Keynote Speaker

  María Paz Moreno
Que ven los Poetas visionarios

María Soledad Barbón
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

¿cien años de aburrimiento? observaciones sobre la relevancia
socio-cultural de la poesía peruana del siglo xviii 

La poesía hispanoamericana del siglo xviii brilla por su ausencia en los programas de los departamentos de literatura hispánica. Poco, parece, ha cambiado desde 1996, fecha en la que  Andrew Bush describió acertadamente la poesía diecochesca como los “cien años de soledad” de las historias literarias y de los estudios coloniales.
           Esa ausencia se debe, entre otras causas, a la notable falta de ediciones críticas y al hecho de que muchos textos quedan aun por localizar en archivos y bibliotecas. Además de reflejar el escaso interés que la poesía del siglo xviii despierta en la crítica especializada, la escasez de ediciones críticas dificulta el acceso de nuestros estudiantes a la producción poética de ese período. En consecuencia, el profesor ha de compensar por su cuenta esa carencia y buscar fórmulas pedagógicas para enseñar adecuadamente ese material.

A través de varios case studies del ámbito peruano (Peralta y Barnuevo, Francisco del Castillo, Esteban Terralla y Landa), el presente trabajo sostiene que la producción literaria de dichos autores gana considerablemente en atractivo para el lector contemporáneo si se estudia vis-à-vis otros discursos socio-culturales (legales, “raciales”, iconográficos, entre otros) de la época. En rigor, su conocimiento y análisis son fundamentales no sólo para la construcción de una historia cultural exhaustiva, en nuestro caso la peruana; por añadidura, puede contribuir a la revisión de clichés aún vigentes de la época colonial tardía (v.g. la concepción teleológica de un creciente criollismo que culminó en la Independencia). De modo paralelo, en esta ponencia se indican algunas estrategias pedagógicas para la enseñanza de la poesía hispanoamericana del siglo xviii.

Luis Beltrán Almería
Universidad de Zaragoza

poesía y modernidad

          Un fenómeno tan complejo como el de la poesía moderna parece requerir para una aproximación a su sentido un esfuerzo más allá de la crítica literaria, incluso más allá de la crítica cultural al uso. Esta tarea precisa la contemplación del problema de la modernidad que tenga en cuenta los debates que se han dado sobre aspectos parciales de la modernidad (la política, el arte, la música, la filosofía, los géneros literarios de la prosa, etc). A partir de ahí nuestra indagación se encamina a una clarificación de los conceptos de modernidad (hay una notable confusión al respecto) y, sobre todo, de poesía (el debate sobre la poesía no ha entrado todavía en la modernidad). Después vendrán otros pasos encaminados a explorar las grandes contradicciones del discurso poético moderno, esto es, su unidad y diversidad. Esas contradicciones son, por una parte, un fenómeno general de las artes modernas y, por otra, adquieren una dimensión específica de la poesía, dadas sus limitaciones premodernas y el lugar que la poesía ocupa en el escenario de la cultura moderna.

Bruno Bosteels
Cornell University

toward weak poetry in hispanic context

            I propose to define a general paradigm shift in Hispanic poetry of the past 50 years by developing the notion of “weak” poetry, or a poetics of "weakening," along the lines of what in the 1980s in Italy was called pensiero debole. By weak poetry I mean a trend to bypass the effects of the linguistic turn and the deconstructive emphasis on the poetics of silence and erasure, which in comparison would be "strong" or "radical" forms of poetry, while never fully becoming strictly speaking "conversationalist" or "experiential" poetry either. I will trace this trend toward the poetics of weakening by comparing three poets from three different countries: Guillermo Carnero, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and María Victoria Atencia in Spain; Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, and Olga Orozco in Argentina; and Octavio Paz, José Emilio Pacheco, and Rosario Castellanos in Mexico. For my first presentation, I will focus on the general theoretical framework, which includes a redefinition of the problems and possibilities of poetic representation outside the structuralist and poststructuralist traditions, and briefly discuss the case of Spain.

