Ernesto Cardenal Salmos: Liberation Theology and Time

At its heart, liberation theology is all about time. It involves taking the story of the Gospels out of the intemporal realm of narrative myth, and introducing it into the realm of history. By myth, I do not mean to imply that the Christian story is false or made up, but rather that its function [...]

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Neruda and Dalton: The art of Prophecy

In my last post I suggested four possible modalities of language which political poetry uses to express the process of history: Lyricism, reportage, heteroglossia and prophecy. Looking at some of the other poets on the list I would modify this theory a little. I would divide lyricism into two distinct types: the subjective lyric and [...]

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Poetry as an act of service

Leopoldo Lugones’ prologue to Lunario Sentimental provides a strong focal point with which to link the various diverse poetries of the 20th Century. In spite of their different aesthetic approaches and themes, each of these poets in his own way views poetry as an act of service to aesthetics, to language, to society, to humanity [...]

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Two Chilean Poets Post 1973

Gonzalo Rojas and Oscar Hahn represent two distinct tendencies in Chilean poetry which one could see from the late seventies onward. The 1973 coup which ushered in the bloody dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet had a very marked effect on Chilean literature, bifurcating it into two camps which each dealt discursively with the question of history [...]

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From 1969…

A little bit of everything…
José Emilio Pacheco: No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo.
Pacheco’s text fits very well on either list, and initially he was on the second list dealing with political poetry but got shuffled around. Much of the poems in this work are comments on and reflections of history and the role of [...]

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The Avant Garde poets of the 1950’s and 1960’s

 
The massive exodus of leftist intellectuals from Spain to Latin America in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War had a huge effect on both society and culture in the Americas from the 1940’s onward. It was during the three decades between 1945 and 1975 that many social revolutions took place (or at least were [...]

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Brazilian Poetry 2: Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, although considered one of the later figures of Brazilian Modernism also fits quite well into the much broader tradition of “populist poetry” comparable to figures such as Walt Whitman. Thomas Colchie, who edits a collection of English translations of Drummond’s work also makes the comparison between the Brazilian poet and Pablo [...]

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Cesar Vallejo: Poetry Entrenched

Cesar Vallejo’s book Espana aparta de mi este caliz isn’t considered one of his most acclaimed works of poetry. Written in a final burst of poetic fever at the end of his life at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Espana was published posthumously with another work entitled Poemas humanos.  Translator Clayton Eshman considers Espana as an extension of this earlier work in which the Peruvian [...]

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Huidobro: Language at the Speed of Light

Well, we leave behind the world of coherence and launch full-force into the nebulous realm of the avant-garde with Huidobro’s Altazor o un viaje en paracaidas.  Avant garde poetry is good for showing what language can do (though not necessarily what it should).  In the case of Huidobro its an attempt to turn language from mimesis to [...]

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Ricardo Guiraldes: Conversations with God

Guiraldes’ slim volume Poemas misticos almost seems as though it should never have been published.  This is not a value judgment against the quality of the work, but rather because reading it I felt as though I were eavesdropping on someone else’s intimate prayers.  These seven poems were written in 1926 while the author, best known [...]

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