Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America 9780816530809, 0816530807

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Renovating Return to Roots
1. Recitation and Declamation: Public Readings of Shifting Authority and Modernity
2. Performing Racial, Gendered, and Transnational Identities in Poetry in the 1930s– 1960s
3. Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant-Garde
4. Aesthetic Experiment and Political Commitment: Promulgating Poetry in Streets, Cafés, on CDs, and on the Internet
Conclusion: Voice and the Public Space of Poetry
Appendix: “TwoMilMex”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

beyond the page

Beyond the Page Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

Jill S. Kuhnheim

tucson

For Julian and Theresa, who bring their own poetry and joy into my life.

The University of Arizona Press © 2014 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu The Neruda poem quoted and discussed in chapter 3 is “Agua Sexual,” Residencia en la tierra, © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2013. The translation of the Neruda poem quoted and discussed in chapter 3 is “Agua Sexual” by Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh, from Residence on Earth, © 1973 by Pablo Neruda and Donald D. Walsh. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuhnheim, Jill S. Beyond the Page : Poetry and Per formance in Spanish America / Jill S. Kuhnheim. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8165-3080-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Spanish American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—Latin America. I. Title. PQ7082.P7K836 2014 861—dc23 2013034471 Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival- quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post- consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: A Renovating Return to Roots

vii 3

1. Recitation and Declamation: Public Readings of Shifting Authority and Modernity

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2. Performing Racial, Gendered, and Transnational Identities in Poetry in the 1930s–1960s

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3. Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant-Garde

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4. Aesthetic Experiment and Political Commitment: Promulgating Poetry in Streets, Cafés, on CDs, and on the Internet

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Conclusion: Voice and the Public Space of Poetry

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Appendix: “TwoMilMex” Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to complete this project without time for concentrated research, which came in the form of a semester-long sabbatical and a Research Fellowship at the Hall Center for the Humanities, and I am indebted to the University of Kansas for this support. Along with my own research and thinking, this book has been shaped by a series of conversations, and I am grateful to my colleagues who shared ideas, provided feedback, or supported proposals, including Vicky Unruh, Mike Doudoroff, Jonathan Mayhew, Verónica Garibotto, Stuart Day, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Jacobo Sefamí, Joe Harrington, Juan Zevallos-Aguilar, Melanie Nicholson, and Linda Krumholz. My graduate students also provided me with fruitful feedback en camino, especially those who participated in the seminar on Poetry and Per formance that I co-taught with Jonathan Mayhew in 2009. Erin Finzer and Raciel Alonso were my research assistants at different moments, and their efforts for me contributed to my own. Jake Rapp coauthored with me an essay on Marosa diGiorgio, and I enjoyed our working dialogue. Edma Delgado’s and Pablo Celis’s cultural and linguistic acumen made more accurate translations of some of the poetry I include here. Luis Bravo was inspirational and generous, sharing his ideas, his time, and his friends with me in Montevideo; other poets and performers have been very openhanded with their work and correspondence, including Roxana Crisólogo, Rojo Córdova, Clemente Padín, and Luis Paredes Pacho. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their insights and their attention to detail that enriched the final version of this vii

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book and to my editors at the University of Arizona Press for their work on its presentation. An earlier version of my work on Eusebia Cosme and Luis Palés Matos appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna 61, no. 2 (2008): 135– 47; also, a condensed and revised version of ideas from the article I coauthored with Jacob Rapp, “Una puesta en voz neobarroca: Diadema de Marosa di Giorgio,” in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 76 (Segundo semestre de 2012): 279–316, appears in chapter 4. I thank the editors of both of these journals for permission to reprint this material in revised forms. I also thank Roxana Crisólogo, Rojo Córdova, Clemente Padín, Pedro Santa Cruz, James Wagner, and Clayton Eshleman for permission to quote their work, as well as New Directions Press (for Donald Walsh’s translations of Neruda), The Sheep Meadow Press (for Rebecca Seiferle’s translation of Trilce), and the Fundación Pablo Neruda for permission to quote Neruda.

beyond the page

Introduction

A Renovating Return to Roots

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, poetry enjoyed a revival through its oral presentation in slams and festivals, its circulation on the Internet, and its availability on CDs. Combining poetry with performance is one of the important ways in which the genre transforms, evolves, and gains diverse audiences in different transnational social and cultural settings. Electronic and multimedia presentations move poetry beyond the text and in so doing invite questions: Is this poetry? How is it poetry? What are the different demands it makes of its readers, listeners, or viewers? I begin to answer these questions here and will continue this dialogue in the pages that follow. When we include poetry’s voicing or oral presentation and make textual analysis a secondary feature, the visual, aural, and performative become factors that cannot be read around or left out. These elements highlight changes in definitions of the “poetic” and demonstrate that our generic expectations are historical constructs that can (and do) change. Dana Gioia has observed a shift in the position of print in late twentieth-century USAmerican culture that he deems an epistemological transformation, a change in “the means by which our society uses language, images and ideas to represent reality” (5). There is a similar epistemological shift in Spanish America, although it is grounded in distinct cultural histories, as we will see. This book addresses the performative aspects of poetry in order to reverse the prevalent twentieth-century tradition that has fixed the poem on the page as a self- sufficient “verbal icon.” Taking per for mance into account gives us a distinct kind of cultural event record; per for mance 3

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embeds reading in the everyday world, and performed poetry often reaches a different audience. While the historical relationship between speech and writing is frequently contentious in postcolonial regions, looking at performance in Spanish American poetry throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first allows us to see how the relationship between terms might be complementary rather than opposed. Oral and written elements in poetry form a continuum of results; these range from the democratization of verse culture in early voiced performances to more recent shifts in roles for print culture in increasingly visual and aural environments. Studying poetry’s “voicing” demonstrates how readers and performers appropriate written texts and, through this, how poetry may become a site of tension between authority and power and a possible place of subversion, re-creation, and innovation. Performance also allows us to reconceptualize the relationships between popular and elite realms of production and reception. By examining instances of performances that range from early twentieth-century recitation and declamation to twenty-firstcentury performances on film, CDs, and the Internet, this book offers its readers analytic tools with which to chart the circulation of poetry beyond the printed word. Each written poem is a “scene of language,” and poetic texts create speakers or “ventriloquize voices,” as Edward Hirsch puts it, but when poetry is actually spoken it embodies the written voice in distinct ways, often either subverting or reinforcing the author’s inscribed speaker (117, 124). Examining poetry’s voicing throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first illustrates how authors and performers of this genre of Latin American literature incorporate performance in ways that resituate and expand conventional assumptions about the uses for poetry. It also combines two areas of study that have heretofore employed contrasting approaches. Poetry, while rooted in the oral, became a predominantly textual and literary genre after Western romanticism, and more recently performance studies have infiltrated multiple aspects of contemporary life but often exclude poetry because of its perceived “literariness.” In order to read poetry in performance, one must break the oral-written barrier and include elements that have been sidelined by both approaches alone. The poem is set in a context beyond the page and the book and the place and means of per formance can alter meaning. Voice adds volume, texture, aural punctuation, and vocal markers of gender and race, among other sound elements (such as noise and music), and when poetry is embodied, we must take into account the gestures, costumes, and many other visual elements that multiply with contemporary technological possibilities, such

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as video. Reading, hearing, and seeing features of performed poetry together, as I do throughout this book, demonstrate the kinds of issues that arise in their interplay and how this interaction enhances our understanding of poetry’s different cultural roles. Poetry has long been associated with voice, and oral poetry predates written poetry. As Walter Ong has explained, oral expression has existed without writing, but not writing without orality (quoted in Hirsch 213). For Paul Zumthor, “language without voice is unthinkable” (6). In sorting out the shifting relationships between the two means of expression, he asserts: “A poem composed in writing but ‘performed’ orally is therefore changed both in nature and in function to the same extent that an oral poem collected and disseminated by writing changes in the exact opposite fashion” (27). For this reason it is useful to recall the transition from oral verse to writing in Europe. In their study of the emergence of prose in France, Jeffrey Kittey and Wlad Godzich note that written texts of oral verse in the High Middle Ages both included references to its per formance and excluded these (sometimes they are implicit); they reread these works and find implied references to per formance that readers of our era have to reconstruct (16). The transition from poetry to prose, like the shift from books to computers, offers us another example of a moment when the mode of communication changed significantly, according to Kittey and Godzich, giving us the opportunity to observe a shift in signifying practices, as the dominant one—the oral and performative lyric—“falls from authority and another rises to replace it” (7). This does not mean that poetry lost its acoustic and visual or oral and performative aspects but, rather, that these were soon to be eclipsed by writing. Margit Frenk has also studied the transformation from voice to silent reading and does so in the context of Spain. In her work she finds that oral and typographic cultures coexisted to varying degrees from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. She charts the “oral residue” in the narrative, theater, and poetry of the early modern period, concluding that as Spain drew closer to the nineteenth century, the “book spoke ever more mutely to an increasingly deaf reader” (86, my translation).1 Both Frenk’s and Kittey and Godzich’s work concerns the rise of prose in a European context, and, while postconquest Latin America draws on this tradition, the region also has different historical circumstances that shift inherited cultural practices. One difference is the role of writing in the colonial enterprise. The vexed history of writing in Latin America often begins with a recounting of the practice of the colonial requerimiento, in which indigenous people were read rules that they could not understand

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but to which they were expected to adhere, or with the famous saying that reveals the violence that colonial literacy compelled: “La letra con sangre entra” [The letter enters with blood]. Walter Mignolo, among others, has called attention to the social roles associated with reading and writing practices in the New World. Noting that philosophies of writing are culturally specific (Writing . . . 258), Mignolo argues that Amerindians and Spaniards were “on opposing sides of the letter” in the colonial moment (257), and that their very different understandings of what speech and writing mean and do created a conflict of literacies. Mignolo explains that unlike contemporary ideas proposed by Derrida, writing is not a representation of speech in ancient Mesoamerican writing systems but a way to control the voice (302–3). Different notions of writing in Andean and Mesoamerican contexts mean the speechwriting hierarchy Derrida describes is not pertinent to this particular encounter (it may be more relevant to later republican societies, or nineteenth-century Spanish America, however). One possible benefit of returning to orality and performance in the study of Spanish American poetry, then, is to sidestep academic colonialism by recognizing and searching out the presence of alternative means of communication, “alternative” or “transitional” literacies (the first is Mignolo’s term, the second, Ong’s). In the chapters that follow we will see how some of the outcomes of this colonial situation resonate in twentiethcentury and twenty-first-century cultural performances. Although orality is connected to performance and may occur without a textual component, my focus here is not primary orality, which exists without any written expression (according to Ong 11), but, rather, with evidence of poetry performances that have a hybrid quality, that in some ways cross or question the boundaries of belletristic conceptions of poetry and/or its audiences. I look for ways in which poetry has moved outside and sometimes through, but not remained within, the Ciudad letrada, critic Angel Rama’s expression for the small urban intelligentsia that controlled many Latin American nations from colonialism into the twentieth century. To put it another way, I am looking for alternative roles that poetry may have played on the twentieth-century cultural stage and into the twenty-first century. Some research has been done on cases that exemplify the popular circulation of poetry—the tradition of chapbooks, or literatura de cordel [string literature] in Brazil, for example, or the institution of the lector (reader) in Cuban and Floridian tobacco factories. Most of the research on these readers has been done by historians, however (rather than researchers interested in the circulation of poetry), particularly those interested in labor history, as the lectors had a notable influence on

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organizing the labor movement. The custom, which began in the midnineteenth century in either a Cuban prison or on sugar and coffee plantations, was adapted to cigar factories where the workers heard newspapers in the mornings and literature in the afternoons. Transcripts of interviews and historical material reveal that some of the authors read were Hugo, Zola, Galdós, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega. Poetry is mentioned in general, specifically the poetry of José Martí, who on a visit to a factory in Ybor City, Florida, called the workers “intelectuales que trabajaís con las manos” [ Intellectuals who work with your hands ] (Cabrera Infante 96). Workers chose what was read in the factory and were apparently very exigent about the quality of their readers, for they comment in the oral histories about the per formance styles and interpretative powers of the lectors (Mormino and Pozzetta 12–13). Thus many unschooled Cuban and Floridian cigar workers know Martí through the oral per formance of his poems in the workplace.2 The readers in Cuban cigar factories do not exemplify a return to folk culture (although there may be links to this) but an intersection of written literature and oral performance. This is what interests me here, for it demonstrates how poetry circulates beyond its written manifestations. Angel Rama discusses how writing empowered the Creole elite of the evolving lettered city; he also highlights the transgressive possibilities within orality and marginal writing such as graffiti and, at times, poetry (popular poetry in Brazil and rural cultures’ mixture of orality and writing are two of his specific examples [Rama 64, 67]). In his chapter on the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Latin American “modernized city,” Rama asserts that “Poets are, and always have been, the least assiduous members of the lettered city, and that even after their incorporation into the orbits of power they generally appear disoriented and incongruent with their surroundings” (73). This may be because poetic discourse during Spanish American modernism was increasingly viewed as being isolated from politics and cultural issues (although many studies now demonstrate that this is not the case), or, paradoxically, because poetry as a genre is connected to an orality that Rama sees as systematically disregarded by the influential learned class; in either case, he positions poets as being out of step with the hegemonic prosaic world. The following chapters include examples that will dialogue with and condition Rama’s view of the oppositional potential in “marginal” genres and in oral performances of poetry in Spanish America. We will see how in some circumstances performances may reinforce existing social hierarchies and norms, in others they may significantly open up or democratize culture, and in still others moving beyond

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writing offers opportunities to modify the connections between authority and signification. My interest in following the history of poetry and performance at key moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin America is not an attempt to read these practices against the lettered city or as idealized alternatives to it, however, but as practices that are somewhere in between—for while the per formances I analyze do not exist wholly outside of the practices of the metropolitan literati, neither are they always firmly rooted within these. The examples of performed poetry that I study throughout the twentieth century often reveal themselves to be hybrid cultural artifacts that attest to changing cultural environments. Several recent studies of Latin American narrative texts analyze the presence of orality or document the tensions between oral and written realms in the region. Amy Nauss Millay, for example, chronicles a series of writers and discusses those writers she sees as mediating between oral and written cultures in texts that “oralize writing” (16). In a study of writing, violence, and ethics in modern Spanish American narrative, Aníbal González observes that Spanish American cultures exhibit a paradoxical distrust of the written word and at the same time a “profoundly literate character,” despite low literacy rates; these are societies “founded upon a persuasive utilization of writing and a deep respect for it” (3– 4). Jorge Marcone explores the contemporary interest in oral culture as an alternative to the lettered sphere and speculates that the appropriation of oral texts may revitalize writing (47). All of these cases exemplify the creation of oral effects in writing rather than oral performance itself, but they also evidence the coexistence and ongoing interaction of oral and written spheres. In this way they intersect with the idea of “orature,” Joseph Roach’s term, which he proposes to transcend “a schematic opposition of literacy and orality [to acknowledge] that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (11–12). Narrative has also opened a dialogue with performed poetry through its re-creation or evocation in fiction. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Otoño del patriarca [The Autumn of the Patriarch], for example, Rubén Darío recites his poetry, while Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair features an aging “declamadora.” In Puig’s Cae la noche tropical [Tropical Night Falls], Darío appears again when two sisters recall which poem they heard recited in a bar: “La más conocida de la época, la ‘Sonatina’ de Rubén Darío” [the best known of the times, Rubén Darío’s “Sonatina”] (85). They also reminisce about the voice of the young man who recited, highlighting the “grain of the voice” that may be awakened in oral performances.3 The re-creation of performed poetry in fiction attests to its cultural importance

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and demonstrates how the voicing of poetry may have served as a classless unifying force, engaging both readers and listeners, and as a marker of high culture. In her book Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, Joan Shelley Rubin demonstrates the multiple ways in which readers appropriate texts to make poetry part of their everyday worlds. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a USAmerican context Rubin observes that performed poetry has personal uses—as eulogies, commemorative odes, expressions of emotion—and public ones—as a part of pageantry and civic events. “What did a poem add that a parade could not supply?” she asks. She answers that a poem could be reprinted in a booklet or newspaper and therefore saved and revisited; it offered the promise of permanence to events (171). So the poetry was both occasional, taking place in a particular context, and extended beyond this through its crossover into print. Another scholar who has considered a range of practices associated with poetry and its circulation is Kirsten Silva Gruesz, who, in her exploration of the trans-American origins of Latino writing, examines poetry’s role in redistributing “the cultural capital of Euro- style high art by ‘Americanizing’ it” (17). In the literature she studies (often drawn from popular or middlebrow sources such as periodicals, new anthologies, translations, and performances), she looks outside of the “critically validated way” to read poetry and finds “constantly shifting ways of performing texts—written, memorized, and spontaneous alike” (23–24).4 My study draws on the approaches of these two scholars by reading, listening to, and watching a range of ways in which poetry has been and is performed in Spanish– speaking America. I also include a more recent means of circulating poetry by incorporating digital technology, which adds yet another set of possibilities to both create and disseminate poetry. Sarah Bay-Cheng, writing about digital recordings of theater performances, has observed that these can convey a “thick record of performance” (127). She adapts the term from anthropology or New Historicism’s “thick description,” which creates a context for the phenomena described. Digital recordings of poetry presentations have the potential to include more semiotic material, vocal and physical cues, which will create a more direct engagement of the senses and supply information about the context of the performance itself to produce meaning in addition to that of the written language, punctuation, and poetic structure. “Performance,” a word that has been wending its way throughout these ideas, has traditionally been difficult to define. In my approach to performance at the beginning of the twentieth century, I look predominately

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and quite literally at the voicing and sometimes the embodiment of poetry. This fits with Diana Taylor’s conceptualization of per formance as an expressive behavior and an embodied practice, the latter in instances when more than voice—elements such as gesture, movement, and physical presence—adds to the semiotic complexity of the presentation (The Archive, xvi). In discussing what comprises performance, Taylor also makes a very useful distinction between the “archive” (texts, documents, and buildings) and the “repertoire” (spoken language, dance, and ritual) or more ephemeral modes of transmitting culture (19). Her conceptualization of per formance reminds us that “not everyone comes to ‘culture’ or modernity through writing,” and that, over time, “writing was far more dependent on embodied culture for transmission than the other way around” (xviii, 16). Uncovering some of the ways in which poetry has been voiced or enacted illuminates how the concept of performance may expand “what we understand as knowledge” (16), and how the Western poetic tradition may be both reinforced and remade when writing is decentered. The fluidity of the term per for mance makes it an attractive means to approach poetry from interdisciplinary or multigenre perspectives. In the chapters that follow I also consider performance as a kind of “transmediation,” because when a written work is not just vocalized it may join with other cultural forms: dance, music, film, theater, and the visual arts. In other instances I examine translation as a kind of performance; when poems are re-created in another language the translation becomes a public reading of the work, a testimony to the translator’s engagement with the author’s sound, sense, and style. Here I pay particular attention to sound as I examine what happens to aural elements when they are given voice in another language. In some of César Vallejo’s poetry, the impossibility of translation provokes phonic and visual performances or translations to other media. Jerome McGann makes a link between performance and translation when he observes that there are two kinds of interpretative actions: a mode oriented in performative models, of which translation and parody are the master types, and a mode oriented in scholarship (137). His ideas complement Taylor’s theory that performance is not simply an object of analysis but a theoretical term, “a way of knowing” (xvi). We can also conceive of translation as “a dialectic of interpretation and reinvention,” Peter Middleton’s way of applying Judith Butler’s ideas about gender performances to contemporary British and North American poetry and performance (29). Translation becomes more performative as the dynamics of this dialectic increase—that is, when the work and its translator compel less equivalency and demand more inventiveness instead.

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This book is structured, in a roughly chronological order, around the themes and modes of performing poetry. In the first chapter I track the voicing of poetry in early twentieth-century Spanish America by using sources that have often been considered anecdotal by others—reviews that document audience responses, guides, and pedagogical practice books that reveal a range of assumptions about poetry and performance—allowing me to resurrect the contents of and responses to public readings practiced by declaimers (who emotionally enact poetry) in this time period. I then analyze key works by four popular early twentieth-century poets—Amado Nervo, José Santos Chocano, Rubén Darío, and Gabriela Mistral—whose work was included in many repertoires and collections of performers, to demonstrate which of their works reached mixed publics beyond the usual readers of poetry. Performers created an alternative canon through the works they selected of these well-known authors, selections that make us reconsider the prevailing historical and ideological assumptions about poetry and the poet’s work in Spanish American modernismo (1882– 1910), a movement generally seen as an attempt to create an autonomous space for art.5 Instead, per formances of poetry during this period demonstrate how the aesthetic lyric assumed a variety of roles in the more “prosaic” world. The different cultures within the Spanish–speaking region allow us to see cultural developments in more than one context. The second chapter examines some of the ways in which race is performed in poetry in examples from Peru and the Caribbean in the 1920s through the 1960s. My segue from the previous chapter comes from the example of the well-known Argentine declamadora Berta Singerman’s per formance of Caribbean sexuality in the film Nada más que una mujer (Nothing more than a woman, 1934), a provocative example that links race, gender, and sexuality in the setting of the postcolonial Philippines. Singerman’s per formance in this film is one of the only visual documentations of her style, and it demonstrates how the accessibility of sound recording and the development of radio and film at times incorporated poetry, which in some instances became a transnational carrier of ethnic and regional identities. I then draw on the ideas of Paulla Ebron, who has proposed that regional identity is the result of performance—“We have learned to imagine regions through repetitive tropes,” she states (10)—to explore how the Caribbean is composed through the work of Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos and Cuban performance artist Eusebia Cosme in the 1920s and 1930s. Both of these artists problematize race through poetic performances, unsettling some polarized extremes and reinforcing others.

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The second half of this chapter deals with the performance of Peruvian identity as voiced in the poetry of Nicomedes Santa Cruz. This poet and performer developed the popular form of the décima, recognized throughout the region, and combined it with local speech and myriad elements of his Afro-Peruvian experience to create a national and then a regional identity. Santa Cruz paradoxically moves a marginalized element of Peruvian culture (the Afro-Peruvian) to the center through his records and radio transmissions in the late 1950s through the 1970s. His books were supplemental to his performances, and he worked both inside and outside of national and transnational identities, straddling the divide between popular and elite and oral and written to construct a specific “Black Pacific” identity (ethnomusicologist Heidi Feldman’s term) through the voicing of his poetry. The third chapter reprises the roles of performance in the Latin American vanguards, which, like many of the European avant-gardes, cultivated new audiences for art through performance (Unruh 32). In her book on these vanguards, Vicky Unruh chronicles a series of “performance manifestos” of the 1920s and 1930s that took place throughout Latin America and that frequently included poetry, visual arts, and music in inter-artistic events. As the first two chapters of this book demonstrate, some of the performative qualities that Unruh and others have astutely associated with the avant- garde are present in the same time period in less bohemian milieus, and performance continues to extend the possible social uses for poetry throughout the century. We find examples of this in two poets whose early work was rooted in avant-garde activities but who later became Latin America’s most well-recognized poets, Chilean Pablo Neruda and Peruvian César Vallejo. There are many examples of Neruda reciting his work, and he openly affirmed his desire for his oeuvre to be performed; this may account, in part, for the numerous representations of his poetry that have multiplied as the media have, making him a kind of performative icon. My analysis contrasts the author’s ritualistic style for presenting his own work, which has created an auditory archive, with performances by others, readings, and musicalizations, both online and recorded. Analyzing contemporary versions of Neruda’s work demonstrates how various factors continue to construct different “Nerudas.” This has not been the case with Vallejo’s work. One factor changing the aural reception of his work is that there are no recordings of his readings; Vallejo makes a phantasmal “appearance” on the Internet through those who choose to read and through artistic adaptations of his work. Analyzed in terms of performance Vallejo’s work is paradoxical, for in some poems he inscribes a pop-

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ular voice, while other works resonate with a narrower public attracted to poststructuralist critical ideas. Performances of Vallejo’s poetry include some very innovative translations that resound and recontextualize some of his poetry, and another example dramatizes and dialogues with it in a Swedish film from 2000. In terms of its resonance in contemporary contexts, Vallejo’s work remains elusive, garnering more particular audiences and stimulating more experimental performances or riffs on his work, in keeping with the goals of the avant-garde, while Neruda’s is more readily adapted to mass media and popular spheres. The last chapter begins by observing a shift in the 1960s and 1970s as political and social changes linked performance and poetry in Latin America. Some poets spoke of a “segunda vanguardia” [second avant-garde], and there are some parallels to and dialogue with the role of Beat poetry in the United States. These decades, in which young people in many different countries questioned established definitions of culture, were connected to a variety of social and political movements that produced new cultural forms; performance art and the new song movement made poetry public in different ways. There are many examples of the intertwining of poetry and song at this time: the work of Violeta Parra and the “new song” (nueva canción) movement in Chile, the musicalization of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and José Martí and the Cuban “new ballad” (nueva trova) movement, and Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti’s collaborations with musician Daniel Viglietti, which began during the dictatorship in their country and continues to circulate in book and CD form (for example, in A dos voces [In two voices]). Rather than concentrate on these musicalizations that have been studied by others, I explore performances of poetry that combine contemporary declamation with per formance art through multiple figures in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico. Later in the century, collaborative approaches evolved into live performances and multimedia poetry that have been circulated through CDs and on the Internet, as well as in print. A series of questions guides my discussions of these works: Who are the anticipated and real audiences for these works? Does the increased “mediatization” of poetry demonstrate new or continuing transnational cultural flows? Are there formal changes in the poetry written for and presented in multimedia environments? Is it more narrative, or is there an increased emphasis on form, accentual meter, and strong rhyme? In the course of the chapter I examine contemporary examples of poetry and performance in these three countries, charting the rise of trans-avantgarde performances that appealed to elite or intellectual audiences and the broader circulation of poetry that is still experimental through a greater

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range of public performances, such as poetry slams. As was the case in some of the examples from the first part of this book, poetry’s distribution outside of print—through film, mass media, and the Internet—gives it an alternative, and often a more accessible and dialogic, role in what is now an increasingly global culture. This book breaks new ground for understanding the relationship between popular and elite cultural activity in Latin America through the performance of poetry. It dialogues with several writers who have investigated similar issues in North American contexts, such as Charles Bernstein, who, while noting the dearth of attention to the performative aspects of contemporary American poetry, recognizes that incorporating these aspects “allows for the maximum inflection of different, possibly dissonant voices” (Close Listening, 15). It will interest readers who are attentive to poetry and performance and those who are interested in how poetry circulates outside of the page. While it will appeal to Hispanists, my application of ideas about poetry and performance to several countries in a Spanish American context offers an innovative methodology and theoretical model for humanists beyond the immediate field. It will speak to readers who are more generally interested in the intersection between poetry and identity, popular-elite or oral-written cultures, and those concerned with new ways of studying poetry and performances of it in an international context. The kinds of historical material I uncover reshape our awareness of the cultural work that poetry has done in the past and may do in the future as poets and performers engage an array of venues and technologies to present their work. Some performers and performances of poetry change our concept of how cultural work is done, for performers can become alternative cultural authorities and certain performances can alter our understanding of the written texts. Poetry is not only a set of texts or objects, and by including aspects of how it is performed or practiced we see how it can enact, embody, or voice various identities and meanings. We also find examples of how poetic voices can merge with political voices, and, as Marjorie Perloff has observed, these can capture a different audience and validate marginalized speakers and experiences (Differentials 28). Some of these performers’ works highlight the tension between poetry’s static existence on the page and the flexibility of multimedia per formances. In her work on poetry slams, María Damon states that these per formances can “rewrite the privacy of the lyric scene into a site for public discourse” (Wheeler 142). Slameros (performers at poetry slams), as well as other recent performers of poetry, also take advantage of the technological possibilities that greatly extend the circulation of their work, resulting in an emphasis on collective,

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communal audiences for poetry. All voicings or embodiments of poetry I examine here build listeners, readers, or spectators through the alternative circulation of poetry, alter the balance of power between producers and consumers, and shift the roles aesthetics may play in different social situations. In doing so, they offer us multiple materializations of the voices that may inhabit poetry.

chapter one

Recitation and Declamation Public Readings of Shifting Authority and Modernity Voz de fuente clara de claro cristal en donde los versos encuentran más brío. Al oír en ella la Marcha Triunfal, ¿qué sentirá el alma de Rubén Darío? [Voice of the clear fountain of clear crystal / in which the lines find more charm / upon hearing the “Triumphal March” in it / what would Ruben Darío’s soul feel?] —“En el álbum de la genial recitadora Dalia Iñiguez”

In the opening stanza of this poem honoring Cuban declaimer Dalia Iñíguez’s performance in Costa Rica, the speaker wonders what Rubén Darío would think about his poem as voiced by this “embajadora de la poesía” [ambassador of poetry], as she is called by another reviewer in the same issue. The question calls our attention to the idea that the act of reading or reciting is also an act of interpretation. The public performance of poetry adds layers to the communicative act, for how a work is received depends not only on the author and the reader but also on the performer, the place, the audience, and myriad aspects of the context. An elegant theater creates a format for a response that is different from an open-air riverside park; a bookstore may be a more intimate place for a reading, yet the atmosphere, both mercantile and bookish, may draw only certain listeners. A commemorative event frames a reading differently than a less specific celebration of poetry. The kind of public readings practiced by declamadores in early twentieth-century Latin America could occur in many venues, informal and formal. What drew audiences to these events? There are many 17

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possible factors and little evidence, so we must speculate. One draw is pleasure—of community, of enjoying the sound of language, and of an emotional rather than an intellectual response to poetry. Edification and the chance to participate in a “cultural” or an aesthetic experience are other possible draws. But listeners may have taken diverse lessons from the poetry they heard—some based on citizenship or regional identity, others about oration or speaking well, and still others that involved developing aesthetic or moral values. The subject of this chapter is early twentieth-century performances of poetry as voiced through the practice of declamación. This is not simply recitation, as we will see, but the physical and aural enactment of written poems. Ugo Ulive defines it relative to a performance of the Argentine Berta Singerman in the 1940s as “recitar versos con la entonación, los ademanes y el gestos convenientes” [reciting lines of poetry with the appropriate intonation, gestures and expression] (7). He continues to describe the “gran arraigo” [deep roots] that the practice had at the time and explains: “Había incluso Escuelas de Declamación. [ . . . ] Generalmente se prefería el verbo recitar, ya que declamar incluía una connotación de teatralidad exagerada. Era normal entonces que los poemas dichos en voz alta con mayor o menor acierto fueran parte infaltable en diversos festejos” [There were even Schools of Declamation. . . . Generally the verb recite is preferred since to declaim includes connotations of exaggerated theatricality. At that time it was normal for poems spoken aloud with varying success to be a part of miscellaneous celebrations] (8). Since there are no videos and scarce recordings of these performances, we must track this cultural phenomenon through records and reviews of performances and performers by examining a series of manuales de declamación and the ideas they offer to us about poetry and through an analysis of key works by four popular early twentieth-century poets included in many repertoires and collections of performers. They are Amado Nervo, José Santos Chocano, Rubén Darío, and Gabriela Mistral. These authors’ works, all connected to modernismo, were presented in a range of venues that attracted the literary elite and other poets, middle- class audiences, and listeners who paid no entrance fees. In this way their work reached mixed publics, beyond the usual readers of poetry. These manuals and authors reveal how poetry fits into broader social projects and uncovers prevailing historical and ideological assumptions about poetry and the poet’s work and, by extension, about different roles for literature in the first half of the twentieth century in Spanish America. The declamation of poetry was linked to theater and music; when it was taught as a formal discipline, it often was associated with these schools.

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The manuals I examined, which were published in seven different countries and dated from 1900 to 1966, sometimes preceded the establishment of different university facultades [schools] or documented the creation of these. They often begin with the history of declamation, the roots of oral poetry from the Greeks and Egyptians and the Spanish tradition of juglares [bards], and they explain how declamation joins erudite and popular poetry and brings together epic, lyric, and dramatic genres. Many of these authors ground the tradition in its European roots, ignoring more local, less esteemed oralities. Each manual outlines, in its own way, the steps involved in learning to perform. Adolfo Urzúa Rosas, writing in Chile in 1900, explains: “El que lee o declama tiene [ . . . ] la misión de producir en el alma de sus oyentes las mismas impresiones de que se supone poseído el personaje que representa o que sintió el poeta al escribir sus estrofas” [He who reads or declaims has . . . the mission of producing in the souls of his listeners the same impressions that he assumes the character he represents or the poet felt when he wrote his stanzas] (62). The performer must use gesture, appearance, voice, memory, sentiment, and spiritual qualities to communicate the author’s emotion. Rosalía de Jijena Sánchez, writing in Buenos Aires in 1955, seconds his opinion, stating that declamation should give us the “voz viviente del poeta” [live voice of the poet] (18); she also describes how “la declamación, en sus distintos aspectos, se aproxima a la danza, al canto, a la misma representación teatral” [declamation, in its different aspects, comes close to dance, song, or theatrical representation itself] (9).1 Many authors stress the differences between declaiming and reciting; declamadores did not hold a printed text—they memorized it and dramatized it. Their per formances went against the idea of introspective, solitary reading and a concept of the lyric as a particularly subjective expression. In his more contemporary study of reading, Alberto Manguel has considered some of the ways in which reading aloud alters the relationship between the listener and the text, a change that is pertinent to the per formance of poetry: Surrendering to the reader’s voice [ . . . ] removes our ability to establish a certain pace for the book, a tone, and intonation that is unique to each person. It condemns the ear to someone else’s tongue, and in that act a hierarchy is established [ . . . ] which places the listener in the reader’s grip. [ . . . ] At the same time, the act of reading out loud to an attentive audience often forces the reader to become more punctilious, to read without skipping [ . . . ] fi xing the text by means of a certain ritual formality. [ . . . ] It also gives the versatile text a respectable identity, a

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sense of unity in time and an existence in space that it seldom has in the capricious hands of a solitary reader. (123)

Changes in the reception of the text are not due just to the performances’ context but to changes in our control and power over the writing created by reading aloud. When the work is embodied by a performer, still other elements come into play. Imagining Darío listening to Dalia Iñiguez’s “Marcha triunfal,” the poem would inevitably be feminized for its listeners in a way Darío may not have foreseen. Iñiguez would not represent a soldier but a female citizen, one of the “bellas mujeres” [pretty women] who “aprestan coronas de flores” [prepare wreathes], or she may be metonymically linked to “el suelo materno” [native soil] (and linguistically associated with la patria, la Gloria, and la victoria; Poesías completas 62– 63). Her gendered presence is just one of the ways in which she may alter our reception of the text. Her intonation, emphasis, and passion may have drawn attention to certain themes or images and her Cuban accent may have recalled the late independence of that country, while the location and timing of a particular performance may have resonated with current needs for continued national triumph. The passions stirred by declaiming poetry may also be understood as a way to value poetry in an increasingly rational, mercantilized world. From this angle, performed poetry has a didactic function and operates as a way to instill aesthetic and human moral values. The Peruvian Rosa Roca, writing in 1943, proclaims that one achieves a superior life via two avenues: science and reason, or art and the heart and emotions, and declaimed poetry points us down the second path (1). For her, the declamador is a divine intermediary between the poet and his listeners who can elevate the artistic and cultural level of Peru (4, 7). “Debemos observar que en el desarrollo estético de los niños, la poesía tiene su puesto de preferencia” [We should observe that in the child’s development, poetry has a preferred place] (175), she argues, because “por el arte se llega a la belleza y por la Belleza al Bien” [through art one arrives at beauty and through Beauty to Goodness] (163). Jaime Molins seconds her on this, emphasizing the pivotal role of emotion in capturing the hearts (and minds) of its audience: “La poesía no se define: se siente [ . . . ] declamar bien es llegar a los corazones de los demás” [Poetry is not defined: it is felt . . . declaiming well is arriving at others’ hearts] (13). For Ecuadorian Ana Lucía Jaramillo, poetry’s role in the modern world is to respond to materialistic society; she sees humankind as a victim of its passions and bankrupt spirit, hence, for her, declamation has an “alta misión” [high mission] to accomplish as an inter-

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preter of human thought and a defender of great spiritual values (11). Like Roca, she compares aesthetic beauty to a moral beauty that transcends time: “En todo el tiempo, pasado y presente, la Poesía constituye el índice de la cultura alcanzada por un pueblo” [Through all times, past and present, Poetry is the index of the culture achieved by a people] (96). Both use an ahistorical concept of beauty that relies on poetry as the prestige genre, the “art par excellence,” a notion that in fact arose from the romantic tradition (Bourdieu 114). They ironically use this very historically rooted perception of poetry to propose that poetry’s beauty is useful (none of these manuals claims art for art’s sake), for declamation joins lyrical and theatrical traditions to reach a wider audience, to popularize poetry, and at the same time to edify, for moral elevation and to increase the cultural capital of participants in this rich performance tradition. In his study of nineteenth-century culture and politics in Latin America, Julio Ramos makes a statement that resonates with declamation’s popularization of poetry and poetry’s concurrent role as social leavening. He says: “The humanities—with literature occupying the central place—would be the discipline capable of stabilizing the turbulent world of the street” (244). Declamation opened what had been seen as a “high cultural” genre to a range of people in order to elevate them, not only morally and aesthetically but very practically, for poetry is also linked to worldly success in these manuals. Another benefit it offers is to model competence in oratory, grammar, and pronunciation. These were crucial skills in the development of the modern state, and Ramos reiterates the importance of fluency of expression to power: “Eloquence was as much a means of social authority through letters as it was a model for teaching and learning the logic of rationality in a World where saber decir (knowledge-(as)-said) was the condition of possibility for knowledge (saber) itself” (32). The benefit of “speaking well” appears in all of the manuals, although slightly different results are emphasized. In Costa Rican Enrique RodiMur’s book, declamation is an opportunity to improve language: La declamación no ha sido un campo muy cultivado en nuestros centros de enseñanza. Y con ella podríamos corregir innumerables vicios de lenguaje, no sólo generales sino también típicos de Costa Rica. Fuera de que, el arte de declamar afina el sentido emocional y aviva el apetito creador de los pueblos. (Vincenzi) [Declamation has not been a very cultivated field in our teaching centers. And with it we could correct innumerable linguistic vices, not only

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in general, but also those that are typical of Costa Rica. Aside from which, the art of declamation refines emotional senses and whets the creative appetite of the people.]

