After slogging through 350 pages of Raúl Zurita’s La Vida Nueva I just can’t take any more. It’s 500 pages of the same, poem after poem, rivers crossing oceans, oceans opening, up is down, down is up, rivers love each other, torrents, ice flows, the Andes, I don’t get it! I just don’t get it! [...]
Archive for the ‘Lista’ Category
Zurita Sucks
Posted in Lista on December 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Tulio Mora: Juntos y Revueltos
Posted in Lista on December 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In my post on Canto General, I made the observation that Latin American Socialist poetry tends to conflate the 500 years post conquest into a single narrative of oppression and resistance. Tulio Mora’s poetry follows this tendency. Cementerio General seems to be in part modeled after some of the sections of Canto General: particularly “La [...]
The Cuban Revolution: Two Views
Posted in Lista on December 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
It is interesting to read both Nicolás Guillén and Heberto Padilla right next to each other, as here we find two very distinct perspectives on the exact same event. The Cuban Revolution was, to sympathizers in Latin America, a beacon of hope. This is a country right under the nose of the United States which, over the [...]
Ernesto Cardenal Salmos: Liberation Theology and Time
Posted in Lista on November 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Neruda and Dalton: The art of Prophecy
Posted in Lista on November 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
The Avant Garde poets of the 1950’s and 1960’s
Posted in Lista on November 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Cesar Vallejo: Poetry Entrenched
Posted in Lista on November 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Ricardo Guiraldes: Conversations with God
Posted in Lista on November 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
JLB in BA
Posted in Lista on October 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The best part about picking Latin American poetry as a study topic is I get to read books like Jorge Luis Borges’ Fervor de Buenos Aires and legitimately refer to the activity as “working”…it’s “working” the way the guy who tests the ferris wheel at the carnival is “working”. Borges is one of my favourite poets [...]
Brazilian Poetry: Mario de Andrade
Posted in Lista on October 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In order to try and cover as much of Latin America as possible, I put two Brazilian poets on the list in spite of not knowing any Portuguese. Because I can speak and read Spanish (and French a little) I was able to read some of the works in their original language without relying too [...]
