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Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
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This essay argues that there is a divide in LGBT studies on Hispanic writers, between those researchers who map the portrayal of gay culture in the work of writers who are known to be or to have been gay and those critics who prefer to produce innovative queer readings of canonized figures. A number of test-cases are studied, including the life and work of the Mexican, Xavier Villarrutia (1903-1950), the Peruvian, César Moro (1903-1956), the Puerto Rican Ramos Otero (1948-1990), the Argentines Néstor Perlongher (1949-2002) and Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), the Uruguayans Cristina Peri Rossi (b. 1941) and Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004). The essay concludes with a discussion of homoaffectivity in César Vallejo’s poem “Alfonso, you are looking at me, I see…”
This essay analyses various examples of poetry written in Quechua (as the indigenous Andean language is known in Perú and Bolivia) and Kichwa (or Quichua in Ecuador) and begins by underscoring how colonial linguistic and cultural hegemonic structures and policies, together with the intense chaos, violence, and demographic collapses that characterized the colonial period throughout the Americas, has resulted in the loss of many indigenous language manuscripts and voices, whilst work attributed to the (written) corpus of one author may in fact, have been the (oral) work of an entire community. Although the essay describes key Quechua language poetic texts of the pre-colonial, colonial and Republican-era, its primary focus is on the post-indigenista corpus of twentieth century poetry published by authors such as Kilku Warak'a and José María Arguedas, as well as the post-Arguedian generation of bilingual Quechua poets. The essay concludes with a consideration of new currents of Quechua poetry--often written by poets who also work as translators, educators, activists, or community organizers--which choreographs verbal gestures that flow nimbly between denunciations of a myriad of both injustices and celebrations of the vitality, beauty, and creativity evident within urban, rural, and peri-urban Andean communities.
This essay traces the trajectory plotted by conversational poetry in Latin America from, roughly, the 1930s until, roughly, the 1970s. It was a time of the Twilight of the Idols, a Post-Vanguard when the poet turned away from rhymed verse, metaphors and the book, towards the rhythms of everyday speech, the charm of common words and the scenes of the quotidian world. One of the major figures behind this trend was the U.S. poet, William Carlos Williams, who wanted to get back to “words washed clean.” The Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) is identified as an innovator of this trend in Latin America’s poetry circles; as he advised young poets: “Don’t waste your time lying.” The essay concludes with the discussion of the role played by the conversational mode and the happenings of everyday life in the poetry of the Cuban, Roberto Fernández Retamar (b. 1930), the Uruguayan, Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), the Mexican, Jaime Sabines (1926-1999), the Nicaraguan, Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925), the Salvadorean, Roque Dalton (1935-1975), and the Chilean, Nicanor Parra (b. 1914).
This chapter offers a survey of Pablo Neruda’s most important poetic works, beginning with his melancholy-drenched Crepusculario and the work that made his famous, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, which express the post-adolescent longing for fulfilling love. A new phase was reached with the publication of Residencia en la tierra, inspired by Neruda’s rather negative experience of life as a diplomat in Rangoon. This essay argues that it was Neruda’s intense friendship with the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, that pulled him out of his “disgust with existence”; and it was Lorca’s murder in August 1936 in the opening months of the Spanish Civil War that provoked a dramatic transformation in Neruda’s work – he began to see poems as social and political weapons. His political phase – epitomized by Canto general – was followed by four volumes of odes in which Neruda wrote poems in which he sought to make the ordinary appear extraordinary, many of which are exquisite gems.
This chapter maps a literary history of U.S. Latino/a poetry, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Examining how Latino poets have adopted Latin American symbols and traditions, the chapter argues that understanding Latino poetry requires knowledge of Latin American poetries and histories. To catalogue Latino poetry’s range of forms and practices, the chapter offers a hemispheric lens that foregrounds historical relations and migratory routes between north and south. After defining Latino poetry’s multiple genealogies and languages, the chapter discusses the development of Chicano (Mexican-American) and Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) poetries during the “movement” era (mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies). Then it sketches the parameters of the “post-movement” era (Eighties and Nineties), when Latino poetry expanded, often via feminist and queer paradigms, to address conflicts in Central America and cultures of the U.S-Mexico border. The chapter ends by outlining the aesthetic range of contemporary Latino poetry, with micro-sketches of poets whose hemispheric literary practices include poetry, translation, criticism, teaching, and editing. The chapter discusses major figures such as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Pedro Pietri, Juan Felipe Herrera, Martín Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Gloria Anzaldúa, and emerging major figures including Urayoán Noel, Daniel Borzutzky, and Carmen Giménez Smith.