Chilean Adolfo Urzúa Rosas recommends the “ceceo” (the lisp used in Spanish pronunciation) and comments on the generally poor pronunciation of Chileans (40).2 Vera Zouroff urges her readers to create a facultad of recitation in Chile in order to correct “el mal decir” [speaking poorly] (6–7); these lessons could be applied to oration or “en general a todas aquellas personas que, por la índole de su profesión, necesitan de una convincente manera de hablar” [in general to all those who, because of their profession, need a convincing mode of speech] (8). Like her compatriot, she supports Castilian intonation, which adds more drama and energy to speech (64). She adds: “En nuestra América, donde la lengua indígena carece de la letra “s,” su sonido, en castellano, es el oro que nos dejaron los españoles a cambio del que se llevaron en pepitas de las entrañas de nuestra tierra” [In our America, where the indigenous language lacks the letter “s,” its sound, in Castilian Spanish, is the gold that the Spaniards left us in exchange for the nuggets they took from the depths of our land] (48). Roca’s remarks also are a testiment to the postcolonial situation, and she makes an indirect reference to other (indigenous?) languages when she notes that “el encanto del buen decir dá la impresión de superioridad y distinción” (6), especialmente en un país bilingüe como el nuestro, es preciso desterrar el acento regional y vencer los defectos de articulación propios de determinados lugares del país” [the charm of being well spoken gives an impression of superiority and distinction . . . especially in a bilingual country like ours, it is necessary to banish our regional accent and overcome the defects of articulation specific to certain parts of the country] (164). For Ecuadorian José Felix Heredia, declamation is “indispensable para los que quieren llegar a ser buenos oradores—también útil para quienes desean tener pronunciación clara, voz flexible y expresiva, porte noble y airosos movimientos del cuerpo: cualidades que tanto recomiendan al hombre en toda culta sociedad” [indispensable for those who wish to become good public speakers—it is also useful for those who want to have clear pronunciation, a flexible and expressive voice, and noble and graceful body movements, qualities that recommend an educated man in any cultured society] (3). He too urges his fellow citizens to avoid regional pronunciation and to adopt “un acento o tono propio de Castilla (importante para los ecuatorianos que se alejan tanto de él)” [a proper Castilian

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accent or tone (important for Ecuadorians who deviate so much from it)] (23). These writers’ preoccupation with “correct” language makes clear its importance to the social sphere. At the same time, we observe fear of the dissolution of a shared language—Spanish—into its regional variants, a remnant, perhaps, of the residual authority of Spain that reminds us of Andrés Bello’s attention to grammar a century earlier. Ramos has persuasively demonstrated how nineteenth- century discussions surrounding grammar were an attempt to discipline the popular speech of the masses (35), and we find evidence of continued anxiety about this speech in these manuales de declamación. In this framework, performing poetry was another tool to broaden literature’s influence over life, encouraging creativity and interaction with the genre, but within certain boundaries and with utilitarian as well as inspirational benefits. In a series of ten radio transmissions in September and October 1925, “desde un poderoso broadcasting de Buenos Aires” [from a powerful broadcasting station in Buenos Aires], Molins discussed the need to orient declamation in “una corriente netamente americanista” [a clearly Americanist current] (9–10). Speaking specifically of Argentina, he said: “Nos sobran motivos, alma, tradición, tonalidades propias, modismos, voces autóctonas. . . . Y sobre todo tenemos en nuestro haber, estas dos grandes tragedias, la indiana y la gaucha, que están reclamando, desde hace siglos, cantores e intérpretes de la gran epopeya” [We have too many reasons, soul, tradition, our own musical keys, idioms, native voices. . . . And above all we have those two great tragedies in our purview, the Indian and the gaucho, singers and interpreters of the great epic who have protested for centuries] (14). Rather than struggle against American influences, Molins embraces them. In this his perspective continues the modernist strand of nuevomundismo that affirms national and regional identities. Molins still insists on clarity of diction, however, and affirms a certain uniformity of language: “Es de todo punto imprescindible evitar el ceceo y todos los acentos provincianos” [It is at all costs essential to avoid the Spanish lisp and all provincial accents], and he urges performers to use “el sonido castizo de la elle. Suena muy mal decir estreya, cabayo, caye . . .” [the purist sound of the double L. It sounds very bad to say “estreya, cabayo, caye . . .”] (16). His advice, in effect, calls on performers of poetry to formalize the local. Declamation moves poetry from a private experience to one that produces or reinforces collective, national, or regional identities. This goal is no surprise, but reading Molins’s ideas relative to the other manuals makes it clear that this cultural practice stimulated heterogeneous or conflicting responses to the democratization of culture that this means of circulating

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poetry implied. In her study of the trans-American origins of Latino writing in the nineteenth century, Kirsten Gruesz has observed similar “bipolar” models of cultural transmission that were “not intended to level social hierarchies but, rather, to redistribute the cultural capital of Europeanstyle high art by ‘Americanizing’ it and promoting institutional programs that would spread both basic and specialized literacies in the dominant national language” (17).3 With roots in both folk and elite traditions, dramatic readings of poetry in the twentieth century can still be linked to the transitional literacy Gruesz observes in the nineteenth century, reaching listeners at various points on the continuum between “orality” and “literacy” (22–23). Per for mance crosses the boundaries between oral and print or visual cultures, and between private and public experiences, and different audiences may interpret poetic per formances in ways that may reinforce or question national identity, exemplifying myriad, sometimes conflicting, roles for literature when performed in a modernizing society. Declamation allows poetry to reach more diverse audiences, but often with the idea of elevating them or bringing them into the castizo (or purist) fold. Critics of the practice of declamación are generally not those writing manuals but offer their opinions in the different print media of the time. In her manual, Zouroff refers indirectly to her detractors, noting that in certain circles recitation is viewed as a second- class art, an opinion she qualifies as “error, error craso” [a crass mistake] (9). Writing from one of these “circles” in Contemporáneos (March 1929), Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano gives a series of definitions of the aesthetics of bad taste (“lo cursi,” which he describes as “la clase media del gusto” [taste’s middle class] 199) in which he includes “lo oratorio del lenguaje” [the oratory quality of language] (202). Francisco Monterde García Icazbalceta, writing in El Universal Ilustrado (February 1926), enumerates the differences between reciting and declaiming poetry. Since the latter suggests “afectación, amaneramiento” [affectation, mannerism], recitation is preferred by people of educated tastes who have delicate sensibilities and do not need to be hit over the head with emotion. This author observes that since the advent of the printing press, there is no longer the need for the oral transmission of texts, and it is for this reason that poetic recitation has become theatrical: “Apareció entonces, signo de decadencia, la declamación” [Declamation appeared, then, as a sign of decadence] (50). He also advises Mexicans not to follow the lead of the Spaniards, for their national character results in emotional declaiming; however, he does see a need for recitation, as many poets do not read their work well.4 This critic’s remarks evoke an artistic

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hierarchy, and performing poetry appears to move it from pure art to the applied, pedagogical, or commercially successful realm. Thus poetry may be seen by some as losing its autonomy when combined with theater. This viewpoint departs once more from a romantic notion of what poetry is and does, one, not incidentally, embraced by Spanish American modernists against the long history of poetry in ser vice to the state: a regional tradition of neoclassical and heroic national odes and occasional poetry. Declamation of poetry opens a polemic about legitimacy and literature that includes struggle about the authority of the product, its producers, and its coproducers or intermediaries who are its performers and readers. One of the outcomes of the performance of poetry is to make reading a public experience by bringing together an audience and, as part of the process, granting more power to the reader—the first of whom is the performer himself or herself. Since Monterde García Icazbalceta does allow for some recitation, he advises readers to choose which poems “entran por el oído” [enter through the ear], those that emphasize sonority and lend themselves to collective (rather than individual) reception. Molins specifies what to emphasize in performance: “Aconsejo a los recitadores que den preferencia al ritmo sobre la rima” [I advise reciters to give preference to rhythm over rhyme], because rhyme is decorative (52). The choice of material demonstrates how specific performers acted as readers, or how they appropriated texts to include in their repertoires. This is one of the ways declamadores controlled their performances and composed their identities according to their ideas of what poetry was suitable for the occasion, which authors “fit” them best, and their own strengths and visions of themselves. In this they are not critics, editors, anthologists, or the traditional letrados, or lettered elite, but “alternative cultural authorities” whose role in the circulation of poetry has not often been accounted for.5 In the following chapters I discuss particular performers such as Berta Singerman, Eusebia Cosme, and Nicomedes Santa Cruz in more detail, but we can begin to examine their collective effect on the transmission of poetry here by analyzing key examples of poems recommended for declaiming and considering what these choices imply about various aspects of early twentieth-century literary culture. Some declamation manuals include selections of poems and other texts that collect the “best poems” for declamation (for example, García Velloso’s Piedras preciosas [Precious stones]); still others assemble the selection of a particular performer (for example, the anonymous Las mejores poesías . . . a base de los programas de Berta Singerman [The best poems, based on Berta Singerman’s programs]). Some names appear in almost every collection

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I found, and among them are those Zouroff lists as the “eminencias líricas del continente” [the continent’s leading light of the lyric]: José Santos Chocano, Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and “la Mistral” (163).6 What follows is a brief summary of which poems by these poets some of the anthologies contain. Molins includes five poems by Chocano: “La cruz del sur,” “El amor de las selvas,” “Los caballos de los conquistadores,” “El alma primitiva, and “Bajando la cuesta” [Southern cross, Love of the forest, The conquerors’ horses, Primitive soul, and Going down the hill]; six by Darío: “Pax,” “La dama de las camelias,” “Elegía pagana,” “Versos de otoño,” “Los motivos del lobo,” and “Marcha triunfal” [Peace, The lady of Camellias, Pagan elegy, Autumn verses, The wolf’s motivations, and Triumphal march]; three by Mistral: “Credo,” “Plegaria por el nido,” and “Interrogaciones” [Creed, Prayer for the nest, and Interrogations]; and eight by Nervo, among them “Cobardía” and “El día que tu me quieras” [Cowardice and The day that you love me]. Miguel Camargo Latorre’s collection is organized by topic rather than by author, and he includes a section of himnos nacionales, or national anthems (including the complete text of the Colombian anthem and the first stanzas of those of other countries of South America). Of Mistral’s work he chooses six poems that fit into the sections canciones infantiles, or nursery songs (“El cardo,” “Los cabellos de los niños,” “A los niños,” “Manitas,” “El corro luminoso,” and “Me tuviste” [Thistle, Children’s hair, To the children, Little hands, The bright circle, and You had me]), and poesía sentimental [emotional poetry] (“Al pueblo hebreo” [To the Hebrew people]). Darío has only one poem in the religious poetry section, called “Los motivos del lobo,” while Chocano’s five poems appear in various sections: “Ciudad fundada” in Ciudades colombianas [City founded in Colombian cities], “El virrey pasa,” “Esmeraldas y mariposas,” and “Café, tabaco . . .” in Raza. Naturaleza. Descripción [The viceroy passes, Emeralds and butterflies, Coffee, tobacco . . . in Race. Nature. Description], and “La canción de las tinieblas” [Song of darkness] in the section entitled Sentimental. Of Nervo, Camargo includes only “Cobardía.” Las mejores poesías [The best poems] (based on Singerman’s programs) incorporates nine poems by Darío: “Sonatina,” “Marcha triunfal,” “Los motivos del lobo,” “La rosa niña,” “Canción de otoño en primavera,” “Cuento,” “Blasón,” “Margarita,” and “Caso” [Sonatina, Triumphal march, The wolf’s motivations, The rose girl, Song of autumn in spring, Short story, Coat of arms, Margarita, and Case]. There are four by Mistral, including “El ruego,” “Piececitos,” “Himno al árbol,” and “Caperucita Roja” (The prayer, Little feet, Hymn to the tree, and Little Red Riding Hood]. She does not include any Chocano but does quite a

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selection of Nervo; among the ten poems mentioned are both “Cobardía” and “El día que me quieras.” Manyari Rey has eight poems by Chocano: “La magnolia,” “Amor en las selvas,” “Nostalgia,” “¡Quién sabe!,” “Los caballos de los conquistadores,” “Blasón,” “La tristeza del Inca,” and “El amor mudo” [The magnolia, Love of the forest, Nostalgia, Who knows!, The conquerors’ horses, Coat of arms, The Inca’s sadness, and Silent love]. There are three of Mistral’s— “Doña primavera,” “Nocturno,” and “El día y el niño” [Lady springtime, Nocturne, and The day and the child]—and seven of Darío’s—“Sonatina,” “Responso a Verlaine,” “Marcha triunfal,” “Canción de otoño en primavera,” “Cuento,” “Margarita,” and “Los motivos del lobo” [Sonatina, Response to Verlaine, Triumphal march, Song of autumn in spring, Short story, Margarita, and The wolf’s motivations]. The only poem by Nervo is “El día que me quieras.” It is clear that each anthology is influenced by the nationality of its editor. Some include prose as well as poetry. None of these anthologies includes any Afro- Caribbean poems (no Palés, Guillén, etc.), although Singerman mentions performing authors from this area in her autobiography, and these poets were the centerpieces of other performances during this time period. It could be that Afro- Caribbean poetry was deemed part of oral culture and therefore not included in the written archives. While some poems were selected in terms of national import, there are some “stock pieces,” or “Caballitos de Guerra,” Singerman’s term for poems that were part of the declaimer’s canon at the time. The poems performed shift in meaning relative to the audience, the location, the event that stimulated the performance, or the historical circumstances; imagine reciting a poem or a series of poems about the sea in 1880 Bolivia or Chile just after the War of the Pacific, in which the Andean country lost access to the sea to its southern neighbor. What do these selections tell us about the literary culture of the moment (and, by extension, of today)? By examining a poem by each of these leading lights, we will see how they draw in their listeners, how they develop distinct threads of regional identity, and how they “Americanize” inherited forms, all while appealing to the ear.

José Santos Chocano and Amado Nervo Both of these poets were prominent Spanish American modernists, or modernistas, who have become marginalized to a certain degree by contemporary tastes. Nervo is known as a sentimental poet, displaying a degree of emotion that later is labeled “cursi” (corny or in bad taste). He was

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born into an old Spanish family in Tepic, Mexico, and died in Montevideo on May 24, 1919; in his prime, he was recognized as the “poeta máximo de América” [highest poet of America] (Leal 43). But, as José Olivio Jiménez explains in his anthology of modernism, modern- day readers find his popularity problematic: “Cómo explicarse que sus versos, fáciles y amables pero en general de poco calado y escasísimo riesgo, pudieran alcanzar el gran favor de que gozaron en vida de su autor, y hacer de éste uno de los poetas más populares de su tiempo” [How can we explain how his verses, easy and congenial but generally shallow and taking little risk, could achieve the great approval that they enjoyed in his lifetime and make him one of the most popular poets of his time] (257). José María Martínez responds, in part, to Jiménez’s observation in another essay that notes Nervo’s accessibility, which opens his works to wider audiences that included a notable number of women who were attracted to his intimate verse and the autobiographical elements in his oeuvre, linked to several well-known tragedies in his life (such as the death of his beloved wife). Manuel Gálvez, who introduced him in Argentina in 1918, referred to his large female audiences who “beben la fuente de vuestra alma lírica” [drink from the fountain of your lyrical soul] (Martínez 89). The emotive quality of his poetry lends itself to declamación, and he was lauded for his own per formances of his works in Mexico, Madrid, New York, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo; these were “lecturas que se convertían en auténticos fenómenos de masa debido al magnetismo del poeta y a su cautivador modo de recitar” [readings that turned into mass phenomena due to the poet’s magnetism and his captivating way of reading] (22–23). Huge numbers of admirers attended his funeral (300,000 according to Leal [Leal 43]); his poetry, however, did not appear in the Antología de la poesía moderna en lengua española [Anthology of modern Spanish language poetry] (1941), edited by his compatriot Xavier Villaurrutia—he was rejected by the Mexican avant-garde, los contemporáneos. As Martínez observes: “La obra de Nervo es, en el modernismo, una de las que más dependió de la específica sensibilidad de su época, y por lo tanto una de las más afectadas por el estigma de la caducidad” [Nervo’s work is, within modernism, one that most depended on the specific sensibility of his epoch and, for this reason, one that was most affected by the stigma of aging] (18). In his 2002 book, Yo te bendigo, vida [I bless you, life], Carlos Monsiváis does a phenomenal reading of Nervo and situates his work as part of a modernist “espectáculo de la palabra” [spectacle of the word] (60). Unlike dominant perspectives that characterize Spanish American modernism as a solely literate or ivory tower movement, Monsiváis proposes that “en gran

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medida el modernismo es también asunto de la cultura oral—las multitudes acuden a los recitales para aprender las señas de la sensibilidad sonora cuya existencia ignoraban” [to a great degree modernism is also a matter of oral culture—the crowds flock to the recitals to learn the indicators of sonorous sensitivity of which they were ignorant] (61). Unlike many other writers of the moment, Nervo distinguishes himself as a religious modernist, and in his poetry he materializes the spiritual realm (43). Monsiváis describes his poetry as a religion: “Esta religión laica (la poesía) localiza sus instituciones en los estados de ánimo y su clerecía en los declamadores” [This laic religión (poetry) locates its institutions in the state of mind (of the people) and its clergy in the declaimers (of poetry)] (46). Considering the changing role for the poet in the increasingly industrialized world, he observes that while “no hay Mercado literario” [a literary Market], there is a “mercado sentimental” [a sentimental market] (92), and Nervo enters this market through the public performance of personal emotion. Poetry or art that stimulates an affective rather than an intellectual reaction has often been stigmatized by twentieth-century literary critics, and perhaps it is for this reason that we should reconsider the function of emotion and the values implied in our multiple ways of experiencing the world (Altieri 5). The work of a poet like Nervo can help us understand how emotion influences our actions and beliefs, highlighting certain traits in a work and blinding us to others (8). The emotional links that an artwork creates can produce different types of satisfaction: in Nervo’s case, they may evoke a gambit of feelings such as love, mourning, religious reverence, and a longing for ecstasy. While per formance augmented his notoriety during his life and the dominance of emotion over style later marginalized him, both of these elements have facilitated the translation of Nervo’s work into the popular realm through its musicalization. The lyric voice can be extended in music, both a means of emotional expression, for, as Rei Terada notes, “the discourse of emotion is curiously saturated with musical metaphors, instruments figuring selves and music figuring feelings” (92). Several of Nervo’s poems have been adapted to music, often in the tango or bolero styles, which lend themselves to affective experience. “Si tú me dices ven” [If you tell me to come] is a well-known example of a Nervo poem that originally had a religious referent but was transformed by others into a love song. “El día que me quieras” [The day you love me] is perhaps his most enduring poem that has been recontextualized at various times in the twentieth century (the original poem that appeared posthumously in El arquero divino [The divine archer] 1915). Carlos Gardel set the poem to

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music in 1935, with paraphrased and additional lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera. It is the theme song of the film with the same name (directed by John Reinhardt of Paramount), whose plot is a love story frustrated by class differences and features Gardel himself singing an extended version of the poem. “El día que me quieras” returns as the title and theme song of Argentine Leandro Katz’s 1998 documentary about the last deathbed photo of Che Guevara; in this case, love could be of the revolutionary kind that Che espoused and perhaps could also refer to the adoration of Che as a revolutionary icon. Additionally, the song is the ironic title of a Nicaraguan documentary by Florence Jaugey (1999) that deals with domestic violence, offering the audience a sad postmodern version of the bolero. According to Roberto Selles, there have been 117 recordings of the song. Looking at only a few examples here, we see how the poem that became a song is rearticulated in different contexts for diverse emotional ends. When we contrast Le Pera’s version with the original, we see how he elaborates on the original verses that used modernist vocabulary, tropes (such as synesthesia and an abundance of musical figures), and images to express a contingent desire. The original reads: El día que me quieras tendrá más luz que junio; la noche que me quieras será de plenilunio con notas de Beethoven vibrando en cada rayo sus inefables cosas y habrá juntas más rosas que en todo el mes de mayo. Las fuentes cristalinas irán por las laderas saltando cantarinas el día que me quieras. El día que me quieras, los sotos escondidos resonarán arpegios nunca jamás oídos. Éxtasis de tus ojos, todas las primaveras que hubo y habrá en el mundo, serán cuando me quieras. Cogidas de la mano, cual rubias hermanitas luciendo golas cándidas, irán las margaritas por montes y praderas delante de tus pasos, el día que me quieras . . .

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Y si deshojas una, te dirá su inocente postrer pétalo blanco: ¡Apasionadamente! Al reventar el alba del día que me quieras, tendrán todos los tréboles cuatro hojas agoreras, y en el estanque, nido de gérmenes ignotos, florecerán las místicas corolas de los lotos. El día que me quieras será cada celaje ala maravillosa: cada arrebol, miraje de las Mil y Una Noches; cada brisa un cantar, cada árbol una lira, cada monte un altar. El día que me quieras, para nosotros dos cabrá en un solo beso la beatitud de Dios. (444– 45) [The day that you love me will have more light than June; / the night that you love me will be a full moon / with Beethoven’s notes vibrating in each ray / their ineffable things / and there will be more roses joined / than in all the month of May. // Crystalline fountains / will tumble down the slopes / skipping singers / the day you love me. // The day you love me, the hidden thickets / will echo with arpeggios never heard before. / The ecstasy of your eyes, every spring / was and will be in the world, will exist when you love me. // Holding hands, those blond sisters / showing off simple white lines, the daisies will go / through the mountains and the meadows / before your steps, the day you love me. . . . / And if you pluck a petal, her last innocent white / petal will tell you “Passionately!” // As the day you love me bursts, / all of the clovers will have divining four leaves / and in the pool, nest of unknown germination / the mystical corollas of the lotus will blossom. // The day that you love me each sign will be / a wonderful wing: each red glow, a mirage / from One Thousand and One Nights; every breeze a song / each tree a lyre, every mountain an altar. // The day that you love me, for both of us / the blessedness of God will fit in one kiss.]

The beloved in this poem is only indirectly present; what responds more directly to the speaker’s desire is Nature. But this Nature is entwined in culture, since the moonbeams vibrate with Beethoven’s music and the springs sing in personified voices. In Le Pera’s revision the song lyrics share the title and the longing of the poem, the contrast between day and night, and an expressive, personified view of nature; they amplify

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all of these elements and, most notably, eliminate the direct reference to God: Acaricia mi ensueño el suave murmullo de tu suspirar, ¡Como ríe la vida si tus ojos negros me quieren mirar! Y si es mío el amparo de tu risa leve que es como un cantar, ella aquieta mi herida, todo, todo se olvida. El día que me quieras la rosa que engalana, se vestirá de fiesta con su mejor color. Y al viento las campanas dirán que ya eres mía, y locas las fontanas se contarán su amor. La noche que me quieras desde el azul del cielo, las estrellas celosas nos mirarán pasar. Y un rayo misterioso hará nido en tu pelo, luciérnaga curiosa que verá . . . ¡que eres mi consuelo! Recitado: El día que me quieras no habrá más que armonías, será clara la aurora y alegre el manantial. Traerá quieta la brisa rumor de melodías. Y nos darán las fuentes su canto de cristal. El día que me quieras endulzará sus cuerdas el pájaro cantor, florecerá la vida

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no existirá el dolor . . . La noche que me quieras desde el azul del cielo, las estrellas celosas nos mirarán pasar y un rayo misterioso hará nido en tu pelo, luciérnaga curiosa que verá . . . ¡que eres mi consuelo! (Le Pera) [My dream caresses / the soft murmur of your sigh, / like life laughs / if your black eyes want to look at me! / And if the protection / of your light laughter like a song is mine / it calms my wound / everything, everything is forgotten. // The day that you love me / the adorning rose / will put on its party clothes / with its best color. / And to the wind the bells / will tell that now you are mine, / and the crazy fountains / will tell about their love. / The night that you love me / from the blue of the sky, / the jealous stars / will watch us go by. / And a mysterious ray / will nest in your hair, / curious firefly that will see . . . that you are my solace! // Recited: / The day you love me / there won’t be more than harmonies, / the dawn will be clear / and the spring cheerful. / The breeze will quietly bring / the sound of the melodies. / And the fountains will give us / their crystalline song. // The day that you love me / The songbird will / sweeten his chords / life will flower / pain will not exist. . . . / The night that you love me / from the blue of the sky, / the jealous stars / will watch us go by / and a mysterious ray / will nest in your hair, / curious firefly that will see . . . that you are my solace!]

There is more direct communication between the singer and the natural elements that speak to him; moreover, the beloved is implicitly present or she/he is at least imagined to be present (as evidenced by the plural pronoun “nos” and by the physical description of the moonbeams that light on her/his hair like fireflies, and because the speaker addresses the beloved directly: “que eres mi consuelo”). The third stanza is recited, an interesting shift that reminds us of the song’s connection to poetry and unites sung and spoken emotion. The performance of the song modifies our emotional reactions to it, removes the explicitly Christian reference, and extends the poem to a mixed audience that is not restricted to the usual readers of poetry. Music has often been seen as stimulating feeling rather than intellect, and the actual performance of the song may bring to the surface emotional inflections implicit in the text.7

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In the first half of the twentieth century, performance is regularly associated with the avant-gardes and more bohemian milieu, but Nervo’s work demonstrates how, through performance and emotion, poetry could reach a broader audience. This example breaks with the idea of modernism as an attempt to create an autonomous space for art and instead allows us to see how it participates in the more “prosaic” world. The example of how Nervo’s poetry has taken on new lives through music also shows us how this poetry has been transformed yet continues to resonate in the popular realm. Chocano fell out of the modernist mainstream for somewhat different reasons: known for his extravagant celebration of the new world, his nuevomundismo, and his heroic voice, much of his work does not fit with the critical construction of modernismo around canonical writing figures such as Rubén Darío. Jiménez characterizes him this way: “Es Chocano, sin duda, el modernista hispanoamericano que más lejos ha quedado de nuestra sensibilidad pues fue la suya una poesía que encarnó, como la de ningún otro coetáneo, esa línea exterior y grandílocua del modernismo que más pronto quedó arrumbada con el tiempo” [Chocano is, without a doubt, the Spanish American modernist who has remained most distant from our sensibility, for his poetry incarnated, like no one else’s of his cohort, this exterior and grandiloquent line of modernism that quickly became abandoned with time] (418). Like Nervo, his work and the response to it are rooted in specific historical and cultural situations. Unlike Nervo, Chocano did not appeal to personal sentiments but national ones—many comment on his proclaimed desire to be the “poet of America”—Whitman having the North and Chocano the South. Julio Ortega characterizes him as one of the last of the “modernistas públicos,” or public modernists, who fanned the flames of regional and national pride in the past and present for his audiences. Born in 1875 Lima to a Spanish family (in spite of his claim of being an Incan descendant, as Phyllis Rodríguez-Peralta reminds us [Rodríguez-Peralta 21]), he was in 1921 declared poet laureate of Peru by the dictator August Leguía. “Chocano saw the poet as a noble spirit at odds with the egalitarian mediocrity of the modern world” (Higgins 98), and while he used modernist verse forms, his attitude is often romantic, celebrating the poet’s verbal power in a patriotic, arousing manner. Rodríguez-Peralta remarks on the vibrant sound of his poetry and on his imagery that “aunque violenta y sobrecargada a veces, siempre es deslumbrante y original” [although violent and overloaded at times, always is dazzling and original] (23–25). Although his poetry is moving, in textual form as well as in per formance, it suffers from “su énfasis oratorio, el ruido de

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címbalos y tambores, y su heroísmo exorbitante” [its oratorical emphasis, the noise of cymbals and drums, and his exorbitant heroism] (47, her verb, my emphasis). This is Ortega’s description of the performative mode of his poetry: “Chocano fue uno de los últimos poetas modernistas en escribir para un auditorio específico, el que paga su entrada a los teatros para escuchar la oratoria civil del nacionalismo vindicativo y tardío” [Chocano was one of the last modernist poets to write for a specific listener, who paid his entrance to the theater to listen to the civic oratory of a late and vindictive nationalism] (62), and Zouroff offers a description of Chocano’s gestures: “Cuando el poeta Chocano leía sus versos, sostenía el papel con una mano mientras con la otra iba acompañando la lectura, y no se hallaba qué admirar más, si los magníficos poemas, o esa mano que lo era también” [When Chocano the poet read his verses, he held the paper with one hand while with the other he accompanied the reading, and one did not know what to admire more, the magnificent poems or this hand that was also magnificent] (92). Not supplementing but competing with the text, Chocano appears to have been an excessive performer of his own authority or authorship. Like Nervo, his autobiography added drama to the works he presented, but more in terms of contentious or self- glorifying background elements than tragic spirituality. Chocano was a Peruvian poet who spent much time outside Peru, residing in Spain and traveling throughout Central and South America. He knew a wide range of political figures, which kept him in the public eye, and his life was punctuated and ended in histrionic violence; he shot one of his critics (the journalist Edwin Elmore) in Peru in 1925, served prison time for this crime, and in 1934 was killed in a dispute in Santiago, Chile. The oft-recited poems of Chocano are typical of what this poet represents. “Los caballos de los conquistadores” is a narrative poem that tells the story of the conquerors’ horses in the Americas, but it connects these steeds with heroes’ mounts throughout history. The style of the poem draws on history, on epic, romantic, and even neoclassical traditions, although the use of varied meter, reinforced by the use of four-syllable words and more uncommon palabras esdrújulas (those accented on the third to the last syllable, such as cánticos, Píndaro, and olímpicas), suggests a modernist formal innovation. The horses here are synecdochical portrayals of men, but they are also literal representations of otherness, of the meeting of old and new worlds: “De unas tierras nunca vistas, / a otras tierras conquistables” [from lands never seen, / to other conquerable lands]. The poet appears to celebrate the conquest in different moments in the poem and

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in the refrain, “!Los caballos eran fuertes! / ¡Los caballos eran ágiles!” [The horses were strong! / The horses were agile!], but the expressive intonation of these lines may be different on each appearance (Alma América 31). Performances of the poem may publicly reenact the conquest and at the same time incorporate reactions to it through shifts in tone and emphasis. This is literally an old warhorse of a poem whose dramatic story and style lend themselves to declamation, and whose written attitudes and technique also support Mariátegui’s claim that, in Peru, Chocano “pertenece al período colonial de nuestra literatura” [belongs to the colonial period of our literature] (242). The other standard poem for recitation from Chocano’s works is “Blasón” [Coat of arms] (from Alma América, 1906), with its famous opening lines that give voice to Native America: “Soy el cantor de América autóctono y salvaje” [I am the singer of autochthonous and savage America].8 Whether it is the singer or the continent that is qualified as autochthonous and savage, identity is the central issue here. The speaker, celebrated in the poem as both Incan and Spanish, orchestrates or melds these two identities: the “oro y plata” [gold and silver], precious metals intertwined. “Blasón” is an alexandrine sonnet, a modernist innovation of the form associated with Darío; Chocano changes the conventional rhyme scheme to pairs of consonant rhymes that strengthen sound and emphasize line endings, indicating that this poem was meant to be performed. The Peruvian enters into a dialogue with Western tradition when he chooses the sonnet, yet he goes against this in several ways, for, as Paul Oppenheimer has demonstrated, the sonnet is one of the first modern, written poetic forms, directed inward and meant to be read rather than performed (179– 82). One sign of the sonnet’s interiority is that the voice is not directed to an interlocutor but, rather, to the form itself; it is the logic of the form that should resolve the problem proposed in the octave when the speaker arrives at the sestet (183– 84). This poem goes against tradition through its orality and performative qualities and its changed rhyme scheme, variations that fit with its focus on mixed identities and the favorable conjunction of colonizer and colonized throughout the poem. In the tercets we see that the poet is central to the act of forging identities, for it is in his imagination that Incan and Spanish parts converge: Mi fantasía viene de un abolengo moro: Los Andes son de plata, pero el León de oro; Y las dos castas fundo con épico fragor.

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La sangre es española e incaico es el latido; ¡Y de no ser Poeta, quizás yo hubiese sido un blanco Aventurero o un indio Emperador! (35) [My fantasy comes from Moorish lineage / The Andes are silver, but the Lion is gold / And I found both castes with an epic crash. // My blood is Spanish and my heartbeat Incan; / And if I not a poet, perhaps I would have been / a white adventurer or an Indian Emperor!]

The verb fundo is from fundir, to melt or fuse, and the verb fragor means to clamor or crash; here they denote the sound of the two races coming together and also suggest fragua, or a forge, intimated by the precious metals. The last tercet makes it clear that the speaker is an individual who represents the whole, and that everyone who recites or reads the poem assumes this identity as a mestizo poet—elevated emperor and adventurer of America. Thus the poem offers a portrait of two contrary (but similarly exotic) identities brought together through the office of the poet, functioning in the broad sense of “poesis” or “maker” of the ideal: mestizaje.9 Some of the traits that help this poem maintain its resonance in contemporary settings are the imaginary assumption of an indigenous identity and the adaptation of the sonnet to performance. While Chocano’s tone and grandiloquence do not fit with modern- day taste and his works have a diminished presence in anthologies, “Blasón” is still performed today, most frequently as a staging of mestizo identity. One recent example is a written version of “Blasón” on YouTube, accompanied by photos of indigenous faces and the Pan-Andean charango and zampoña music of Inca Taki (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL -sElGcH-A). There is also a version recited by a young boy (along with a poem by Nicomedes Santa Cruz, examined in the next chapter), and the poem is discussed by various readers in the online chat group, Club de la escritura [Writing club] (www .xing.com/ . . . /blason-jose-santos-chocano -peru-8775109). In this chat group readers in May 2008 discussed how they learned to recite the poem by heart and how they are teaching their students in the fourth year of primary school to recite it, and they say that they wonder about the meaning of the third stanza (the logic of making the Andes silver rather than gold). Its reception in the virtual environment demonstrates how part of Chocano’s production lives on in the more truly mestizo mouths of these younger readers and reciters.