Andrew Bush
Vassar College 

más allá de lo estético

            My starting point would be the ways in which Russian formalism and la estilística framed poetry as the exemplary case of the aesthetic use of language, and to suggest the inadequacy of that view for the present-day curriculum.   
            I would then like to explore two directions más allá de lo estético. First, reflecting on how the category of the aesthetic drew upon and also rivaled religious discourse, I will look at the way that poetry continues to intersect religion.  A touchstone will be a remark by scholar of Bible and Midrash Michael Fishbane, who proposes to readers who have difficulty assimilating the claims of the Bible to speak a heightened form of language, that they consult their experience of poetry.
      Second, I want to propose that poetic figuration, especially the carrying-across of meta-phor, can provide a theoretical model for an area of political discourse of pressing importance in the contemporary curriculum.  That is, thinking of poetry as the mode of the más allá, rather than lo estético, it may be that it can speak to, and provide a theoretical paradigm for the many ways in which one now works on border crossing.
         Lezama Lima's religiously inflected understanding of poetry and his theorization of metaphor through the image of a voyage across the sea to the islands will probably serve as the link between the two aspects that I wish to discuss.  But as my prooftexts I expect to look at Jorge Guillén's “Más allá” at the outset of Cántico, and the cross-cultural mysticism of the poetry of Clara Janés.

Michelle Clayton

University of California, Los Angeles

modes of transport

             In the past year I have begun to work directly on the question of poetry in movement, across regional areas and across languages, thinking about the ways that poetry can process local concerns while engaging with broader geopolitical and theoretical panoramas. As Jahan Ramazani underlined in his recent article, “Travelling Poetry”, poets travel, poems travel, and poetry often enacts forms of imaginative travel which can productively unsettle our understandings of both localist and cosmopolitan identities without losing sight of the peculiar flexions of either one. Nonetheless, Spanish-language lyric poems are frequently cut out of discussions of postcolonialism and modernism alike by virtue of their language, their genre, or both at once. My goal is therefore to bring Hispanic poetry into broader modernist debates, and simultaneously, to recuperate thematic, theoretical, and formal questions central to modernism for the study of the Latin American avant-gardes, while pushing for a more accurately transnational account of the place and movements of literature.

My paper for the colloquium, “Modes of Transport”, will explore the relationship between poetry, history, and media in and between Europe and Latin America in the period of the avant-gardes. Latin American poets who laid claim to the same technological imaginary as their Western European contemporaries have often been criticized for a purely projective modernity derived from European models, blind to local needs and structures. But what has recently begun to be productively theorized –by critics such as Carrie Noland, Martin Puchner, and Douglas Kahn—is the extent to which avant-garde poetry in Europe and the Americas alike responds to media or communications technologies, and indeed to the idea of technology, much more than to material developments on the ground. In the Latin American context, as Ruben Gallo, Mirko Lauer, Gonzalo Aguilar and others have suggested, those technologies do not supplant or displace poetry but rather suggest to it new forms, moving poetry’s remit away from direct representation and shifting its place in the discursive public sphere. This will be the crux of my paper, which will examine lyric invocations of media technologies by avant-garde writers in Europe and Latin America. Setting writings by Blaise Cendrars, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, and Tristan Tzara alongside poetry by Argentinian Oliverio Girondo, Chilean Vicente Huidobro, and Peruvian Carlos Oquendo de Amat, I will explore the tropes of tourism, radio, and film in contemporaneous texts from different areas which nonetheless all foreground questions of transnational circulation. I will be asking three pointed questions: what was at stake in the debate about the avant-garde lyric’s capacity to represent local modernity? How did advances in the lyric dovetail with or diverge from simultaneous attempts in prose to rethink the contemporary scene? And finally, what role did the media play in the circulation of aesthetics and politics in the 1920s, and how does poetry from the period show the traces of those modes of transport?

