******

Si tu estas en Nueva York
En nueva York no hay nadie mas
si tu no estas en Nueva York
En Nueva York no hay nadie.

These two poems take another break from political matters in order to focus on love, this time in terms of perspective.  In both poems, the beloved is placed against
the backdrop of an unidentified multitude.  Though many of Cardenal’s epigrams seek to extend the singular, individualistic voice of the poet in love into a more collective register, these do the opposite
by creating an irreconcileable breach between the collective and intimate.  The beloved is not a member of the collective, but in the eyes of the poet she is the only one who truly exists.

In the first poem “Tu eres sola entre las multitudes” Cardenal plays with the notion of being singular “eres sola” and being alone “estas sola”.  The use “ser” as the primary verb in the first stanza echoes this notion of singularity.  The beloved is unique in her existence just as the moon and sun also are.  It’s interesting that the second line breaks immediately after the world “luna”, creating an enjambment necessitated by the use of “son”.  “Son sola la luna/y el sol en el cielo”.  “Son” is a plural conjugation of “ser”, but by breaking the line so that “luna” and “sol” are separated from one another, the singularity of each is emphasized.  Though there are both a sun and moon in the sky, they are ontologically separated from one another, not unified.  Similarly the beloved is a unique being in this stanza, although spatially she may be found “among the multitudes”.

In the second stanza, the verb “estar” is used to displace the adjective “sola” from an ontological meaning (singular) to a positional one (alone).  The beloved yesterday was in a stadium full of people, but the poet found her at the moment of his entry “as if she were alone”.  The shift from “ser” to “estar” however, doesn’t alter the ontological nature of the beloved, but rather serves to reinforce it.  The fact that he spotted her immediately in a crowd of people is due to her singular nature.  The poet can find her as easily as he could find the sun in an empty sky, simply because there is only one.

This notion of the beloved as a “singular” being is picked up again in the second poem.  In this brief, four-line epigram Cardenal uses New York City as an imagistic shortcut, an visual and geographical icon to call to mind the idea of an immense, throbbing multitude of people against which the beloved potentially stands as the only one who truly exists.  What is interesting here is that the beloved isn’t actually described as in NYC.  The poem is written as a pair of conditional phrases,  “If you are in New York, in New York there is no one else./  If you are not in New York, in New York there isn’t anyone.”  The multitude of the city, like the multitude of the stadium in the previous poem do not exist in the eyes of the poet, it is only the beloved who does.  This seems to be a reversal of the tendencies of epigrams such as the Claudia poems, in which the individual love of the poet is collectivized to the point where the beloved ceases to exist. Here it is the collective which disappears, or ceases to matter.  The poet and his beloved are alone in a world built for themselves.

“De pronto suena en la noche una sirena”

This poem not only describes but actually imitates the sound of a police siren heard on the streets at night through the use of word repetition, assonances alternating vowel sounds, first “A” “U” “I” and “E”          

“El alarma larga, larga

el aullido lúgubre de la sirena

de incendio o de la ambulancia blanca de la muerte

como el grito de la cegua en la noche

que se acerca y se acerca sobre las calles

y las casas y sube y sube y baja

y crece y crece y se aleja

creciendo y bajando.  No es incendio ni muerte

es Somoza que pasa.

