I met Chris Tănăsescu aka Margento for the first time fifteen years ago when I invited him to take part in Le Printemps des Poetès, organized in Romania by poet and literary translator Linda Maria Baros in many schools and cultural institutions at the beginning of the spring. We went to The German High school in Bucharest were I had studied many years ago. And the students were totally taken aback by the original performance of poetry, poetry done on the spot, not read from a paper.
I found out about his group Margento that defined itself years ago as “a crucible of arts, a reunion of poetry, painting and music which stem out of each other, nurture, inspire each other”. The Margento group had international success: being awarded prizes abroad. The very recent poetical Gesamtkunstwerk was born.
Many years have passed and Chris has been to several countries and taught extensively at universities: Vietnam, France, USA, Canada, Belgium and now in the Republic of Ireland. Chris has developed a new art of expressing himself that stunned me: it is a melange of poetry, combined with music of his liking and the continuous zapping simultaneously through different ideas. Zapping, until he reaches the feeling, the word, the phrase. Until he finds himself again and utters the words reverberating in musical tunes. I have tried to understand the lyrical music in contrast to the continuous search on internet of different ideas, philosophical, political, linked to superior mathematics etc. woven onto images, recurrent verses, to and fro, as if looking for closure. As if trying to find the harmony that elopes him, at times.
Music is so important, so fundamental to Chris that a song might get him into an exuberant state of feeling that compels him to utter the words and think thoroughly ideas. Music can induce a reasoning stripped of any lyric, at times.
Zapping the texts is so important because, at times, Chris is choosing a word, a sentence and highlights it stops several seconds, making us discover by ourselves what he intends to impart us: thus, he compels us read instead of him the texts. We become, at times, the co-performer of his poems.
As a testament to his troubadour poet mission inherited many centuries ago, he writes in English, French, Dutch, ”trespassing” the border of languages nonchalant as his feelings impose upon him. Listening again, watching again his #GraphPoem, I got the feeling that Chris has developed – as a matter of fact – the way our brain works and becomes tender or tough with ideas, feelings, music, harmony, fears, love and defeat, poetry.
Because poetry can be anything we feel strongly about and think fiercely of.