Ana Eire
Stetson University

sin nostalgia: la poesía española contemporánea se enfrenta al futuro

Mi ponencia explorará las variadas respuestas de poetas españoles contemporáneos a los desafíos que les presenta la invisibilidad de la poesía, la disminución del público lector y la necesidad de funcionar en un mercado cultural. Los poetas son los primeros en plantear y contestar la pregunta “¿merece la pena leer poesía en estas circunstancias?”  Sus respuestas imbuyen la poesía que escriben y modelan su actitud pública como poetas. Decididos, en su mayoría, a enfrentarse al futuro y a los desafíos que el presente ya plantea, revisan el concepto de modernidad sin abandonarlo, escribiendo una poesía que se centra en un concepto de resistencia: superar la resistencia de los lectores a la poesía, superar las resistencias latentes en la modernidad hacia la sociedad moderna, y practicar la resistencia, es decir, que la poesía resista y resida no en los márgenes sino en el horizonte. Analizaré la coherencia crítica, la validez y posibilidad de éxito de esas actitudes en una sociedad en que la cultura debe competir en un mercado y en la que el texto escrito ha perdido su preeminencia como medio de comunicación, como fuente de entretenimiento y como discurso epistemológico.

Licia Fiol-Matta

Lehman College, City University of New York

                                   poetics of gabriela mistral

En esta ponencia inicial, me propongo, primero, resumir las lecturas que intentan definir la poética de Gabriela Mistral desde el fin de la dictadura chilena hasta hoy y, segundo, adelantar mi propia lectura de la poética de Gabriela Mistral en anticipo del segundo coloquio de la serie. Examinaré la crítica literaria chilena y latinoamericana convencional, la crítica feminista, y la crítica queer para trazar mis propios lineamientos. Responderé a las preocupaciones del coloquio de Vanderbilt con un re-examen de las filiaciones hispanistas de Mistral en el contexto de su tiempo y además reflexionaré sobre la modernidad poética latinoamericana que, como se sabe, le asigna a Mistral un lugar antimoderno y arcaizante. Finalmente, como reza el título, intentaré contribuir al problema de la poética en sí misma como modo de lectura y praxis.

Mary Malcolm Gaylord
Harvard University

the romance as poetry out loud 

            From its origins in medieval epic to the present day, the romance can claim pride of place as one of the dominant forms of Hispanic poetry.  Its simple resources of kind have served as vehicle for materials so diverse that the trajectory of the form virtually mirrors the course of literary history.  Frequently hailed as the most “natural” means of poetic expression in Spanish, the ubiquitous and Protean ballad has been naturalized into the language, cultures and national communities of the Hispanic world.  Any historical survey of the form would find its themes, fables and figures deeply—if sometimes obliquely—immersed in the social and political contexts from which individual ballads spring. 

          The sense of naturalness undoubtedly accounts for the romance’s enduring energy and its power to move audiences.  Yet the same minimalist aesthetic can, paradoxically, lead to neglect of what Hayden White has called “the content of the form”.   It is precisely the content of the romance form, considered over time, in anonymous and authored poems, in Spain and Spanish America, that I propose to explore. 

In order to understand what a poem represents (and what its significance is)—today or yesterday—we need to ask how the poem represents its chosen subject.  In this case, that question calls for attention not only to the familiar prosodic means of octosyllabic meter, assonant rhyme, astrophic composition and its variants, but to the particular narratological and rhetorical practices that give the Hispanic ballad its distinctive character.  Focusing on the romance’s representation of spoken language, as it mixes—and conflates—narrative and direct discourse, I consider both the strategies and the implications of a poetic kind that insists on its own orality, making both delivery and reception central to the acts of speech it imagines. 

Although reliance on fictions of speech and song suggests links with lyric, ballads do not usually offer the “speech overheard” of Northrop Frye’s definition of lyric poetry; rather, they tend to present themselves as “poetry out loud,” as communicative language and as speech harnessed to action.  The traditional bard not only impersonates his characters’ voices, but makes the stylized expressions of this borrowed speech available to audiences for future adoption and adaptation.  In this sense, the primary chosen subject of ballads is their speaking subject or subjects.  Whatever thematic matter they deliver derives its significance and its power from the poetic speech act and the context of its performance.   My paper considers some Early Modern, Romantic and 20^th-century instances, looking for the personal and political motives that prompt poets to serve new wine in old vessels.