There is a pattern to this poem.  The poet hears the sound of the siren and begins to imagine what it could be.  Lines 1 and 2, as well as 5, 6 and 7 focus on the act of hearing through assonance and repetition.  Lines 3 and 4, attempt to put the sound into several different contexts, first a realistic, historicized one (de incendio y de la ambulancia blanca de la muerte) then a poetic/mythological one (como el grito de la cegua en la noche).  Thus while this is fundamentally an imagistic/sonic poem,  Cardenal also brings to it the thematic and political streams of the other poems.  La Cegua is once again mentioned as a point of comparison this time adding a second semantic layer to the word “sirena”.  La cegua is a type of “Siren” in the mythological sense, invading the dreams of the poet.   Just as in “Dueña por muchos años”  the Cegua/Siren represents the pale faced life-in-death .   The siren is described as potentially originating from “la ambulancia blanca de la muerte” reiterating the use of white and the Cegua herself as a sign of both life and death/corruption and eternity.    (indeed the image of an ambulance is somewhat ambiguous, in that ambulances either infer a life being saved or a life ending, Cardenal removes the former meaning however, by associating the ambulance with death alone).    Lines 8 and 9 return the poem to its proper context, by reaching a conclusion about the origin of the sound,  it is Somoza who is causing it  (cruising through the streets in one of his armored vehicles)  In a sense Cardenal is simultaneously associating and dis-associating Somoza with the Cegua.  He is causing the siren sound and indeed is associated with corruption and decay but he is not powerful enough to be the true harbinger of death (echoed in the line “no es incendio ni muerte”).

In the transition from waking thought to dream, the beloved transforms from a living creature to a mythological one “La cegua”,  one of the manifestations of the Devil in Nicaraguan folklore.  La cegua appears as a beautiful young girl to men walking alone at night in order to tempt them in to picking her up.  When they do, her face transforms into that of the skeleton of a horse covered in rotting flesh and the men either die of fear or are carried off to her lair where they are tormented to madness.  Here the comparison of the beloved to a “Cegua”  is one of life-in-death, in which death itself remains in a kind of intemporal stasis,  in an eternal state of corruption without actual death.  (indeed one of the contradictions of the Devil is that while representing  death, corruption and contingency, he is also eternal).  The “Cegua/beloved” is a “lepra, lechuza luna”  “leprous, milky moon”  trapped between the two temporal poles of contingency (leprousness and corruption) and eternity (eternal return symbolized by both the moon and milk).  This position presents a torment for the poet.  (interestingly Neruda in his Residenicia poems is also tormented by erotic love as a kind of death that does not die, but exists intemporally even as it fills him with a sense of his own fleshly corruption.  Alain Sicard discusses this in great detail, comparing the intemporal love of “residencia” to the temporal, historicized vision of love seen in Neruda’s later poems).

In the last line, however, the poet triumphs over La cegua through the act of forgetting by reiterating love’s contingency.  Here the poet states that even the memory of love is contingent, so while the beloved may have thought to escape oblivion by remaining in the poet’s dreaming mind, he reminds her that she has ceased to exist even there.   Love’s contingency brings a sense of relief and triumph over evil.   The religious implication in this poem is very powerful, as erotic love, like La cegua is only capable of manifesting illusions and dreams which eventually pass away.

cuando están en flor los malinches en Managua

Solo este mes dan flores, en los demás dan vainas

y el amor que se fue ya no volverá otra vez.

“Nuestro Amor” relates thematically to the poems that precede it, particularly “Yo no canto a la defensa de stalingrado”, “Recibe estas rosas costarricences Myriam” and “Todavia recuerdo”, the poet continues with the theme of love and contingency.  As with the previous poem a single, fleeting moment in time is evoked and frozen within the flow of time.  Love, as before, is a primarily contingent matter, doomed to  end and disappear.  This is in contrast to the temporality of nature which is circular.  (It’s interesting to note that in Kristeva’s exploration of female subjectivity and time, circular and monumental temporality are intrinsically linked to one another, as repetition becomes a metonymic sign of eternity.)    The first two lines establish the frozen moment in which love is born, set against the backdrop of the flowering malinche.   As in “recibe estas rosas” a flower is used as a sign of both contingency and love.  Instead of the rose, the European Renaissance sign of tempus fugit, however, we are given a flower that is native to Nicaragua, one which figures in Nicaraguan folklore and popular expression:

“But the trees most celebrated in song are the malinches. Malinche, flower of May, red with blood.
There is in that symbol a double ambiguity that makes its meanings multiple. La Malinche—Hernán Cortés’ woman/interpreter, who witnessed at the side of the conqueror the torture of Cuauhtemoc and the fall of the gods of Tenochtitlán—is, in her original land (Mexico), synonymous with La Chingada, the raped woman. Traitor or victim? And in Nicaragua the old military man Mascafierro repeats what he heard from his grandmother: “Marriage is like the malinche tree: one month of flowers and eleven of vainas.” The vaina of Malinche: bearer of seeds and life/ synthesis of all that is constraints and complaints.”

