Julieta Sbdar Kaplan is a poet born in Buenos Aires in 1993. She published the poetry books Demoliciones (2017, Eloísa Cartonera, Premio Nuevo Sudaca Border), Mandarinas (2022, Nebliplateada) and Poesía escolar (2026, Nebliplateada). She has participated in various anthologies, readings and festivals. She holds a Licentiate in Modern Letters from the University of Buenos Aires, a Master’s in Gender Studies from the University of Paris 8, and she is currently completing the PhD (UBA, Paris 8) with a CONICET doctoral fellowship. She also works as a teacher and translator. We present a sample of poems from Poesía escolar (Nebliplateada Editions, 2026), a book project that was selected to join the poetry clinic at the Haroldo Conti Cultural Memory Center and won the Buenos Aires Biennial of Young Art prize in 2023. A proposal whose title, in the words of Paula Jiménez España, reinforces the idea of those beginnings in which we were taught the learning of a language whose core, its jewel, is the sand of love and belonging. Poesía escolar is, above all, an ars poetica, a genre that thinks poetry with its own materials. And it is more than that. In its different possibilities, in the projection or appropriation of its utterances, with the rules that punctuate or liberate it, in its questions, in its erasure and its eternal return, a language that is utterly alive between these pages.
*****
Sentimental Poem
Eleven-syllable lines and alexandrines
in a blank notebook.
I will write with rhyme
a sentimental poem:
in love
enthusiastic
abandoned.
To love, to poetry
I enter through the participle:
of the past tense
its invariable form.
The participle
points to what has been,
but also gives shape
to what is being.
***
Marina Writes with Chalk
Marina writes with chalk: to explain
with words of this world
that departed from me, a ship carrying me.
Separates explain
from the rest of the verse,
leaving the infinitive
floating above the dark green.
***
The Years
What did I imagine, student
as I recited aloud
they have shadow, transparency,
weight, feathers, hair?
Will it be the same as I imagine now
when I transcribe from memory and in reverse:
they have hair, feathers, weight,
transparency, shadow?
Gradually the years
become lighter
transparent, shadows, nothing.
***
Green Marker on a Whiteboard
I jot down a literary topic
and I do not erase it.
Later, when
the math teacher
teaches limits
derivatives, functions
it will be read in the background
tempus fugit
semi-erased and loose:
empu f git.
The forgotten word
incomplete on the whiteboard
is corpse, is shadow, is dust
and it is nothing. It is the flight
but also that instant
in which the letter
with ink enters or remains
until the next hour
and the times, overlapped
neither advance nor are they lost.
***
We, Disrespectful
We, disrespectful
change the pronoun as we go.
We are the student and the teacher
and we spend our time talking.
In writing
as in class
distraction overtakes us,
we are in love:
for pure desire to converse
we raise the head of the poem
over and over again.
———————
Author: Julieta Sbdar Kaplan. Title: Poesía escolar. Publisher: Ediciones Nebliplateada.