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Rubén Darío and Gabriela Mistral Darío and Mistral are both canonical figures of Latin American poetry, their poems “perlas” [pearls] that had to be included in declaimers’ early twentieth-century repertoires; the interesting question is which works are selected and what light these choices may shed on the cultural milieu at the time. In his autobiography Darío notes that “Margarita” (from Prosas profanes [Profane prose], 1896) is his most recited poem “en tierra hispana como en nuestra América” [in Spain as in our America] (106). Darío speculates that its popularity may be because of the “anécdota sentimental” [sentimental story] of this poem about lost love or because the death of a beautiful muse for “lo sencillo emotivo” [simple emotion] serves as a hook to draw in a broad range of readers or listeners. It is also a sonnet, one of the conventional Western forms for love poetry; popularized when recited, its classical form fits with the notion of a lettered elite elevating middle-class audiences. “Los motivos del lobo” [The wolf’s motivations] (which appears in his Poesías completas as part of Poemas del otoño y otro poemas [Poems of autumn and other poems] but notes that the poem was originally published in Madrid in 1913) is another regularly recited Darío poem that is still much in vogue in oral performances, as attested to by the many versions available on YouTube today.10 Unlike many of Darío’s bestknown modernist works, this narrative poem tells a story, and its dramatic elements offer possibilities for a performer’s embellished interpretation of its moral lesson. The poem is a kind of Christian parable that relates an encounter between Saint Francis of Assisi and a wolf that has been terrorizing a town. Saint Francis brokers an agreement between the wolf and the townspeople in which the latter will feed the beast in exchange for a change in the wolf’s “carnivorous” behavior. This works for a while and the wolf learns about Christianity with Francis, but when Francis must leave town for a while, the wolf sees the people sinning around him and they turn on him and beat him for his very humility, provoking his return to his savage ways. When Francis returns and confronts him, the wolf explains his change and Francis, wordless, is left to his prayers. The poem has a moral appeal: it is emblematic of the struggle to maintain faith when confronted with wrongdoing, and of a continuous questioning of the gap between words and deeds. Dodecasyllables predominate in the 159 lines with consonant rhyme throughout (a possible mnemonic device), but the line lengths vary and the conversations between Francisco and the lobo, in par ticular, feature shorter, six- syllable dramatic verse. There is little to mark this stylistically as a modernist poem, although themati-

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cally it is in line with existential meditations of late modernism in Darío’s work. “Marcha triunfal” [Triumphal march] from Cantos de vida y esperanza [Songs of life and hope], 1905), another standard in oral performances, fits more in the pattern of public poetry, occasional verse, or civic poetry. In this it is like “Salutación del optimista” [The optimist’s greeting], the poem that Gerard Aching studies in some detail to highlight Darío’s public voice. Aching notes how the speaker hails his audience in this poem, as Darío did in an original per formance of the poem at the Ateneo in Madrid in 1905 in order to invoke a transatlantic hispanism (56). He finds evidence of the performative origins of this poem in the text, which, like the work of other modernists, constructed alliances “for and with their reading constituencies” (18). In the context of Cantos de vida y esperanza, “Salutación del optimista” is the second poem, after the well-known, self-reflective “Yo soy aquel” [I am that one] that announces a change in Darío’s poetics. The public voice of “Salutación” is echoed at the close of this fourteen-poem section by “Marcha triunfal,” the final emphatically public poem of the first unit. The poem itself is a “canto sonoro” [sonorous song] that registers the sounds of the “claros clarines,” “los timbaleros,” and “ritmos marciales” [clear bugles, the drummers, and the martial rhythms], the noise of the horses, the parade, and the voices of the surrounding crowd. The enthusiasm of the celebration, punctuated with exclamation points, culminates in a united salutation that closes the poem: “¡Saludan con voces de bronce las trompas de guerra que tocan la marcha triunfal! . . .” [Their bronze voices greet the war horns that play the triumphal march! . . . ] (64). The metonymical swords of patriotic soldiers past and present combine with synesthetic bronze voices to salute in a poem that uses modernist technique to effect an almost neoclassical tribute to victory. This is civic poetry, much like Darío’s “Oda al libertador,” or “Himno a Bolívar” [Ode to the liberator, or Hymn to Bolívar], poems that the Nicaraguan wrote and recited in his youth. None of these three favorites from the repertoires of poetic performers fits with the dominant image of modernist poetry as evasive, “precious,” or purely aesthetic; however, these favorites do fit with Ivan Schulman and Evelyn Picón Garfield’s observation about the range that modernism actually encompasses: “El modernismo poético [ . . . ] no representa un solo estilo, sino un enfrentamiento con un mundo de carácter fallido y tentativo por parte de los escritores de buscar alternativas—lingüísticas, estilísticas o sociopolíticas—sabiendo que serán defraudados o frustrados en su busca” [Poetic modernism does not only represent style, but also a confrontation with a world with a type of failure

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and the writers’ attempt to search for alternatives—linguistic, stylistic, sociopolitical—knowing that they will be disappointed or frustrated in their search] (27). That “Marcha triunfal’s” confidence is followed by “¿Qué signo haces, Oh Cisne?” [What sign do you make, oh swan?] is not paradoxical but part of a continual modernist struggle with diverse registers. I began this chapter considering how the words to this poem might change when voiced by Dalia Iñiguez and speculating about other contexts that might alter or inflect its meaning. Another context—perhaps the most traditional—for its analysis is that of the book, and we have begun to see how “March triunfal’s” meaning may shift relative to other poems in the collection. It may also be read relative to “Allá lejos” [There afar away], the penultimate poem of the collection; an alternative salutation at once spoken and meditative, this poem does not appear to have been frequently performed. The “lejos” of the title is both temporal and spatial, for this is a locally focused poem, a memory of Nicaragua in the speaker’s youth. In a fairly straightforward style, the speaker greets the ox—a coarse, humble, and hardworking presence—and the dove, which represents ideal harmony, or the natural music of the past. Although this is also a salutation, the voice and tone are distant from those in poems meant for more public declamation. Meditative, nostalgic, local, and personal, this is more of the speaker’s conversation with his past that sets the stage for “Lo fatal” [Fatality], the final poem in a book that demonstrates the poet’s changes and continuity within his own work. The set of poems in this collection and those that are most chosen for performance make clear Darío’s struggle or play with distinct concepts of voice: we observe the more traditional oral and the theologized, depersonalized, interiorized, or otherwise invented contemporary metavoices. He works on the boundary between these voices in modernism and shifts between his positions as a “colonial” poet serving the community in the turn- of-the-century transition to economic liberalism, as the avatar of a literary movement, and, in a more personal stance, suggesting perhaps an alternative, popular voice. There is not as much consistency in terms of a par ticular poem or poems selected for declamation in the case of Mistral. All of the manuals I consulted include at least one of her children’s poems, and the composite selection I noted earlier in this chapter includes poems from her first book, Desolación [Desolation] (1922), and her second, Ternura [Tenderness] (1924), but nothing from Tala [Felling] (1938) or Lagar [Winepress] (1954), the other books published in her lifetime. The poems do share two general themes: they either have religious content, or they focus on children,

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which supports her image as Christian, mother, teacher, and poet of America. In keeping with officially “appropriate” roles for women, these declamation manuals do not include Mistral’s famous “Sonetos de la muerte” [Sonnets on death] or poems from the “Locas mujeres” [Crazy women] section of Lagar, but they reinforce her most popular work (Licia Fiol-Matta notes that Ternura was her best- selling book during her life, with approximately ten editions [Fiol-Matta 84]). This construction or marketing of Mistral as sentimental mater et magistra [mother and teacher], while at one time fomenting the circulation of her work, does not do justice to its complexity and has led readers and listeners away from it for multiple reasons. Chilean Leandro Urbina remembers reading the poet’s work in this way: “El útero sofocante de la Mistral en que nos habían metido a todos los niños chilenos agitando banderitas y bailando rondas era la caverna en la que el flautista de Hammelin, alias César Bunster, y el estado chileno y la Iglesia chilena nos tenían confinadas” [Mistral’s suffocating uterus in which all Chilean children were deposited, waving flags and dancing in circles, was the cave in which the pied piper of Hammelin, alias César Bunster and the Chilean church and state, had us confined] (185). At the beginning of his exemplary book on the poet, Grínor Rojo observes how her work originally held no interest for him due to her monolithic and conservative image, and many contemporary readers have been put off by her apparent support for conventional roles for women. Since the mid-1980s, however, rereadings of Mistral have sought to redress and redeem her work by including a broader selection of materials (both within her published works and that which was previously unavailable) or by reevaluating the canonical poems with diverse theoretical approaches that highlight elements previously ignored.11 Other readers (Elizabeth Rosa Horan, Fiol-Matta) seek to reclaim her as a lesbian who was always conscious of her public persona, reading the silences or paucity of references to physical or erotic love in her writing. There has also been increased attention to her prose, which demonstrates her strong political convictions, her public solidarity with the people against military governance, her role as a defender of social justice, and her controversial positions relative to feminism and women’s roles, and it adds new information about her personal relationships and further details of her biography through her letters. While she performed and was cast in numerous roles in her lifetime—educational missionary, frustrated mother, woman of letters, suffering poet with an appearance that did not conform to ideas of femininity at the time, a writer imbued with spiritual inclinations, and first Nobel laureate of Latin America—unlike Nervo, Chocano, and Darío,

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she was not known for her own performances of her poetry. When she won the “Juegos Florales,” an award that would mark the first major success of her career, Karen Peña notes that a young Mistral listened as her poems were read by a male poet and did not appear on stage to receive her prize (2). Mistral is better known as a public speaker in terms of prose rather than poetry, although her poems appear in the repertoires of many performers. Their choice of poems leads to an often static, sentimental interpretation of her work, which even in the 1920s was seen as anachronistic or out of step with the poetic innovation of the times. While using a range of metrical formats, her poetry has a similar style throughout, featuring a formal austerity, an often simple assonant rhyme, and an apparently humble, yet often prophetic, voice. Her performed poetry is sonorous and often has an intimate, spiritual tone. In this she shares some traits with Nervo, and Rojo has noted that Mistral appreciated her Mexican colleague’s worldview, his “neo-spiritualism,” and the accessibility of his work, qualities that prevail, as she wrote in a letter to Nervo, “tras el gran boato verbal de los modernistas y ‘rubendaristas’ ” [through the great verbal pomp of the modernists and followers of Rubén Darío] (Mistral, quoted in Rojo 79). One of her performed works, “Plegaria por el nido” [Prayer for the nest], a poem that appears in the “Casi escolares” [Almost school-age] section of Ternura, offers a prayer for nature, a plea for God to save a delicate nest, which represents a promise of the future and a fragile home, from destruction. One could hear this public prayer as a locally focused sotto voce spiritual prelude to the later, more direct poems against the destruction of the Second World War that would appear in the “Guerra” [War] section of Lagar, or as an entreaty for the vulnerable young in many possible situations. That she groups these poems under the rubric “Casi escolares” tells us that they are meant for young voices, and in her “Colofón con cara de excusa” [Colophon with an excuse], an explanatory essay included in Ternura at her editor’s request, she gives us her own reaction as receptor and creator of her work: “Cuando leo mis poesías más o menos escolares, y más aún cuando las oigo en boca de niño, siento una vergüenza no literaria sino un quemazón real en la cara” [When I read my poems that are more or less about school, and even more when I hear them in the mouth of a child, I feel an embarrassment that is not literary but real burning on my face]. Continuing her self-critique, she expresses a desire to change the “dureza del verso, presunción conceptual, pedagogía catequista, empalagosa parlería” [hardness of the verse, the conceptual presumption, the catechistic pedagogy, the cloying verbiage] in these “versos que

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andan en boca de tantos” [verses that circulate in the mouths of so many], for her ear tells her that she has not achieved a child’s crystalline communication (109). Rather than teach through this work, she strove to turn our attention to children’s expression and to use it to develop a castizo or criollo [of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent or Spanish born in the Americas] children’s literature, which she may have only partially achieved (this is one possible reading of the “Casi” in her subheading). In the “Colofón” she explains that she writes lullabies and children’s songs to integrate traditional culture and folklore in poems that express the silenced voices of mothers: “Porque las mujeres no podemos quedar mucho tiempo pasivas, aunque se hable de nuestro sedentarismo, y menos callarnos por años. La madre buscó y encontró, pues, una manera de hablar consigo misma [Because women cannot remain passive for long, although they speak of our sedentary nature, and even less, shut ourselves up for years. Mothers look for and find a way of talking to themselves] (106). Rewriting inherited traditions in her “children’s poetry” was something for which she has been criticized, Mistral notes, but she dares to rework tradition in spite of (or even because of) “el conflicto tremendo entre el ser fiel y el ser infiel en el coloniaje verbal” [the tremendous conflict between being faithful and unfaithful to verbal colonialism] (107). Mistral rejects the charge of imitation, an element in her clear Latin Americanist stance, and she works within her subordinate position as a postcolonial bricoleuse who picks and chooses from inherited traditions in her reconstruction of popular genres. Mistral’s voice represents one of the few widely available female voices in early twentieth-century Spanish American poetry, and general interest in her work was augmented by her Nobel Prize. Her spiritual- and motherand-child-themed poems put into words experiences that many of her readers and listeners may have felt, lend attention to ideas or details they may have noticed, and validate their worldview. Her work did so within poetry that was accessible yet not “popular,” for she translated shared experiences into anachronistic, ritualized formal language, “elevating” her listeners’ experiences but not eliminating correspondences. When voiced, her poems may become the words of a (female) lay priest or a tool to ensure women’s conformity to traditional roles in their mystification of maternity, but they may also have created bonds among women, breaching “the Romantic model of lyric poetry as a private, individual experience of communion” (Gruesz 24). One example of this is the poem “Manitas” [Little hands] (also from the “Casi escolares” poems), which seems to be a simple celebration of children’s small hands. One can picture how the images in the poem might shift with a chorus of children reciting this poem,

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including hand gestures. A closer look reveals that it also implies a dialogue among women about their role in child care. The first two verses observe the power of these tiny hands, described as “pedigüeñas” [demanding] and “dueñas” [owners] of the world’s valleys: fruits light up for them, as if asking to be picked (90). The third stanza shifts the tone to note: Y los panales llenos de su carga se ofenden. ¡Y los hombres que pasan no entienden! (90) [And the hives full / of their load are offended. / And the men who pass / do not understand!]

The hive is put off by the baby’s predilection for fruit, indicating a preference for image and color perhaps, or the more basic end product that fruit represents rather than miel [honey], which, while natural, is still processed.12 In either case, those who pass by do not understand or see these things. We can read these “hombres” as mankind, as all adults perhaps, but also literally as men who do not see the child’s little hands interacting with the natural world.13 They also would not see the “espiga” [ear of wheat or corn] that seems to respond to these hands in the next verse, or how the hands reach out for and resemble the tiny snails and pine nuts (fifth verse). Those who do see and hear them are blessed, declares the speaker in the final stanza; those who perceive may be attentive men, or, if they are not the “hombres,” they are mothers or women attuned to children and nature. Just as in the example that opened this chapter and questioned how Iñiguez’s performance of Darío’s poem might shift its meaning, the possible gender inflection in the poem would shift with the gender of the speaker but would maintain in either case the focus on the intimate details of children’s lives and their roles in the environment. In each author’s performed poetry, sentiment is central, whether religious or spiritual in the selected poetry of Mistral, Nervo, and Darío, national or regional zeal in Darío and Chocano, expressions of love and longing in Darío and Nervo, and a specific love of children and the natural world in Mistral. Performance manifests the emotional work of poetry, which makes personal emotion public and elicits collective feelings of community. From a degree of critical distance, these personal and collective emotional responses may serve as significant indices of cultural trans-

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formation. They are “attributes of attitudes being formed by agents in ways that modify desire and hence indirectly modify actions” (Altieri 108). Critical distance also returns us to the most common secondary response to private or shared emotion by a given poem or style—the charge of bad taste. This makes the accusation of cursilería [vulgarity or poor taste] itself a productive marker, much in the same way the grammarian’s rage against errors in speech and writing provides invaluable documentation of the modes and rates of change in language. In his analysis of cursilería in Mexico, Carlos Monsiváis addresses the function and status of poetry in this way: “En la vida social de México (y la generalización abarca a Latinoamérica) la poesía fue elemento fundamental durante el siglo XIX y las primeras décadas del XX. No sólo era el valor cultural más elevado; también y principalmente, era la única señal de refinamiento interno, el barómetro de la Sensibilidad personal y colectiva” [In the social life of Mexico (and the generalization includes Latin America) poetry was the fundamental element in the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. Not only was its cultural value more elevated; also, and principally, it was the only sign of internal refinement, the barometer of personal and collective Sensibility] (Escenas 176). Monsiváis maintains that an element of being “cursi” brings us closer to earlier sensibilities—it means to be anachronistic and to be proud of being so (172). His observation fits with the selection of poems examined here in that many of them have more in common with earlier neoclassical and romantic themes (and some stylistic elements) than they appear to have with the modernist and particularly the avant-garde innovations of the moment in which they were performed and written. In her study of cursilería in Spain, Noël Valis frames it as an expression of economic and cultural belatedness, a dyssynchronicity characteristic of an emerging modernism in Spain (where it appears in the nineteenth century) and in Latin America (where it is observed in the early twentieth century [Valis 4]). It is a metaphor of cultural change in both of these cases and of the surfacing of a middle class (15). While this public reception of poetry has been disdained by critics for multiple reasons, it does demonstrate a significant aspect of poetry’s role in the public sphere. The meaning of an art object or a genre is constructed through its consumption and representation and in its interaction with the context in which it is presented and received. Highlighting the oral transmission of poetry reveals shifting cultural boundaries for poets and poetry, as the former lose traditional roles and identities with the rise of positivism and the professionalization of the artistic realm, while poetry itself circulates both within and outside of the spheres of the lettered elite through its

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per formance. All of the manuals, the performers, and the specific examples of Mistral, Darío, Chocano, and Nervo analyzed here demonstrate how early twentieth-century poetry fits within broader social projects, such as the democratization of culture, and reveal a more popular side of modernism, one engaged with bourgeois cultures and marketplaces. More than simply supplementing the idea of literary modernism, then, poetry and per formance in this context suggest that there are multiple ways of being modern. Using Lawrence Grossberg’s terms, we might conceptualize modernity “as both a descriptive/analytic category and as a prescriptive/normative category” (72). If we circumvent the rigid categorization that encourages us to classify examples as either modern or antimodern or progressive or regressive, we come to see that modernity is neither singular nor stable. Stuart Hall warns us not to collapse “modernization” into a single tradition but to treat the “deeply structured processes of change taking place over long periods” as “different processes, working according to different historical time scales, whose interaction led to variable and contingent outcomes” (quoted in Grossberg 79). In this light, we might see the accusations of bad taste and the dominance of affect over intellect in modernista-performed poetry as part of a struggle over or response to Euromodernity that may suggest other possibilities to Latin American poets and intellectuals who speak within a colonialized modernity. Early twentieth-century modernismo, even in its popular manifestation, is still an essentially Western phenomenon, but rather than viewing its performative aspects as evidence of its hybridity or multitemporal qualities (while not denying these), these aspects also allow us to see it as a competing manifestation of modernity. “Modernity continues to arrive or emerge in opportunistic fragments,” Grossberg reminds us, for it is an “ongoing contestation” (82, 85). The performance of written poetry makes a space for a representation of the popular within certain privileged spheres. It puts popular and elite provinces in dialogue—sometimes intermingling these and sometimes resulting in a standoff but in each case opening a conversation across the rift between mass and elite cultures that continues to haunt the twentieth century, as we will see in the chapters that follow.

chapter two

Performing Racial, Gendered, and Transnational Identities in Poetry in the 1930s–1960s

Berta Singerman (1903–1998), the best-known declamadora in the early twentieth century, actively sought new audiences for poetry. In her memoir, Mis dos vidas, she describes her quest in a language of liberation that recalls Bolívar and other figures who struggled for independence: Sentí que la poesía encerrada en las cárceles del libro deseaba su libertad antigua, anhelaba expandirse por el mundo y posarse sobre los corazones, quería llegar a las muchedumbres y ser el clarín de batallas redentoras, porque desde el primer momento la poesía que sentí fue la de avanzada y a veces de tipo social. La poesía debía llegar a las grandes masas y a los adolescentes. Quería y debía ser yo la libertadora de la poesía. Fue un sueño de anticipación que más tarde se realizó y la poesía salió del libro y descendió sobre las muchedumbres enloquecidas de entusiasmo. (60) [I felt that poetry, enclosed in the jail cell of the book, longed for its old freedom and yearned to expand itself into the world and perch on people’s hearts, it wanted to come to the masses and be the bugle of redemptive battles because from the first, the poetry I felt was the advanced and sometimes social kind. Poetry should reach great masses and adolescents. I wanted and needed to be poetry’s liberator. It was an early dream that later was realized and poetry left the book and descended on the crowds that were crazed with enthusiasm.]

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Just as we observed in some of authors of the manuals in the previous chapter, Singerman sees her liberated poetry as descending on the masses, who eagerly embrace it. In her memoir she rereads her own past with a similar sense of her incipient emancipatory role in the cultural world; she notes that she was a child prodigy and that, although she came from an impoverished background and as a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants she was marginal to Argentine society in her youth, her talents were recognized by others, for she was awarded scholarships to study literature and the arts of “lectura y declamación” [reading and declamation] (31, 37). While a young Berta first dreamed of being another Sara Bernhardt, she distinguished herself through her interpretations of poetry and excelled at an art that she recognized some claimed to be “cursí” [in poor taste] (40). Yet her work exceeded all expectations about what one could achieve as a declamadora or diseuse. Although in the early stages of her career she was first associated with the Argentine literary group Anaconda and recognized by relatively literate audiences, she was gradually embraced by a range of international artists and authors who, as Sandra McGee Deutsch observes, “inspired and stimulated her; they were also her fans, promoters, sources of material, lovers, and political comrades” (96). Her influence gradually expanded beyond literary circles through her open-air recitals that began “by accident” in Mexico City when the audience did not fit into any existing theater, leading her to perform in the bullfighting stadium and then the secretariat of public education. Her increasing popularity led to massive performances throughout the Spanish–speaking world, some of which were sponsored by the cities that hosted them and offered free admission (Mis dos vidas 210–11). As technology changed, Singerman adapted her work and performed on the radio and also worked a bit in film. By the 1930s radio had many listeners and was embraced by some in the literary world as a means of educating the masses, while others feared that it would lead to the decline of culture (Gallo 120). Eduardo González Lanuza, writing in Sur in 1937, expressed doubts that were shared by others in his article “¿Habrá que suprimir la radio?” [Must the radio be suppressed?]. Here he argued that the medium should be used to facilitate listeners’ entrance into culture (and make their exit difficult), while he worried about the quality of the programming and noted that early radio broadcasts had a tendency to be frivolous. Singerman’s autobiography demonstrates her early participation in the mélange of early radio, and many early twentieth- century listeners came to know her work through its broadcasts.

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As Rubén Gallo has demonstrated, the medium proved to be especially effective in countries with high rates of illiteracy, for it “transformed every listener into an acoustically cosmopolitan subject” (125, 163). Singerman’s radio success was complemented by her film career that began in 1920 when she starred in the silent film La vendadora de Harrods [The salesgirl of Harrods]. She later integrated her acting and declaiming roles in the 1934 film Nada más que una mujer [Nothing more than a woman]. In this Spanish-language version of the film Pursued (remaking a film in Spanish was a policy that Fox Films pursued in the 1930s to garner a wider audience), Singerman played Mona Estrada, a single woman who arrives at “Ropangi, una de las islas Filipinas” [Ropangi, a Philippine island] on a ship, unaccompanied. As she disembarks, we see the dedication in the book she is reading, which insinuates that the reason for her voyage is a failed love affair: “Guarda siempre esta historia de amor, tan parecida a la nuestra” [Forever keep this love story, so similar to ours]. Mona heads to the local cabaret where she speaks to Denise La Verne, a fan dancer, and Madame Lascar, the proprietor, about work. “¿Qué es lo que haces?” [What do you do?] asks the manager. “Digo versos, recito” [I say verses, I recite], answers Mona. The cabaret workers laugh and the manager scoffs at her, but the dancer urges Madame to give Mona a chance. Estrada recites “La rumba,” a poem by Afro- Cuban author José Z. Tallet, and she gets the job. Singerman’s recitation of the poem is seductive but not lascivious: her voice is sonorous and her tongue draws out the erres [letter “rr”] at the beginning of the poem, and she accompanies her intonation with slow, sensual arm movements. She skillfully recreates the onomatopoeia of the maracas and the bongo, which punctuate the poem. As the performance continues, Singerman accelerates, adds more of her body, incorporates her breasts (she wears a ruffled blouse, but never anything particularly revealing in the film), and sways, but her gestures do not come close to matching the carnality of the rumba recounted in the poem. This is the scene in Tallet’s text just before the dancers arrive at a trembling paroxysm (his words): Hasta el suelo sobre un pie se baja y da media vuelta José Encarnación. Y la niña Tomasa se desarticula y hay olor a selva y hay olor a grajo y hay olor a hembra

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y hay olor a macho y hay olor a solar urbano y olor a rústico barracón. Y las dos cabezas son dos cocos secos en que alguno con yeso escribiera, arriba, una diéresis, abajo un guión. (121) [To the floor on one foot he lowers himself / and gives a half turn José Encarnación / and Tomasa the girl takes herself apart / and it smells like rain / and it smells like rook / and it smells like female / and it smells like male / and it smells like an urban tenement / and it smells like rustic slave quarters / and two heads are two dry coconuts / and on one someone might write / above an umlaut, below a dash.]

The poem itself creates a distance between the observer and the dancers, and one wonders whether the speaker is also the one who “writes” on the figures observed at the end of this section. Hearing Tallet’s poem enacted by Singerman’s Mona Estrada in her ruffled blouse creates the effect of an educated, articulate, and expressive woman (with an accent from the Río de la Plata region) imagining and re- creating the AfroCaribbean for prurient (and economic) interests. Although we do not know just where Mona is from, she needs a job, and while it is never made explicit in the film, this cabaret on a tropical island patronized by sailors and the local landowner is coded as a brothel. With her performance Mona gains employment yet distinguishes herself as different from the other performers: though she can recite some hot verses, she is often cold, distant, elegant, and in control. While her public per formances “undercut any aura of exclusivity” that poetry may conventionally have had in early twentieth- century Latin America, since they were popularized there, they also elevate Mona, who remains a cut above her coworkers in this film.1 While this is definitely B-movie material, Nada más que una mujer is intriguing for a variety of reasons. It is one of the only film recordings of Singerman reciting poetry, and four different poems are featured here. The first two serve as entertainment in the cabaret: “La rumba,” by Tallet, as we have seen, and “Los pregones de Buenos Aires” [The cries of Buenos Aires], by Alberto Vacarezza, which dramatically re- creates nineteenthcentury struggles between Unitarians and Federalists and allows Singerman to characterize Buenos Aires (another “exotic” local) by creating a vocal mosaic that incorporates distinct registers, tones, and some song in her sonorous rendition of the city’s life.

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The other two recitations are linked to the plot and Mona’s increasing frustration with romance (she has fallen in love with a young, attractive businessman with a peninsular Spanish accent whom she is nursing back to health after he was temporarily blinded in an assault). At one moment in the cabaret, when the proprietor asks her to do the rumba poem, Mona replies, “No, I’ll do something they’ve never heard,” and she recites Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz’s “Hombres necios” [Foolish men]. They love this too, though the doctor, who knows Mona has fallen in love with his patient, looks worried. After impossible love and inevitable lust play out their typical roles, the film ends with Mona aboard another ship leaving the island and reciting Gabriela Mistral’s “Canción de los que quieren olvidar” [Song of those who want to forget] (from Desolación), a coda to her failed romance. Singerman’s declamation in this film gives poetry a public interpretation, makes the poem an “espectáculo,” or show, and gives it an autobiographical, narrative slant relative to the characters. This use of poetry goes against the concept of the poem as private or subjective expression and limits the possibilities for a close reading or for our contemplation of the poem as an aesthetic object. Instead, poetry is a vehicle for emotional communication—expressing desire, outrage, heartbreak, and passion—it is a personal story made public. For better or for worse, Singerman’s performance repudiates our understanding of poetry as a text genre and allows us to see how poetry reading and performance is a social act.2 In this instance it is one that links received ideas about race, gender, and sexuality in the setting of the postcolonial Philippines. Its inclusion in the film demonstrates how the accessibility of sound recording and the development of radio and film at times incorporated poetry, which in cases like this one became a transnational carrier of ethnic and regional identities. The popularization of poetry in the film “illuminates and reshapes the world of literary poetry,” just as film does fiction (as Dana Gioia reminds us in another context [Gioia 19]). Singerman is and is not Argentine in the film—while the poem about Buenos Aires, her fame outside of film, and her accent mark her origins for some listeners, to others she is a generic Hispanic character who has drifted without explanation to the Philippines, where there are many other Spanish-speaking people (why is another unexplained subtext). The fact that all of the poems that Singerman performs were originally written in Spanish reinforces the idea that she represents a region and a language more than a specific national identity. Singerman’s per formance in this Hollywood film is a fitting introduction to several other transnational

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per formances of poetry that dealt with a range of regional, ethnic, and racial identities in mid-twentieth-century Spanish America. The first case I will examine here is that of Cuban performance artist Eusebia Cosme, who also interpreted poetry in the 1920s–1940s period, beginning on stage and ending her career in radio and film. Examining her work relative to the writing of Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos illuminates how each of these artists composed the Caribbean. In the second part of this chapter we will move to mid-twentieth-century Peru, where Nicomedes Santa Cruz developed the popular form of the décima [ten-line stanza], recognized throughout Spain and Latin America, and combined it with local speech and myriad elements of his Afro-Peruvian experience to create a national and then a regional identity. Race is a central theme for all three of these poets and interpreters whose work moves beyond that of Singerman in this respect, more overtly problematizing the construction of AfroLatino identities through their poetic performances that at the same time deconstruct and create a diasporic consciousness.

Eusebia Cosme and Luis Palés Matos In Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands, Charles Carnegie asserts that “Western modernity has excelled in the production of discrete, stable, manageable categories” (65). These categories, such as race and nation, are social phenomena that, like Judith Butler’s notion of gender, must be continually reproduced, or performed, to be maintained. Carnegie, a social scientist, argues that the need to impose order in academic disciplines has led to privileging the national at the expense of mobile or drifting transnational cultural flows; adverse to ambiguity, he finds that his colleagues have often been unable to convey “the significance of lives that transect the borders and boundaries of place and race” (70). Arjun Appadurai, another social scientist (much read by students of literature these days), extends Carnegie’s thinking when he proposes that “cultural differences are no longer taxonomic but interactive and refractive” (60). He says: “Culture is less a ‘habitus’ ” (Pierre Bourdieu’s term, which refers to a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and “more an arena for conscious choice, justification, representation”—the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences (44). Both of these writers offer more interactive models of cultural identity that seem particularly applicable to the early twenty-first century, when “transnational” and “global” are buzzwords, but their undoing of rigid concepts also allows us

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to see the past in a new light, to recognize people and practices that have slipped between or moved among more strictly defined categories. The Caribbean offers particular challenges to many concepts of category, as it encompasses diverse languages, cultures, and ethnic and racial identities within and across various nations. The issue of categorization is compounded by the facts of migration and transnational drift, both historical and contemporary. The Caribbean is a permanent example of continual transformation, for it is composed of hybrid sites that are “neither one nor the other, but something else besides, which contests the territory of both” (28). Homi Bhabha’s definition of “interspace” resonates with Fernando Ortiz’s early twentieth-century definition of transculturation, and both characterizations draw attention to the fact that theories can compose regional identities as much as describe them. Paulla Ebron has developed this perception relative to Africa, and in her book Performing Africa she proposes that regional identity is the result of performance: “We have learned to imagine regions through repetitive tropes,” she states (10). Transculturation and hybridity—mulatez [mulatto identity] and mestizaje [mixed-race identity] cultural and racial mixing— compose the Caribbean. Combining these ideas with an analysis of the work of early twentieth- century artists, Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos, and Cuban performance artist Eusebia Cosme, the discussion that follows will offer some specific examples of how elements of race, region, nation, and gender are performed in their work and the effect that performance has on the genre of poetry. We will find that both of these artists problematize race through poetic performances, unsettling some polarized extremes and reinforcing others. Neither can escape the representational regime of racial difference, yet both call attention to its boundaries and question conventional roles for poetry. In the process we will see how established concepts about poetry—its style and content, its audiences, and its circulation in the early twentieth-century Americas—represent part of the dominant culture that they both undermine. Palés Matos is the better known of these two figures: born in 1898 (the year Puerto Rico became a colony of the United States), he began his career writing poetry in modernist, baroque, or costumbrismo criollo styles (Castro de Moux 59). The year 1921 marked a change in Palés’s style, for he rejected his earlier individualist perspective and became an engaged writer. This transformation in his attitude led to his poesía afroantillana, or poesía negra [Afro-Antillean poetry or Black poetry] in which he began to express in his work the colonial situation and global subjection of the black race (Castro de Moux 121). His name is often associated with that of

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Nicolás Guillén in the Spanish American tradition for their shared negrismo [the celebration of Black Cuban culture]; Palés, however, is a white poet who identifies with his black heritage in the Caribbean as part of a defiant response to Western culture (Castro de Moux 119). At the time, his shift in styles was received with antagonism by the literary establishment. Today his earlier poetry is often forgotten, and he is read only for his negrismo, which still generates polarized opinions. Josaphat Kubayanda, for example, criticizes Palés for his failure to connect with his negrista poetry: there is “no adequate emotional bond [ . . . ] forged between the poetic voice and the poetic object,” and this creates a damaging distance rather than a proximity to those significantly different from the majority (23–24). Magali Roy-Féquiere views Palés as an outsider speaking of Afro- Caribbean culture rather than speaking for it, as a member of the group might, and this is one source of the ambiguity she finds in his work (238). Arcadio Diáz Quiñones also observes ambiguity, but he urges reconsideration of the historical circumstances of Tuntún de pasa y grifería [Drumbeats of kinkiness and blackness] (the first collection to feature Palés’s negrista poetry, published in 1937), and he reads it as an expression of the author’s colonial status, as opening a dialogue with his cultural context in the 1920s and 1930s (when many of these poems first appeared in other venues). Developing this line of thought, Aníbal González notes that Tuntún “has rarely been read as a book,” and González’s subsequent reading of it as such demonstrates that “it is a carefully structured text which aims to make a coherent statement about Caribbean culture” (287). González shows how Palés’s concept of mulatez [being a mulatto] endorses a utopian vision of Pan- Caribbean unity in step with his Latin American contemporaries’ search for national identity (González mentions Vasconcelos and Martínez Estrada, among others; 286, 290). The contradictions evident in Palés’s negrismo and in the critical reactions to this may be inherent in telling a story of cultural difference, to a “politics of belonging-in- difference,” as Stuart Hall might put it (Scott 13). Centering the discussion about Palés around concepts of cultural blackness indirectly calls into question the construction of whiteness and reminds us how the construction of identities may be “interactive and refractive” (Appadurai 60). Luis Palés Matos finds himself in his Other, communicates his own concerns through a black voice, yet his negrista poems contain cultural elements that are not completely under the poet’s control. Some of these elements become more apparent when Eusebia Cosme, a mulata [mulatto], performs Palés’s work. She brings his language to life, for it is embodied in the Cuban’s dramatic recitation, and her performances