Envio

Contingency, along with betrayal and duplicity, is another defining element of malinche.  Malinches are famous precisely because their flowering is brief, a splendor of red colour which lasts one month and is later sealed up in pods.   Indeed contingency and betrayal are conceptually linked to one another, as a betrayer’s pledge of fidelity has its own time limit.   In the poem, the love that flourishes, in spite of its beauty,  is brief possibly due to a betrayal on the part of the beloved.  The promise which flowered during that May ecstasy of bold red disappears as quickly as it appears.  What is interesting about this poem is that the malinche’s own fugacity is more temporally stable than that of the beloved’s heart.  The malinche may flower only once a year for 30 days, but it flowers every year during the same month for the same 30 days.  The two middle lines of the poem echo this idea by describing the plant in the present tense “Cuando están en flor los malinches en Nicaragua”  “Solo este mes dan flores, en los demás dan vainas”.  By using the present tense here Cardenal describes not something that is occurring in one frozen instant in time, but something which is both in the poet’s immediate present (also seen in the use of the demonstrative “este”, instead of “ese”, suggesting that the malinches are also in flower as the poem is being written…literally “only this month do they sprout flowers” ) and which is a general condition and trait of the flower, something it tends to do.    This is then contrasted to the love between the poet and the beloved which “se fue” “has gone” and will not return again “ya no volverá otra vez”.

I think there is also the possibility of once again carrying this reading into the question of the nation by the use of the malinche flower as a national symbol, though this may be an interpretive stretch.  In “Recibe” we saw the roses as being given a nationalist designation, and this national designation containing with it a sort of backhanded slap against Somoza.  The malinche-as-betrayer-as-contingent might also be another coded reference to Somoza.  Part of the betrayal of La Malinche was, in Mexican folklore, her preference of the foreign over the native.  Somoza is himself a type of Malinche, who sold himself and Nicaragua out to American interests.  Somoza was literally the betrayer of Nicaragua when he ordered the assassination of Augusto Sandino.  In another poem in Hora Cero Cardenal cites the supposed statement of FDR that “Somoza is a sonofabitch but he’s ours”.  Similarly, the malinche, like the rosas costarricences are brief.  Somoza’s regime will end.

As I read into Epigramas I’m starting to get the sense that temporality is one of the main avenues through which Cardenal brings together love and national concerns.  His understanding of both might be summed up perfectly by the writer of Ecclesiastes “All is vanity and a chase after wind”.  Love provides no sense of permanence or commitment for the poet.  The beloved is often as untrustworthy and vain as Somoza himself.  Love affects the poet on the intimate level, while the condition of the nation affects him publicly,  both Somoza and the beloved have the ability to cause the poet suffering.

After “Yo no canto” and “Tú has trabajado” we come to three poems which focus on love primarily, with no reference to the Somoza regime whatsoever.  This seems to be a purposeful maneuver on the poet´s part.  Having belittled and willfully rejected monumentalist  political ambition in the name of love, the poet then goes on to commit the three following epigrams to reflecting on a love that is, as a continuous slap in Somoza´s face, fundamentally contingent, temporal, due to pass or having passed already exists only in the poet´s memory.

In “Todavía recuerdo” this contingency is expressed by focusing on a single moment caught in the flow of time which the poet recognizes as having already passed. The poet constructs this moment as a scene of both visual and auditory elements, the full moon glimpsed between radio wires, the sound of a distant radio, yellowish streetlights, the sound of a distant radio, a clock tower striking eleven, and the vision of gold light streaming from the open door of the poet´s beloved.  The full import of this scene is left unspoken in the poem.  The poet´s reasons for “remembering” this scene are never explored, what we are left with is a Poundian imagistic flash in which the moment is caught by the poet in its passing.

