At 12:33 PM -0800 4/1/04, Mark Weiss wrote:
>Erminia: Are you aware that many latin american poets have been
>calling themselves neobarroco, in I think a very different sense,
>since at least 1972 (when Severo Sarduy first used the term in
>print)? The term covers a great deal of the best poetry in Latin
>America since around 1939. Lezama Lima is the founding figure.
>
>The term is extremely current--any literate latin american will
>recognize and understand it immediately. Roberto Echavarren, José
>Kozer and Jacobo Sefamí's 1996 anthology, Medusario, is a good
>introduction to the neobarroco poetry of their generation (they're
>all in their late 50s to early 60s). Interest continues: I know at
>least 4 poets in their 20s and 30s in Tijuana and Mexicali who
>describe themselves as neobarroco.
There are some wonderful discussions of the use of baroque in Spanish
American writing in Octavio Paz's early book Alternating Currents
(essays written in the 60s, published in English in 1974) - sometimes
he defines it in dualities - transparency v the mask, creative
languge v criticism, and he also discusses its foregrounding of the
erotic, its political conundrums; it's also somewhere in there that
he talks of the baroque hiding/revealing a terrifying emptiness, an
idea I have long found very striking. Am I right in thinking that
the poets you mention are drawing on this tradition - which is so
strong in Spanish poetic traditions, after all? - and that this
poetry also draws on Breton and the Surrealists -
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
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http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
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