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of his work suggest that both the form and content of the poetry may change depending on who is speaking and who is listening. When there are substantive differences between the poetic speaker and the writer, or between the writer and the person who embodies his or her words, the performer must bridge these gaps. In her analysis of Cosme’s per formances, Emily Maguire suggests that the linguistic aspects are secondary to the physical ones and Maguire describes her show as a “carefully crafted, well-rounded per formance [ . . . ] in which Cosme herself had a surprising amount of directorial agency” (79 ).3 Cosme orchestrated her presentations, which drew on works from a range of writers influenced by the African diaspora and combined written works with elements from dramatic and oral traditions, creating hybrid per formances that joined European and African griot or storytelling traditions. In a 1948 newspaper report, Cosme stated that the emotion of her race cannot be understood merely through reading but requires an interpreter to “re-create” the written work, “similar to the musician who feels the force of a great theme throughout his consciousness” (Yale Daily News). Indeed, she sees her role as essential to the reception of the poetry she presents. In sound recordings of Cosme’s declamation, the pitch of her voice moves from high and emotive to low, rocking, and rhythmic—from wails to murmurs. Her intonation is always markedly dramatic and expressive as she creates different voices and regularly slides into song. The heightened emotion in her work may seem dated or over-the-top, but it may also be viewed as part of an affective performance of her national and racial difference. In his article “Feeling Brown,” José Muñoz makes this connection between ethnicity and affect and suggests that “we move beyond notions of ethnicity as fixed (something that people are) and instead understand it as performative (what people do)” (70). Muñoz argues that there is a normative or an official “national affect” that is aligned with a hegemonic class, and that minority groups perform affect against this normative subjectivity (the white middle class in the United States; in Cuba in the 1930s it would be an upper-middle-class criollo identity), and “navigate the world on a different emotional register” (68, 70). In Cosme’s case, as we will see in the discussion that follows, audiences may have connected with her per formances of sentiment at multiple levels, leading them to apprehend the meanings of the poems she performed in different ways. Born in 1911 in Santiago, Cosme was an early interpreter of AfroAntillean verse; she was an influence on later well-recognized performers whose recordings still circulate, such as fellow Cuban Luis Carbonell. She performed the works of Nicolás Guillén, Felix Caignet, Emilio Ballagas,

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and Palés Matos (among others) in the 1930s, traveling throughout the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and the United States. She settled in New York City in the 1940s, where she had a radio show on which she read dramatically and recited poetry on CBS’s “Las cadenas de las Américas” [Networks of the Americas]. She later appeared in several Mexican films and plays, often in a stereotypical servant or maternal role.4 On examining some of the reviews of her work with poetry, it is clear that she embodied an Afro- Cuban identity for most of her audience. Féderico de Onís called her “Cuba hecha carne, voz, gesto, ritmo” [Cuba made flesh, voice, gesture, rythym].5 Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez said of her: “Es una empinada ola negra, especie de Josefinita Baker de la declamación desgarrada [ . . . ] la rosa canela cultivada” [She is a proud black wave, a kind of little Josephine Baker of bold declamation . . . the cultivated cinnamon rose] (quoted in Sarabia). Luis Palés Matos described her as the “verbo auténtico y único de la poesía antillana [ . . . ] que arranca de lo más entrañable y angustioso de su raza” [the authentic and unique verb of Antillean poetry . . . who draws on the most intimate and distressing (aspects) of her race].6 Cosme makes the Afro-Antillean visible to outsiders, giving form to the exotic, but she also creates this identity for Cubans (and, when performing the work of Palés, for Puerto Ricans). In a long introduction to Cosme, Fernando Ortiz notes how many aspects of Afro- Cuban life were denied in the 1920s and 1930s; he said these aspects were “made Indian” (hecho indio) in Cuban culture.7 Aside from her radio broadcasts, Cosme received much recognition, recited poetry in Carnegie Hall, and included traditionally black institutions such as Howard University in her US tours; her work was met with acclaim in these venues, although she recited her poetry in Spanish and audiences often understood the meaning of her per for mances through voice and gesture rather than language. As Antonio López describes it in his recent book, which includes a chapter on Cosme, “Most folks don’t like to read poetry. They do like to listen to it” (92). López explains how her performances tied into the idea of a “non-elite, non-literate, Anglophone African American audience” and in the process devalued the “Hispanophone words and literacies of poesía negra’s men poets” and revalued the “embodied visuality and vocalized sound (outside of Hispanophone linguistic signification) of an Afro- Cuban American woman performer” (93). Among Cosme’s papers is an announcement for “A Cuban Evening” in New York, presenting Cosme and Langston Hughes as the main attractions, with songs by Eartha Kitt and poems by Nicolás Guillén.8 Guillén, in fact, called her a “puente lírico, la genuina

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portadora de un mensaje difícil a causa de su misma sencillez” [lyrical bridge, the genuine bearer of a message, difficult because of its simplicity] (quoted in Sarabia), a message that was difficult not so much for its poetic style but for its distance perhaps from dominant society. Unlike other declamadoras of the times (such as Berta Singerman or Dalia Iñiguez), Cosme chose to focus her performances on Afro-Antillean verse. Because of its folk origins and its dependence on sound—its use of the jitanjáfora (words, often neologisms, used not for meaning but for sonoral or onomatopoeic qualities) and its valuation of the “indecible”—this style of poetry leant itself to declamation and per formance.9 But, as Roberto González Echevarría has demonstrated in his perceptive rereading of Guillén’s “Sóngoro cosongo,” this poetry does not depend only on sound but frequently includes multilinguistic and transcultural meanings that cultural outsiders may not understand. In these aspects, Cosme’s performances are vocalizing cultural differences. Guillén himself may have wanted to play down this aspect of his poetry because in recordings of him presenting his own poems he reads in a clear and formal style that does not draw attention to the sonority of his work. Eusebia Cosme had other goals. Margot Arce made these remarks about what Cosme did with her performance of “Falsa canción de baquiné,” a poem published by Palés Matos in 1929: Eusebia, compenetrada del espíritu del poema y dominando otra vez las dificultades del ritmo, crea un canto originalísimo y maravilloso, especie de “spiritual” por su acento ritual, en donde se mezclan todas esas paradojas de superstición, dolor, dinamismo e ironía que hacen el alma negra. A Eusebia Cosme, la gran artista, debemos la revelación completa de este poema de Palés; también le debemos una más honda y aguda comprensión de la poesía afroantillana.10 [Eusebia, interpenetrated with the spirit of the poem and controlling the rhythmic difficulties, creates a marvelous and very original song, a type of spiritual in its ritual accent, in which all of the paradoxical elements of superstition, pain, dynamism and irony that compose the black soul are mixed. To Eusebia Cosme, the great artist, we owe the complete revelation of these poems of Palés: we also owe her a deep and serious understanding of Afro-Antillean poetry.]

Hers is a performance of cultural difference, one that offers interpretative possibilities that may range from seeing her work as the representation of

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lived experience or a performance of “authenticity,” to a marginal example of folklore, to an exaggerated performance of otherness. “Falsa canción de baquiné” on the page and in performance offers an intriguing example of cultural difference. The poem is described in a program for one of Cosme’s performances in New York as “ ‘the false song of the baby’s wake’: In this poem the poet presents the idea of an African ‘baquiné’ or the wake of a baby.”11 Traditionally, a “baquiné” is a transcultural ceremony combining Spanish and Kikongo wake traditions (according to Onís and Moreno Vega). Some definitions note that it celebrates the death of a child, who becomes an angel; however, Federico de Onís’s transcription of a baquiné sung in Guayama (Palés’s birthplace) clearly expresses mourning and places the blame for the baby’s death on the lack of a doctor (or on socioeconomic circumstances). But the words of Palés’s poem contradict all of these traditions (hence the title “Falsa canción . . .”), for he sings of a child who has died because of Babilongo, the brujo [witch], and who after death becomes a warrior serving Ogún Badagrí, the Yoruba god of war, “in whose honor white flesh is devoured in order to obtain the power of the oppressor’s race” (my translation, Castro de Moux 89–90). What the program does not tell us is that Cosme is performing a story of revenge and rebellion: Papá Ogún, quiere mi niño, Ser un guerrero como tú; Dale gracia, dale cariño. . . . Papá Ogún ¡ay! Papá Ogún. Ahora comamos carne blanca Con la licencia de su mercé. Ahora comamos carne blanca. (86) [Papa Ogún wants my child / to be a warrior like you / give him thanks, give him affection. . . . / Papa Ogún ¡ay! Papa Ogún. // Now let’s eat white meat / with your grace’s license / now let’s eat white meat.]

Colonialism and slavery are violent cultural intersections that in turn produce violent responses. Cosme, an Afro- Caribbean woman, is performing a poem that turns a mourning ritual into the threatened overthrow of dominant colonial society. In a Calibanesque move, she and Palés use the language of their oppressors (colonial and white) not to mourn but to menace. She enacts the words of Palés and embellishes them through her theatrical representation.

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Since there are no existing visual records of Cosme’s performances, we have access to this aspect of her work only through commentaries on it, programs, notes, still photographs, drawings, and a few sound recordings (that do not circulate much beyond special collections).12 Listening to her rendition of “Falsa canción de baquiné” is striking for the drama she injects into the poem. She begins her per formance singing the opening summons, which addresses the child using a mixture of Spanish and African languages: ¡Ohé, nené! ¡Ohé, nené! Adombe gangá mondé, Adombe. Candombe del baquiné, Candombe. (84) [Oh- e baby / oh- e baby / Now we are going to dance / now / The dance of the baby’s wake / the dance.]13

In the following stanza she alternates observing the “sleeping” child in a dramatic whisper that creates an air of suspense and confidentiality with the sung words “ju-jú,” and when she arrives at “Babilongo ha sido” [It was Babilongo], the seventh line of this section, she repeats it and skips the last two lines of the textual version, emphasizing the orisha’s eerie role here. Cosme breaks into a more dramatic narrative inflection to briefly recount the passage of the baby under the watchful eye of “Bombo el gran mongo” [Bombo the great chief], framing this section within the sung “coquí, cocó, cucú, cacá” verses of Palés’s text that anticipate the heavily accentuated repetition of “Papa Ogún” that follows. Papa Ogún’s name appears ten times and each time Cosme makes it an emotive exclamation, louder than the surrounding words, her voice rises emphatically with the final syllable. The last repetition before “comemos carne blanca” (cited in the lines above) includes a sly chuckle, and the volume of her voice increases as she arrives at the poem’s conclusion, a repetition of the opening invocation. Cosme’s performance does not alter the meaning of Palés’s text but inflects it and calls attention to magical, rebellious elements already there, through both her edits and vocal elements of her performance. The performances of his poetry also call attention to the complex reception of poetry presented in different venues and remind us of how it may be interpreted differently, depending on audiences’ range of relationships to the languages and cultures involved.

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Taking place in the 1920s and 1930s, Cosme’s performances and Palés’s move to an Afro-Antillean style correspond to the Harlem Renaissance, and while part of Cosme’s international audience was Spanish-speaking and part was of a Pan-African diaspora, another part was surely participating in the white vogue for Africa. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North examines the white writers of the time who use cross-racial linguistic identification to rebel and escape social norms (9). He found that white Americans’ or Europeans’ imitation of African American dialects created a racial masquerade that offered them a certain freedom (11, 33). It is significant that rather than a visual marker of race, these writers chose a linguistic disguise. Both Cosme and Palés perform Afro-Antillean identity— although one is white and one is mulatto, one is a writer and the other a reader or an interpreter—through poetry. In this they also move from visual distinction to sound and language as modes of racial differentiation. But do they find freedom in otherness? Not the freedom of the white Europeans and North Americans, of course, but different kinds of independence. Palés embraced what was certainly a marginal identity in 1930s Puerto Rico for political reasons; he wrote what he characterized, not in racial terms, as Antillean poetry to reflect a collective reality. He said: I posit that the Antilles—Cuba Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico—have developed a homogeneous spiritual type and are therefore psychologically tuned in one common direction. And I further sustain that this spiritual homogeneity is absolutely different from the common masses of Hispanic Peoples and that in [our homogeneity] the negroide factor intermixed in the Antillean psyche has served as a separator or, in chemical terms, as a precipitative element. (Palés, quoted in Marzán, “The Poetry . . .” 512–13)

Arcadio Díaz Quiñones notes that Palés’s goal was radical; he sought to write “una poesía que no sólo aspira a la revisión del lenguaje sino trata de subvertir una literatura y unos valores” [a poetry that not only aspired to revise language but also to subvert a literature and certain values] (103). Palés wrote against the myth of the jíbaro (or his Puerto Rican countryman of Spanish descent) to provoke the defenders of Hispanicity in the Antilles (114). His work is an example of “interculteration,” Jahan Ramazani’s term for the postcolonial hybridization of Western literary and nonWestern oral traditions (18). It is also indicative of his double consciousness as an early twentieth-century Puerto Rican, at once Western and modern, yet negotiating his own and his region’s “unsteady location inside

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and outside of conventions” (Paul Gilroy’s characterization of members of the Black Atlantic [Gilroy 73]). Edward Brathwaite, discussing the Anglophone Caribbean, offers us another angle from which to approach Palés’s use of dialect, which he calls “nation language.” Rooted in African oral traditions, it is the result of specific cultural experiences and “is like a howl, or a shout or a machine gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues” (Brathwaite 311). Sound or noise is an element in the creation of meaning. Not “bad English,” its purpose is to rally national spirit and break from standardization (quoted in Bernstein, “Poetics . . .” 114–19). Vera Kutzinski affirms this idea when she describes the turn to Afro- Cuban culture in the period as a “political vehicle for national integrity and survival” (142). Rather than read what has been called “dialect poetry” as transcribed speech, Charles Bernstein has suggested that we might use it to observe the distance between the written and the oral, to make note of how authors and performers play with this gap (“Poetics . . .”117). Palés uses literature to explore fissures between the oral and written and black and white, making these words “interactive and refractive” (returning to Arjun Appadurai’s phrase) rather than static. These ruptures are heightened in its performance. Speaking of oral poetry, Paul Zumthor has proposed that “at the heart of a society saturated with writing, oral poetry [ . . . ] tends—because it is oral—to escape the law and to submit only to the most flexible formulas” (188). When Eusebia Cosme performs “Falsa canción de baquiné,” she is reinventing Palés’s work and reinventing herself, staging her Antillean identity in contrast to other races, cultures, and ethnicities. Her work is also an example of “orature,” Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s term for interactive forms that are “produced alongside or within mediated literacies” and go beyond the oral-written opposition. These oral and written “modes of communication have produced each other interactively over time” and play a powerful role in maintaining collective memory (Roach 11–12). An example of this interaction is the fact that the Puerto Rican poet’s writing was clearly inspired by the songs of the baquiné he attended as a child, accompanied by his family’s cook, Lupe (Onís 15); Cosme’s performance of it returns it to both the feminine and the oral realms.14 Joseph Roach uses Ngugi’s concept of orature in his study of performance in the circum-Atlantic cultural exchange, Cities of the Dead, to analyze how speech, images, and gestures may supplement or contest the authority of “documents” (Roach 11). Roach finds that performance can create “counter-memories” that call attention to the “disparities

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between history as discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by bodies that bear its consequences” (26). When Cosme performs Palés’s baquiné she is publicly enacting a phantasmic rebellion enclosed in a mortuary ritual. In doing so she gives voice to otherness, recalling the pain of slavery and the colonial experience and implicitly questioning the authority of the colonizer who will not understand the real significance of her ceremonial response (but who will respond only to the English précis and the range of emotions she engages). When Cosme performs Palés she becomes a metonymical representative of her race and gender, and of her triumph (both personal and representative).15 Cosme participated in the production of her image as mulata through the poems she presented, and she insisted on black and mulatto identity in their thematic and formal elements. Antonio López notes that she had an interest in conceptualizing her performances relative to poesía negra and calls her a “theorist of her own poesía negra practice” (68). He notes how both she and others have indicated the “multiplicity of her vocation”; she is both critic-theorist, and author-performer, which “resolve in her a history of the gendered, racialized inaccessibility of modern, literacy-intensive institutions such as criticism, authorship, and stage performance for AfroCuban women” (68). López also observes the range of her performances, from a public hurricane benefit to the more exclusive Lyceum “with origins in the 1920s avant-garde” and eventually the radio (73).16 Her repertoire included works from locally known poets such as Cubans Teófilo Radillo, Félix Caignet, Rafael Esténger, and Arturo Clavijo Tisseur, as well as many poems by those prominently associated with Afro- Caribbean literature, such as Guillén or Palés. In her selection Cosme effects a kind of sampling, joining a variety of poetic voices united by theme and by the person presenting them. Some of Guillén’s poems that appear repeatedly in her programs are “Balada de mis dos abuelos” [Ballad of my two grandfathers], “José Ramón Cantaliso,” “Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio” [The kidnapping of Antonio’s woman], “Simón Caraballo,” “Pregón” [Street cry], “Sensamayá” [The snake], and “Balada del guije” [Ballad of the magical water-being]. All of these impart the history of African presence in Cuba; several evoke syncretic Afro- Cuban religious experiences, many express suffering and/or dramatic death due to social inequality and poverty, and others include rebellion. “Jose Ramón Cantaliso,” for example, features a figure not unlike Cosme herself as she performs “Falsa canción.” Cantaliso is an entertainer who sings songs that chronicle suffering and rebellion to tourists and comrades—stirring reaction in one group while entertaining the others, who do not comprehend his message. Of Palés’s

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oeuvre, she regularly included “Falsa canción”; “Majestad negra” [Black majesty], a sensual celebration of the mulata; “Lamento” [Lament], another baquiné; “Bombo” [Drum], a sonorous depiction of an African scene; and “Ñam-ñam” [Yum-yum], a stereotypical portrayal of African cannibalism. Her repertoire ran the thematic gamut: from poems that celebrated African heritage and chronicled both suffering and survival to those that reinforced the most clichéd fears about Africans. Palés’s “Intermedios del hombre blanco” [The white man’s intermissions], a series of poems from Tuntún, is included in some performances and is a  curious choice for Cosme. Here Palés shifts perspective to that of a white male observer who uses a more distanced tone with less striking rhythm to portray tropical venues. In a poem from this series such as “Tambores” [Drums], African presence is observed by the white Other who is warned: Ten cuidado hombre blanco, que a ti llegan Para clavarte su aguijón de música Tápate las orejas Cierra toda apertura de tu alma Y el instinto dispón a la defensa; Que si en la torva noche de Nigricia Te picara un tambor de danza o guerra, Su terrible ponzoña Correrá para siempre por tus venas. (99) [Be careful White man, they come to you / to jab you with music’s sting / cover your ears / and close all openings to your soul / and awaken your instinct to self- defense; / that in the grim Sudanese night / a war or dance drum may sting you, / its terrible poison / will run forever through your veins.]

The irony of the admonition and of the work in the context of the other poems in Palés’s book is heightened when one imagines these words embodied by Cosme. Giving voice to the white man may be one way she claims her Other, defamiliarizes the dominant white male subject, and, in so doing, brings her difference and her audience’s possible fear of this to the forefront. The fact that Cosme’s and Palés’s artistic production occupies disparate positions relative to power and discourse is not due just to race, gender, or nationality, however. Another factor is the endurance of the Puerto Rican’s

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written texts or books versus the ephemeral existence of Cosme’s work— those concerned with her work must use still photos, archives, programs, letters, reviews, and other records of responses to her performances to reconstruct what is not there. Since her performances took place before ready reproduction, we need to search out different ways to account for or imagine that to which we do not have access. This means that there are inherent limitations on the claims we might make, yet it may also lead to a more balanced critical perspective, for we must examine the reception of her work as much as its production, and we must speculate about how performance alters relationships between poetry and its readers—transformed to público. It also tells us something about other audiences for poetry, about its circulation and consequences beyond the intelligentsia, the “official voices” of the literary establishment. There is a range of interpretations of what a performance may mean: not just entertainment, an audience can be at the same event and take quite different things from it. We have already seen how Cosme’s presence and style of declamación might affirm her own and others’ African roots, might reinforce stereotypes, and might permit a rebellious cross-racial identity. Adding another ingredient to the mix, her work may also operate as a concrete cultural per formance, that is, it may participate in the performative in a particularly Afro- Cuban way. In African- derived Santería, song is an element of ritual, a way to open communication with the divine realm, and lyric poetry has long been associated with song. When the poems Cosme presents include names of and references to a saint or an orisha, her speech may “do things with words” (recalling J. L. Austin’s characterization of perlocutionary speech acts). To a believer, invoking a deity’s name may be like public prayer, meeting an obligation, or “cumpliendo una promesa” [keeping a promise] by honoring the orisha and his or her powers.17 Taking into account the possibilities of poetry as ritual speech reminds us that some members of Cosme’s audiences may have experienced certain poems in terms of their sacred dimensions. While her per formances were public, what she did could still be experienced in very personal ways. Paying attention to how per formance remakes the poetic experience, builds community, affirms or alters identity, and communicates in multiple registers simultaneously leads to a more nuanced understanding of how Cosme created intercultural performances of multiple identities. While Cosme started her career in Cuba, began to travel in the Caribbean, and in her early international profession represented Cuba, she moved out of the Afro- Cuban national framework when she settled in the United

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States. One can see this change in the works she chose to include in her radio show, for in the 1940s she incorporated translations of works of African American poets such as Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, demonstrating that the framework for her presentations was not solely national or regional but racial. We might read this internationalization as an affirmation of her racial rather than her regional identity and of her ability to speak for a larger group, or it may have been a way for her to step back from her role as “iconic mulata” (Kutzinski’s term for the symbol that contained myriad questions about race, gender, and sexual power relations in Cuba, 7). As was true for each of her roles, becoming a representative of the broader African diaspora involved some compromise. There is evidence of this in the text of “Morenito mío,” a translation of one of Dunbar’s poems included in one of the undated transcripts of a radio broadcast from the 1940s.18 The first few lines of the poem are translated like this: Morenito mío de brillante ojos, acércate a papa, sube a sus rodillas. ¿Qué cosas hacías? ¿Tortillas de lodo? Mira este babero. Qué sucio. Díos mío.

Dunbar’s original poem reads: Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes, Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee. What you been doin,’ suh—makin’ san’ pies? Look at dat bib—you’s ez du’ty ez me. (134)

“Little Brown Baby” is a good example of the dialect poetry for which Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life (1901) is well known. The poet’s use of Afro-American vernacular speech allows us to “hear” race in the Englishlanguage version, and it also creates boundaries, signaling the difference between members of the group and outsiders. Cosme and her translator do not choose to reproduce Dunbar’s use of dialect, even though clear antecedents existed in Spanish, for Guillén’s Motivos del son was already published (1930), and Cosme had been performing for some time works that used popular Cuban vernacular speech. The translator may not have been able to more closely approximate what Dunbar wrote, or perhaps Cosme and her translator were not willing to enter into the linguistic and ideological controversy that Guillén’s work had activated. Or, it may be that, rather than reinforce boundaries, Cosme wanted to embrace a broader

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group of listeners and was therefore not interested in alienating part of her audience that may have been comprised of members of a “nascent AfricanAmerican middle class” and “wealthy white patrons” of the Harlem Renaissance (Kutzinski 152). We can speculate, but what is clear is that the conflict between the desire for recognition, voice, publication, and audience and the realities of survival in a predominately white cultural world is a transnational experience evidenced in different ways by Dunbar, Guillén, and Cosme. “People who are in any way significantly different from the majority,” Stuart Hall has explained, are “frequently exposed to binary forms of representations, polarized extremes” that can only provisionally be unsettled (229). Yet when analyzing race and Black Atlantic cultures, Paul Gilroy proclaims that they are “unashamedly hybrid,” and that they continually confound any simplistic (essentialist or anti- essentialist) understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial nonidentity (99). In effect, according to Gilroy, these minority cultures are always unsettled. Which is it? As we have seen, it is some of both, and what meaning is produced depends as much on who is listening as who is writing, who is speaking, and what is said. Palés’s poetry and Cosme’s performance of it raise rather than resolve questions about identity—racial, gendered, spiritual, national, and regional—and about poetry. Rather than declaiming poetry to reinforce national identity (as was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the example of Eusebia Cosme’s per formances, like her life, exemplifies a multidirectional cultural exchange in the Americas. The conjunction of these two artists makes us confront and renovate our assumptions about poetry and the shifting boundaries and overlaps among high and popular cultures, oral performances, and written literatures, as it suggests possible ways to renegotiate and reconsider dominant and subordinate positions within broader concepts of literature, culture, and nation.

Nicomedes Santa Cruz: Inside and Outside the Nation Transculturation and mestizaje, or choledad, are some of the repetitive tropes that compose Peru’s national identity, and the mixing implied by these terms evokes the considerable indigenous presence in the region.19 Most discussions about race in the region have tended to refer to indigenous identities. Although Afro-Peruvians have been present in Peru since

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colonial times, their cultural influences have only recently been recognized. When Marvin Lewis included a chapter about Nicomedes Santa Cruz in his 1983 book on Afro-Hispanic poetry, he noted that scant attention had been paid to this poet whose work had circulated widely (50). Since that time there has been increasing interest in Nicomedes Santa Cruz: contemporary studies by Heidi Feldman, Martha Ojeda, Pablo Maríñez, and Daniel Mathews all extend the earlier work of scholars such as Lewis and approach Santa Cruz from different angles. Earlier attention to Santa Cruz’s work may have been sidelined in part because, like Cosme, he is a border crosser: he worked both inside and outside of national and transnational identities in poetry that straddled the divide between popular and elite, oral and written, and sung and spoken. In this he participated in what ethnomusicologist Heidi Feldman has termed a “Black Pacific” identity, while Daniel Mathews locates his work as part of the “ciudad cantada” [sung city], as we will see. Both of these authors’ interpretations depend on the voicing of his poetry; although some earlier scholars read his work only in terms of written production and its connection to poetic tradition, Santa Cruz’s books were, in fact, supplemental to his per formances.20 And while its performative aspects increased the circulation of his work, they may also be one reason it was not seriously considered in literary terms during the poet’s lifetime. In a series of postmortem testimonials, one of his cousins states that “he doesn’t appear in anthologies because they don’t consider him to be a poet” (my translation, Maríñez 127). Ironically, his work may have been too “popular,” in both the English and Spanish senses of the word: it enjoyed too wide a distribution and pertained too clearly to the people. An Afro-Peruvian poet and performer of humble origins, Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–1992) paradoxically moved a marginalized element of Peruvian culture (the Afro-Peruvian) to the center through his literature, his records, and his radio and television transmissions beginning in the 1950s. To do so he focused on a traditional verse form—the décima, or tenline stanza—that has long functioned as a border-crossing structure. Martha Ojeda has noted how the form was used in the Spanish Golden Age to join high and low cultures, and how after Peruvian independence decimistas registered collective memory. She observes a syncretic union of Spanish, African, and Peruvian indigenous cultures in the décima, which may incorporate “indigenous traditions through glosses that come from indigenous harawies” (13, my translation).21 Some of Ojeda’s research depends on Santa Cruz’s, for along with the poetry he wrote he also authored a study of the history of the décima (La décima en el Perú), which traces the

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trajectory of the form from its Spanish roots through its various manifestations in Perú (including anticolonial décimas produced during the Tupac Amaru rebellion) through 1982 (when the study was published). In his own poems Santa Cruz used the décima de pie forzado: four stanzas of ten eight-syllable lines, opening with a four-line gloss, each line of which also serves as the “foot” or last line in the four stanzas. The décima features consonant rhyme, and the traditional scheme is abbaaccddc, but this can vary, as décimas often copy popular speech. Feldman notes that it was in the mid-1800s that the décima, abandoned by the “cultured” classes, became the province of the lower and working classes, which included the railway workers in Peru from whom Santa Cruz first learned the form (Feldman 88; Maríñez, 50). These popular décimas were sung, often accompanied by the guitar melody of the socabón, which linked them to music and performance. Nicomedes Santa Cruz both collected décimas and wrote them. From a musical perspective, Feldman observes how he used Afro- Cuban rhythms “to accompany a poem about Afro-Peruvian rhythms,” creating a Pan-African approach (90). She also notes that, with Vicente Vásquez, Santa Cruz revived the “agua e nieve Afro-Peruvian guitar melody,” and, combining this with a “highly complex Spanish poetic form, he broke the barrier of Black Peruvian invisibility” (90). He accomplished this not just through the technical traits of his poetry but by circulating his work outside of as well as within print culture. According to his detailed website, Santa Cruz enjoyed his radio debut in 1957 and in October of that year he recorded the record “Gente morena” [Black people]: side A featured décimas and side B music with other artists. In 1958 he participated in the first commercial television program in Peru (on Channel 7) and the next year his LP, “Nicomedes Santa Cruz y su conjunto Kumanana,” came out; later that year Juan Mejia Bace published the print version of Décimas in Lima. Two more records, Inga and Décimas y poemas afrocubanos, were released in 1960, and in 1963 he recited his décima “Basket-ball” at the National Stadium during the South American Championship for the sport. This brief list of his early production gives us a sense of the multimedia distribution of his work. Following Maríñez, Feldman writes that Santa Cruz’s audience in the late 1950s and early 1960s was “primarily members of high society and the criollo oligarchy that had controlled Perú since independence,” but that he later alienated his upper- class audiences with poems like “El café,” which begins the written collection, Cumanana (1964), and calls for coffeecolored people to rise up, like the speaker who “a sangre y fuego y sudor /

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Mi libertad conquisté” [with blood and fire and sweat / I conquered my freedom] (12). Or “Talara, no digas ‘yes,’ ” written to the petroleumproducing North of Peru, a region personified, whom the speaker encourages not to submit to foreign investment: “y no dobles la rodilla, /. . . . Y no digas ‘yes’ Talara” [and do not bend your knee, / . . . and do not say “yes” Talara] (Santa Cruz, Cumanana 60; Feldman 100). Martha Ojeda notes that access to his poetry was later facilitated by the government of Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975), which tried to curtail the dominance of US music and culture by fomenting interest in popular Peruvian culture, thereby stimulating more attention to Afro-Peruvian topics (5– 8). After his initial national success, Santa Cruz traveled to Brazil, Cuba, and Africa, developing his knowledge of international movements (such as African decolonization) and moving his poetry beyond negritude to an increasingly Pan-African consciousness. His poems deal with religious and worldly topics that are kept separate, as is the tradition with the décima. His worldly topics include sports, black experience, and politics; all of these are in continual evolution, as Santa Cruz’s relationship to his national and international identities shifts. In this we find continued evidence of the hybrid quality Gilroy observed in the Black Atlantic, and Feldman builds on his ideas with her term “Black Pacific.” With this phrase she notes the similarities and differences between scattered African communities on the east and west coasts of South America and how Afro-Peruvians take part in a “newly imagined diasporic community on the periphery of the Black Atlantic.” Like the Atlantic, Black Pacific communities “share a counter culture of modernity,” for they are neither outside of nor part of Western modernity, and their identities are “characterized by a critically marginal ‘double consciousness’ ” that is both racial and national (7). Feldman observes how Black Peruvian society must negotiate complex relationships with local criollo and indigenous cultures and with the Black Atlantic (7). And, as Feldman demonstrates in other chapters in her book, within the Black Pacific itself, which is by no means unified, as well as internationally, since the 1960s heralded a time of worldwide awareness of black identities. These multiple factors impelled Santa Cruz to use a PanAfrican perspective and to draw on the past to circulate popular poetry in what are both eminently traditional (oral, la décima) and new (mass media, record) ways: Murieron los negros viejos, pero entre la caña seca

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se escucha su zamacueca y el panalivio, muy lejos. Y se escuchan los festejos que cantó en su juventud. De Cañete a Tombuctú, de Chancay a Mozambique llevan sus claros repiques ritmos negros del Perú. (Cumanana 24) [The old black men died, / but amidst the dry cane / you hear their zamacueca music / and the panalivio Afro-Peruvian dance, far away. / And you hear the festive Peruvian music / that he sang in his youth. / From Cañete province to Timbuktu, / from Chancay to Mozambique / his clear sounds are carried / Black rhythms of Peru.]

The italicized words in this final stanza of “Ritmos negros del Perú” refer to Afro-Peruvian expressions that are defined in the glossary that Santa Cruz wrote for the published version of Cumanana. As its circulation by multiple means demonstrates, this poetry was meant to cross borders, to be heard and understood within the community, and to be read by those outside of the community. It affirms African presence within Peru for a range of local and international audiences. In its rhythms and its voicing it also becomes part of what Daniel Mathews calls the “ciudad cantada,” or “sung city.” This is Mathews’s name for the poetry and song that parallels Rama’s lettered city and shares with the lettered elite its urban context and creation of the city as a paralinguistic product. It is not Raúl Bueno’s “ciudad oral” [oral city], however, because of the presence of the author and his or her consciousness of his or her cultural role (“La ciudad cantada”). In several of his articles, Mathews chronicles how the early twentiethcentury need for a new literature for the largely illiterate urban workforce took the form of music and produced forms such as the vals, tango, ranchero, and bolero. He cites authors such as Juan Gonzalo Rose who abandoned “academic poetry” and whose audience was “las grandes minorías” [the great minorities] for songwriting, creating a cultural system that was comparable to that of the lettered elite (“La ciudad cantada”). In a later essay about Santa Cruz in particular, Mathews studies how Nicomedes transformed the décima in the 1950s from its popular roots, in which it was anonymous and learned directly from its creators or listeners, to its mass dissemination.

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Santa Cruz used forms of production and consumption that are totally different from tradition: “Formado como decimista por Porfirio Vásquez, tuvo una conciencia política y literaria que a los otros les faltó” [Trained as a decimist by Porfirio Vásquez, he had a literary and political conscience that others lacked]. He was both a poet and an organic intellectual who studied the form. Mathews discerns three differences between Santa Cruz and his predecessors: “a) el registro escrito y fonográfico; b) la amplitud de temas; c) el profesionalismo” [a) written and phonographic records; b) the breadth of themes; c) his professionalism]. This method led to his “doble suerte” [double luck], for his poems were “muy apreciados en el gran público y poco apreciados en la academia” [very esteemed by the public at large and little esteemed in Academia] (“Tres momentos”). There were two systems at play: one controlled by the literate and another linked to popularity. Santa Cruz worked outside of the established academic or literary spaces, yet he employed elements of these systems to regularize popular production. While Mathews’s study of popular song in Peru is sharply focused and insightful, a recent experience in the classroom demonstrates that there is still some slippage between the old and new systems of transmission in the case of Santa Cruz. In a graduate seminar I taught in 2009, a Peruvian student working on Nicomedes Santa Cruz was surprised to discover that the poem “A cocachos aprendí” [With knuckle-blows I learned], a décima he had learned and that is popularly memorized by schoolchildren in Peru, was not anonymous, as he had thought, but authored by Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Indeed, some of his poetry has become incorporated into the popular realm to the degree that it has “lost” its author and reverted to being poetry that speaks for or from the collective. This par ticular poem works for a range of familiar working-class perspectives as it focuses on an adult reflecting on his or her primary school educational experience in a popular neighborhood. Here is the poem in its entirety (also widely available, recited, and sung by children on YouTube): A cocachos aprendí mi labor de colegial en el Colegio Fiscal del barrio donde nací. Tener primaria completa era raro en mi niñez (nos sentábamos de a tres en una sola carpeta).

