There is consternation among readers and writers in the Catalan language over the death, a few days ago, of Jaume Pont, one of the most prominent poets of his generation. Pont was born in 1947, like Josep Piera, another of the great poets in the Catalan language of the last decades: because of these two deaths, it is appropriate to think of 2026 as a disastrous year. A beautiful photo circulates on social media in which both appear, Piera and Pont, at the former's house in La Drova, about to embrace, happy to enjoy the pleasure of true friendship. They were masters in the art of writing verses and in the art of living, and they made this clear, without even setting out to do so, in everything they did. Their condition as “peripheral” (Jaume Pont was from Lleida and Josep Piera from Beniopa, in the very fertile region of La Safor) was not just a fact about their respective places of birth: poetry, high poetry, is always a peripheral matter, and this does not mean that it does not interest anyone (quite the contrary: it interests a multitude, it interests the crowds) but rather that it is not monetized, it is not venal, it is not exchanged in euros or dollars, and, for that reason, those who need to quantify everything and put a price on everything find it suspicious.

Four of the pillars of the poetry of Jaume Pont i Ibáñez (Lleida, 1947-2026) have been love, madness, chance, and death. Having died this Thursday at the age of 79, Pont, who held a degree in philosophy and letters, made a name for himself with Límit(s) in 1976, published by the emblematic Llibres del Mall, and not long after he founded and directed the influential magazine Quaderns de Ponent (1979-1983), which helped to disseminate and critically value the work of creators from the Terres de Lleida such as Maria-Mercè Marçal,, Josep Maria Sala-Valldaura, and Pere Rovira.