Monumentality and contingency play with each other in this poem.   Time that is distant, flowing in the past is also simultaneously present due to its existence in the poet´s memory.  The phrase that opens the poem “todavía recuerdo” collapses time.  The act of remembering, or meditating on the past,  takes place in the present, echoed by the temporal adverb “todavía” meaning “still”.  Michael  Swan´s “Practical Guide to English Uses” describes “still” as “used to say that something is in the present, not the past – it has, perhaps surprisingly, not finished”.   “Recuerdo”  uses a present tense verb to describe the act of reflecting on the past, drawing it into the present. The ability to bring past into present is another instance of the poet drawing on his privileged relationship to monumentality in order to enshrine contingency.

Related to this, If time is simultaneously contingent and monumental in this poem, it is also simultaneously stopped and moving.  The only verb other than “Recuerdo” which occurs in this poem is used to describe the clock striking eleven.  In this case the poet uses the imperfect tense “La torre de La Merced que daba aquellas once” .  It´s interesting that the imperfect tense is used in is what is essentially a preterit  moment.  A clock marking the hour is generally something instantaneous and quick:  “the clock struck eleven”.  Cardenal expands this moment, however, by using what functions in Spanish as a progressive tense:  “the clock was striking eleven”.  By using the imperfect Cardenal emphasizes time as something in motion, in progress, even as it is captured in the frame of the poem.  (another temporal reading might suggest that this moment was not a singular time-freeze, but a repetition of a scene enacted over and over again, which the poet remembers clearly because he has done it many times. “Daba” could also mean “would strike eleven” or “used to strike eleven”.   Circular temporality would tie this poem into the following one).  The notion of frozen and moving time, besides related to imagism also recalls one of the motifs of 17^th Century baroque visual art.  John Rupert Martin in his study of the period notes that visual art tried to capture the sense of temporal contingency, which the Copernican revolution had provoked, by representing its subjects in a dynamic state, frozen in motion.  Baroque art, responding to the crisis in the human understanding of the universe as the result of Copernicus´ discovery of the earth and the bodies of the universe in existing in a constant state of motion, nursed an obsession with the contingent time, mortality, mutability and the idea that all things will pass and become dust.  A moment in time caught in it´s passing, tells of its passing and of the sure fate that awaits all human beings.   Similarly the enlightenment´s slow dismantling of the role of religion in human knowledge began calling into question the given idea of eternity.   The realization that “all things will pass” could no longer be counterbalanced with surety by the idea that humanity would not.  For Cardenal, however,  as in the other half of Christ´s phrase “my words will not pass away”.   Poetry is intemporal.

Yo no canto a la defensa de Stalingrado  (negation)

Ni la campaña de Egipto                                (negation)

Ni el desembarco de Sicilia                           (negation)

Ni la cruzada del Rhin del Gral. Eisenhower:  (negation)

Yo solo canto a la conquista de una muchacha  (affirmation)

Ni con las joyas de la joyería Morlock   (n.)

Ni con perfumes de Dreyfus                       (n.)

Ni con Orquídeas dentro de su caja de mica  (n.)

Ni con Cadillac                                                   (n.)

Sino solamente  con mis poemas la conquisté (a.)

Y ella me prefiere, aunque soy pobre, a todos los millones de Somoza.

Formally speaking, this poem divides nicely into both streams:  the first conjunction expressing the first, the second expressing the second, and the final verse synthesizing the two under the rubric of disinterested love.