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Yo creo que la palmeta la inventaron para mí, de la vez que una rompí me apodaron “mano ‘e fierro,” y por ser tan mataperro a cocachos aprendí. Juguetón de nacimiento, por dedicarme al recreo sacaba Diez en el Aseo y Once en Aprovechamiento. De la Conducta ni cuento pues, para colmo de mal era mi voz general “¡chócala pa la salida!” dejando a veces perdida mi labor de colegial. ¡Campeón en lingo y bolero! ¡Rey del trompo con huaraca! ¡Mago haciéndome “la vaca” y en bolitas, ¡el primero! En Aritmética: Cero. En Geografía, igual. Doce en examen oral. Trece en examen escrito . . . Si no me “soplan” repito en el Colegio Fiscal. Con esa nota mezquina terminé mi Quinto al tranco, tiré el guardapolvo blanco de costalitos de harina. Y hoy, parado en una esquina llora el tiempo que perdí: Los otros niños de allí alcanzaron nombre egregio. ¡Yo . . . no aproveché el Colegio del barrio donde nací! (109–10) [I learned by knuckle-blows / my work as a school boy / in the public school house / of the neighborhood where I was born. // To complete

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primary school / was rare in my childhood / (we were seated three / at a single desk). I think that the cane / was invented for me, / from the time I broke one / they nicknamed me “iron hand,” / and because I was so rebellious / I learned by knuckle-blows. // Playful from birth / by dedicating myself to recess / I received a Ten in cleanliness / and Eleven in Attention. / In terms of Conduct I better not tell / to top off my misdeeds / I called out / “Let’s meet outside!” / at times leaving my school work / abandoned. // Champion in lingo and playing the bolero game! / King of the top with a slingshot! / A magician at skipping school and in marbles, the first! / In arithmetic: Zero. / In geography, the same. / Twelve on the oral exam. / Thirteen on the written exam . . . / If they catch me cheating I’ll repeat / in the school house. // With this paltry grade / I finished my Fifth year in stride, / I threw off my smock / made of white flour sacks. / And today, hanging out on a corner / I regret the time I lost: / The other kids from there / gained illustrious names. I . . . did not take advantage of the School / in the neighborhood where I was born!]22

The poem does not denounce the violence with which the letter entered but instead expresses remorse for wasted time and lessons not learned. Although the speaker was rebellious, she/he now is an adult who expresses regret at opportunities lost in a poem that encourages adaptation to the system and working hard to gain knowledge in a school that is structured to control wild (creative?) behavior. This is hardly a defiant stance in either form or content, and it may come as no surprise that Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s work was not embraced by Hora Zero, an avant-garde literary group principally situated in Peru that came into being in 1970.23 According to Santa Cruz himself, the group “sataniza todo lo que hago, sobre todo por haber hecho un comercial” [demonizes all that I do, above all for having made a commercial] (Maríñez 65). As the title of Tulio Mora’s book expresses, Hora Zero wanted to be the “última vanguardia,” the end of the line or epitome of those seeking to break with the past, to radically question the institution of literature, to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, and to renovate poetic form (César Vallejo is the only poetic antecedent they leave standing, according to Mora 8). The Hora Zero poets looked for inspiration outside of Peru through attention to English-US-American poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, as they sought to give voice to the “sintaxis callejera” [street syntax] of the common man (Mora 10).24 In this, poets such as Jorge Pimentel, Juan Ramírez Ruiz, Antonio Cisneros, Rodolfo Hinostroza, Mirko Lauer, Enrique Verástegui, and Tulio Mora (among others) continued the

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earlier avant-garde’s search for the vernacular, although they themselves were mostly members of the middle class (poor or emergent, according to Chueca 35). Luis Fernando Chueca, who discusses these issues in some detail, concludes that even if they wanted to represent popular speech, their poetic speakers were “verosímilmente popular más que populista” [more credibly popular than populist] (36). Juan Zevallos-Aguilar has observed that Juan Ramírez Ruiz was a poet who explored popular everyday life, appropriating the marginal space of the city that was not quite his own (“Notas” 50– 51), and his observation may be extended to others in the group. The Hora Zero writers, participating in late twentieth-century modernity as it moved into postmodernity, supported the creation of “integral poetry” that recorded all of the elements that affect contemporary human experience; to do so they used the strategies employed by their precursors in the early avant-gardes, publishing manifestos and denouncing a world that they saw as more and more controlled by commercial interests (Zevallos-Aguilar, “Notas” 48; Mora 13). They worked to write poetry that transformed the boundaries between art and lived experience in the 1970s, when there was an “increasingly high profile relationship between politics and cultural production” in Latin America (Brooksbank Jones and Munck 5) and, in the process, employed more experimental formal strategies or cultural references that would distance their creations from possible recuperation by the market. They appear to have rejected Santa Cruz’s work for its traditionalism, for what might be seen as an anachronistic use of the décima at a time when free verse was seen as an innovative norm or part of evolutionary poetic development that broke with (rather than grew out of) colonial tradition; the other part of their critique had to do with his use of mass media and his embrace of the popular realm. In correspondence with the author, Zevallos-Aguilar affirmed the tension between Hora Zero and Santa Cruz, noting that the latter was seen as an artist and intellectual “palaciego,” or linked to earlier patronage systems, for he had “la habilidad de tener siempre buenas relaciones con los grupos de poder y los gobiernos de turno peruanos” [the ability to always have good relations with the groups in power and rotating Peruvian governments]. While this characteristic can be seen as opportunism, his ability to survive and prosper under changing regimes could also be an element of the cultural inheritance of enslaved peoples who share a history of strategic invention within dominant linguistic and cultural practices. Rather than seen as gaining the power of speech for a heretofore silenced people, however, his success was

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read as a sign of compromise or selling out. In this aspect, Hora Zero went against the earlier avant-gardes who, as Vicky Unruh has observed, opposed the hierarchy of traditions to create “a more collage-like American culture of the fragmentary and the displaced” (168). This struggle between stances in the literary field can be read as an extension of the confrontation between artists and the bourgeois culture that Pierre Bourdieu locates as beginning in the nineteenth century in Europe (215). In his sociological study of literary fields, Bourdieu observes a ranking among artists and finds that it is more valuable to be recognized by one’s peers than to meet the demands of the general public; success in the latter realm is seen as a sign of compromise with the times (217). But in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s, Afro-Peruvian culture was not part of commercial art; just as the Hora Zero writers had to create their readership through their gatherings, their manifestos, their publications, and their poetry, by using multiple elements of performance and the newer mass media Santa Cruz created a wider audience for a range of Afro-Peruvian artists. He was enabled by a set of social and political circumstances that stimulated interest in local art while he, in turn, went beyond this, joined his work with others (Afro-Peruvian in a variety of artistic modes and with expression beyond Peru), and in the process revealed a collective subject that had long existed but whose voices and stories had been left out or marginalized in national and regional histories. While the Hora Zero project began with revolutionary literary and social aims that its members worked on from provisional positions, over time poets in the group wanted to see their poetry as more central, as the “true” poetry of Peru (Chueca 35). Chueca notes that, in the 1980s, “HZ ha pasado a imaginarse como un propuesta que actúa fundamentalmente en el espacio literario, aunque claro que con los ojos puestos en el espacio social” [HZ has come to imagine itself as a proposal that fundamentally operates in literary space, although clearly with their eyes set on social space] (39). In this shift the group moves from the avant-garde to what Bourdieu calls the “consecrated avant-garde,” whose initial radicalism is tempered by its desire to garner literary prestige and cultural capital (financial value is practically out of the question for Latin American poets of any persuasion, with very few exceptions) (220). In this they demonstrate the changing relations between politics, cultural, and social realms, as Hora Zero moved from challenging tradition to strategically finding a place within it. The relationships between these poets reveal the cultural complexity of the literary scene, which is not coherent but contradictory, marked by provisional positions that are in flux. Santa Cruz and the Hora Zero poets

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in 1970s Lima brought together the popular tradition (oral poetry, the décima, and improvisation) and multiple aims of the avant-garde in art that indicated a society that was “becoming postmodern,” circumstances that Bill Ashcroft defines as not the “overcoming of modernity, but modernity coming to understand its own contradictions and uncertainties” (19). We see some of this complexity and ambiguity in the contention among writers who work within the cultural arena from different subordinate angles to gain strategic political aims, while in important aspects of their work they all negotiate outside of dominant cultural production. While Santa Cruz’s poetry represented the experience of a dominated group, he did enjoy some commercial and financial success; he said, for example, that in the 1960s “un obrero ganaba en esta época mil o dos mil soles mensuales, y yo cobraba trienta, cincuenta y hasta cien mil soles por una décima” [a laborer at this time earned a thousand or two thousands soles a month, and I charged thirty, fifty, and up to one hundred thousand soles for a décima] (quoted in Maríñez 59). Later, outside of Peru, he parlayed his knowledge of Afro-Peruvian poetry into a position hosting the program “Juglares de Nuestra América” [Bards of Our America] for Radio Exterior in Spain (Ojeda 38). He crossed over into the commercial sector and in doing so gained cultural authority through his use of conventional forms that permitted a variety of readers or listeners to understand and interact with poems that included some rebellious, some descriptive, and some conformist content. In some ways his poetry acceded to market interests and in others it resisted these (“Talara, no digas ‘yes’ ”), but either way, in the process Santa Cruz recuperated previously lost or subordinated popular perspectives. His accessibility did not fit the vision of poetry of the Hora Zero group, which worked to unsettle what came before but which paradoxically reinforced some aspects of the dominant paradigms of poetic production in work that depended on the individuality or originality of the poets and the interpretative skills of their readers. Trapped by their own desire for literary modernity or postmodernity, they also, perhaps ironically, came to see their position as the only tenable one. But dominant codes and systems may be dislocated by a continuum of practices, and artists who are distanced from power are by no means homogeneous. As we can see, the conflicts between Santa Cruz and the Hora Zero writers are indicative of the more general shifting roles of art relative to commercial culture midcentury. Anny Brooksbank Jones suggests that, in Latin America, “Postmodern-inflected cultural critiques are not reducible to metropolitan forms,” implicitly allowing a space for the décima within postmodern cultures, and she continues to observe that the

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“openness and plurality of commercial culture is potentially enabling, to the extent that it recognizes the claims of individual pleasure in a way that ‘elite’ cultural critics have repeatedly failed to do” (Brooksbank Jones and Munck 9). Reflecting on the role of mass media in changing relationships to art, Jesús Martín Barbero sees art as “caught between the experience of the market as it assigns ‘value’ to works of art, the pressure of the culture industries to make art accessible to and consumable by all, and the technological reconfiguration of its conditions of production and distribution”; in these circumstances, he contends that “art has slowly lost many of the contours that defined it” (56). Like many of the performers of poetry discussed so far, the circulation of Santa Cruz’s work is an indication of democratization, but it raises issues about the quality compromised or the diminished density in the process of making poetry accessible to broader audiences. As we have seen throughout this chapter, there was increased communication among African diaspora populations in this time period, and, like Cosme before him, Santa Cruz took part in this by forging cultural alliances outside of his national identity. Not surprisingly, some of the strongest of these are with the Caribbean: “En los recuerdos infantiles de Santa Cruz Lima era un enclave que estaba más ligado al Caribe que al resto del Perú, porque había desarrollado una cultura mulata en trescientos años entre murallas” [In Santa Cruz’s memories of his youth Lima was an enclave that was more bound to the Caribbean than to the rest of Peru because it had developed a mulatta culture in three hundred years between walls] (Mathews “Alianza Lima ” 147). Santa Cruz knew Afro- Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and admired his work, and the island metaphor evoked by the Caribbean reinforces AfroPeruvian separation from surrounding society. Yet Santa Cruz both affirmed Afro-Peruvian singularity and linked this group to others, such as the indigenous population in his poetry (see, for example his poem, “Los comuneros” [The commoners]) in Cumanana, and in his work on the history of the décima that he connects to both accounts of colonial evangelism and its resistance. He states: “El negro es el último de los poetas populares de esta tradición cuatricentenaria” [The Black person is the last of the popular poets of this four hundred year tradition] (Ojeda 73–74). In his décimas he performed black identities for listeners from the elite and popular spheres, as did Cosme, making us see and hear multiple identities. This turn to folklore in a postmodern context is not necessarily an act that can be criticized for “stylizing and decontextualizing local arts” for consumption by elite audiences; as Feldman observes in dialogue with

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Zoila Mendoza, the embrace of folklore by those in the community who produce it can allow those in the community to “rework and contest social values and stereotypes promoted by such elites.” Following this train of thought, Feldman notes a shift in the concept of folklore within the revival of interest in Afro-Peruvian cultures. She sees attitudes moving “from criollo paternalism to popular revalorization and finally to a mixture of the two” (Feldman 129). Traditional yet boundary-challenging work like Santa Cruz’s allows him to take part in the creation of a more “collage-like” culture that Unruh observed and for which the vanguard movements strived earlier in the century. In each instance of performance and the circulation of poetry in the early to mid-twentieth century that we have examined so far we have come across some unanticipated outcomes: in the first chapter we saw how although the institutionalization of declamation sought to regularize speech and move the masses into the social mainstream at the beginning of the century it also opened up a space for speakers (such as women) and audiences excluded from the traditional lettered city (criollo and not, and participants from multiple classes). This chapter continues to register these shifts and adds new subjects, in all senses of the term, both as topics (such as race and popular culture) and as speakers. In this chapter we also see technological shifts with the increased influence of radio, film, and recordings, which rather than leading inevitably to the diminishment of aesthetic experience opens this up to wider audiences who through these means intermingle with tradition (Martín Barbero 71). In each case, the performance of poetry initiates alternative urban populations as audiences for poetry, bringing together or restructuring relationships among popular, elite, and mass cultural categories. Poetry as a genre is not devalued because of its more varied dissemination, its voicing, or its musicalization, but it does lead us to renegotiate the boundaries between popular and elite cultures, to reproduce these—in the sense of questioning and remaking— keeping us mindful of rather than subservient to conventional conceptions of the values and roles of literature.

chapter three

Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant- Garde

Early in the twentieth century the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti decreed an end to traditional poetic declamation. In his 1916 proclamation, “Dynamic, Multi Channeled Recitation,” he announced how the futurists are “renewing and quickening the spirit of our race, making it more manly” (193). With aggressive terminology, he planned to liberate “intellectuals from the age- old, static, pacifist, and nostalgic type of recitation and create a new, dynamic, synoptic, and warlike form of recitation” against a traditional style that, even when “supported by the most wonderful vocal organs and by the strongest of temperaments, always inevitably ends up being a monotonous series of high and low points, a hodgepodge of gestures, which time and again wash over the inveterate stupidity of lecture audiences in floods of boredom” (193–94). Included in his long list of suggestions for performance are the following: the dehumanization of the speaker through techniques such as electrification of the voice; the use of a combination of voices throughout the hall; the incorporation of motors, drums, and saws, especially to highlight onomatopoeia; and gestures by the performer that should be typographic or graphic, creating spirals, cubes, cones, and ellipses in the air—almost every proposition moves declamation toward performance and written work toward sound poetry. The performer is a cocreator and an inventor who in some ways dislodges the authority of the text and decenters the author (paradoxically both conditioning his own authority and heightening it). Marinetti’s ideas fit with Marjorie Perloff’s and Craig Dworkin’s observation that futurist artwork “represents the brief phase when the [European] avant- garde 79

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defined itself by its relation to the mass audience” (38), but only part of its mass audience, for while he may have been attempting to reignite interest in poetry and art through revitalized performances, Marinetti’s views in many ways augment the stylistic bifurcation we have observed between the popular and the elite. Even in the fragments just quoted, which seek to invigorate declamation, the futurist disparages some audiences for their “inveterate stupidity,” while he seeks to distance performed poetry from emotion, melodrama, and the spoken word (gendered feminine or effeminate in his perspective). The ongoing polemic about cultural categories is apparent in the futurist’s reconceptualization of poetry and performance, and it is one that will continue to structure my analysis of the relationships between the poetry and performances that grew out of the Latin American avant-gardes. As in many of the European avant-gardes, performance has a strong role in the Latin American vanguards. It is one of the ways in which artists demonstrated their interrogation of the role of art in society and restructured traditional boundaries vis-à-vis genre and the circulation of culture. Perhaps the most famous anecdote that arises in many accounts of performance and avant-garde poetry is the story of Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo’s theatrical presentation of his book Espantapájaros: al alcance de todos [Scarecrow: At the reach of everyone] (1932). Following his stated desires to integrate art into a broader public sphere, Girondo had a giant aristocratic papier-mâché scarecrow constructed and hauled into Buenos Aires on a funeral carriage to parodically promote the sale of his new collection.1 While, as Oscar Brando has noted, the content of this new book was more radically experimental than his previous work and thereby potentially narrowed his audience, this marketing performance broke with the Fierro group’s general rejection of writing’s professionalization and, at the same time, extended his public. Perhaps this incident is so frequently recalled because it anticipates commentary on the society of spectacle to come (Debord, Baudrillard) and embodies many of the core paradoxes of the avant-garde: the desire to disseminate art in broader contexts yet resist its commercialization and the wish to combine political and aesthetic spheres and redefine the role of the artist, yet to do so by entering into dialogue with an international vanguard that required knowledge of particular aesthetic codes available to relatively few (García Canclini, 277). These paradoxes are compounded in the situation of Latin America, a region in which the issues of modernity and coloniality are intertwined, as it sought a place within “a larger modernity in which colonial projects, past and present, continue to be foundational” (Rosenberg 163).2

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As we saw in the first two chapters of this book, some of the performative qualities associated with the avant-gardes are present in the poetry both earlier in and during the same time period in less bohemian milieus, but in the late teens through the 1930s, various avant-garde movements made explicit their theoretical relationships to performance through their manifestos, both written and oral (Unruh 32). Vicky Unruh makes this compelling argument in her book on the Latin American vanguards, in which she posits that these movements were “a form of activity rather than simply a collection of experimental texts” (3). She chronicles a series of “performance manifestos” of the 1920s and 1930s that took place throughout Latin America and that frequently included poetry, visual arts, and music in interartistic events that reached out to new audiences (31–70). Fernando Rosenberg builds on her ideas, affirming that the vanguards were the “first artistic enterprises of the cultural elite” that attempted to cross the divide between mainstream and elite cultures and to participate in “the logic of mass production and consumption” (5). Rosenberg’s work on the Latin American avant-gardes reconceptualizes them as expressions “from and about a global, simultaneous dynamic” (16). He situates them not as belated or imitative of European movements or as revelations of local authenticity but as part of a process of the ongoing negotiation between cultural margins and centers. In this regard, Rosenberg sees avantgarde texts as “simultaneously agents and resistant subjects of colonial modernization” (27). “Simultaneous” is a temporal term that redefines Latin America’s role relative to modernity and describes how peripheral avant-gardes were called on to fulfill two conflicting roles at once. Thus he reevaluates the avant-gardes in terms of a global dynamic rather than as a series of interchanges between centers and peripheries, a focus that allows us to see more clearly how these positions are continually created. We find intriguing examples of dialogue within the global avant-gardes and an archive of per formances in the work of two of Latin America’s most well-recognized poets— Chilean Pablo Neruda and Peruvian César Vallejo—whose early work was rooted in the avant- gardes. These are two iconic figures, which makes them propitious examples of how per formance has circulated and continues to circulate their work. The poetry of both has fundamental connections to the avant- gardes, and we will see how per formances or reincarnations of both poets’ works at times reinforce these connections and in other instances veer away from the kinds of expressive experimentations characteristic of the early twentieth-century vanguards. There are myriad examples of Neruda reciting his work, and he openly affirmed his desire for his oeuvre to be performed; this may

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account, in part, for the numerous representations of his poetry that have multiplied as the media have, making him a kind of performative icon. I will contrast the author’s ritualistic style for presenting his own work, which has created an auditory archive, to per for mances by others, both online and recorded. Analyzing contemporary versions of Neruda’s work demonstrates how varied factors construct different “Nerudas” and often sidestep the poetry consecrated by literary critics. Vallejo’s work has not been performed to nearly the same degree or in the same venues and one wonders why. One reason is that there are no recordings of Vallejo reading; he makes a phantasmal “appearance” on the Internet through those who choose to read and through artistic adaptations of his work; another reason is that although he is a canonical author in a regional context, his work did not begin to garner international attention until late in the twentieth century. Analyzed in terms of performance, Vallejo’s work is paradoxical, for although he inscribes popular voices and a range of social discourse in his work, many of these have gone unheard, while the challenging aspects of his poetry have resonated with a narrower public attracted to poststructuralist critical ideas. Each of these poets transcended the category of avant-garde in his lifetime: Neruda in his later work and in his repudiation of modernist poetics and Vallejo in his move toward social commitment in the 1930s. By examining more recent performances of their poetry, we will see how both of their works have been further refunctionalized in contemporary contexts that offer us intriguing examples of changes in their reception and in the circulation of culture.3

“And then there is the sound”: Performing Neruda On the centennial of Pablo Neruda’s birth, National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States paid tribute to the famous poet by featuring a reading by the Chilean American writer Ariel Dorfman. Dorfman chose to read a poem from Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra II, “Agua sexual” [Residence on earth II, Sexual water]. The sensuality of the poem is apparent not only in the images its title evokes but also in its sonorous language and accentuation that highlight the o, a, and s that travel throughout the poem. It begins: Rodando a goterones solos, a gotas como dientes, a espesos goterones de mermelada y sangre,

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rodando a goterones cae el agua, como una espada en gotas, como un desgarrador río de vidrio, cae mordiendo, golpeando el eje de la simetría, pegando en las costuras del alma, rompiendo cosas abandonadas, empapando lo oscuro. (105) [Rolling in big solitary raindrops, / in drops like teeth, / in big thick drops of marmalade and blood, / rolling in big raindrops / the water falls, / like a sword in drops, / like a tearing river of glass, / it falls biting, / striking the axis of symmetry, sticking to the seams of the soul, / breaking abandoned things, drenching the dark.] (Donald Walsh’s translation, 151)

Read it aloud and listen to it, and you hear that the poem is as much about resonance and seducing the ear as it is about liquid movement and inner darkness. Dorfman reads the poem quietly, though with some urgency, as the images accumulate in the middle of the poem through the speaker’s observation, “Veo camas, veo corredores donde grita una virgen,/ veo frazadas y órganos y hoteles” [I see beds, I see corridors where a virgin screams, / I see blankets and organs and hotels] (Walsh’s translation, 151), in a series that arrives at a kind of climactic witnessing: Veo los sueños sigilosos, admito los postreros días, y también los orígenes, y también los recuerdos, como un párpado atrozmente levantado a la fuerza estoy mirando. (106) [I see the silent dreams, / I accept the final days, / and also the origins, and also the memories, / like an eyelid atrociously and forcibly uplifted / I am looking.] (Walsh’s translation, 152)

This last simile recalls the forcibly open eye in Buñuel and Dali’s’ Un chien andalou (1929), but instead of slicing it the shift in perception occurs between seeing and hearing.4 In Dorfman’s reading, we hear the transition when he arrives at the next stanza that begins “Y entonces” [and then], for his intonation changes as the speaker listens. Amid the sounds and noises and breaths and sobs, Dorfman’s “escucho” [I listen], repeated

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twice in the poem, deemphasizes the s, reminding us, with other features of his pronunciation, that he, like the author, is Chilean. As his reading arrives at the poem’s conclusion that unites and interiorizes sight and sound, since with eyes closed “veo caer agua sorda” [I see a muffled waterfall] (Walsh’s translation, 153), Dorfman almost whispers. The quietude of his voice suggests that these words are private, spoken to oneself or to an intimate audience. Ariel Dorfman may have been chosen to memorialize Neruda because of his transnational identity that allows him to interpret the poet across cultures. The NPR archives also feature a version of him reading the poem in English, and he sounds like another person in this language. His spoken English is impeccably American, and listening to the renderings sequentially one cannot help but notice how the sound is altered. You hear that the hard d’s and r’s and the spaces between words are more audible in English, even though Dorfman maintains his quiet intonation. The rhythms shift; you perceive how certain word groups, such as gerunds, are linked through sound and stress in the Spanish (golpeando, pegando, saliendo, durmiendo, soñando, mirando, oyendo), and how this cannot be replicated in translation. The poem becomes more literal: the “goterones” become “drops” or “raindrops”—the first choice less elegant and more pedestrian, and the second choice more restrictive and specific.5 Voicing the poems together, we find elements that are at once complementary and contradictory and that also bring to the forefront how poetry works: they feature a masterful use of sound and sense and have a participatory dimension that draws in readers and listeners. Every per formance is an interpretation, a reading, and, put into another’s voice, embodied by another, a translation of an author’s work with a different anticipated audience. Circulating are additional recent per formances of “Agua sexual,” one by the Mexican Gothic metal band, Anabantha, which musicalized a version of the poem, adapting the lyrics, and another by the Chilean rock band, Lucybell, which followed the original more precisely.6 Anabantha starts its version with the first lines of the second stanza of the original: “Solamente es un soplo, más húmedo que el llanto, / un líquido, un sudor, un aceite sin nombre—Agua sexual” [It is only a breath, moister than weeping, / a liquid, a sweat, a nameless oil] (Walsh’s translation, 151). The remaining lyrics follow the first two stanzas, with some additions: aquí [here] is added to “cae el agua” [the water falls], and lists are abbreviated so that the water “cae mordiendo” las cosas abandonadas [falls biting the abandoned things]. A slow, plucked guitar introduces the song, and Duan Marie, the lead vocalist of the band,

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strongly and passionately belts out the lyrics in rock-star style, punctuated by refrains of oh, ah, ah. It is a moving version, but very distant from the intimacy created by Dorfman in both of his readings. The addition of multiple instruments and a pulsing beat that the singer’s melody twists around emphasizes the sensual; the lyrics no longer struggle with perception, interiority, or darkness in the natural/sexual world but bring the sexual into primary focus, sidestepping the more hermetic elements in the written work. Several YouTube videos that put images to the music make this interpretation quite explicit with erotic images—of body parts, of people kissing or making love in the rain. This adaptation is intriguing for what it leaves out as much as for how it extends the text. In the written version, the speaker is actually distanced from whatever sensuality he observes or hears, positioned more as an anguished voyeur than a participant. Lucybell’s interpretation appeared on the CD Marinero en tierra: Tributo a Neruda, a project initiated by the Fundación Neruda in 1998 in remembrance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the poet, on which a wide range of readers and musicians recorded versions of Neruda’s work.7 In the liner notes, Manuel Basoalto speculates on what Neruda’s reaction to the project would have been: A Pablo sin duda le habría entusiasmado un proyecto como este, a él le gustaba sentir su poesía en la voz de otros, de estudiantes, de amigos, de actores como María Maluenda y Roberto Parada, o cantada por Víctor Jara o Ángel Parra. Este disco nos devuelve una antigua tradición juglaresca, nos devuelve el tiempo en que la palabra era fundamental. Otro mérito extraordinario es la variedad de intérpretes. Aquí la poesía no es sólo cosa para los viejos, sino que nos encontramos con una actitud vital en que la antigua palabra del poeta se llena de nuevas vibraciones, en la voz de quienes hablan al corazón de los jóvenes, en toda Iberoamérica. [Pablo would have been excited about a project like this one, he liked to feel his poetry in others’ voices, of students, of friends, of actors such as María Maluenda and Roberto Parada, or sung by Victor Jara or Angel Parra. This record returns us to the old bardic tradition; it returns us to the time when the word was fundamental. Another extraordinary merit is the variety of interpreters. Here poetry is not only something for old people, but rather we find a vital attitude through which the old words of the poet are filled with new vibrations, in the voice of those who speak to the heart of the young people in all of Latin America.]

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Lucybell begins their interpretation of the poem with slow electronic music, fragmented and hesitant at first, then establishing an even, persistent beat. When the voice of Claudio Valenzuela comes in to begin the poem, there are just a few punctuating guitar chords added to the spare electronic background, and he recites rhythmically, urgently, a bit more frenetically than Dorfman, with some rapidity, but he does not sing. At times his voice accelerates, such as in part of an enumerative list, but the backbeat remains steady. He punctuates moments in the poem by extending the concluding sound of words: oscuroooo, aguaaaaa, hotelesssss— sometimes emphasizing an end stopped line and sometimes creating more of a pause around a comma. After the third verse, electronic guitar riffs with heavy bass create a brief interlude, but for the next verse the voice recites unaccompanied, the surrounding silence in contrast to the music, which comes in heavily again after the verse’s concluding words “Estoy mirando” [I am looking]. Music and voice are joined in the last two verses, which are sung, the last one with the voice more distant and electrified. Lucybell returns to the penultimate verse several times, highlighting the section of the poem that brings together sound and sight, complementing this with the conjunction of voice and music. After four repetitions, the poem closes with the end of the penultimate stanza in the original—“y con las dos mitades del alma miro al mundo” [and with the two halves of my soul I look at the world] (Walsh’s translation, 153)—with reverb on the final o in the last repetition—making the union of senses and halves continuous, circular, or inescapable. Lucybell’s choices in its performance of “Agua sexual” retain more characteristics of the original’s angst and exploration but bring these into the twenty-first century. The electronic music is eminently contemporary and is not just an accompaniment but serves as additional “punctuation” for the poem and as a way to augment the interaction between noise and silence. Unlike Dorfman’s reading, with its personal, reflective tone that was directed to a sector of the US audience who tunes into public radio, this per formance, like Anabantha’s, is clearly public and meant for a younger hip audience. Although Lucybell’s recording may have originally appeared on a CD with relatively select listeners, the song has become part of its repertoire and is widely available. These examples demonstrate that when the lyrics of “Agua sexual” are adapted by divergent performers and reframed in a range of contexts, distinct aspects of the original text surface: a different object of interpretation is created through performance.8 Poetry is rooted in music and therefore shares certain characteristics: both depend on sound, which unfolds in time, and each uses beats or

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meter, although these elements are structured differently. Poetry uses a certain number of syllables and accents, which may follow a regular pattern and/or surprise the reader by creating rhythmic or accentual change within the structure. Both music and poetry work within a “framework of formal expectations” (Cureton 154), and in these examples of “Agua sexual,” the musicalization of the text hinges on its language and lyricism. Each performance testifies to the ongoing circulation of the poem, and each performer interiorizes the text, making Neruda a part of himself or herself. In this way, they might be viewed as transitory inhabitants of the text; like Michel de Certeau’s readers, whom he characterizes in one instance as “renters,” they “insinuate their countless differences” into the poem (xxii). Recording—and circulating versions of Pablo Neruda’s poetry (or anyone else’s, for that matter)—has become relatively easy with twenty-firstcentury technology. Yet during Neruda’s lifetime, canonicity determined whose work was recorded, and, most often, recordings privileged a recognized author reading his or her own poems; with Internet technology, various versions of per formance, including aural renditions, are now open to many. The author’s version has trumped others, however, as it has appeared to offer listeners another way into authorial intention. There are abundant recordings of Neruda reading his work, and every poem is voiced in the same ceremonial style; once you have heard Neruda reading, it is difficult not to hear his voice in your head. He reads slowly, observing his punctuation in a tone that I find liturgical, like a chant, an incantation, or a prayer. Students have found his style mesmerizing and monotonous, passionate, mellifluous, and sometimes unexciting. Volodia Teitelboim describes his style of reading as a “slow droning curve, like the sound of the Mapuche reed horn, the trutruca” (411). Pacing is central, and although there are crescendos in his interpretations, he does not accelerate. His openness to reading aloud is connected to a desire to form an affiliation with his audiences and to communicate through his poetry, in keeping with his Communist ideas and roles in Chilean politics. His memoirs and many of the biographical writings about him affirm his interest in sharing his work aloud, and the number of recordings of his voice suggests the importance of oral transmission and his embrace of mass media and new technology. Throughout his biography of the poet, Teitelboim comments on Neruda’s readings: one of these took place in the Miraflores Theater in Santiago in 1932, when Neruda was already legendary. In this account, Neruda hid behind giant oriental masks, and his “nasal twangy voice, dragging like a lament,” came out from behind them, startling and enchanting the audience (155). He dramatized his authorial position through

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both his presence and his absence. This is the year he returned to Chile from Ceylon, the last in a series of diplomatic residences in Asia, and he staged his relationship to the East through the masks, obscuring his own physical presence or making himself accessible to his listeners primarily through his speaking voice. In this way he may also have indirectly focused attention on his Chilean identity, for, as Peruvian cultural commentator José Carlos Mariátegui observed, during the time of the avant-gardes the local may have become “most fully visible through the lens of the global [ . . . ] through a critical engagement with the world, an opening to the outside which enlarges the frame in which a country can view itself and its culture” (quoted in Clayton 138). Later, removing the mask and performing for a different audience in 1944, when he was campaigning to be senator for the Chilean Communist Party, instead of making a more conventional political speech, he read his long poem, Greetings to the North, to workers in the nitrate fields. With it he enjoyed a success that “gave Neruda new confidence in poetry’s persuasive power over the masses, and at the same time revealed to the people that poetry was not an inaccessible, distant, elegant lady but rather a potential friend and companion” (Teitelboim 267– 69). His engagement with the dramatic lyric, evidenced by the use of the masks earlier, now puts this on a social stage as part of a collective, inclusive experience and a means of opening a national dialogue that would continue throughout his life.9 In a 1953 speech at the Santiago National Theater, he proclaimed that “poetry is like bread that both the literate and illiterate eat” (345).10 Neruda’s recordings supplement his live presentations, and, along with his accounts of his readings and those of others, form a historical record that has perhaps encouraged the panoply of musical adaptations of his work. As well as the popular forms already discussed, these include Peter Lieberson’s “Neruda songs” and the “Canto general” by Mikis Teodorakis, which are performed with orchestras and operatic voices, and Luciana Souza’s spare, jazz-inspired renditions of Neruda, among many others. “Agua sexual” is not the most obvious choice for contemporary per formances of Neruda’s oeuvre, for it is from Residencia en la tierra II, originally published in 1935. This multivolume collection contains Neruda’s work that is most associated with avant-garde experimentation; it is not from the more popular, accessible vein that Neruda cultivated later in his life, but it is some of the most critically revered poetry he wrote. Prominent Neruda critics such as Jaime Concha state that this series of poems “has enjoyed the most sustained critical attention,” and, he continues, “Residencia en la tierra se ha impuesto como un clásico de vanguardia en

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las jerarquías actuales de la poesía en castellano” [Residence on earth has been imposed as an avant-garde classic in the current hierarchies of poetry in Spanish] (5). Gustavo Pérez Firmat makes a similar assertion, noting how critics prefer the works that leave room for “exegetical maneuvering,” the “truly important Neruda of the Residencias or the Canto general” (32). Teitelboim observes that in 1949, at the American Continental Peace Congress, Neruda repudiated his first works (including the Residencias) for their existentialism and angst and opposed their reprinting in America (323). Another reason for his reassessment of his early work may have been that it may be seen as participating in colonial modernity in its stylistic engagement with the European avant-gardes rather than resisting or reformulating these movements. But while critical attention has consistently been drawn to the challenges of the Residencias, in the kiosks of Santiago and on the long list of works that have been and are being performed and adapted, an earlier collection dominates—Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [Twenty love poems and a desperate song] (1924). This is Neruda in his romantic or sentimental guise (which persists throughout his career, although the aesthetic scaffolding changes), and from the ubiquity of these poems in textbooks and online, one can surmise that they are frequently read at face value—as love poems. One of the most popular of these is “Poema 20,” which famously begins, “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche” [I can write the saddest lines tonight], and is generally thought to be the speaker’s nostalgic recollection of a romance lost. While it is undoubtedly a poem full of emotion, of moving sentiment, Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s masterful reading of the poem reveals that it is also a poem concerning emotion—as it is textualized and as a phenomenon. He finds that it is “not only an affecting poem but a poem about affect, its release and regulation” (33). Paying close attention to both style and content, he demonstrates how Neruda’s speaker, who begins in a distanced stance, meditating on the desire to speak, in the course of the poem stops and starts in his struggle between cognition and emotion, pensar and sentir [thinking and feeling], the written poem and the song poem. The love poem shifts to “declamatory emotionalism” when we arrive at the canción desesperada’s ohs, ahs, and exclamation points that complete the work and give “vent to sentiment” (38–39). As the poem moves toward song, the emotion intensifies. There is a tension between the oral and written elements throughout the poem that is detailed by Pérez Firmat and that has gone unnoticed in many prior readings; this critic’s attention to the detail of composition and meaning reawakens interest in an academic audience.