Gwen Kirkpatrick
Georgetown University 

the ruins of poetry and the dissolution of form

        Why, almost in unison, did  Western poets discard the centuries' old metrical forms and rhyme schemes? In Latin America there is a persistence of formal elements in “regional” or “Americanist” poetry, well after the dissolution of form by the vanguards.  Do the aims of visual representation (panoramas, inclusive perspectives) go hand in hand with traditional forms? In contrast, does the fragmented form relate to a shattered world view (as in Benjamin), or does the answer lie in the domain of literacy?

Tomás Urayoán Noel
SUNY (Albany)

tuerza! towards a translanguage latin/o american poetics 

            In his The Translingual Imagination (2000), Steven G. Kellman observes that “[much] translingual writing [...] is the literature of immigration” (17) while insisting that translinguals “are the shock troops of modern literature, and those avant-garde movements that, like dadaism, surrealism, and futurism, have been the most insistent on the inadequacy and treachery of conventional speech, have been led by multilinguals, translinguals, and other unmoored cosmopolitans” (31). Lacking an overarching theory of the translingual, or even a convincing definition of the term, Kellman's book nonetheless is helpful in linking the ways in which migratory movements and vanguard movements   are scored through nonmonolingual language practices.

            Whereas Kellman's analysis focuses on fiction, and assumes a more or less normative notion of literary, I analyze how contemporary experimental and/or performance-oriented poets such as Edwin Torres, Josefina Báez, and Heriberto Yépez approach translanguage as a problematizing both of genre (so that poetry is inseparable from performance art, video art, graphic design, dance, and cultural criticism among others) and of ethnic, national, and transnational identification (so that terms like “Latino/a poetry,” “border poetry,” “Latin American poetry,” and “Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Dominican/Dominicanyork/Mexican/Chicano” become increasingly pressurized).

            Following Emily Apter's conception of “Netlish” (The Translation Zone) as an “essentially schizophrenic phenomenon,” that is, as “a postmedia form of expressionism driven, on the one side, by experimental forms of multilingualism across media, and on the other, by the desire for a lingua franca of translatability” (239), I consider eccentric post-millennium performance texts such as Josefina Baez's Dominicanish (2000) and Edwin Torres's The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (2007), far beyond the the binaries of high (print/literary) and low (oral/folk) culture, as verbivocovisual exercises that demand and  imagine new modes of reading and relating. A Hispanism capable of accommodating such idiosyncratic texts would necessarily be, like Apter's comparative literature, a transnational and multimedia affair; it would engage self-reflexively with its own conditions of articulation, and with the complexity and provisionality of its (twisted/twisting) institutional imprimatur.

            I conclude with an analysis of Yépez's YouTubed video art piece voice exchange rates (subtitled “a talk on fake technology”), where I outline the promises and pitfalls of translanguage as a process-based poetics/politics of movement.

Rafael Olea Franco
El Colegio de México

oralidad y escritura en la primera poesía de borges 

El presente trabajo se propone analizar las relaciones entre oralidad y escritura poética en Luna de enfrente, colección de textos publicada en 1925 por Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Este libro se singularizó por algunos rasgos de escritura, incluso visibles en las cornisas, donde el nombre de pila del autor apareció como “Jorje”.

Luego de haber construido una visión idílica y nostálgica sobre su ciudad natal en Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), en su siguiente volumen Borges ensayó una arriesgada modalidad poética. Quizá el rasgo que más desconcertó a sus primeros lectores fue la deliberada y desafiante intención del autor por plasmar en la escritura algunos de los rasgos expresivos del dialecto argentino. De este modo, en la obra desfilan expresiones como “verdá”, “realidá y “ciudá”, además del innovador uso del “voseo” argentino.

Más allá de las reacciones negativas de algunos de sus contemporáneos, cabe preguntarse si la tentativa poética de Borges aportó una variante fructífera a la poesía argentina e hispanoamericana del siglo XX, en particular respecto de las variantes modernistas, las cuales, desde la perspectiva del autor y de su grupo literario, estaban anquilosadas y ya habían agotado sus posibilidades verbales.