In the first conjunction the poet does two things simultaneously:  he denies the role of the poet as the official voice of history whose purpose is to glorify large-scale events.  At the same time, the poet introduces contemporary temporal markers into a poetic structure which would normally be occupied by references to great battles of antiquity.   As noted in the previous epigram “recibe estas rosas costarricences Myriam”  Cardenal uses the poetic form as a means of collapsing time by utilizing the format and themes of the Roman love lyricist Sextus Propertius and introducing into it references  to 3 major historical battles which took place during WWII:  The defense of Stalingrad, The allied invasion of Sicily and Eisenhower’s advance on the Rhine, all of which simultaneously occurred within the lifetime of the poet.  If we take the fourth battle–the “campaña de egipto”  as a reference to the French Campaign in Egypt during the Napoleonic wars.  Then one can see very clearly Cardenal’s  attempt to create an equivalence between events in his time, major events in history and the world of Propertius. Time has essentially collapsed.  The poet is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, singing of love in a world populated by the monumentalist ambitions of war-generals, imperators and dictators. The act of legend-making, of serving the construction of a monumental (and ultimately dehumanizing ) capital H history is roundly refused by the poet, in four anaphoric beginning with “ni” (nor), while the affirmation of love, is given a line of it’s own at the very center of the poem.  In this sense, love sets itself in opposition to both historical monumentalism and political ambition.   In “Recibe” we saw how love itself becomes simultaneously fleeting and intemporal, contingent and monumental due to its emotionally fickle nature and it’s role as the motivator for poetry.  In “Yo no canto a la defensa de Stalingrado” love almost acts as a kind of temporal goad to monumentalist ambitions.  The poet will apply his intemporal privilege to hallowing a contingent and simple reality, the conquest of a girl, and not to the monumentalist cause of enshrining great events.

This goading of monumentalism and ambition is carried into the next stanza, the second adversative conjunction which unlike the first places the subordinate clause, composed of four anaphoric lines, first, and the main clause at the end.   In the anaphoric lines which make up the subordinate clause, the goad is both economic  and temporal.   Cardenal refers to contemporary brands and entities which act as signifiers of wealth and prestige in his own time, Morlock, Dreyfus, Cadillac, entities which Somoza uses as a means to attain not only privilege but monumentality.  Somoza fancies himself a millionaire whose wealth automatically confers political and temporal dominion.  Once again one cannot fail to notice the parallel drawn between Somoza and the Roman imperators whose monumentalist ambitions involved both public demonstrations of lavish wealth as well as military glory.  The poet, however, demonstrates that the conquest of the young girl is not done through riches, through perfumes, cars, jewelry or orchids, but rather through poems.   For all the political power that Somoza boasts of through his wealth, for all the military glory that the United States claims, neither is able to do something as simple as attract the attention of a young girl who responds only to simple poems from a pure-hearted man without a cent to his name.

Tú has trabajado veinte años

This goading of Somoza’s ambitions is taken up again in the following epigram, addressed directly to the dictator.  Cardenal sets up a contrast between the people and the dictator, once again dividing the epigram neatly into a four-line adversative conjunction.  The first two lines describe the dictator’s activities, the second describe that of the people and their negation of him as a model.  The dictator is described as someone who “has worked for twenty years to make twenty million pesos” while the people “would give twenty million pesos to not work as you have done”.   As in the previous epigram, and in other “money” epigrams, economics provides a convenient shortcut into the motivation of the poem’s subject.  In “Ella se vendió a Kelly y Martínez Cia Ltda.”  The poet’s beloved sells herself for expensive gifts, ignoring the poet’s supplications and revealing a base and ambitious character.  In this epigram, Somoza’s work is primarily motivated by political ambition, and the activities he engages in are distasteful to the people, who would prefer to pay money NOT to do the things that Somoza did.

Recibe estas rosas costarricences Myriam is the first of a pair of Epigrams in which the contrast of temporalities is used.  The epigram which follows “Yo no canto a la defensa de Stalingrado”  compares twentieth century battles, ancient battles and the regime of Somoza and places the pure desire of the lover in sharp relief next to them.  In “Recibe” Myriam the beloved is given a bouquet of “Costa Rican” roses and a book of love poems.  The roses represent contingent, immanent temporality, the poems transcendental intemporality.  The poet gives her roses not only as a reminder of her beauty but also as a sign of tempus fugit.