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In contrast to this, the myriad renditions one can find on the Internet today may reinforce the reader’s impressions that this version of Neruda is popular for all the “wrong” reasons: images, music, and even typeface highlight in the poem the melodramatic aspects of love, loss, and regret. In these cases, performance stages the poem as cursi, celebrating its sentimentality, reinforcing its most obvious emotions through other elements of its presentation, and obscuring the author’s struggles with his own means of expression, with the lyric as well as with feeling. Yet when we put all of these versions of “Poema 20” in dialogue, we get a fine example of how different audiences are interpolated by contrasting per for mances of a poem. Pérez Firmat can “redeem” the poem by showing its profundity, and what it offers to careful, well-trained eyes, while many of the online versions demonstrate that the poem resonates with a broader range of readers and listeners. “Poema 20,” like the more “impenetrable” “Agua sexual,” is a cultural artifact that performs distinct functions in different time periods and is reframed by and for different audiences and performers. One quite unexpected recent rendition of “Poema 20” is that of a Chilean electronic music duo, Marciano. Comprised of Rodrigo Castro and Sergio Lagos, their version of “Poema 20” appeared on their breakout CD, Polarizado (2002), and later on the second CD, Marinero en tierra (2004). Their presentation of the poem is surprising because it incorporates the voice of Neruda reading his poem into the electronic house music mix. The juxtaposition is incongruous as the insistent beat of the up-tempo dance music is out of sync with the poet’s measured pace and the tonal frame of the poem. Evidently it was one of the hits of the album. Thinking about its reception in post–Pinochet Chile with a booming free market economy in the early twenty-first century, one wonders if the house music does not represent the driven beat of electronic (and sexual?) success that overpowers and replaces Neruda’s emotive lament. Or is it nostalgic, an enactment of the kind of affecting contemplation that has little place in 2002 Chile? In either case, these performances, like the others chronicled here, evidence public interest in and repossession of Neruda for their own ends. Like Michael Radford’s 1995 free adaptation of Antonio Skármeta’s novel for the film Il Postino, in which Neruda’s poetry is used by the protagonist to seduce his girlfriend, or the subsequent release of the film’s soundtrack, punctuated by celebrity readings of Neruda’s poetry, the Chilean’s work continues to be repackaged to appeal to diverse audiences. The selections on the sound track are all linked to either love or nature,

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and while I find that Madonna brings intensity, pathos, and depth to her reading of “If you forget me” (which resonates in multiple ways with her own very public biography), other performances on the film’s CD leave me cold (for example, Julia Roberts’s and Andy García’s “Sonnet 81”), and the recording may be primarily a sign of kitsch commercialization.11 While Teitelboim’s biography makes it clear that Neruda’s performed poetry was embraced by readers and listeners in the mid-twentieth century for its affective power, for the author’s ability to captivate his listeners with the spoken word, and for his ability to identify with the people, their problems and Chile’s and other countries’ often bleak realities, which expanded his listeners’ sense of political possibilities (266), many of the recent interventions demonstrate how his work can be and has been simplified and depoliticized. The fact that he is now represented in the international mass media chiefly as a Latin lover and secondarily as a powerful cultural voice who affected the moral and aesthetic compass of the mid-twentieth century is indicative of shifts not in his work but in values and tastes in contemporary cultural consumption.

“To hear bright smacks on their palates”: Listening to Vallejo The Peruvian César Vallejo’s name is often linked with Neruda’s, as they share the status of the best-known avant-garde poets of Latin America. However, Vallejo just as frequently serves as a counterpoint to Neruda. Readers contrast their lives: Neruda’s diplomatic posts and the recognition he garnered from his first collection versus Vallejo’s poverty and relative obscurity, with two books published in his life and one fusion of several he left in progress appearing later. As Stephen Hart states, “It is not an exaggeration to say that Vallejo is essentially a posthumous poet” (40). And they distinguish the trajectory of their poetry: Neruda’s move toward accessibility and the elemental in the extensive arc of his production, and Vallejo’s more concentrated output that is deemed difficult and more radically experimental, yet paradoxically colloquial. While early critics read Vallejo as a mestizo or an Indian voice of America, at times eliding the conflictive hermeticism of his poetry (Orrego, Mariátegui), later poststructuralist readers have embraced his poetry’s fragmentation and formal complexity (von Buelow, McGuirk, Clayton). Perhaps since he was not canonized in his lifetime there are no recordings of Vallejo reading his work. Also, while his friends, such as Antenor

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Orrego, mention Vallejo reading his poetry and that of poets he admired (Whitman, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Darío, Herrera y Reissig, and Lugones, among others) with his literary friends from Trujillo, he apparently avoided public recitation. Orrego comments that although Vallejo recited his work among friends or students from San Marcos, “Cuando la compañía era más numerosa, Vallejo era parco y pudoroso en la recitación de sus propios versos. Tal actitud, me explicó después, se debía al desenfadado latrocinio de alguno de los circunstantes que frecuentaba estas reuniones, el cual llegó a publicar sin escrúpulo frases literarias o versiones apenas disfrazadas de sus versos” [When the company was more numerous, Vallejo was frugal and modest in the recitation of his own lines. That attitude, he explained to me later, was due to the casual theft of his work by those who frequented these meetings, for they later unscrupulously published literary phrases or thinly disguised versions of his verses] (77–78). Echoing his postmortem fame, Vallejo does make phantasmal “appearances” on the Internet and in mass media through those who choose to read his poetry and through artistic adaptations of or responses to his work. Several recent critics have also focused on the sound or orality in his writing; in poems like “Pedro Rojas,” as Antonio Cornejo Polar has observed, he inscribes a popular voice, while Michelle Clayton describes Trilce as “caught up in a frictional dialogue with other voices against which it must assert itself” (58). When we listen to Vallejo we must be attentive to sound and voices in his texts; when we add the dimension of subsequent soundings of his works by others, we will come to see what others’ performances tell us about his poetry. Vallejo’s first collection, Los heraldos negros (1918), includes colloquial language, accessible topics, and some narrative structure amid aesthetic experimentation. The most famous poem of the collection is the title one; it is an apocalyptic intent to express the inexpressible, which in the process inscribes the limits of communication: Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes . . . Yo no sé! Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido se empozara en el alma . . . Yo no sé! Son pocos; pero son . . . Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte. Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros atilas; o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

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Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma, de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema. Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema. Y el hombre . . . Pobre . . . pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada; vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido se empoza, como un charco de culpa, en la mirada. Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes . . . Yo no sé! (7) [There are blows in life, so hard . . . I don’t know! / Blows like God’s hatred; as if before them, / the undertow of all that has been suffered / welled up in the soul . . . I don’t know! // They are few, but they are. . . . They open dark trenches / in the fiercest face and the strongest back. / They may be, perhaps, the colts of barbarous atillans; / of the black heralds sent to us by Death. // They are the deep falls of Christs of the soul, / of some adorable faith that Destiny blasphemes. / Those bloody blows are the crackles / of some bread that at the oven door burns us. // And man . . . poor . . . poor one! He turns his eyes, as / when we are called by a slap on the shoulder; / he turns his wild eyes, and all that he has lived / wells up, like a pool of blame in his look. // There are blows in life so hard . . . I don’t know!]

There are many oral versions of this poem circulating on the Internet, which range from children to older folks reciting it, from its musicalization or accompaniment with an instrument (often native Andean) to versions of the poem with video clips. One of these is a moving clip from the documentary Che, un hombre nuevo, which features the voice of Che Guevara reciting the poem in a tape he left for his wife, just before he was assassinated. Another comprises part of the trailer for the 2008 Peruvian film Máncora. A longer version of the poem is a voice- over in a clip from the film itself with an underwater scene (available on YouTube).12 Curiously, the filmmakers chose to follow the first two stanzas of the original and then to shift the last two in which Vallejo’s speaker becomes plural and the focus shifts to humankind. In their adaptation, the voice becomes even more personal and now refers to the film protagonist’s issues: problems with his parents and doubts about his future. Visually we observe fish and enter into the rhythm of the waves throughout the poem, watching the protagonist sink and swim into frames, punctuated by a flashback to

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his childhood on the beach with his mother when the poem shifts to the film’s context, and then he frantically tries to surface. When he does, we see that he is wounded, a physical manifestation of the psychological and spiritual pain of the poem (in which the speaker “swims” and expands his focus but never really surfaces). The poet’s expression of frustration and anguish can be adapted to various circumstances; one can imagine many scenarios in which someone would recite these words. The emphasis on impersonal existential verbs (hay, ser) [there is, to be] opens the text, just as the repeating “hay” suggests a wail of sorrow almost beyond language (ay!). Clayton observes how Vallejo works through a series of poetic modes and voices in the poem to bring us to its penultimate stanza in which the speaker’s brooding isolation is interrupted by the imagined presence of another. She reads this moment as cutting short the “performance of poetry [ . . . ] by the rough fact of life” (57). But the gesture and image of the other are conjured, for the speaker imagines the eyes of the other man/all men. And this phantasmal human presence does not make a sound—his imagined eyes and gesture send the speaker back to the stammered question/cry, finally condensed into an ellipsis. In his study of Vallejo’s poetry, José Cerna-Bazán applies Matei Calinescu’s observations about Baudelaire to the Peruvian poet, affirming that the loss of language one encounters throughout his writing is at once modern and antimodern. It is “modern in its commitment to innovation, in its rejection of the authority of tradition, in its experimentalism” and antimodern in “its dismissal of the dogma of progress, its critique of rationality, in its sense that modern civilization has brought about [ . . . ] the fragmentation of what once was a mighty unity” (Calinescu quoted in Cerna-Bazán 48). This poem may also be seen as modern in a classical, postenlightenment sense of being a written lyric that concerns the selfconsciousness of an individual in conflict with himself or herself. There is no implicit interlocutor in the poem, which is meant to be read rather than performed. These are a few of the traces indicating that Vallejo was writing and living within multiple modernities simultaneously. His second collection, Trilce (1922), often considered to be one of the most challenging books in the Spanish language, is an aesthetic explosion. This was the last book published in his lifetime, and, while it originally met with silence or hostility, it has been intensely analyzed, particularly during the last thirty years. Several of these analyses comment on its oral elements: Julio Ortega says that “its orality is actuality, the pulse of the present” (15), and Michelle Clayton observes that while other of the poet’s

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contemporaries’ emphasis is on image, throughout his work “Vallejo’s grounding is in sound” (54). In Trilce, she asserts, this orality shifts from the level of content to form (74). For these reasons, among others, his poetry is untranslatable, according to Bernard McGuirk, who agrees with what Vallejo himself affirmed in a 1929 essay in which he reinforced the primacy of words over ideas in his poetry (the essay appeared in El comercio, quoted in McGuirk 115–17). McGuirk chooses Trilce XXV as his example, highlighting the sonorous play on Alpha in the first stanza of the poem (a resonant frolic that precedes Borge’s Aleph), and is finally forged into “falsas” at the poem’s end (118). If false is the predestiny of any translation of Trilce, how have his translators (intrepid souls) met or eluded their fate? How have they sounded Trilce in English? Clayton Eshelman is the best-known translator of Vallejo’s work into English and has had a long engagement with the poet, for he began to work with his poems in the 1960s and recently published César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry (2009), which includes reworked versions of earlier translations. In 1992, which marked the one-hundred-year anniversary of the poet’s birth, Rebecca Seiferle and Eshelman each published translations of Trilce; before this year, the only complete translation was David Smith’s in 1973, for the book had mainly been translated in selections.13 Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith collaborated on a translation that appeared in 2005. Contrasting how Eshelman, Seiferle, Gianuzzi, and Smith deal with the sonorous play of the opening of Trilce XXV will give us some sense of the challenges of giving voice to Trilce in English. Poem XXV begins like this: Alfan alfiles a adherirse a las junturas, al fondo, a los testuces, al sobrelecho de los numeradores a pie. Alfiles y cadillos de lupinas parvas. (138)14

There are many possible interpretations of this poem, including a stunning amalgamation of language drawn from multiple registers (local, historical, archaic, and natural, among others), and many of these elements are linked through sound, not logic. What to do then when sounding Vallejo in another language? Seiferle chooses to stick closely to sense and offers us this: Bishops arise to adhere to the joints, the depths, the crowns, the underbed of numerators on foot.

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Bishops and cockleburs of wolfish harvests. (Vallejo, Trilce, trans. Seiferle 55)

While she is able to maintain some alliteration and assonance with her word choices, overall, the sound play and the strangeness of the word choice in the original are diminished. Eshelman makes more radical adjustments in an attempt to capture the resonance of the Spanish version: Thrips uprear to adhere To joints, to the base, to napes, To the underface of numerators on foot. Thrips and thrums from lupine heaps. (Vallejo, Trilce, trans. Eshelman 61)

Eshelman’s 1992 version includes a long note explaining his choices, and while he recognizes that he veers from the literal meaning, he clarifies why: The magic of the line is in the sound connection (with the first two words followed by a adherirse [ . . . ] Because the alfiles seem to function as destructive agents that attach themselves to a number of unrelated and related things (which subsequently unravel, collapse, hobble, and wheeze), I have decided to work with a reading of alfiles which I acknowledge is questionable. (221–22)

Eshelman’s performance of Poem XXV demonstrates how sonic reverberation is central and that much of what happens in the poem happens through echos. Yet he maintains links to several possible conductive threads of meaning (unraveling, for example, and references to a Peruvian context later on). Smith and Gianuzzi also wrestle with sound in their adaptation of the stanza: Omens leap up to grapple the joints, the base, the brow, the under-face of walking numerators. Omens and warp- ends of lupine lumps. (Vallejo, Trilce, trans. Smith and Gianuzzi , 69)

Their choices shift the soundscape again (to 1, b, o, and u), although their selection of terms does not really echo words that are linked by sound

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in the original. The word “Omens” here is the most noticeable shift, chosen not for sound but for its sense of foreboding, which will be echoed later in their version of the poem. These translators, one Irish and one Peruvian, hope that their distance from English, familiar and foreign to each, gives them a “linguistic freedom” when facing the challenges of Vallejo (16). Vallejo’s “difficulty” does offer his translators the opportunity to innovate and to make us hear the original in new ways. Peter Middleton engages with the ideas of the cognitive linguist Reuven Tsur when he observes that writing that uses neologisms or language that depends more on sound than sense encourages “an uneasy oscillation in a listener’s mind between the ‘auditory and phonetic modes of listening’ during a performance” (56). Just as these translators do, when we hear poetry that pushes sound to the forefront, we process it in a different manner that fluctuates between understanding it as speech or listening to it as sound. James Wagner’s Trilce (2006) approaches sound from an even more radical angle, offering us an “auralgraph,” a rewriting following the sound structure of Vallejo’s work. Intriguingly, although this is the most experimental mode of translation, it is the only one that appears without an introduction. Evidently Wagner wants his readers or listeners to experience his poetry without contextualization or a bridge between poets and places. In an introduction to some of his auralgraphs in an online journal, Wagner explains that his intent is to honor Vallejo’s work: But I am honoring it in my own way, by writing through passed Spanish frames, to make different enigmas. Needless to say, of course, but when someone doesn’t speak another language one hears the language as “gibberish,” or as near-sounds to one’s own colonized tongue. There are also moments of mishearing when this happens. I am interested in these encounters and also how they intuitively point things away from a simplified storyboard, how they diffuse and curl back and break apart suddenly, and how this doesn’t end poems in the way that poems have grown accustomed to doing themselves in, aiming toward that false beacon of summation in the final sentence, which is actually begging relief from its position of soothsayer. (“About Trilce”).

Colonized and colonizing tongue, I would add, for while Wagner’s conversation with Vallejo’s sound allows him to construct his own frames of reference in dialogue with the original’s sound patterns, one noticeable loss is Vallejo’s sense of place. His first stanza of Poem XXV sounds like this:

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Often all fields add heresies at last junctures, I’ll find her, a lost test to share, all sober let go the lost numbered doors open. All fields you can’t lose the wolf parts. (34)

While this first section is tricky to situate, in other stanzas of the original there are references to guano and “americanizar” (in the context of “nuestra América,” not the northern one), which Wagner’s ear does not hear. From the outset he inserts a female presence in the poem, through “her” and, later, “Rhondas,” creating a love-relationship thread in the poem. In the next stanza, “deshilada sin americanizar” becomes “does she love a simple American,” one indication of how far Wagner takes us from Vallejo’s tone, place, and topics, obscure as these may be. Ortega notes the degree of critical frustration cycling around this poem, but he does find credible references to Peru in Neale-Silva’s reading, which he then elaborates on relative to the social situation of the guano workers on the north coast of Peru (César Vallejo, 139– 40). Wagner’s auralgraph is really a “listening to” rather than a sounding of Vallejo, in which sound dominates and allows the US poet to create aural correspondences or riffs from his own frame of reference.15 Ortega writes that in his posthumous poems Vallejo developed dramatic monologue more than in his earlier work (César Vallejo, 22), and perhaps this has prompted more performances of these poems.16 “Masa” [Mass], one of the poems written in response to the Spanish Civil War, appears repeatedly on the Internet, recited and set to music (perhaps most famously by two of the founders of the Cuban “new song” movement, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés). With its refrain “Pero el cadáver, ay, siguió muriendo” [But the cadaver, ay, went on dying], it cries out for oral interpretation.17 It offers an animating vision of moral and political solidarity in reference to the Spanish Civil War, but this is not specified, so that the poem can be (and is) applied to and performed in myriad circumstances; its adaptability allows it to serve as occasional poetry. The poem “España aparta de mi este cáliz” [Spain take this chalice from me], is much more clearly grounded in history, and the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti has an affecting oral rendition of it that circulates on the Internet. A friend and colleague of Vallejo’s, his interpretation of the poem evokes his own biography: his militancy in the Spanish Republic and beyond, his exile from Spain, and his belief in a more ideal political future for his country. The text of the poem relies on repeated apostrophes to the children of Spain, which, when voiced and circulated on the Internet, tran-

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scend their figurative function and really address the “niños de España” who are part of the electronic audience. The poem combines religious and political discourses to give voice to a collective cause; when Alberti recites it, he embodies Vallejo, himself, and an expansive group subject— twentieth-century citizens affected by the Spanish Civil War. The text emphasizes what can be heard in the “mind’s ear”: voice, breath, sounds (el canto de las sílabas, el llanto, el rumor, el ruido [the syllables’ song, the sob, the murmur, the noise]), produced by the speaker and the talking skulls who speak amid the ruins of writing: “los lápices sin punto” [the pencils without a point], for they will continue to be “atado por la pata al tintero” [tied by a leg to the inkwell] (Vallejo, Poemas, 160). Vallejo puts the legacy of the war in voices, and it is clear that this poem is meant to circulate outside of writing as well as within it.18 Another poem out of Vallejo’s posthumous repertoire that appears consistently in performance is “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca” [Black stone on white stone], in which the poet forecasts his own death. There is an attraction in autobiography, and many commentaries include the circumstances in which the poem was written, inspired by a dream in which the poet “pre-remembers” his death in rainy Paris (although the poem states that it will happen on a Thursday and Vallejo died on a Friday). The poet uses his own name in the poem, creating a mystical martyrdom in an introspective sonnet. His contemplation ends with the speaker plagued by a trinity of “la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos . . .” [solitude, rain, roads], followed by an ellipsis that opens to uncertainty, a foreboding conclusion, leading the poem to circle back on itself. As in Los heraldos negros, performers appear to be drawn to the posthumous poems with the most referential material, offering a foothold for readers and listeners. “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca” also appears in Stephen Hart’s docudrama Traspié entre 46 estrellas [Stumbling between 46 stars], based on incidents drawn from Vallejo’s life and from his Paris poetry.19 At the end of the book (which shares the film’s title, adapted from the poem “Traspié entre dos estrellas” to reflect Vallejo’s forty-six years perhaps), Hart explains that the focus of his film is Vallejo’s poetry, not his life. Yet it dramatizes episodes that “contain a mysterious residue”—the premonition of his death at Antenor Orrego’s house, his death, its possible circumstances, his debated last words, and his wife, Georgette’s, destruction of his autographs upon his death (Hart 122). The imaginative re-creation of these scenes is made more realistic by the inclusion of photographs of Vallejo and Georgette, of places in Paris, and by the place-names and dates, yet we are distanced from the action by the black-and-white film, the lack of

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recorded dialogue, the use of titles, the many symbolic actions, and the recitation of poetry. In the first segment the poet awakens and tells Orrego (via interspersed titles) that he has seen his own death, and as “Piedra negra . . .” is recited we observe the actor who plays Vallejo observing himself in the mirror, looking at a pocket watch, being beaten and whipped (literally, but only as a gesture, by the slash of a rope and a cane); his watch is then broken, and then he extends himself, alive, on the real tomb of the poet. In the second part, “Paris, October 1936” is recited, while a photo of Vallejo on a bench dissolves into the actor “Vallejo” on a bench. He breaks apart a model of the number forty-six made out of wood with hammer blows and then wanders around Paris, quite alone. The poem concludes with close-up shots of an eye, an elbow, and a shirt sleeve, as these are mentioned in the poem. The film cuts to the next title, “Paris, April, 1938,” and begins with the Vallejo-actor stumbling up a spiral staircase, entering room 46 where he is next seen in bed, with his hat on a book of his complete poems. He mouths the following three times—“Me voy a España” [I’m off to Spain] (we see a map of Spain), “Me voy al Palais Royal” [I’m off to the Royal Palace], and “Georgette, ¿mis autógrafos?” [Georgette—my autographs?]—performing all of his deathbed words according to different sources—and then he dies. Georgette takes his papers and the scene changes to “Vallejo” and “Georgette” looking at placards with his name outside of a building in Paris (his apartment), and then it cuts to inside, where he calls out “Bonjour mademoiselle” and we see Georgette in her window. The poem begins to be recited as the actor starts to fold his pants, as per the first lines of the poem: “Ello es el lugar donde me pongo / el pantalón, es una casa donde / me quito la camisa en alta voz / y donde tengo un suelo, un alma, un mapa de mi España” [This is the place where I put on / pants, it is a house where / I take off my shirt out loud / and where I have a floor, a soul, a map of my Spain] (Poemas 128). As we listen to the rest of the poem, he looks at his reflection on an outside wall, and we see real photos of Vallejo and Georgette; then the actress Georgette walks in the cemetery, and, amid images of “Vallejo” writing, his manuscripts, his death mask, and death photo, she rips his papers and leaves them shredded, with a stone, on his tomb. Hart’s docudrama offers a provocative aesthetic combination. He uses a few images that recall surrealism (watch, numbers) or symbolist poetry, but many others enact a tone of historical realism (the use of black-andwhite film and titles that recall the silent film era, the dramatization of imagined action in the poems), all clearly choreographed—he does not create a stream of consciousness texture. Context is important to his works,

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and here it is Paris. We do not see “Peruvian iconography” or hear Andean pipas but, rather, Erik Satie. Hart notes Vallejo’s admiration for the French composer whose works expressed the “osmotic relationship between art and life” to which he aspired (Hart 123). But dramatization may also lead to a literalization of the poet’s language that actually struggles against symbolism. As in many of these poems, the opening lines “Ello es el lugar donde me pongo . . .” are deceptively straightforward, but as the first stanza goes on, it complicates matters: Ahora mismo hablaba de mí conmigo, y ponía sobre un pequeño libro un pan tremendo y he, luego, hecho el traslado, he trasladado, queriendo canturrear un poco, el lado derecho de la vida al lado izquierdo; más tarde, me he lavado todo, el vientre, briosa, dignamente; he dado vuelta a ver lo que se ensucia, he raspado lo que me lleva tan cerca y he ordenado bien el mapa que cabeceaba o lloraba, no lo sé. (128) [Right now I was talking / about myself with myself, and was putting / on a small book a tremendous bread loaf / and I have, then, made the move, I have moved / wanting to hum a little, the right side / of life to the left side; / later I washed everything, my belly, / with spirit, dignified; / I have turned to see what is dirty, / I have scraped what brings me so close / and I have put in good order the map that / was nodding or crying, I don’t know.]

Commenting on another poem from this collection, Clayton observes that “possessions not only supplement the subject but threaten to supplant him,” and one could apply this insight to this poem as well (206). The speaker struggles to order, clean, transfer, and hum—to verbalize and obtain an elusive control over his body, belongings, surroundings, and reaction to the state of things. Yet his efforts disappoint: his dignified washing is ironic, and this map, a representation of the physical world (linked in the first lines with the floor, his Spain, and his soul), is humanized: it is his interlocutor who nods off or cries. “No lo sé” returns us to the incomprehension and despondency of “Los heraldos negros,” the continuous struggle to

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understand and make meaning out of human existence. The poem ends with the speaker as one man among many, “como un hombre que soy y que he sufrido” [like a man who I am and I have suffered]—not el but un hombre—who has suffered as a man and from being human. One of the most surprising aspects of the film Songs from the Second Floor, my last example of Vallejo’s performances, is how clearly the artistry of Vallejo’s creation of a particular sense of distress in his poetry is translated to the screen. In a totally different time and context, this 2000 Swedish film directed by Roy Andersson opens an exchange between the Peruvian and Swede that we are invited to experience. Andersson feels Vallejo, and we, in turn, do too. Andersson structures his film around “Traspié entre dos estrellas,” and there is nothing mainstream about the filmmaker’s approach. This is an art film, and its style fits Vallejo’s poem, whose meaning circulates around fragments of everyday life. The film opens with a quote from the poem, which recurs at various moments throughout the film, primarily through one of the characters, Stefan, who recites it to his brother, Tomas, a poet, who writhes in speechless torment in a psychiatric hospital. “Traspié . . .” rewrites the ritual discourse of the Bible, particularly the Beatitudes, in which Jesus teaches that the humble shall triumph over the powerful. The opening sections set up a vision of the unfortunate who, through cumulative description, seem to be all of us, and who “parecen salir del aire, sumar suspiros mentalmente, / oír / claros azotes en sus paladares!” [to appear out of thin air, to add sums in their heads/ to hear/ bright smacks on their palates!] (110). The middle of the poem brings the biblical reference to the surface and changes “Blessed are the . . .” to “Beloved are the . . .” in a series of figures (sometimes paired) that unites and embraces the absurd and the commonplace: ¡Amada sean las orejas sánchez, amadas las personas que se sientan, amado el desconocido y su señora, el prójimo con mangas, cuello y ojos! ¡Amado sea aquel que tiene chinches, el que lleva zapato roto bajo la lluvia, el que vela el cadáver de una pan con dos cerillas, el que no tiene cumpleaños, el que perdió su sombra en un incendio, el animal, el que parece un loro, el que parece un hombre, el pobre rico, el puro miserable, el pobre pobre! (111)

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[Beloved be the sánchez ears / beloved the people who sit down, / beloved the stranger and his wife, / the neighbor with sleeves, neck and eyes! // Beloved be the one who has bedbugs, / the one who wears a broken shoe in the rain, / the one who watches the bread’s cadaver with two matches, / the one who has no birthday, / the one who lost his shadow in a fire, / the animal, which looks like a parrot, / which looks like a man, the poor rich one, / the purely miserable, and poor poor one!]

In the director’s commentary on the DVD Andersson talks about how he had been struck by Vallejo’s poem when he first read it in translation in 1975. He felt that “the words capture our fragility, our destiny here on Earth.” The line that occurs throughout his film is translated in the English subtitles as “beloved is the one who sits down,” and it is repeated orally and visually by the actors in numerous scenes in which people sit. Andersson comments on the importance of a place to sit down: “Sitting down is a major part of our lives,” he says, and he sees this as part of “the poetry of everyday occurrences” (director’s commentary). The poet’s simple lines are echoed by the simple images and scenarios in the film, which are juxtaposed in a complex manner, to create absurd, ironic, and true-to-life, but disturbingly humorous, scenarios. The relationship between this film and Vallejo’s poetry could be described as metaphoric, bringing together or transferring the meaning between two different elements or dissimilar things: putting them together illuminates each one and creates a relationship between them so that we apprehend them differently. While both artists share a profound uneasiness with possibilities for communication, with power and convention within their respective societies, they convey their discomfort through distinct mediums. Curiously, I was already working with the idea of Vallejo’s spectral presence via the performance of his poems on the Internet before I saw this film; after seeing it and exploring what had been written about it, I found that both of the critics who approached the relationship between Vallejo’s poetry and Andersson’s film included a ghostly image in their titles. This reveals how present Vallejo’s work is in the film and indicates that viewers familiar with his writing will see and experience the film differently. In “The Ghost of the Second Floor,” Dominique Russell proposes that the film is a conversation between two artists who are very far apart but obviously in sync aesthetically and philosophically (316). She characterizes the act of sitting down in the film as “private poetry, stolen from the useful actions of work” (318).20 Among her many insights about the film’s composition, she explains how Andersson echoes Vallejo’s understanding of structure and time and uses analogical repetition in the

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film (as opposed to a forward-moving narrative). The filmmaker does this, in part, through his use of a static camera that reflects the stasis of his characters; at the same time, he creates an interplay between background and foreground in his carefully composed shots (Russell 319). In his article analyzing relationships between lyric poetry and film in Spain, Juan Egea proposes that when a film is called “poetic” it is frequently the non-narrativity of the lyric genre that is invoked. He notes that this quality was embraced by the historical avant-gardes (in Spain via filmmakers like Buñuel) who worked against more mainstream or realist approaches to film (161). The film Songs from the Second Floor does include a story—of Kalle and his sons, Stefan and Tomas—but it is fragmented and interwoven into other smaller narratives or hints of these (those of Pelle, an indigent man, an immigrant, a doctor and nurse, an old infirm man, and ghosts who appear to Kalle asking him to listen to their stories, among others). Andersson’s fragmented vignettes parallel the structure of much lyric poetry, creating the narrative and interrupting it with the visual equivalence of space on the page, between stanzas, or the pauses of line breaks. Like poetry, some of these fragments are connected through sound, rhythm, and repetition (visual and aural), and some of poetry’s oral features are mimicked in the film through the music, which may flow from one scene to the next, forming a bridge between fragments (but not necessarily a logical one, an example being a moment of open-mouthed singing in the metro, which continues in a cut to a diner). All of these elements highlight an antirealist, composed quality in Andersson’s filmmaking. Russell deems it “hyper real” and therefore false (318), for, like much lyric poetry, it calls attention to its own constructed nature. His careful framing and setup of the scenes work like a series of tableaux vivant or filmed per for mances with different links between them. The unnaturally bright lighting and choreography of the details of the scenes are unnatural in a way that is similar to the structure of a poem on the page or to ritualized modes of recitation that bracket it off from everyday speech. The action within the scenes is slow, so that every new scene allows moments of contemplation when we are invited to look at the character(s) as they sit, lie down, or perform some trivial, mundane activity. The filmmaker’s style fosters attentiveness, a way of looking that is “poetic,” similar to the kind of concentration that reading or listening to the language of a poem triggers—a poetic responsiveness. Poetry is often called language made strange, and Andersson works to both highlight the strangeness of the everyday and to make the world we observe strange.

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Like Russell, Ursula Lindqvist also sees Vallejo’s specter in the film, which she characterizes as an interartistic dialogue that inspires a “cinematic poetry.” Language is transmuted into image: “The translated lines of Vallejo’s poem become alive in this film when they lose their literariness and become cinematic” (204), she says, but she also determines that both artists blur the lines between “written (literary), spoken (colloquial, everyday), and Scriptural (monumental) language” (203). Lindqvist finds correspondences with Vallejo’s poetry not only in the filmic technique but also in the use of language in the screenplay. Many of Vallejo’s readers have recognized how his poetry engages multiple discourses, shifting between registers within a poem and throughout his books. Interspersed with colloquialisms and neologisms are religious, scientific, artistic, and materialist rhetorics; one of the effects of these is to insert Vallejo’s poetic subjects into the contemporary world. We see some of this discursive and visual variety in the scene in Andersson’s film that takes place in a ballroom (apparently an expo or a job fair) in which businessmen talk in front of a display of crucifixes. Kalle slowly enters the scene and the ongoing conversation from the background. As he does so, one of the arms of a crucified Christ slips off the cross and the figure begins to rock back and forth, creating a comical visual repetition, a kind of meter, while the men discuss economic deals that parody the Golden Rule (do unto others here means mutual opportunism). The combination of religion and business in front of the swinging Jesus creates an absurd joke, an irreverence that no one else seems to notice. This animated object is the symbol of generosity and love, emptied out and refilled with other meanings in this context: to readers of Vallejo, it may recall the fall of the plural Christs of “Los heraldos negros” (“Las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma”). Even without that reference, however, it presents an ironic view of both religion and commerce, like that of the flagellants in business attire who appear in the background of several other scenes. Linqvist notes that Leslie Bary has proposed that Vallejo seeks to “restore the social content of words” through his poetry, and she extends this idea to suggest that one of the ways in which Andersson strives to do the same is “by rendering them as complex, unforgettable images” (205). His sardonic visions promote a sense of responsibility similar to the ethical response that is often generated by Vallejo’s oppositional poetics. Like much lyric poetry, which uses an “I” that is really a “we,” the film opens its perspective beyond that of a single subject. The fi xed camera allows the filmmaker to utilize a “neutral,” unidentified stance, and the fragmented structure and use of white-gray makeup on the actors expand

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our sense that the perspective is that of a “we” that is plural, yet at the same time singular. Andersson creates an individualized mass presence like that evoked in the first verse of “Traspié entre dos estrellas”: ¡Hay gentes tan desgraciadas, que ni siquiera tienen cuerpo; cuantitativo el pelo, baja, en pulgadas, la genial pesadumbre; el modo, arriba; no me busques, la muela del olvido, parecen salir del aire, sumar suspiros mentalmente oir claros azotes en sus paladares! (110) [There are people so unfortunate that they don’t even / have a body; quantitative hair, / goes down, in inches, the fantastic weight; / the way, up; / do not look for me, the tooth of forgetfulness, / they seem to come out of the air, to add sighs in their heads / to hear / clear whips on their palates!]

The contradiction of being one among many, part of a shared experience, is like the paradox of being there and not existing (without a body, yet hairy). Several of the characters display a notable physicality or corporality, which is emphasized in extended shots of them just being there: Kalle, his large, blond wife, the fired worker and his wife with her open robe, and Pelle and his lover. Their presence, a genial pesadumbre, makes them appear slow, stoic, and bound to the Earth, or perhaps overloaded, like the luggage carts that these same characters struggle to push in the airport as the film ends. There are also ghosts who look like everyone else—they are not spectral. Two of them appear about three-quarters of the way through the film and haunt Kalle; there is nothing that distinguishes them from the others, but it is clear that only Kalle sees them. Later in the final scene, where Kalle is at the dump with his load of unsalable crucifixes, a mass of these living dead arises from the ground and he yells at them in frustration—what can he do? In some ways this scene recalls Vallejo’s poem “Masa” (from España aparta de mí este cáliz [Spain take this chalice from me]) and the cadaver that continues dying, yet who, when surrounded by people in the end, walks. The miracle of resurrection is ironized here—these are zombies, more reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead than of a rebirth. Andersson takes Vallejo’s prospect of solidarity and twists it: “Does anyone know how to get out of here?” Kalle asks at the end of the film. “No” is the simple response.