A la par que intentaré responder parcialmente la anterior pregunta, revisaré las posteriores modificaciones de Borges a su obra poética, en especial las correcciones que tendieron a eliminar casi totalmente las huellas de su escritura de la década de 1920. Este punto resulta de particular importancia porque las posteriores ediciones de la obra poética del argentino, preparadas a partir de la década de 1940, impidieron que los lectores conocieran sus propuestas poéticas originales. Además, como lamentablemente no se cuenta con ninguna reimpresión del texto de 1925 (y menos aún con una edición crítica de su poesía), la revisión de la versión primigenia puede ilustrar muy bien el proceso de constitución de un texto poético.

Creo que detrás de mi ensayo estará de forma permanente la pregunta sobre los límites de la representación poética escrita, en contraste con las posibilidades de la expresión oral, que proporciona a la cultura popular inflexiones cuya asimilación escrita resulta casi imposible.

Roberta Quance

Queen’s University of Belfast

Speaking with the other

¿Qué representa el poema hoy en día?

           The “hoy en día” attached to this question suggests that the meaning of what a poem is has changed over time and will continue to change. From the point of view of the poet, who might be called upon to explain what it is has moved him or her to write a poem, this is undeniable. But I suspect that this question assumes that poetry has become a genre that needs to justify itself to a modern public. The question is, I take it, then, of what interest is poetry to a modern audience who may not share the presuppositions about poetry that moved its creators to write?

            Of course, one traditional answer to this is that lyric poetry addresses such universal themes—love, death, the relation of self and other—that historical differences in the poet's own world view become irrelevant to the experience of the poem. Yet that does not answer the question of how it is that our interest in this repertoire is sustained over centuries and that in Spain, at least, there is a great reading public for poetry. 

            If we are to say anything intelligent about the question, we ought to address the question from the point of view of the reader. What is the experience of reading or hearing lyric? It seems to me that if we can attend to this we will be in a better position to understand how poetry survives.

            In Hispanic poetry the question goes back at least to the Generation of 1927 and to Federico García  Lorca, who forged an early style by bringing his musical training to bear on the conception of the poem. His first accomplished sequence of poems--Poema del cante jondo--is predicated on the idea that a poem is like a musical score, which one 'performs'. An intrinsic part of the pleasure of reading his poetry is the sense one has that he or she is filling in gaps and repeating a script. The poems are about desire, but they also call up desire in their very execution, so that the reader participates in the process of positing a fulfilment of desire and experiencing its loss.  The mystery here is that this is pleasurable—perhaps it is a bit like Freud's claim that there was something intrinsically satisfying in the child's fort-da game. Freud, of course, traced that pleasure to the child's satisfaction in being able to control the presence or absence of the mother, for which his toy and his game were a substitute. I am not willing to reduce the pleasure of reading a poem to a psychological need. I think that the process of constructing meaning for oneself and seeing it undone is in itself satisfying to readers, and I know of no other place where this happens—where this is enacted—except in a lyric poem, one possible reading of which, as Jonathan Culler once observed, is always self-reflexive: it is always possible, he says, to read the poem as a comment on its own coming into being. We could also add that it is intrinsically satisfying to see how a poem accomplishes its end.

            It could be objected that by using the term ‘representation’ here I am smuggling narrative into the discussion and that I am suggesting that the experience of the poem is essentially no different from the experience and pleasures derived from a satisfying narrative or even a well-made drama. In fact I am aiming at a more general principle about poetry that distinguishes it from either narrative or drama and which has to do with the question of voice. And I find that its most basic premise has been argued, quite unexpectedly, by Spanish novelist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio in Las semanas del jardín (1974).

            Ferlosio takes as his point of departure that lyric is the expression of an I. But, in an effort to distinguish what happens when we read or recite a poem from our experience of other literature, he makes the following point. Structurally, there are three parties involved in the process (the emisor, receptor, and the personaje –or personality--evoked in the poem. What distinguishes the lyric from other kinds of poetry (or literature in general) is that in the experience of the poem all three parties are subsumed in one and the same yo. In lyric, therefore, says Ferlosio,  one should not speak of a receiver (a reader or listener) but rather of a user (usuario):

            La lírica llega a cumplirse de veras como tal únicamente cuando, como ha  sabido mostrarnos, sin lugar a dudas [...] el usuario--y ya no ´receptor’—se subroga en el "yo" de la letra como emisor y personaje, es decir, se hace él mismo tal primera persona que habla por sí y de sí, y cuando, correlativamente,   en el "tú" de la letra, si es que lo hay, ese yo de la voz que canta o lee pone un tú suyo privativo y personal. No hay, pues, en la lírica, propiamente un receptor, sino un usuario: el genuino y singular modo de empleo que la distingue y la define consiste en que cuando yo leo un poema no soy uno que escucha, sino uno que dice. Lo más parecido a ello es la oración.... (Semana segunda, 203).

