Avant-Garde Poetry and Politics

It seems that not a few of the critics who try to characterize the major themes of 20th century Latin American poetry are fond of dividing poets into two separate groups, or what Enrique Foffani calls a “regimen bipolar” : teh avant-garde poets who explored art as itself, and the socially committed poets who wrote poems about political issues and historical events.  We see this, for example in Hugo Achúgar´s 1989 article ”La nueva producción literaria latinoamericana”  which Foffani cites as a debating point:

Hasta comienzos de los setenta era plausible sostener que la poesía hispanoamericana se repartia, fundamental, aunque no exclusivamente en dos líneas: Una que podría rastrearse hacia atrás en Baudelaire y que podría caracterizarse como el discurso poético de la modernidad con figuras como Octavio Paz o Pablo Neruda de Residencia en la tierra, y otra que apostando a la vivencia y a lo social se apoyaba en lo que quizás podria llamar “realismo referencial” que tiene entre otras figuras al otro Neruda, Cardenal, Cisneros, y Gelman. Si bien existían todas las gamas, matices y tendencias o experimentos: ambas líneas parecen seguir compartiendo la hegemonia popular de las ochenta. ( ctda en Foffani 154)

This notion of the “regimen bipolar” is echoed by William Rowe, whose 2000 study Poets of Contemporary Latin America seeks to stake out a place in the debate for those poets who challenge both how poems are read and what they are capable of doing, begins by reiterating the same idea:

For poets writing in Latin America since the 1950´s there have been two main inheiritances to be used, modified or abandoned:  the work of the avant-gardes and the tradition of politicized poetry.  But whereas the latter is widely known and associated in particular with the name of Pablo Neruda, the general reader is less likely to come across the contributions of Latin American poets to the avant-garde tradition of experimentation with language and form.  (Rowe 2)

As I dig into some of the other research of more contemporary studies such as those by Nelly Richard, as well as some of the political issues surrounding poetry as a genre, I am starting to get the sense that this is a false dichotomy and perhaps the product of mutual prejudices among poets of the period, the more partisan ones who see the art-for art´s sake philosophy as politically reactionary (I´m thinking in particular of not only Neruda, but of the Padilla case, in which a poet who questioned the use of poetry in defense of the Cuban revolution was himself accused of being counterrevolutionary), and also amongst those who saw political engagement in poetry as a sacrifice of artistic vision or integrity (Octavio Paz and Padilla for example).  

Looking at the characterizations of the avant-gardism which is applied by these two critics calls into question the very nature of this dichotomy.  According to Rowe, the avant-garde is defined as a movement dedicated to testing the boundaries of language and form.  According to Achúgar, the art for art´s sake poets trace  in an unbroken line back to modernism and the influences of Baudelaire.  Addressing Achúgar´s definition one finds, however, a problem.  The notion that the poets of Baudelairean extraction defined themselves by retreating into the poetic discourse of modernity.  It´s worthwhile to note, however, that neither Octavio Paz, the Neruda of Residencia or the poets of modernismo, who influenced these later two, were completely apolitical or disconnected from the social.  The poets of modernismo, for example, often used poetry as a way of expressing their utopian ideals for a better society.  Beverley and Zimmerman make the important point about Rubén Darío that he was writing as much out of frustration for the persistence of Feudalism in Nicaragua and expressing his desire for Central America to move into a more liberalized and cosmopolitan world.  Leopoldo Lugones, in his prologue to Lunario Sentimental expresses a distinctively social role for the poet and artist as an agent for social cultivation and improvement.  Neruda, in Residencia, often writes reactively against what Adorno refers to as the ”reification of the world and the dominion of merchandise”  (Walking Around, for example).  

Going back to Rowe´s idea of the avant-garde as defined by the “experimentation with language and form” one questions whether socially engaged poets aren´t also seen to be doing that, or whether many poets who experiment with language and form aren´t doing so out of a desire to deconstruct the oppressive structure of society through language.  Nelly Richard brings up continuous examples of the latter activity through the actions of both poets and artists of the CADA movement in Chile during the dictatorship years, whose boundary-breaking projects called into question the monolithic discourse of both the military regime and those who were defeated by it.  Many socially committed poets experimented with language at the structural level as well,  Ernesto Cardenal´s “Exteriorismo” movement was based on demolishing the dominion of lyricism over poetic creation and introducing the common elements of speech into poetry (using “vos” instead of “tú” for example)  Antipoetry, initiated by Nicanor Parra was a deconstructive effort both on the political and linguistic level (especially where those two dovetailed as in the use of highly emotive ideological language).

 

Rowe´s definition of avant-gardism is a good one, but it doesn´t necessarily have to imply a disconnect from the political realm.   To go deeper into the philosophy of it, it might be possible to say that the very act of testing the boundaries of language and meaning is inheirently political.  Language is a social phenomenon.