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Songs from the Second Floor was awarded a Special Jury Prize in the Cannes Film Festival, and in its antihegemonic, experimental cinema style, it may be Vallejo’s most tenable translation or performance. As Linqvist observes, both artists share concerns about the “dynamics of domination, separation and alienation in modern society” (206). César Vallejo’s work is unassimilable, not just due to its links to the avant-garde and radical use of language but also due to the Peruvian’s ongoing experience of coloniality and his secondary position in the world poetry canon. Linqvist sees parallels with the filmmaker here too, and she demonstrates how Roy Andersson has been marginalized vis-à-vis contemporary Nordic film, which has been dominated by the group Dogma 95 (207). Vallejo embraced film, welcomed techniques such as filmic montage, and appreciated the ludic parodies of Charlie Chaplin, so the transmediation of his work into cinema is logical. Perhaps the silence of his authorial voice and his relegation to cultural commentator while in Paris have allowed others to voice his poetic production in a variety of ways. The poetry of Vallejo and Neruda continues to accrue new and returning readers through the circulation of their texts, and, as we have seen, the reach of their poetry is extended through its performance in a variety of domains. In the popular realm, Neruda’s work has been increasingly distanced from the avant-garde—perhaps the price of his fame is the domestication of his voice. Yet throughout his life his work defied strict literary enclosure; it has become part of the poetic tradition that is hybridized with mass and popular cultures. We might observe the Chilean poet’s legacy as part of the political avant-garde in the recent activities of the Mexican poet for peace, Javier Sicilia, who is speaking out and taking a stand against the violence of drug lords. He uses his position as a poet, not as a politician, to gather people around him, and he uses poetry in his speeches to mobilize them. Vallejo’s work has been embraced by translators and performers who struggle to represent and engage with his poetry by experimenting with it. His writing has been recovered for contemporary vanguard art in a way that Neruda’s has not; nonetheless, much of his work remained outside of Western European conventions (even those of the avant-gardes) until later in the twentieth century, when some critics appropriated his work via deconstruction for academic readers (and perhaps to replenish the Western canon). Returning to Angel Rama’s ideas about the lettered city, Román de la Campa reminds us that textuality assumes a privileged role for unpacking, and at the same time constituting Latin America (129) and Vallejo’s domain has remained predominantly textual. Still, it underscores the “lingering problem of linguistic reconversion” (139), a term Campa uses to describe the process of translating Latin

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American languages and cultures into Spanish narrative forms. Some of César Vallejo’s poetry is more radically transcultural than Neruda’s, not as open to “reconversion,” and some, like Neruda’s Residencias, arises from and continually gestures toward language’s inability to fulfill the possibilities it suggests. But, as we have seen, his poetry has at times been effectively resituated via translation and film to demonstrate the relevance of his ideas and styles to contemporary listeners, to their issues, and to their lives.

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Aesthetic Experiment and Political Commitment Promulgating Poetry in Streets, Cafés, on CDs, and on the Internet In the last two chapters we saw the continuing influence of avant-garde activities that proposed different conceptualizations of the relationships between art and society as an undercurrent in poetry performances of the midcentury until very recently. In chapter 2 changing roles for poetry relative to avant-garde goals manifested themselves in the tension we observed between Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s commercial success and the ideals of Hora Zero. This opposition was in some ways reinforced and at the same time undermined in the next chapter, which examined artistic experimentation and the adaptation and circulation of Neruda’s and Vallejo’s work. The kinds of reworkings, translations, and performances of these major poets’ works that we examined are emblematic of a broader shift in the concept of the poet’s role, a shift that began midcentury when the poem’s author more frequently assumed a secondary relationship to his or her product. In some ways, then, these performances of canonical poets’ works act out Barthes’s “Death of the Author” (in which writing trumps writer) and respond to Foucault’s question “What is an Author?” by demonstrating how a name unifies and, in some cases, may lend an aura of legitimacy or prestige to a body of work but not determine its meaning. Publishing about the same time as Barthes and Foucault and extending his earlier idea of antipoesía (1954), Chilean Nicanor Parra brought similar questions to the forefront in his Artefactos [Artifacts] (1972), a collection that challenged the boundaries between word and image, page and postcard, and elite art and mass communication. Parra’s work, a collection of postcards with images and slogans, questioned the concept of the book 109

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and begged the question: What is poetry? He joined and juxtaposed photos, drawings, and texts to create an ironic dialogue between images, writing, and their material presentation that produced laughter and often critical reflection on modern Western culture. As in his antipoesía, he attempted to demystify poetry as he created it. A striking example of his antiautoría [antiauthorship] stance is the poem “La poesía chilena se endecasilabó,” in which he unites the text with the image of a declaiming statue.1 Parra’s text celebrates poetry’s rebellion against inherited structures in a playful tone. In the visual image the statue that monumentalizes the achievements of this new poet is garbed in classic robes: with a Napoleonic hat and tomes under his arm, he gestures and sweats as he speaks. Rather than hail the new poet, the monument to the contemporary hero grapples with the burden of tradition, and whether he is making a speech about poetry or declaiming his work he is clearly a struggling protagonist of innovation. Parra, like Barthes and Foucault, came to his ideas that probed traditional genres and authorial roles in the 1950s and 1960s. The Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer sees a corollary between Parra’s ideas and the rise of conceptual art in Latin American art, noting that, in the 1960s, “artists were coming to see themselves as fulfilling a role somewhere between catalyst and stage director” (148). Parra, like the artists of his generation in other countries, questioned his own role, his mode of production, and the traditional ways in which poetry had circulated, and he invited his readers to explore these issues. Therefore, while literary theorists may link shifts in the position of the author to the influence of structuralism, they are also embedded in the broader transnational social and cultural activism that characterized the 1960s, a decade that witnessed a range of activities that sought to deinstitutionalize art and fulfill one of the earlier avant-gardes’ goals of reintegrating art and society. With the increasing rise of mass media and multiplying modes of communication, a process of artistic and political radicalization and resistance occurred globally (continuing the dialogue Fernando Rosenberg observed in the early part of the century). Camnitzer states that, while in conversation with other movements (such as that of the Situationist International, which encouraged poetry to be an event, without poems [Camnitzer 254]), in Latin America, “Art, education, poetry and politics converge and do so for reasons rooted in the Latin American experience” (73). Throughout the region there are experiments with happenings and action art, rock music and nueva canción [new song], and media art and “works intended to expand the notion of the literary, replacing the book with the cassette, incorporating oral language, recording ‘nonliterary,’ colloquial, or circumstantial registers on tape” (Longoni and Westman 163).

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Specific circumstances motivated changes in cultural production in the region, such as the Cuban Revolution and the influence of liberation theology, which fired aspirations to subvert “traditional Catholic, patriarchal values that sustained politics throughout the region” (Zolov 385). These political events spurred corresponding aesthetic shifts and changes in who were the target audiences for poetry. While there would be a social and political backlash in the dictatorial regimes that gained power in the 1970s and 1980s, in many Latin American countries 1960s experimentation laid more groundwork for the range of performances and innovative approaches to the circulation of poetry happening today. The mass media and increased communication also fostered a more trans-American exchange in the 1960s, and in this decade’s performed poetry there are resonances of the North American Beat movement. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was translated into Spanish by Fernando Alegría and published in Chile (Editorial del Pacífico) in 1957; his poem “America” was translated by José Maria Oviedo and published in Peru (Taller de Artes Gráficas) in 1961. Mexico was a Beat destination in the 1950s: Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Kenneth Koch, among others, all traveled to Mexico and wrote about their experiences. Perhaps they ventured into Mexico to escape the “American way of life,” at times to escape the law, and sometimes to search for alternative realities through drugs; later, some of these writers traveled to parts of South America. According to Irene Rostagno’s research, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti attended in 1962 a writer’s conference in Concepción, Chile, where they met Nicanor Parra (68). Carlos Torres Rotondo and José Carlos Yrigoyen date this meeting in 1960 and see it as only a pretext for Ginsberg’s subsequent visit to Peru, in search of the hallucinogen ayahuasca (15). The Peruvians recount Ginsberg’s encounter with a decrepit Martín Adán at the beginning of their oral history of poetry and rock (which they dedicate to a generation of national poets they name “Beat”: Sebastián Pimentel, Fransisco Melgar, Alfredo Villar, and Arturo Higa). This group of Peruvians would label themselves a “segunda vanguardia” [second avant-garde] in the 1960s (25). Almost all of the recent accounts of performed poetry in the US context acknowledge the importance of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat movement to today’s performance scenes. When he comments on the significance of the Six Gallery event, where Ginsberg read Howl for the first time (October 13, 1955), Tyler Hoffman defines the moment as one in which the poet “sought to challenge the dominant culture and its social hierarchies and effect ‘communitas’ ” (13). With their journal El corno emplumado (published in the period 1962–1969), Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón continued

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this project, creating community amid the Americas. In their first editor’s note, they state: “Now, when relations between the Americas have never been worse, we hope El corno emplumado will be a showcase (outside politics) for the fact that WE ARE ALL BROTHERS” (5). In the letters section of the second issue of the magazine (from 1962), Edwin Yllescas and Roberto Cuadra, two Nicaraguan poets, commend the publication as “la primera revista verdaderamente bitnik que se pone al alcance del lector hispanoamericano” [the first truly beatnik magazine to be within reach of the Spanish American reader] (63). They continue, explaining the way they see that these North American poets speak to a global generation: Nosotros hemos formado un grupo llamado GENERACION TRAICIONADA. . . . En muchos aspectos coincide con la BEAT GENERATION, los ANGRY YOUNGMEN, y las TRIBUS DEL SOL (Japón) pero claro está, con grandes diferencias, ustedes están en el centro del problema CIVILIZACION Y PROGRESO (a estos llamamos la mierda), nosotros estamos un poco más alejados de ella, y nuestra misma idiosincrasia hispanoamericana y especialmente nicaragüense—vivimos en un puente— nos hace ser diferentes, aun cuando compartimos las profundas ansiedades, terrores, y esperanzas de los seres humanos de todas partes. (64) [We have formed a group called the BETRAYED GENERATION. . . . In many respects it coincides with the BEAT GENERATION, the ANGRY YOUNGMEN, and TRIBES OF THE SUN (Japan) but of course, with great differences, you are in the center of the problem CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS (we call these shit), we are a bit further away from it, and our same Spanish American and especially Nicaraguan idiosyncrasy—we live on a bridge—makes us different, even when we share the profound anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.]

The magazine opened a dialogue among poets, including the work of such writers as Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Alberto Girri, Alejandra Pizarnik, José Emilo Pacheco, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Diane Wakoski, Jerome Rothenburg, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Bly, and Clayton Eshelman. In the printed version of El corno there is written evidence of performativity in many poems, which we see through the use of capital letters, exclamation points, and vernacular speech, as well as responses to particular performances. The magazine documents a transAmerican dialogue and is an index of how poetic and political voices merged at this time.

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Poetry and performance also came together in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s through “Poesía en Voz Alta” [Poetry Out Loud], an avant-garde theater group that developed at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). It began as an experimental workshop troupe in the 1950s during which its founder, Juan José Arreola, combined theater with recitation—seeking a theatricalization of verse, according to Roni Unger (11). Octavio Paz favored its more experimental efforts, “a partir de las experiencias de la vanguardia” [based on the avant-garde’s experiences] (quoted in Brun 75). Yet Josefina Brun notes how some productions were hybrid and combined classical dramatic poetry with new approaches, such as a 1961 production of Fray Luis de León’s adaptation of “El cantar de lo cantares” [Song of songs] or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Villancicos, presented by the innovative Teatro 61 group (82). While theater historian Unger qualifies “Poesía en Voz Alta” as “a revolutionary movement” (29), she also observes how theater that emphasized the spoken word was seen as “elitist” (84). According to Unger and Brun, there was more theater than poetry in the early manifestations of “Poesía en Voz Alta”; production notes include details of costume, makeup, lighting, and scenography, and in its first years the troupe performed at the Teatro del Caballito, Teatro Moderno, and the Fábregas Theater. In 1960, “Poesía en Voz Alta” came to the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec Park, a space that was run by Arreola as a cultural center for the UNAM, and, although productions were not continuous in this decade, it was perceived as a hangout for the “infrarealistas,” a group that included José Rosas Riberyo, Mario Santiago, and Roberto Bolaño in the 1960s. Peruvians Carlos Torres Rotondo and José Carlos Yrigoyen cite it as the “centro de operaciones para estos poetas irreverentes totalmente rechazados por la oficialidad mexicana” [the center of operations for these irreverent poets who were totally rejected by Mexican officialdom] (63). This is the first part of its history (1956–1967); we will return to the Casa del Lago later in this chapter to see how “Poesía en Voz Alta” has more recently been reenergized and transformed, drawing more on its origins in poetry and popularizing this through performance. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, social and political movements flourished throughout Latin America, influenced by students, workers, and women coming together, by antiwar movements, and by the idealism of the Cuban Revolution. Aesthetically the decade saw the birth of performance art, “el arte de las calles” [the art of the streets], according to Alcázar y Fuentes, part of a more generalized questioning of definitions of culture “ya dada” [given or accepted], such as the fetishized spaces of the museum, concert hall, and gallery (15). As we have seen through Parra’s work, this

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questioning extended to the book itself, and poetry moved to postcards and to mail art and to the street itself, a metonym for “vida social” [social life] or the union of political and aesthetic activities in a public space (30). This combination of diverse forms of art and politics that circulate in less restricted settings is exemplified by the Uruguayan Clemente Padín, whose work offers several distinctive kinds of poetry in performance. Padín (born in 1939) is an artist whose work fluctuates between performance and publication, including alternative forms of gaining an audience through visual poetry, video, and Internet art, according to Patricia Betancur. Some of his visual and experimental poetry grows out of concrete poetry, and his repertoire in the 1960s featured mail art, which offered alternative conduits for art and literature.2 Its unconventional means of transmission is central to this form, according to Padín, who sees mail art as giving an artist a way to control the production and distribution of his work. Reproducing words or images on postcards or letters, often creating their own stamps, mail artists created objects that were meant to be completed by the process of transmission, which modified the object and the message, and by their recipients, who may have had a role in effecting the object when it was received. Mail art removed the art object from an institution and depended on personto-person communication. It frequently incorporated political and social content and was a form of art that circulated internationally during the Southern Cone dictatorships (Padín, “El arte correo en Latinoamérica”). In his essay on the form, Padín uses the concept of the artwork as an object or artifact—it is one here, but with a radical shift in terms of its value, for these objects exist at the margin of the market (and recall Parra’s Artefactos). Padín began his aesthetic production during the experimental and confrontational atmosphere of the 1960s and continued his activity in the time of and after the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly including poetry in his repertoire. Like his mail art, the poetry expositions he assembled with Argentine Edgardo Antonio Vigo interrogated what a poem is or suggested a metacommentary on the practice of poetry. César Espinosa qualifies his visual poetry projects as radical intents at “codificación/descodificación semántica de escritura/lectura visual, verbal, fónica, gestual, eurítmica, comportamental, etc., a partir de nuevos modelos lingüísticos en uno o varios sistemas de comunicación” [semantic encoding/decoding of visual, verbal, phonic, gestural, eurhythmic, behavioral, etc., writing/reading based on new linguistic systems in one or several communication systems] (58–59). In his desire to renovate, to reconnect art and life, his work continues the activities of the avantgarde and appropriates some of its techniques—activism, innovation, and polemical debate; Padín continually uses mass media or strategies that

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come from advertising against the market or to reach a wider audience. He combines these strategies with postmodern ones, such as generic heterogeneity (integrating the visual and theatrical elements in his poetry with a continual metapoetic reflection) and multivocality of meaning, while he abandons certainties in his search for new places from which to speak, from which he can question the roles of literature and of art (Richard 211). Padín has participated in a range of performances documented by photographs with text in his book 40 años de per for mances e intervenciones urbanas (40 years of per for mances and urban interventions]. In one of the essays on performance in Latin America included in this collection, Padín speaks of performance’s utopian potential when confronted with institutional political discourses that “dicen y no hacen” [say and do not do] (40 años 119). Throughout his documentation of these events, the text situates the performances, giving us place and dates and a line or two about the event itself, but it is the photos that suggest what happened, what the performance did. One example of this is the “Experimental Poetry Recital” that took place at the International Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia, on June 8, 2001. At the festival Padín performed his poems and five other artists’ poems, a performance that a still photo cannot re-create, but the single photo of him with the festival audience is followed by three more documenting an analogous per formance in the street in Medellín. This one is entitled “PAZ = PAN” [Peace = Bread]; here, with the collaboration of art school students, Padín and company stand between the letters P, Z, and N, forming the A as the words shift (40 años 73–74). In this second part of the performance the audience is not self-selected (as it would be inside the festival’s gates) but composed of passersby. The movement we imagine between the letters makes something happen, constructing a direct reference to policy and politics, using plain, not figurative, speech and images. A digital environment offers more possibilities for documenting and disseminating performance, and Padín has a great presence on the Internet. He has created various spaces from which he questions distinctions between the archive and the repertoire. In general, virtual presentation begins to confuse Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive (composed of texts, documents, and buildings) and the repertoire (spoken language, dance, or ritual) or more ephemeral modes of transmitting culture. As Sarah Bay-Cheng observes in her discussion of the slippery boundaries of theater in a digital environment, the digital “neither eclipses nor negates embodiment, but changes our relationship to the archive” (126). The recorded performance documents an event, making it part of the archive, but in its digital existence it moves closer to the repertoire because the web itself is dynamic, with interconnected sites that evolve (128–29). She also notes that while the audience does

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not participate by being there, it is “there” through its participation (131). We are active in our perception of language, voice, and gesture, and poets and artists who present their work in this form gain different audiences. One of Padín’s archives contains a recording of his performance “Breve antología de la poesía experimental” [A brief anthology of experimental poetry], perhaps an extension of the work presented in Medellín, available on the web.3 We see Padín present his and others’ poems to a room of schoolchildren seated around him. We hear and see Padín enact the poems, using his body and voice, as well as silences, which are really pauses in which we hear indices of the context—traffic noise, coughs, and the children’s participation—for the room is never really silent. The noise of the setting creates more acoustical effects than the language, for Padín’s work (and that of the poets he presents) is not particularly sonorous but, rather, conceptually critical and irreverent. In the classroom the poetry does not exist in textual form, but on the web the words appear on the screen as Padín moves. One of his poems performed here, “Homenaje a la Z,” appears in his book La poesía es la poesía (2003). The written text looks like this:

Poem by Clemente Padín. Source: Electronic scan from La poesia es la poesia (47).

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[The first line of the poem will be read in the upper part. / This second intermediate line should be read on the diagonal. / The last line of the poem should be read in the lower part.] (47)

In the recording Padín steps in the space, creating diagonals or lines with different movements and extending the creation of meaning through his performance. He replaces the art object, here the poem, with his body, his gestures, his voice, and environmental sound—he enacts the ideas behind the text. The per formance of the poem not only adds movement to the text, but Padín also changes the language to account for the new “location” of the poem. Reading (“leerá”) becomes writing (“debe ser escrito”), and the author makes it clear that we are no longer on the page by adding “del espacio”: “Este primer verso debe ser escrito en la parte superior del espacio” [This first line should be written in the upper part of space]. The poem is seen and heard rather than read silently. He does not dramatize a scenario but makes ideas come alive for his audience, which responds to the poems collectively. We see this response in another of these experimental poems, “Poesía y performance,” again by Padín, and when the author arrives at the line “este verso debe repetirse” [this line should be repeated], he reprises this several times with some added voices from the audience until one of the students chimes in with “este verso debe culminar” [this line should finish], eliciting laughter and a congratulatory handshake from Padín. Enacting the poem makes the audience consider what language can and cannot do and how it works in a poem, and it calls into question genre and disciplinary boundaries (between art, theater, and poetry) and prompts interaction. It allows the children in this example to use what they know to enter into this particular poetic experience. Padín’s work traverses many borders, and his creation spans different artistic categories in a variety of locales; he appears to have a wide audience (in fact, he has his own fan club in Buenos Aires), and his name is continually linked to poetry and performance in Latin America. However, because his work is so performative and because of its dialogue with the visual and conceptual arts, Padín is not included in many accounts of Spanish American poetry. This is not the case with another Uruguayan of the same generation, Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004), a poet whose work has primarily circulated in print but who was recognized more locally for her stylized recitations. In these she dramatized her ritualized search for autoría [authority] in a complex style that was more connected to the artistic avant-gardes than the 1960s or succeeding years in figurative, selfconsciously poetic language.

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Di Giorgio’s work, like Padín’s, is difficult to classify, but for very different reasons. Her writing is idiosyncratic, lyrical, and dramatic, often featuring characters that recur throughout her work. Some of her readers have noted that each book is a chapter in her ongoing creation; María Rosa Olivera-Williams affirms that, “Sus doce poemarios hasta el 2000 [ . . . ] constituyen un único libro, una obra indivisible y orgánica que se reitera incansablemente y con nuevos bríos, en un despliegue erótico de multiples capítulos” [Her twelve books of poetry until 2000 ( . . . ) comprise a single book, an organic and indivisible work that indefatigably and with renewed vigor reiterates itself in an erotic unfurling of multiple chapters] (135). The fact that her poetry appeared in Roberto Echavarren, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí’s Medusario (1996), a collection that highlights the neo-baroque from the mid-to-late twentieth century, has led critics to associate her work with the emphasis on language as artifice and the nonreferential aspects of this style. In his “Prólogo” to Medusario, Echevarren stresses the perpetual play of differences in this “arte de abundancia” [art of abundance] and notes how poetry associated with this movement, like the historical baroque, may exhibit monstrous and grotesque qualities. Or, as another editor of the collection, Néstor Perlongher, explains it, these are deterritorialized poets who saturate communicative language, choosing an excessive way to transmit meaning and relocating sense to the “confusional” instead of the “confessional” (Perlongher 22–23). As we will see, both di Giorgio’s written work and her performances demonstrate many of these traits. Di Giorgio presented her work in many venues during her lifetime. Marina Mariasch, commenting on one of these occasions, said that the poet “se erige sobre el derroche, el exceso, la exuberancia. [ . . . ] Marosa hizo de la performance poética una marca propia [ . . . ] asistir a sus espectáculos era un trance lujoso” [is built upon waste, excess, exuberance. [ . . . ] Marosa made her own brand of poetic performance [ . . . ] attending her shows was a luxurious trance]. She elaborates: Pero más impresionante era verla en vivo, deslumbrante, su presencia inundando la sala, llenándola de colores con la tonalidad de sus versos. Recuerdo a Marosa en la sala Batato Barea del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas [ . . . ] de negro, sobre un fondo negro, descalza, con las uñas pintadas de rojo y una rosa en la mano. No me acuerdo si llevaba anteojos oscuros, pero sobre las tablas, junto a ella, había un caballo. Si eso fue o no cierto es lo de menos. Marosa era una ilusionista con su voz en las palabras.

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[But it was most impressive to see her live, dazzling, flooding the room with her presence, filling it with colors, with the nuances of her verses. I remember Marosa in the Batato Barea room of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center [ . . . ] in black, on a black background, barefoot, with nails painted red and a rose in hand. I do not remember if she was wearing dark glasses, but on stage, next to her was a horse. If that was true or not is not important. Marosa was a magician with her voice in words.]

This viewer characterizes her as a kind of magician who used language and voice to put herself center stage and, at the same time, to disappear into other, created “realities.” About her own per formances, the poet said that “recitar es también una creación. La poesía es escrita para ser recibida y esto puede suceder a través de un recitado. Me interpreto a mí misma con mucho gusto” [to recite is also a creation. Poetry is written to be received and this can happen through a recitation. I interpret myself with great pleasure] (quoted in Machado). There are multiple mentions of her recitals in periodical literature in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and they form the fundamental base of di Giorgio’s work. Her poetic project depended as much on voice and presentation as it did on the written word, and these two realms reflect one another. Di Giorgio created her works in a play of mirrors that incorporated her life off the page, in which she converted herself into a character, a woman who defied intellectual and cultural expectations by producing poetry that foregrounded its artificiality on the page and on the stage. In an interview she admitted to Luis Bravo that in spite of the fact that for many poetry is a mute or silent activity, she was a “recitadora.” She explained: “Es un ritual. No quiero ni puedo sustraerme. Es como construir frente al público, construir con la fe, rosas, clavelinas y repartirlas” [It is a ritual. I do not want nor can I avoid it. It’s like building in front of the audience, building with faith, roses, and carnations and distributing them] (“Don y ritual” 56). Di Giorgio created her voice and other voices in her poetry using representational techniques that demonstrate her confidence in her poetic creation. Poetry is a form of cognition that functions at multiple levels in her texts—levels that recur in her recitals—and that offered her audiences the chance to experience her par ticular artistic perception of the world. Although there are photographs and written accounts, there are no videos circulating of di Giorgio’s performances, and our best access to these is through her voice on the CD Diadema, which accompanied her

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2004 book, La flor de lis [Fleur de lis]. Diadema [Diadem], a recording of a recital that she presented many times, is forty-two minutes in length and includes twenty-six poems from her major collections, Los papeles salvajes I and II [Savage papers/roles], and one poem from Misales (2005).4 The unsettling elements that characterize di Giorgio’s work are present from the outset. The program begins with the poem “Los hongos nacen en silencio” [Mushrooms are born in silence], perhaps her most popular poem, which appeared early in her work (it is from Historial de las violetas [History of violets] 1965) and has been widely circulated (as we will see later in the musicalized examples). It includes several characters—the poetic speaker, her mother, and the mushroom buyer—which give it the aspect of a condensed story or dramatic scene.5 It narrates the discovery of some mushrooms in the speaker’s garden; she notes their fleshy color, as she concludes: “Yo no me atrevo a devorarlos; esa carne levísima es pariente nuestra” [I do not dare to devour them; this very slight meat is our relative] (La flor de lis, 98). Her use of homophones and repetitions throughout her work increases the poetic function of language (as Roberto Echavarren has observed, “Marosa di Giorgio” . . . 1105– 6). “Hongos” and “algunos” begin consecutive phrases that echo one another: “Los hongos nacen en silencio; algunos nacen en silencio” [Mushrooms are born in silence; some are born in silence], and their sonorous similarity unites the terms and begins the process of the humanization of the fungi, culminating in the last line, which explains that it is the speaker’s mother who allows the mushrooms to be sold, despite their human resemblance. In the recording, the sound and rhythmic parallels of the first stanza seize the ear, not only because of the assonant rhyme—hongos / algunos, breve / leve, blancos / rosados [mushrooms / some, brief / slight, white / pink]—but also because of di Giorgio’s vocal style. Her voice emphasizes the accentuation and pauses slightly between each duality and thus alters our understanding of these. While the written poem sets up the reflection as if the speaker were discovering the sensual details of the mushrooms for the first time, the maturity and urgency of the recorded voice reveal early on that this is more than a description. The speaker shifts perspectives while seeking a profound revelation (relating the mushrooms to the human cycle of birth and death) and captures the magnitude of the loss of innocence that the sale of the mushrooms provokes and her pain over her mother’s lack of awareness. During her reading di Giorgio’s voice rises with intensity and occasionally lowers, allowing her listeners to rest. She keeps a measured pace in the first stanza, which accelerates during the second and becomes almost furious when she says “Mi madre da permiso”

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[My mother gives permission]. She returns to the original slower tempo in the last line, incorporating significant pauses: “Mamá [pause] no se da cuenta [pause] de que venda a su raza” [Mama . . . does not realize . . . that she is selling her own kind] (98); the phrase hangs in the air like a sentence, and no entreaty from her daughter can alter the transaction. The performance of the poem emphasizes how these observations exceed the natural world and the later spiritual reflection to express outrage at a world that sells itself. Like “Los hongos nacen en silencio,” performances of other poems (such as “La hija del diablo se casa” [The devil’s daughter marries] and “Cuando fui de visita al altar” [When I went on a visit to the altar]) extend poetry to alternate spheres in what could be a narrative of incidents from life. Rather than turning against figurative language, di Giorgio expands its purview. Her voice and diction are not simply fantastic, inexperienced, or surreal, however; they are the expression of a woman who struggled against social systems that tried to silence her. To do so, she appropriates the voices of her mother, a child, of other women, and even of her audience, and she uses these to construct a poetic identity that exists in a creative space—the stage or the page—where the experience of the present is an extension of all moments of the past and the future. Di Giorgio dramatizes her position as a poet and speaks directly to her readers to share her vision through her per formances. Oral presentation is not incidental, then, but is essential to bring to fruition the poet’s search for a female poetic voice and a lyric register, often based in odious or extreme experiences. The fantastic-incomprehensible-real world of her poetry is not an exercise in solipsism but an invitation to reconsider lived experience, particularly that of women. Peter Middleton, writing about how poetic performance can establish community, says: The poetic utterances carry an assertoric force that depends on the presence of the performative author, and the result is a local, momentary attempt to draw listeners closer into such communities, however fragile and temporary, to provide partial foundations for ethical and aesthetic assertions, and at the same time, is a reminder of their partial absence, because its degree of emphasis is commonly in inverse relation to the degree of consensus. (46)

A silent reading of di Giorgio’s poems does not demonstrate this communitarian and communicative aspect of her work. In the textual realm, her poems may appear to be more spiritual, introverted, and oneiric rather

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than experimental and expansive. When she voices her poems she grounds them in the real world, yet at the same time she invites her listeners into a marvelous, alternative world. In this way she urges us to abandon customary signifying systems that frustrate her self-expression in her written work, for they continue to be controlled by men and the dominating mother figure. Several artists have entered into conversation with di Giorgio’s work, among them Graciela Camino, who, after di Giorgio’s death, wrote the play Lumínile (2005), based on the erotic stories from the Uruguayan’s Rosa mística [Mystic rose] (2003). In an interview in Página/12, Camino emphasizes the physicality she finds in di Giorgio’s writing and in her presentations of it. She connects this with her experience as a woman and says that the poet “cuenta otra historia de las mujeres, de otra manera” [tells another story about women, in another way], adding that, “Ie encanta cómo llega y se disemina ese mundo de mujer” [I love how she comes and disseminates this female world] (quoted in Soto). Another artist, Liliana Méndez, translated this same work to the realm of fine arts, and instances of her visual interchange with di Giorgio’s poetry were projected behind the performance of Lumínile.6 Other creators also open dialogues with di Giorgio’s work. The Argentine singer and composer Cecilia Gauna has a song entitled “Los hongos” [The mushrooms], which appeared on Nonstop (2006), a compilation based on the lyrics of several Latin American poets. Gauna musicalizes di Giorgio’s poem, and the music has a naked quality—voice and scant instrumental accompaniment. In her performance of the poem on the Internet, Gauna dresses in white and assumes the role of the female poetic speaker, dramatizing the action of the poem in an emotional style.7 Another Argentine, Juana Molina, a well-known actress and vocalist, has a song based on the same poem “Los hongos de Marosa” (from her 2008 CD, Un día). Unlike Gauna’s version, Molina’s uses electronic music and a combination of vocals that barely make reference to the poem’s language; instead of “performing” it, her music responds to the text with her own riffs or improvised sounds, with a scat style. Both renditions attest to the impact of the poem in the region and on a female audience. Di Giorgio’s work has also been translated into English; a version of Historial de las violetas, translated by Jeannine Pitas, was recently published by Ugly Duckling Press. Speaking about why di Giorgio’s work and image may appeal to a US audience, Pitas compares her to Emily Dickinson. She notes how both of these poets created mythic images for themselves; both dressed in par ticular ways and, outside of per formances of their work,

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spoke little.8 What could be seen as a profoundly introspective focus in di Giorgio’s work has produced a particularly feminine conversation and a wider critical perspective on the roles that poetry may play in other forms of communication, suggesting that her poetry may be an invitation to transgress the boundaries of artistic expression. Clemente Padín’s work is animated by a quest for new roles for art in society; he strives to move the visual and written arts out of the museum/ auditorium/book. His poetry is devoted to communication through visual and aural channels, and it also frequently incorporates metacommentary, maintaining an eye on the problematics of poetry or art itself. This aspect of his work can be related to conceptual art (as Camnitzer observes), but the ideas are not presented in such a complex way that they cannot be understood by broad audiences. Padín’s production does not foreground aesthetic pleasure but thought-provoking stimuli toward social and artistic change. Padín defines the role of the artist as a cultural worker and appropriates poetry as part of this activity. Di Giorgio, in contrast, performed in more conventional venues, and her performances depended on her establishing a literary or poetic aura. Outside of her recitals, this poetic register expanded to her life—she presented herself in eccentric, emotional terms that emphasized her creative capacity and celebrated the poetic imagination. Her performances and her life affirm her position as an artist and her belief in the epistemological power of the lyric. Thus her recitals had more in common with ritual than with happenings and drew more select audiences. With her CD and the contemporary engagement of other artists with her work, which has been disseminated outside of composed formal settings—through music or on the Internet—her audience has been broadened and to some degree popularized (as we saw with Neruda and Vallejo). Together, Padín and di Giorgio’s work represents several lines of development important to performed poetry as it moves into the twenty-first century: self-conscious and metapoetic aspects, conceptual and political aims, and performances that affirm poetry as a form of knowledge, those that exult in lyrical invention. These are lines that become increasingly entangled and interactive in recent works and sites where poetry is voiced or embodied.