            Ferlosio is building his argument around the typically Spanish example (which can still be found today) of the household servant who sings a copla she has picked up in her pueblo. That leaves his argument open to the objection that it is based on an archaic example, a tradition that was dying out fast as Spain became less and less of an agricultural economy by the 60s. But I think his principle holds even for more complex types of verse.

            The key is the concept of 'user' and of how educated the user must be in the forms of poetry that are being written today. Ferlosio uses the term 'say' but we can easily amend this to include 'saying' and 'doing', making the connections, both aural and visual, which modern poetry has done increasingly since Mallarmé.

            We can agree with Northrop Frye, who suggested that poetry has always alternated between aural and visual orientation—between 'babble' and 'doodle' as he put it! – but no matter which way the poem tends we are always invited implicitly to share a voice with the poet, to become one with him or her for the duration of the poem and to experience with him or her the process of making and unmaking meaning. This is probably the closest we come nowadays (if we are not practicing a faith) to ritual...

            Ferlosio's insight into lyric's difference helps us to understand the important role reserved for poetry at critical moments in history. Let us take the example of Spain following the devastation caused by the Civil War (1936-1939). It was then, in 1944, with the publication of Dámaso Alonso´s Hijos de la ira, that poets began to speak with a voice that allowed the nation to recognize its trauma. Here we find poems that take the usuario through the essential stages of mourning. And we must remember that there was no official way of doing this in Spain for those who had fought for the Republic. Dámaso's  poems became a way of mourning the dead, of reminding the survivors, whether they were on the winning or losing side, whether they had supported the rising or not, that the country was going to be haunted by its unnamed victims (as has proved to be the case). Today's readers of the collection are somewhat puzzled by what they see as its ambiguities, its unwillingness to state clearly who "Cain" is, whether he is meant to stand for all men who murder their countrymen or whether he represents the guilty victors. The poet resorts to a Biblical idiom to speak above the differences and to address the grief, or the guilt, to which different readers would have been susceptible as they said the poem along with the poet. For some, the reading of the poems would offer a way to acknowledge and to mourn those who fell for the Republic and who were not elegized by the Francoist regime. For others, who may well have felt the guilt of the survivor, perhaps like Alonso himself, the poems were a call to see the horror of what continued to be done in their name. By the mid-forties Spaniards had witnessed the ongoing persecution, some would say extermination,  of all those who had supported the Republic. For all these readers, then, or 'users' of the poem, relatives of the persecuted or those who stood by as this happened,  the Biblical idiom Alonso had chosen would have helped to instil a sense of pietas when it was nowhere else to be found.

            This paper speaks to the first question, ¿Qué representa el poema hoy en día?, arguing that in the 20^th century we have become aware that the experience of reading a poem opens up the possibility of speaking along with the author and sharing his or her subjectivity, becoming for the duration one with another. This understanding of the experience of a poem, which emphasizes its difference from narrative, and its potential to act as ritual, was set forth by the novelist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio in 1974. An early example of the theory of the poem as a dynamic process can be found in Spanish lyric from before the Civil War in Federico García Lorca's Poema del cante jondo. After the war this peculiarity of lyric was brought to the fore in a very different vein in poetry written by Dámaso Alonso (and others), which approximated prayer. Theorists of the lyric agree that, whether the poem tilts toward ´babble´or ´doodle’ (Northrop Frye), the assumption that it proceeds from a voice is so strong as to be presupposed when no I at all is present. If Ferlosio is right, this is not a sign of intractable individualism or lingering Romanticism but a generic feature that gives the lyric poem a singular ethical charge: to read it is to speak with the voice of the other.