Mis versos te recordarán que los rostros

de las rosas se parecen al tuyo; las rosas

te recordarán que hay que cortar el amor,

y que tu rostro pasará como Grecia y Roma

In these four lines Cardenal sets up a chain effect.  The poems exist to link the face of the beloved with the roses, while the roses exist to express the idea of death, contingency and temporality.  This contingency not only applies to the life of the beloved, but also to the nation, expressed in both the references to Greece and Rome, but also the national designation applied to the roses themselves.  Costa Rica, (and implicitly Nicaragua) is linked to the ancient empires of Greece and Rome, to the beloved through the contingent nature of the roses.  It’s interesting to note that Cardenal seems to taking notes directly from the Renaissance poetic playbook, where the rose is frequently used to signify not only beauty, but also tempus fugit, the fleeting, temporal nature of all earthly things including youth and beauty.  It is also interesting to note that this is the first of two epigrams which mentions Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s neighbor.  In the second poem “En Costa Rica cantan los carreteros” the poet uses Costa Rica to refer indirectly to Nicaragua, by describing the former as a country where “el presidente camina a pie”, in other words the democratic Costa Rican president can walk calmly through the streets of peaceful San José, while the Nicaraguan tyrant Somoza must be driven around in an armoured car surrounded by guards.   This may be the same type of play which Cardenal is making in “recibe”, couching in his love-verse to Myriam an attack against the regime which suggests that it, like Greece and Rome and Costa Rica, will pass away.

Another interesting element of this poem is how the roses also refer to love’s own temporal contingency.  Love in this poem doesn’t belong to the intemporal realm but rather the temporal one.

“Cuando no haya más amor ni rosas de Costa Rica

Recordarás Myriam, este triste canción”

Because there will come a time (pardon the pun) when love ceases to exist, it is as temporal.  It’s only claim to intemporality lies in its ability to inspire the poet to write verse.  In this sense poetry itself is the one true intemporal force, all other things pass away.  It is poetry, after all, which allows Cardenal to collapse time, to bring Greece and Rome into Nicaragua and vice-versa.  Poetry is the thing which remains when all else is gone.  Here we see a discrete example of Octavio Paz’ notion of poetry’s simultaneous position as both inside and outside of time.  This intemporal nature of poetry also allows Cardenal to conceive of it as the perfect tool against the regime, a consciousness which seems to underlie the concept of poetry as outlined in the epigramas.  We see it in the Claudia poems where Cardenal warns his beloved that she will be remembered for all eternity for having loved him and inspired him to write about her.  As the focus of the poems becomes oriented more towards the regime of Somoza, Cardenal begins to apply the same concept towards attacking and undermining the regime’s activities.  It’s interesting to read “Somoza desveliza una estatua de Somoza en el estadio Somoza” in this context, a poem in which the dictator attempts to access the intemporal realm by creating a monument to himself, one which the people will eventually destroy when he dies.

So how does the role of love fit into this? as we will see in later epigrams, love constantly pushes the poet to capture it in verse, which also provides the means for him to capture the condition of the nation.

The epigram is set up as a contrast between the poetic speaker’s love and political experience with three lines addressing the former, and two lines addressing the later. The former produces the type of emotional charge which the latter lacks. The poet is able to confront the agents of Somoza without fear, but passing the house of his beloved causes him to “turn pale” while the gaze of his beloved causes him to shake. This contrast of emotional states, besides echoing the love/war theme of the classical epigram is also reminiscent of Spanish Renaissance poetry, in particular the sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega, in which the warrior poet contrasts his strength in battle with his weakness before the gaze of the beloved. Indeed, way in which the binary conditions are laid out reflects somewhat the Petrarchan sonnet form which Garcilaso originally adapted into the Spanish language, in which an eight line opening is fleshed out by an intense six line conclusion. In this five-line epigram the three-line opening sets the revolutionary scene, while the two line conclusion finishes it, presenting the contrast.
The contrast between the bravery he experiences in his revolutionary activities and the trepidation in his romantic ones also reiterates love’s often difficult and tense relationship with political reality which Rowe describes. Love is a humanizing factor here, but one which leaves the revolutionary vulnerable and introduces the element of contingency and uncertainty into a monolithic and stable public identity. Here love isn’t the banner the revolutionary carries with him into battle, but rather the thing which could get him in trouble, which causes him fear and even dangerous distraction. This is something which Rowe identifies as problematic in “me contaron”. In the earlier epigram, love’s emotional tumultuousness leads the poetic speaker into a reckless action which lands him in prison. Here it leaves him open to fear, a situation which if he is imprisoned could be used against him.

