This book contains previously unpublished material: the book Poems of another has eight poems found in various publications, plus a small set of interviews and recorded conversations.
“Poems of another, rather, exhibits the personal existence of the poet, traces of certain tensions between what Martínez called “writing” and other aspects of his life.”
Therefore although poems of another questions the personal authorship in more than one connection, it also establishes the conflict between the content of natural human existence and the task of writing. These texts were part of a monumental and unfinished project which roughly consisted of creating a series of books written by tremendously different authors. Apparently, Martínez intended to emulate – and exercise – the procedure of Fernando Pessoa, an outrageous genius of literature; to build an identity from the sum of identities, multiplying the self to the total disintegration.
” The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him”, once said Gustave Flaubert, master in the art of becoming invisible. Martinez goes even further, as it says in a poem in this book, his ambition is therefore not only to be another but also to “write the work of another”. Whether or not the author wanted to see his name and his photograph on the cover of this volume is uncertain.