50 Years Down the Drain

Portilla literally means porthole in Spanish, the small window in a ship from which a sailor can stare from his tiny confined cabin out to the vastness of the sea. Portilla is a style of poetry that exploded in popularity in the late seventies in Madrid, Spain, during La Movida Madrileña — that movement of free expression that erupted after the death of Franco, when young men and women were finally free to express their anger at the dictatorship that had confined them for so long, and finally free to explore sexual themes and practices that had been forbidden to them.

Robert Rahula was living in Madrid during those years, presenting his poems at poetry readings in bars and coffee shops, crafting his art, and developing his own unique style of Portilla poetry, a style that accepts human alienation as a norm and deals directly with both sexuality and death. For over fifty years, Robert has continued to write and publish. His poetic output during his life has been nothing less than astonishing. The poems in this definitive collection are not arms-length intellectualisms, but poetic transcriptions of real life, with all its free-flowing polyamorous energy, its ecstasy, eventual deception, separateness, and pointless decay.