Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century: Textual Disruptions 9780292747937

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Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century

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University of Texas Press

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Austin

Copyright© 2004 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2004 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

e The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuhnheim, Jill S. Spanish American poetry at the end of the twentieth century: textual disruptions I Jill S. Kuhnheim.-1st ed. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-71947-7 (: alk. paper) 1. Spanish American poetry-2oth century-History and criticism. 2. Literature and society-Latin America. I. Title. PQ7082.P7K84 2004 2004017745 861' .640998-dc22

This book is for Mom and Theresa, two inspirational women in my life.

Acknowledgments ix 1NT Roo u cT 1oN 1

Textual Disruptions

The Boundaries of the Literary

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Toward a Postmodern Indigenismo The Problem of Cultural Authenticity 14

2 Image and Text Reading Outside Language

47

3 Recycling Urban Poetry al fin del siglo 82 4 Sensual Excess The Neobaroque

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5 Poetry and Technology EPILocu E 1

Notes

"As I Advance the Water Changes"

173

Works Cited 189 Index

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145 170

I am grateful to many people for their contributions to this project, since the development of ideas depends on exchange. Taking part in these conversations were colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially Guido Podesta, Juan Egea, and Ruben Medina, and at the University of Kansas: Danny Anderson, Vicky Unruh, Michael Doudoroff, and Andy Debicki. I was also able to test my ideas in graduate seminars at both U.W.-Madison and K.U., and I thank my students in these classes for their lively engagement with the materials and creative responses to what we read, which frequently stimulated my thinking. Other colleagues who have exchanged ideas, read drafts, and shared their literary and cultural insights are Linda J. Krumholz (my most faithful reader), Jose CernaBazan, Marcia Stephenson, and Jacobo Sefamf. Friends and colleagues who deserve thanks for their more general support of my work on this project are Gwen Kirkpatrick, Roberta Johnson, Brad Epps, Mihai Grunfeld, and Elena Castro. The University of Kansas has provided necessary institutional assistance in the form of a semester's leave complemented by a Hall Center for the Humanities Research Fellowship; I would not have been able to complete the book without this time away from other responsibilities. Many of the artists have also been generous, sharing their work and corresponding or meeting with me, and I am indebted to them for their collaboration: Carmen Berenguer, Luis Bravo, Luis Camnitzer,Jose CernaBazan, Eduardo Espina, Clemente Riedemann, Cecilia Vicuna, and Raul Zurita. The writing of this book would have been possible but not nearly as much fun without the encouragement and inspiration of my partner, Theresa Shireman. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Part of Chapter r originally appeared in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo (2002), and I am grateful to Routledge Press for permission to reprint that section. Part of Chapter 2 appeared in Siglo XX!Twentieth Century: Critique and Cultural Discourse (1996), and a section of Chapter 3 appeared in Romance Language Annual n (2ooo); I am grateful to these ix

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Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century

journals for their permission to republish these segments. Readings of some of the Berenguer and Riedemann poems from Chapter 3 also form part of another essay that appeared in Cultural Studies in the Curriculum: Teaching Latin America, edited by Danny]. Anderson andJill S. Kuhnheim (MLA, 2003), which the MLA has allowed me to reprint. I would also like to thank the following individuals and publishers for permission to reproduce copyrighted material: Cecilia Vicuna, Luis Bravo, Clemente Riedemann, Eduardo Espina, Marita Troiano; Editorial Cuarto Propio (for poems by Elvira Hernandez and Carmen Berenguer); Lluvia Editores (for poems byTulio Mora, Enrique Verastegui, and Jose Cerna-Bazan); Roberto Echavarren (for poems by Nestor Perlongher); Coral Bracho (for her poems); Siglo Veintiuno Editores (for poems by Ernesto Cardenal).

Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century

Textual Disruptions THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LITERARY

Desde su origen Ia poesfa moderna ha sido una reacd6n frente, hada y contra Ia modernidad (10) [From its origins, modern poetry has been a reaction to, toward, and against modernity]. Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo

Poetry, often considered the most "literary" of literary forms, became increasingly isolated from other cultural practices at the end of the twentieth century. Has poetry had its day? Has it proven itself an outmoded genre unable to keep pace with the postmodern self-conscious problematization of representation, of historical metanarratives that characterize much literary production in the late twentieth century? The very "literariness" of its images appears to be a handicap in a cultural world in which visual images, such as those of film, mass media, and the computer screen, predominate. So what does poetry do in contemporary Latin America, and how does it interact with the region's rich array of cultural forms? In this book, I argue that, far from being an arcane diversion for literati, recent Spanish American poetry participates in the fundamental cultural debates of its time. Succeeding chapters will reveal how poetry struggles with the division between politics and aesthetics or between visual and written images, as well as with issues of ethnic, national, sexual, and urban identities, and how it incorporates rather than rejects technological innovations and elements from the mass media. In literary studies in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, the postmodern questioning of history and referentiality has been readily seen in narrative, film, photography, architecture, and other forms of textual and visual representation; in these theoretical considerations of postmodernism, however, poetry is most often mentioned as an aside, if it appears at all (e.g., Jameson, Hutcheon, Colas, Richard, Beverley and Oviedo). Or it is treated as a separate area of interest, a discrete subject that is not incorporated into the broader category of postmodern literature (as

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I Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century

exemplified by the work of Marjorie Perloff, a leading critic of postmodern poetry in the United States, and by the focused, site-specific approach that readers such as Ronald Haladyna take on postmodernist poetry in Mexico). This marginalization of poetry may in some part be due to therenewed importance of narrative or storytelling to global literary studies, a dominance that Brian McHale describes in Constructing Postmodemism. McHale charts the rise of narratology in the sixties and seventies, then a shift from "theories about narrative" to "stories about theory" (4). Since one of the chief characteristics of postmodernism is the end of metanarratives (as signaled by Jean-Fran