhere, a gush in Spanish from T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" or some other poem.

But stray from his favorite subject, his only one, really, and Panero strays even more. He becomes virtually impossible to follow. He says he lives on a far-flung island rather than on the Spanish mainland because a love-crazed nurse has been chasing him for years; his mother tried to kill him, he said.

He laughs. A high-pitched cackle.

Panero only sleeps at the hospital. Just about every morning he gets a day pass, takes a bus into town and whiles away the hours, mainly wandering the streets. Sometimes, he gives lectures at the university. With him always is
his trusty gym bag, crammed with books of poetry — Poe, John Keats and others. He's fiercely protective of it.

His favorite haunts are book stores. He insists on taking his visitor to one, rushes over to a shelf and points with pride. "Those are my books," he says. Five different tomes, one copy each.
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Panero's much-praised gift for imagery can be seen in a poem from a collection published in April 2000, "Theory of Fear":

"I am a nest of ash

"where birds gather

"seeking the manna of shade

"the arrow stuck in the poem

"the insect's kiss."

However, not everyone is impressed by him. Juan Antonio Masoliver, a poet, literary critic and Spanish literature professor at the University of Westminster in London, says Panero's verse is spotty. It can achieve great depth and beauty, then in the next breath turn anecdotal and banal, he says.

Masoliver said Panero has also grown repetitive over the years and lacks discipline. "He is a man with a lot of talent, but I think poetry requires more than that. It's a shame, because Panero has what you could call a genius
that practically no other Spanish poet has."

But the biggest problem with Panero's work, Masoliver said, is there's too much Panero in it.

"He plays the madman too much," Masoliver said. "He plays with being the main character in his poetry and the madness is, I think, too obvious."

That's a common complaint about Panero, even from people who admire his work — that he has accentuated his image as mentally ill, even as he denies being mentally ill. And he has pursued a life of drug use, heavy drinking and
socializing in the style of 19th-century French poets such as Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire. Panero quotes them right and left.

Manuel Desviat, a psychiatrist who once treated Panero, says the poet has been clever about making a sort of cottage industry out of being a poetic enfant terrible who lives for free in state-financed psychiatric hospitals.

Not that it's been a terribly lucrative or comfortable niche. Panero says royalties from his books are paltry and he lives off an orphan's pension and disability checks.

His current psychiatrist, Segundo Manchado, insisted that despite his illness, Panero could live independently and is free to leave the hospital whenever he wants.

But the poet stays put. He says he must. Who makes him?

"I don't know. Nobody. Them."

Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020403/ap_en_ot/wkd_tormented_poet_1


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