Rather than confront the you for preferring another man over him, he directs his anger at a much stronger adversary, the Government. In the context of the poem, the poetic speaker’s anti-government article is relegated to the sphere of jilted love. It presents the speaker as a coward at love who “acts out” against authority without political conviction; the I does not communicate what his article protests. It is clear, though, that gossip about the you drives him to seek seclusion in his room and then to journalistic writing. And whereas the literary effects of his threats to the lover must await the passage of time, the anti-government article’s outcome is quick. http://collaborations.denison.edu/istmo/n11/articulos/cardenal.html

Nevertheless, it’s also possible to interpret this poem as the seed of political engagement on part of the lyrical speaker. When read in isolation, the political action described in this poem seems to be little more than a narcissistic temper tantrum. Read syntactically, this poem is the first point on what Rowe calls the Whitmanian Continuum, in which “that what one cares about [stretches] continuously from the realm of the individual to social and political life” (92).
This poem has an important position within the syntax of the text. This is the first poem in which the poet directly refers to any political reality. Prior to this, politics enters only as a kind of Adornian inversion, in which the frustrated lover expresses his social alienation. Here, the lover’s issues with the beloved extend into political action and repercussion. The poet upon hearing his beloved is with enamored of another turns his frustration towards the government and writes an article against it. The genre shift in this poem’s third line from poetic verse to journalistic writing echoes the thrust of the text, as love concerns begin to shift towards the political. From this point on, the poems will begin to address love only in conjunction with the political reality of the Somoza regime. Love will cease to be merely a personal and subjective matter and become a metonymic indicator of the condition of the nation.

 However, as evident in my last post, I find the narcissism of the poetic I in Epigramas grating.  In a sense I think I am starting to agree more with Ariel Dorfman´s view of the subjective element in Epigramas as appealing to a more bourgeois element.  Cardenal attempts to, in Rowe’s words, invert the classical use of the love epigram which celebrated love and pleasure as ends in themselves rather than as experiences that extend into and reflect a collective reality.  The problem, however, is that the “I” voice remains both exclusive and excluding.  The voice of the other is not heard in spite of Cardenal´s pretensions at moving the epigram form into a more collective register.  The poetic speaker’s ego is impermeable and in no way shaped by his interaction with the beloved or with the people.  His only discourse or intercourse with them is to stand on stacks of his own writing and shout in their faces I AM A POET AND I’M BETTER THAN SOMOZA, BETTER THAN ANY WOMAN WHO REJECTS ME AND BETTER THAN ALL OF YOU.  

 This type of narcissistic monovocality, the insistence on the poet as a prophetic and sanctified human being, as one with a privileged relationship to art, history, love and language, seems upon reflection to be a remnant of modernismo which shines through in Cardenal’s early work in spite of the pared down anti-lyrical style of language which he uses.   Modernismo is essentially a literary style which celebrated a singular poetic voice, a member of an educated class who steeped himself in European sensibilities and aestheticism.  He is chosen by Art to be its disciple, to beautify and elevate the world.  One might imagine modernismo as an axis upon which the Artist stands, gazing upward.  At the pinnacle rests Art, at the foundation Love, and The Environs (society).  Neither love nor the Environs exist outside of the reach of Art, and both only reach the pinnacle of Art by means of the Artist. 

This is Cardenal’s approach in Epigramas.  It is not a book about love or politics, although love and politics do perform interventions throughout.   It is a book about an Artist and his Art, the disciple and deity to which both Love and The Environs are called to submit.