Overflow and expunge the skin. An approach to the poetry of Rafael Cadenas

Abstract

This article approaches some passages in the poetry of the Venezuelan writer Rafael Cadenas where dermal trip appears as a metaphor that retells his nomadic ancestry. In Cadenas the skin is the quintessential vehicle through which man knows, understands and engrosses the world and nature. This is a journey in which the poet exits himself. But Cadenas also speaks of a motionless inner travel through the dermis. Hence this reading of his poetry attempts to describe how the skin becomes the ‘space’ through which man overflows towards the outside: the nature, the world, but also the ‘bridge’ which allows the world of nature and man burst and conquer. Thus, overflow and expunge become two movements in crossed transit through the skin which never appear separately or independently.