This chapter goes beyond the two facts for which the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, is most well known (she was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1945) and she wrote maternal verses but had no natural children of her own) and analyses the various stages of her poetic career from her early verses that established her as the perfect modernista poetess of the turn of the twentieth century to her later works such as “Poema de Chile” in which she explored the fantastic landscape of her native Chile, accompanied by her imaginary son. This essay provides a new reading based on Mistral’s manuscripts which have only become publicly available since 2007.
Nearly unanimously considered Brazil’s greatest poet, Drummond (1902-87) left a vast poetical oeuvre (some two dozen books) of considerable thematic and stylistic variety, demonstrating longevity, versatility, and diversified aesthetic charm. He appealed to connoisseurs of belles-lettres and the broader reading public alike. In the pantheon of Western poetry, Drummond merits a place alongside the greatest poets of Portugal—the giant Luiz de Camões (d. 1580) and the modernist Fernando Pessoa (d. 1935)—as well as the most highly regarded Spanish American poets. His signature composition “Poem of Seven Faces” (1930) is a springboard to discuss structural and thematic aspects of his poetry over the years and to organize poems heptagonally. Translations of his work can be distributed in seven groupings. One can identify seven concentric domains of poetic space in his verse. Lyric selves embody seven fundamental voices (personae) who emerge and evolve. Drummond’s own self-presentation organizes his work as concerning the individual, the homeland, the family, friends, social impact, knowledge of love, lyric itself, playful exercises, and contemplation of existence. His poetry can be clear and seemingly conventional, or dense and abstract, even anti-normative.
This study examines the powerful reinvention of language by Latin American poets associated with the avant-garde. It focuses on paradigmatic ideas such as creacionismo, ultraísmo, Brazilian Modernismo, surrealism, and the Semana de Arte Moderna through a selection of seminal writers. The essay questions an established view about the legacy of Latin American avant-garde poetry: that it has always been dependent on European concepts. Against this traditional standpoint, my investigation highlights the vanguard writers’ taste for materiality, sensation, the “primitive,” and will to reinvent language (including new, multidisciplinary forms of linguistic codification) as sites of critique with respect to Eurocentrism and substantialist accounts of poetry based on a metaphysics of presence. At stake in this questioning is a new conceptualization of Latin American experimental form. Never the result of blind imitation, the Latin American avant-garde’s dialogue with the currents of European modernism—such as Dada, surrealism, cubism or futurism—was framed by dissonance, simultaneity, and the reinvention of language. The essay illustrates how Latin American vanguard poets demonstrated a passion to attain a complex, intensive and anti-representational medium whose purpose was to surpass the limitations of conventional poetry and lay bear a “real” commensurate with the experience of the times.
This chapter provides a sketch of some recent general poetic trends and more detailed observations about a small selection of poets who might be said to represent and at times surpass these tendencies. Perhaps the most important movement or trend in Latin American poetry in the last thirty years is the neobarroco or neobaroque. If the committed poetry of the 1960s and 70s focussed on the message, for example the denunciation of social injustice, neobarroco poetry turned to the medium, namely the experience of language itself. Objetivismo, in contrast, concentrates on the creation of objects in language, and reacted to excess and sensuality with poetry that was stripped of all adornment, including metaphors and even adjectives or adverbs. The work of very recent writers – the so-called “New Lyric” – gives an impression of ambition and skill with which young poets are addressing the page and the reader today. Despite widespread claims of poetry’s irrelevance, anachronism, or wilful isolation, it continues to be relevant for authors, readers, and publishers. New technologies and media have not rung the knell for writing verse, but instead provide some of the liveliest spaces for the circulation and even composition of new poems.