Poetry Speaks: From the Late Twentieth Century to the Twenty-First Century In the late twentieth century, poetry continued to be recited and presented at readings, which could attract intimate audiences or crowds. The latter

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was the case at a poetry reading by Nicanor Parra in Santiago, Chile, that I tried to attend in 1995; even though I arrived one hour ahead of the scheduled reading, the auditorium was full, and although I waited in line for the last available spaces I did not reach the door. Some poets are stars and have the kind of cultural capital that attracts a wide, multigenerational audience of readers and listeners. An icon such as Parra is able to choose where to publish and present his work. Younger, lesser-known poets often take advantage of newer technologies, distributing their written work on blogs and online journals, voiced on CDs, embodied and accessible in digital environments, and presented in other live venues, at times because their poetry depends on resources that are available only off the printed page and in other cases because these modes of distribution are more accessible. Poetry is disseminated and consumed in numerous ways in our present-day context, which Richard Schechner has described as “an explosion of multiple literacies, in an increasingly performative world” (5). Raymond Williams has defined culture as the contention between dominant, residual, old meanings and practices that are still influential; in the examples that follow of more recently voiced poetry, we will see instances of all of these, for residual practices are often evident even in the most innovative emergent forms. In Uruguay, Luis Bravo (1957–) distinguished himself as a pioneer in poetry and performance with his book and CD-ROM Árbol VeloZ [Rapid tree] (1998).9 He continues to perform, and the most recent result of this is his CD Tamudando. This time there is no written text or accompanying book and no created visual imagery; rather, this performance depends on voice and sound. Accompanied by music composed by Pepe Danza and joined by Berta Pereira and several other musicians, it is a recording of a per formance or a “ritual escénico” [scenic ritual] (in Bravo’s words) that took place in 2009 at the Solis Theater in Montevideo. The title evokes orality in its approximation of Uruguayan speech; Tamudando is how uruguayos may say “está mudando” [it is moving], an expression that suggests motion or change and that may refer to speech itself, or poetry, or Earth’s rotation. The title, then, affirms Uruguayan identity, the idea of transformation, and it echoes the importance of sound itself in this per formance. At the International Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia, in July 2009, Bravo performed “Hipogrifo,” a poem from Tamudando.10 Sounds of water, Andean pan pipes, humming, and light percussion create a tranquil, pastoral atmosphere, but what dominates here is the voice. Bravo’s resonant tone demands our attention, and his slow delivery—often breaking words into syllables, making the vowels linger in our ears, such as in

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the word “Hi-po-gri-fo,” which opens and closes the poem—stresses his acoustic evocation of images. He creates the polymorphous beast through sound. Like Pegasus, the winged horse, the hippogriff is a mythological beast, half horse and half eagle, a symbol of inspiration, impossibility, travel, and fantastic escape. And these may be Bravo’s goals: emphasizing the acoustical effects of language and eliciting aesthetic pleasure, poetry is a magical, winged vehicle that transports the listener to new places. It does not do this by describing a scene, for reference evanesces in this poem, captivates us through the “oreja de la página” [page’s ear] (a phrase that occurs in what may be the end of the first stanza). The shifting dynamics of the poem—its tempo, the duration of words or sounds—tell the story. The image of the hippogriff that Bravo conjures is connected to lyric tradition through its presence in the work of the renowned poets of the Western tradition, such as Virgil, who mentions the beast in his Eglogues, and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. The concentration on sound allows the poet to recover an emphasis on the aural poeticity of language (subordinating the visual and written aspects). So while the poem may be circulating in a new format, as part of a performance on CD or the Internet, its structure, sound, and organizing ideas are rooted in tradition. In this, Bravo’s perspective on poetry has more in common with di Giorgio than with Padín, for they share a commitment to upholding the exquisite power of poetry. Little staging and no costume here links him to Padín’s more colloquial style, for, although there is not an explicitly political agenda in his case, Bravo makes his performances accessible, drawing in audiences to “what was once a defiantly avant-garde genre” (Wheeler 135). More than social poetry, Bravo and certain other poets of his generation demonstrate how poetry in the twenty-first century is garnering a social life through performance. A younger Peruvian poet, Roxana Crisólogo, demonstrates how poetry and political practice can come together in a national context that has gained a transnational audience through its circulation on CDs and the Internet. Crisólogo (1966–) is originally from Lima, but she currently resides in Helsinki, Finland. On her website she describes how her cultural activities take many forms: “Desde diversos espacios alternativos impulso y formo parte de proyectos de difusión y reflexión en torno a la cultura, literatura y arte latinoamericano” [From diverse alternative spaces I stimulate and take part in projects that reach out and reflect on culture, literature, and Latin American art]. She has published several books, such as Abajo sobre el cielo (1990) [Down on the sky], Animal del camino [Road animal] (2001), and ludy d (2006); she is also the coauthor of an anthology of poetry, Memorias en santas [Memories in female saints] (2007), written by

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women, that springs from the political violence in Peru. In addition, she has several video poetry projects, including Poéticas visuales de la resistencia [Visual poetics of resistance] and Poéticas visuales del exilio [Visual poetics of exile] (Lima 2007, 2009). She is from the so- called “90s generation” in her country, a time period known as the “época de la violencia” [violent epoch], a decade that concluded twenty years of internal conflict (marked particularly by the activities of the Sendero luminoso, or Shining Path) and of circumscribed cultural activity.11 Other names associated with the poetry of the 1990s in Peru are Luis Fernando Chueca (Lima, 1965), Rodolfo Ybarra (Lima, 1969), Ericka Ghergi (Lima, 1972), and Carlos Villacorto (Lima, 1976). The issue all of these writers face is how to deal with the violence that their country suffered. Paulo Drinot has spoken of the “memory phenomenon” in Peru that he links to the work of the “Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación” [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] (18–19). The commission’s history of the violent period includes testimonies or victims’ narratives, as do many postdictatorship studies, but, as Cynthia Milton observes, the social release: that gave rise to the CVR also opened spaces for public discussion and “speaking truth to power” that were previously unavailable, thus allowing for a flood of alternative forms of historical representation that fell outside the scope of the CVR [ . . . ]: visual and performance art, memory sites, cinema, stories, humor, rumor and song. (4)

These alternative approaches are particularly necessary for groups whose voices are excluded from the written record—the communities from the Peruvian “altiplano,” or high plateau, which were among those most affected by the violence (Milton 4). Milton observes that a particular innovation of the commission was its attempt to include visual representation in its construction of a national narrative about the violence (8). And its inclusion of this aspect fit with other political changes; many cultural commentators have observed how politics in Peru changed with the Fujimori presidency to be based less on rhetoric or language and more on image or media events (Degregori 106– 8). It is in this post-“truth and reconciliation” context that Crisólogo published her book of poetry, ludy d, a lyrical portrait of a female character suggested by the title (this character’s first name and initial). In the written work the poems are connected like a series of vignettes or video clips, composing a picture of the illusion and disillusion of a woman. The poet’s use of lowercase letters creates an intimate perspective, or perhaps an egalitar-

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ian one, putting everything on the same plane of reference, or perhaps it is another way to reinforce the marginal situation of the protagonist. Crisólogo does not use punctuation either, except for a few question marks that appear from time to time, making the space on the page and the margins work as a mode of punctuation. The three sections of the book are entitled: “Yo quería conocer el mundo” [I wanted to know the world], “Arrojas tu historia como cáscara de fruta” [You throw out your story like a fruit rind], and “ludy d,” and these mark the trajectory of the poems that vacillate between addressing Ludy directly (in the more informal “tú” form ) and speaking from her first-person perspective. The collection begins with the poem “Yo era una níña” [I was a girl], which sets up the characterization to come and looks like this: Yo era una niña mi primera poema retumbaba en las orejas de mis vecinos como un vendedor callejero todo lo que nos sirve se extiende sobre la lengua amplia y puntiaguda de la tarde si hubiera habido agua para lavar la melena sedosa del sol la urdimbre de orfebrería que el deseo acantonó en plazas de una existencia inmóvil ah muslos de las dunas deshojadas atravesar el denso tapiz de la neblina que las palmeras impregnan de una incomprensible laboriosidad que aqueja volarle los sesos a la luna es verdad no había agua para regar un jardín el desierto era aquella humanidad y el polvo que mi madres empuja con la escoba (7– 8) [I was a girl / my first poem echoed / in the ears of my neighbors / like a street vendor // everything that serves us / extends over the wide and

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sharp / tongue of the evening / if there was water to wash / the silky mane of the sun / the warp of gold work that desire / stationed in plaza of a still / existence // ah thighs of dunes / defoliated / crossing the dense tapestry of fog / that the palm trees impregnate / from an incomprehensible industriousness / that lies in wait / to blow her brains to the moon / it’s true / there was no water to irrigate a garden / the desert was that humanity / and the dust / that my mother pushes with the broom]

It is not immediately apparent that it may be Ludy speaking here, for the text has an autobiographical tone that is allied with the poet (since the speaker wrote poetry in her youth). The afternoon speaks to the female observer, or displays its tongue, part of an animated landscape. Desire impregnates the scene (like the palms the mist), but it is held in check by the static, arid images. Growth and possibility are stifled by the desert’s dust. Outside of the book, this poem has been resituated on Crisólogo’s CD, Poéticas visuales de la resistencia, which adds video as well as sound, but it does not include the written text.12 The experience of hearing the poem and seeing the visual images shifts the meaning of the poem quite drastically, and a violent undercurrent becomes explicit. The video, like the poem, begins with the image of a girl playing on some steps, but it cuts quickly to a series of images of boys playing with guns (or boards made into guns) in a construction zone—a world of masculine energy. Images alternate between realistic and simulated, and the sound track behind the reading voice (Crisólogo’s) suggests gunshots as well as building noise. The unstable camera is conjoined to the idea of roughness, improvisation, and instability in this portrayal of childhood. While these images and techniques modify how we understand the poem, some images do not change in the translation from written to visual realms, such as that of water, which exists only in the words of the poet and in both cases represents what is lacking—hope, possibility, something to relieve the mother who struggles against the desert with her broom. The audiovisual performance of the poem adds layers of semiotic material, allows us to use multiple senses to interact with it, and builds another perspective from which to understand the language. Bay- Cheng calls this “a thick record of performance” (127), which creates a context for what is described. Like the audiovisual materials included by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this version also can reach other audiences, ones less accustomed, perhaps, to reading poetry. It circulates on the web, and on the CD it explicitly states: “Poéticas visuales de la resistencia es un proyecto que se propone llegar a todo espacio que apuesta por una nueva

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radicalidad en el arte y en la vida cotidiana. Así que pirateen, difundan y disfruten” [Visual poetics of resistance is a project that proposes to reach all spaces that count on a new radicalism in art and in daily life. So you should pirate, disseminate and enjoy it.]. Crisólogo wants to make her work accessible and disseminates it through multiple channels. Crisólogo’s collaborator in her video-poetry project is Karen Bernedo Morales, who later created an experimental documentary about ludy d. Focusing on women in the armed conflict in Peru, her documentary dialogues with Crisólogo’s book using photographs of real women, of scenes of the violence in recent years, with a voice- over commentary of women talking about what Ludy and others like her did during this brutal time period. Bernedo Morales responds to an imaginative work with her own creation, and this, in turn, stimulates both passionate and analytical reactions. In an interview, Crisólogo specifies that ludy d was based on a person she knew, adding that the collection of poems is “un homenaje a una compañera que estudió conmigo en San Marcos en los 80 [comunicación social] y que, como muchas otras muchachas y muchachos, se marchó a la subversión” [a homage to a classmate who studies with me at San Marcos in the 1980s (social communications) and who, like many other young women and men, joined the subversive movement]. Ludy was a young, provincial woman, voices in the film affirm, who had a difficult (“más dura,” or harder) relationship with the world. In Bernedo’s film Crisólogo states that she sees Ludy as a metaphor for the destruction of hope: “¿Qué otro camino que él de la violencia?” [What other road did she have than that of violence?]. Several of the other speakers mention how women of Ludy’s social class are vulnerable in extreme social situations; they suffer the machismo of the leftist guerillas as well as the country’s generalized violence. The documentary ends with one of the speakers stating that this is the history of what happened in our country: “Todos podemos ser Ludys y todos hemos muerto con ella” [All of us can be Ludys, and all of us have died with her]. An interesting corollary to the documentary is the dialogue that it has stimulated on the web. The comments on the video argue about whether or not these works create a heroine out of someone who collaborated with Sendero Luminoso; discussants struggle with the necessity of remembering this kind of particular history and how to do so.13 The discussion offers evidence of the polemics that surround any interpretation of Peru’s recent past. The question that underlies this cultural conversation, suggests Drinot, is whether the violence was introduced by the senderistas or by structural conditions of the country that favored the emergence of a violent

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response to inequalities, racial and gender discrimination, a weak state, and a predisposition to authoritarianism (25). Ludy d portrays a person who is victimized and became a victimizer, only to become a victim in the end. In doing so it does not justify the violence of the senderistas but instead inserts this into an evocation of the broader violence present in Peruvian society. This chain of responses demonstrates how Crisólogo’s visual-poetry project has become interactive; it is not a live performance, but the audience is present (is there) through people’s participation in the ensuing conversation about a complex cultural situation and how to represent it. In this way Crisólogo adds a voice, and ultimately multiple voices, to create a “polyphony that interrupts the Peruvian metanarrative” (Kimberley Theidon, quoted in Drinot 27). Combining poetry and performance, this poet demonstrates her desire to reach a broad audience and to include young viewers who are accustomed to a visual means of expression. At the same time she demonstrates her need to open a conversation about the future of art through her poetry. Another intriguing younger poet with a notable presence on the Internet as well as the live poetry scene in Mexico City is Rojo Córdova (performance name, José Guillermo Córdova Mendoza, 1986). A slam poet, this is how he defines himself and his work: “juglar posmo, poetoide, espoken wordero, poeta eSLAMero, performer poeta, palabrero, hip hopero de closet, aspirante a cabaretero . . . díganme como quieran. Básicamente soy, o al menos eso intento, un creador cuya materia prima son las letras y sus posibilidades escénico- sonoras” (blogspot) [postmodern minstrel, poetoide, espoken wordero, eSLAMero poet, performer poet, wordsmith, closet hip hop artist, aspiring cabaret performer . . . call me whatever you want. Basically I am, or at least I try to be, a creator whose raw materials are letters and sound and stage possibilities]. Rojo spent four years in the Facultad de Letras [Department of Literature] at the UNAM but dropped out after he participated in his first slam and after he won the slam at the annual “Poesía en voz alta event” in 2009. He is paid now to give workshops around the country (for example, in 2012, he was supported by CONACULTA JOVEN to present workshops in a series entitled “Introducción al Spoken Word y Slam de poesía” in the Biblioteca José Vasconcelos and in the Fonoteca Nacional, May– October 2012).14 He is drawn to these venues as a kind of “collective communion centered on words” (interview with the author). Poetry slams are said to have begun in Chicago at the Green Mill Bar in 1986, when poet, performer, and construction worker Marc Smith stumbled on the form (Somers-Willett 3–5). Since then, they have spread throughout the world and generally follow a similar format: it is a competi-

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tion with scoring from 1–10, either by the crowd or a set of judges from the crowd. Poets perform their own work aloud within a three-minute time limit, and often there is a cash prize. As Somers-Willett notes, this format often occurs in a countercultural atmosphere and has disseminated poetry in unconventional venues, along with fostering “certain democratic ideals meant to contrast with exclusive academic conventions” (5). Rojo Córdova mentions slams’ connections to the popular tent show tradition of the early twentieth century in Mexico and notes the strong transnational influences of hip-hop and rap. He sees his work as offering an alternative possibility to disaffected youth in Mexico in the midst of the narco-violence; he described it as a kind of “alfabetización en contra de la delincuencia” [literacy campaign against crime] (interview). In June 2011, Córdova, along with the collective “Poesía y Trayecto” [Poetry and Journey], organized a slam in a metro station for kids (“1 $ slam poético en el metro con temática infantil,” Córdova blogspot), taking poetry into an eminently popular realm and encouraging the participation of all listeners. He has also participated in a performance in the street of a popular neighborhood, called “El Primer Festival de Poesía Re-Apropiada” [The First Festival of Re-Appropriated Poetry], which he renamed: “muy pícaramente llamé Festival de Poesía Rostizada” [very mischievously called the Festival of Roasted Poetry] (Córdova blogspot). These events take poetry far from the page and the Internet into pluralistic, democratized settings with poets performing much as medieval bards did—making direct contact with the community, taking part in public art and oral competition. A stunning example of the small part a written text may play in performance is in Córdova’s presentation of his poem “DosMilMex” [TwoMilMex].15 The text does not appear in the online documentation of his performance, but the author kindly sent me a print version of this poem, in which he speaks to his country, and I include the part that he performs here (the complete textual version is longer). The detailed translation that appears in the Appendix of this book makes it clear just how deeply rooted in modern Mexico his language is: DosMilMex Sé que no tienes forma definida Pero sé que estás entre el Río Bravo y el Usumacinta Entre el Pacífico y el Golfo con todo y petróleo sé que estás cubierta de oro y plata y nieves con basura con raspados, volovanes, versadores de Rapantla,

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trenzas, tranzas, trocas, pocas becas que da el FONCA, héroes piratas made in China, cholos, microbuseros, chimecos, guerrilleros, garnachas, pasamontañas, ataris, baleros y crisantemos// sé que tienes a—zules, amarillos, verdes, rojos, similares, joaquines, joseses, marías, juanes, López, Pérez, Martínez, Beltranes, Pemex, Cemex, Jumex, tienes barbas, ruinas, ruines, ranas de cerámica bara bara, ciruela, chabacano, melón y sandía que llueva que llueva, mojados, acarreados, levantados, secuestrados, adinerados, proletarios, centenarios, pensionados, encarcelados, medallistas, futbolistas, beisbolistas, chicharitos, jitomates, cebollones, nenepil, suadero, metro, llévelo-llévelo, coralillos, cascabel, piloncillo, san Charbel, Teresa Urrea, granizeros, metaleros, carreteras, “El Hijo Desobediente,” “El Sinaloense,” baches, buche, nana perejil, universidades públicas, privadas, otomís, armadillos, kukulcanes, charras leder y Guelaguetzas, mojarras, chiles trigarantes en nogada, San Isidros, Sor Juana, migrantes pre-escolares, sotoles, ajolotes, agaves y catedrales / huicholes, tzotziles, muxes, machos, chichifos, mixtecos, gabachos, maras, moros, muros, morras, cerros, chafiretes, chipotle, toloache, tehuanas, cacahuates, tamemes, capirotada, mixiotes, menonitas, ballenas, morenazis, mariposas monarcas, calabaza en tacha, barrancas, tostadas de pata, trenes, querreques, colas de nicolases, chicozapotes, aguamiel / también sé que tienes nahuas, mambo, techno, mayos, rumba, salsa, mole, mayas, bamba, samba, yuca, coco, tojolabales, congales, manglares, quetzales, chontales / Zempoala, chicle, Cacomixtle, Atzcapotzalco, Poza Rica, nata, Zapotlán,

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Chocolate, Chava Flores, Mexicali, Tzin Tzun Tzan chipi chipi, El Piporro, José Alfredo, Juanga, Chalino, Chente, Armando Comala, Hidalgo, Huapango, chito, Catemaco, Guanajuato, línea 2, línea 3, línea 4, chatos, prietos, chatas, chapos, vatos, capos, sapos del Jícuri-Parangaricutiri-Rarámurira-Ikikunari, chapopote, chiras pelas, matatena, Real de Catorce, Cabeza Olmeca, Goya Goya Goya y Goya / Pepsicoatl, Peyotl, Huichilobos, La Rumorosa, Ecatepunk, Sierra Gorda, Santa Rosa, Anarcocumbia, Nezayork, CalakMUL, Iztapabanda, Balún Canán, Colonia Rockma, Xitle, Ixtle, chile atole, Chiapas, Coatlicue Choper, pistache, grosella, Pitahaya, Tijuana, Tlacuache, Sinanche, Grupo Niche, Beso de ángel, rompope, berrendo, Zona del Silencio, Río Nazas, Chihuahua, su horchata, su albaca, hierba santa para la garganta, escamoles, cocadas, camotes, pellizcadas, chamuscadas, bofetadas, mentadas, sobadas, tlayudas, empinadas, curado de guayaba, Ciudades Blancas, quijadas de burro, lagañas de perro, peluche en tu carro, sus churros, charros, chorros, choros, chopos de agua, carpas, tubas, tubos, pomos, Pumas, toros, rudos, técnicos, la Areeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena México, sí, TÚ Y tus 364 lenguas y variantes dialectales que tú mismo estás matando SÍ, te estoy hablando a ti!! (unpublished manuscript)

Simply reading the written text would enact the multifarious country that is Mexico, for in many ways this is performative writing. But Córdova’s oral presentation of it impressively voices its magnitude with immediate energy. In the YouTube version he is filmed in an empty, industrial-looking

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space, in street clothing, and he begins the poem following the first five written lines in a regular, measured cadence, looking at the camera; when he arrives at the sixth, he hits the accelerator and the tempo picks up to a rapid-fire delivery. This tempo and repeating meter make the quantity that he enumerates in his national catalogue hit us full force, assembling the immense variety of Mexico. Words morph through their sound connections—churros, charros, chorros, choros, chopos—reinforced by heavy alliteration and assonance throughout. The urgency in his voice, his rapid timing, and his breath and energy (he hums a second or two when he has to collect his thoughts to keep things going) have an affective power. Córdova gives us the aural equivalent of multitude and makes us marvel at the multiplicity of his country—he embodies this in his delivery of the poem. The performance grabs our attention, and the complete text makes it clear that the speaker ultimately affirms his belief in Mexico and Mexican society in order to question where it has arrived: “Porque esta guerra somos todos tus jóvenes / con toda nuestra energía mal canalizada / Porque sé que no existen soluciones inmediatas, pero el nuestro no puede / ser un sacrificio armado” [Because in this war we are all young / with all of our energy misdirected / Because I know immediate solutions don’t exist but ours cannot be / an armed sacrifice]. The poet interpolates the nation not to celebrate it but as a call to action, to urge a change in public affairs. The solution he suggests is education—he encourages parents to teach their children to read. His call to action is in keeping with slam practices. Somers-Willett writes that slam is defined “less by its formal characteristics and more by what it wishes to achieve or effect: a more immediate, personal, and authentic engagement with its audience (19). She explains that the popularity of slam poetry “has meaning beyond the spheres of literature and performance, yielding cultural and political ramifications” (7). Like Padín’s performance work, poetry here is a social force, but while Padín cuts to the conceptual level, Córdova’s poetry questions conventional limits on what poetry can do simply by extending the genre. Córdova writes some poetry for the page, some to be presented aloud, poetry for performance (that takes into account body, space, and audience), and some poetry that is a synthesis of these. “DosMilMex” was originally written for the documentary musical media project “Hecho en México,” by One Giant Leap, and Córdova appears performing part of the poem in the film (e-mail).16 His writing and performances demonstrate how poetry can exist in multiple places, reach an assortment of audiences, and be interdisciplinary: enter-

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taining and didactic, aesthetically intriguing and politically rebellious, and a public activity and an expression of confidence in poetic creation. Córdova won his first major slam competition at the “Poesía en Voz Alta” (PVA) Festival, which has taken place annually in Mexico City since 2005.17 The event is overseen by José Luis Paredes Pacho, who wants people to experience poetry beyond its traditional venues, to decenter their conventional views of the genre, and to find sources of creative experimentation and exploration of language, sound, and modes of presentation. Pacho has explained that the title of the festival recognizes the history of the Casa del Lago (where the PVA followed a more theatrical tradition) and revitalizes this with “una sensibilidad actual: la entendemos como poesía escéncia, experimentación y oralidad en su sentido más extenso” [a present- day sensibility: poetry is understood as scenic, experimentation and orality in its broadest sense] (web interview). In an interview he told me that there are generally between one hundred and six hundred attendees each night, and that the event has grown so much that it is now held outside of the Casa in a tent. Pacho looks for variety in the performances that he selects internationally, and he organizes the program to highlight this variety. I attended several nights of the PVA in October 2011, and on the first night the opening performance was comprised of three young Mexican men whose approach to their material was more theatrical than poetic. There was an imbalance between what they said (at high volume), which appeared to be angry or passionate tirades, and the slides they had running behind them; they were clearly young experimenters with the form who had not found their place in the genre yet and were more taken with poetry as a style than as a means of organizing meaning or sustained attention to language. The second performers that night were a set one could have seen fifty or more years ago. Francisco Hernández presenting the rhymed, usually octosyllabic couplets of Mardonio Sinta (who was born in Veracruz in 1929 and died in 1990); Hernández was accompanied by three musicians (on piano, violin, and jarana) and a dancer doing a traditional percussive zapateado [tap dance]. Although Sinta was literate, Hernández explains in the introduction to his printed poetry that he transcribed his oral presentations, a situation made evident in the title of the collection ¿Quién me quita lo cantado? [Who can take away what I sing?]. Sinta, he says, was a troubadour, a bartender, and a cigar maker who never allowed his voice to be recorded (“Prólogo” 7). In spite of this apparent desire to remain within oral culture, his poetry now circulates in book form (Hernández has published three collections of his work) but perhaps

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still gains larger audiences through Hernández’s own performances, at events like the PVA, but also through the Internet. The next night was a combination of indigenous Tojolabal poetry sung and paraphrased by Roselía Jiménez, juxtaposed with French performer Michel Bulteau, accompanied by a resonant, rock-influenced bass guitarist who improvised their “electric poetry” together as Bulteau read in French and in English (parts of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues). This combination of cultures was brought together through the rock-poetry style, which had countercultural resonances with the content of the performance. The last night I attended the PVA a Brazilian poet was featured who combined popular, repentista-style poetry with a synthesizer, recorded voices and music, and poems he had written with other long narrative poems he had memorized as a schoolboy—exemplifying an amalgamation of ways poetry might be performed from popular to personal, with a musical updating of forms grounded in folk culture. The Mexican-Argentine poet Sandra Lorenzano followed, reading in a slow, solemn voice, presenting poems from her book Vestigios [Vestiges] and accompanied by the cellist Jimena Giménez Cacho; a series of background slides in black and white created a dreamlike naturescape. The rhythm of the changes in the slides acted as a visual accompaniment to her lyrical performance. Lorenzano’s work was more within the purview of the contemporary avantgarde, concentrating on the image and poetry as an alternative aesthetic for perceiving the world or the communication of a particular vision of it. This was the seventh year of this version of the PVA, and my overall impression was that the event is very well attended; the event is free, and there was a lively audience response every night (in spite of heavy rains and an outdoor location), and it tends to draw in many younger listeners, combining older forms with newer technologies that remake and revive the oral roots of literature. Córdova commented to me that he realizes that what he is doing is not that different from what the Spanish Golden Age writers like Lope de Vega were doing when their works crossed the divide between the popular and elite cultures of the sixteenth century, and his observation can be applied to the PVA project as well. Although the performers were quite varied, in every case there was a desire to energize language and to communicate, to make a direct connection with the audience. These examples demonstrate the many ways in which poetry infiltrates multiple aspects of contemporary life in Mexico—from slams to indigenous poetry, rock, and Veracruzan son jarocho, and from narcocorrido and narco-rap to the work of Javier Sicilia, a poet who has become a spokesperson for a civic movement against drug violence. Known as the

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“poet for peace,” he led a march to the Zócalo in 2010, then a march to the US border, humanizing victims (both innocent ones, like his son, and those he sees as victims of poverty and lack of opportunity). His role as a poet has led him to a new role, naming the issues: the lack of response by politicians and institutions in Mexico and the United States, which has made weaponry accessible to both sides and responded to the violence with a “drug war” that does not address fundamental issues. Sicilia is not performing poetry, but performing as a poet, using this identity to speak out against and to counter the brutality in his country. These examples in which events or poetic practices are produced or staged and situated in a range of cultural contexts allow us to see how ideas about what poetry is and does have changed. They illuminate how poetry participates in a gamut of social situations and elucidates the shifting roles for the aesthetic in these. George Yúdice and Toby Miller, in their discussion of cultural policy, assert that culture is connected to policy in two registers: the aesthetic and the anthropological. In the first case, culture “is taken as a marker of differences and similarities in taste and status within social groups”; in the second, culture is a marker of how we live our lives. The aesthetic articulates differences within populations, while anthropology marks differences between these. Yúdice and Miller propose that policy can be a bridge between the two registers (1–3). In the most recent instances examined in this chapter we can see how the greater accessibility offered by cyberspace, by poetry slams, and by live per formances in both state- sanctioned, privately funded, and more informal venues (like the eminently popular rotisería, a small informal street restaurant) and by the PVA’s more experimental and eclectic approach to the genre may alter the balance of power between producers and consumers, at times, enabling grassroots cultural production and attracting broader audiences who in some cases become cultural participants. These alternate ways of circulating poetry indicate that “the poetic is not a privileged and specialized use of language” but an exploration of various intersections and modalities of communication (Quasha 487). They are also instances that demonstrate how performance has been instrumental in revitalizing the genre and creating new audiences for poetic activity.

Conclusion

Voice and the Public Space of Poetry

I began this study suggesting that the oral and written elements in poetry form a continuum that has been obscured by our preoccupation with reading poetry on the printed page. Rather than maintain the separation between these two realms, I have sought to reunite them by examining how written works are spoken or put into action through a variety of media and in a range of settings. George Quasha seconds the idea of bringing together the oral and the written when he observes that the word “versus” (in the opposition oral versus written) has its roots in the word “turning”; therefore, he suggests, we need to think of this less as an opposition and more as “speech turning with writing” (485). The concept of speech intertwined with writing resonates with what I have found in this exploration of what artists and entertainers, poets, readers, and translators have done with poetry’s hybrid, performative capacities in Latin America. In the first chapter we saw that early twentieth-century performances via declamación combined written and theatrical realms, popularized poetry, and brought it to different audiences. Poetry’s performance created a space and a means for forming an alternative or expanded canon and also offered ways to circulate poetry outside of publishing, characteristics that continue through the present day. Examples of this are the recent projects of Argentine author Arturo Carrera, who runs a “Caravana de Declamadores” [caravan of declaimers] every year at his restored train station on the Pampas in the town of Coronel Pringles. He has defended his reactivation of the practice of declamation in this way: “Aunque todo se instala en las convenciones del kitsch, cada nuevo poema exige inevitablemente una revision de los 138

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recursos sensibles y técnicos de su dicción” (Martyniuk) [Although everything is installed in the conventions of kitsch, each new poem inevitably requires a review of the responsive and technical practices of its diction]. Supplementing these ideas in a different essay on “The Voice,” he begins with this observation: Recuerdo algo que dijo el poeta ruso Ossip Mandelstam: que quien no hubiera escuchado la voz de Ana Ajmátova, no conocería nunca su poesía. Recuerdo también ese poema de Bonnefoy: “La voz de Katleen Ferrier,” donde él se decide a pensar definitivamente, me atrevo a decir eternamente, la filiación del sentido y la voz. O la percepción—en todo caso—de la poesía como voz, como una voz aislada de ese material que es la escritura. ¿Pero no hay en cada lectura y en cada acto de escribir una voz escondida que a su modo nos atraviesa nos dirige y no nos salva? (Carrera 27) [I remember something that the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam said: that whoever has not heard Ana Akhmatova’s voice will never know her poetry. I also remember that poem by Bonnefoy, “The Voice of Kathleen Ferrier,” where he decided to think definitively, I dare say eternally, about the affiliation of meaning and voice. Or the perception, in any case, of poetry as voice, as a voice isolated from that material that is writing. But is there not in every reading and every act of writing a hidden voice that in its own way goes through us, directs us, and does not save us?]

Returning to the oral performance of poetry may revitalize it, create new relationships between authors and readers or performers, and take it on the road—in this case, fostering its circulation outside of Buenos Aires, a city that stands for the urban areas that tend to dominate cultural life today. Changing technologies such as radio, film, and records also altered how poetry was produced, distributed, and received and, as observed in the second chapter, allowed poets and performers like Eusebia Cosme, Luis Palés Matos, and Nicomedes Santa Cruz to construct alternative cultural identities by capitalizing on the performative capacities of poetry. At the same time, we observed how Cosme’s role in the circulation of poetry and Santa Cruz’s poetry itself has been excluded from the realm of literature and has been understood solely in popular terms. Their very “popularity,” in the English sense of reaching mass audiences and in the Spanish one of representing the people, may have marginalized their literary roles.

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Looking back at their work now, however, from a context in which performance, spoken word, hip-hop, rap, and the electronic circulation of voiced or embodied poetry attracts new audiences, their activities appear prescient. Next, Pablo Neruda’s and César Vallejo’s work offered instances of how the poetry of these emblematic writers has circulated and changed meanings in distinct contexts and historical circumstances. Vallejo’s and Neruda’s poetry exemplifies the continuous struggle between the popular and elite cultural forms and between an increasing modernity amid their ongoing coloniality as Latin American writers. Their work, most associated with the avant-gardes, was not often put into voice or performed in the 1920s and 1930s but reappears in more recent versions that bring together different segments of their poetry, connecting visual images with sonority and writing with sound. The instances I chose elucidate how newer avenues of circulation have built fresh communities of readers or listeners through recent dialogues and technological possibilities—through rock, video, film, and the Internet. These renderings are examples of what Charles Bernstein might call “discrepant versions” of the written work, made possible in their performances (“Hearing Voices” 142). In the last chapter we observed what poets and performers at the most recent turn of the century are doing to take poetry off the printed page by engaging the possibilities of multimedia—visual, digitalized, and mass cultural tools and means of distribution. While some depend on an embodiment of speech linked to theater and others use the latest technology that may distance the performance from human presence, in some ways all of these poets and performers bring the genre back to the plaza pública de la poesía [poetry’s town square] by using mass cultural paths to circulate their art. As Lawrence Levine, thinking about the divisions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, reminds us, “The same forms of culture can perform markedly distinct functions in different periods or among different groups” (240). In every case of poetry and per formance examined here, we get a broader, more consequential experience of poetry’s impact and audiences when we take into account how and where it has been and is being voiced. During my research I also noticed how poetry as a genre has in some ways been marginalized in performance studies. For example, in the collection of essays in The Per for mance Studies Reader, the group of authors included found per for mance throughout everyday life and cultural practices—in ritual, religion, gender, and sports, as well as in theater, both traditional and experimental—but there is no mention of poetry. When

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I mentioned this to the collection’s editor, Henry Bial (who is a colleague of mine), he reflected that poetry may still be perceived to be too literary, and, as he asserts in his introduction, performance studies today is captivated by the contingent, by its own “undefinability” (1). As Joan Shelley Rubin has observed in her book, which examines some similar questions to those I raise about the production and circulation of poetry in a US context, the reception of poetry is mediated by its cultural conception as a “text genre” (8). Yet, as we have seen, performances of poetry can be quite diverse; unified by their concentration on language, poetry enactments may incorporate many other genres or art forms. By reactivating the performative elements inherent in poetry, we can experience the genre in multiple ways, both returning it to its oral roots and extending it beyond these. Like some of my colleagues mentioned in the introduction who are working in other literary traditions (Gruesz, Rubin), I have found evidence that undermines the idea that there are “exclusive relationships between specific cultural forms and particular social groups” (Rubin 10). Instead, the instances I examined demonstrate that poetry has a range of “social uses,” as Rubin would put it. Performed poetry testifies to the eclectic and continuing circulation of modernist and avant-garde works, together with folkloric, self-reflexive, and politically activated verse, that have a range of relationships to dominant conceptions of literature and art at any specific time. Changing technologies have shifted how poetry is performed and circulated. The ease and accessibility of creating CDs mean that many poets may choose to include these as an accompaniment to a printed book or, even more commonly, simply circulate their works on CD without a print version. Poets increasingly publish in digital journals or use blogs, such as those of Argentine Bárbara Belloc (Glossemata and Evolucionariarevolucionaria), which incorporate visuals, video clips, and music amid the written content. There are also online anthologies, such as Abrapalabara-Poesia argentina actual and La infancia del procedimiento; the latter describes itself as “un espacio colectivo de poesía contemporánea” [collective space of contemporary poetry] that will give poets new ways to communicate with one another and their readers and listeners. Other websites that bring together newer poets and well-recognized ones is the series Las afinidades electivas [Elective Affinities], which has been described as “una antología móvil y deforme, como un médano: sin límites, ni jerarquías, ni censura alguna” [a mobile and misshapen anthology, like a sand dune: without limits, or hierarchies, or any censorship], yet it remains primarily organized by country.1

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At the same time aural aspects are being highlighted by some, there are current-day poets and editors whose publishing practices emphasize the book as an object. One example is the Uruguayan Gustavo Wojciechowski (known as Maca), who publishes the series Yauguru. Maca’s books are art objects that emphasize the material aspects of their presentation and how this affects reading. His own Poesía en caja [Boxed poetry], for example, comes in a red box that contains a series of stickers from which the reader can select a title; the box holds cards featuring radically different typefaces, some pictures, and much variation (with echoes of Cortázar and Parra that stimulate interactivity). Maca has also published a long thin book authored by Ana Cheveski (pen name for Héctor Bardanca) that reads half one way and half the other, and another by Inés Trabal, Alloiosis, whose silver type visually whispers on onion-thin paper that allows one to see print on multiple pages at the same time. These are just a few books among many published in the Yauguru series and circulated in local bookstores or through a subscription list, but in each one the composition of the book itself, its material manifestation, is part of the creation of meaning. In Peru, Carlos Estela uses his publishing house, Manofalsa, to publish what he calls “libros objeto y libros acción” [book objects and action books]. He produces these books to explore “la otra materia de la letra, la gráfica, tratando de construir un lenguaje artístico de la edición y acercar al lector a este objeto que resulta obsoleto para muchos hoy en día: el libro” [the other terms of the letter, graphics, trying to build an artistic editing language and bring the reader to this object that is obsolete for many today: the book]. Estela has also done some oral performance and participates in workshops to broaden access to and interest in poetry. Both of these examples are not antiperformance but represent a concomitant desire to hold on to the materiality of the book at a time when audio performance and other means of circulating poetry are gaining ground. I began my research for this book intrigued by poetry’s recent reoralization and interested in the expansion of possibilities for its dissemination. In the final chapter of my last book, Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century: Textual Disruptions, I had already surveyed instances of the late twentieth-century circulation of poetry through performance and in virtual environments, and I wanted to connect these contemporary changes to its past, which led me to explore how poetry has circulated outside of texts throughout the century. Spanish America is a large and diverse area to cover, but I sought out examples from several different national traditions in order to put these into dialogue and cover a range of poetry and places. Uruguay has offered several instances, for it is

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a small country that has produced a vital stream of poets who perform their work, and it represents the Río de la Plata region here. And Peru, an Andean country with a vigorous poetic tradition, gained my attention. Like every country, Peru has performances going on today that I could not incorporate here. One example is the work of Roger Santiváñez, founder of the Kloaca movement in the 1980s, who has moved more toward performance in his recent writing; Amaranth (2010) includes a neobaroque emphasis on an eminently popular and sonorous Peruvian use of language, bridging the vernacular and the literary. Or, there is Frido Martin, who performs an apparently written poem entitled “Mudo” (for he holds a text), but he reads without words, his voice marking a rhythm and straining against closed lips (both of these performances can be found on the Internet).2 Mexico presents a wealth of poetry in per for mance, and a book could be written centering on that country alone. Pacho, the organizer of Poesía en Voz Alta, is working on a digital book or series of films that will document the events. This festival, like the poetry festival in Medellin, Colombia, and others will continue to be places where many performers of poetry come together and renew opportunities for dialogue while introducing new performers to each another and to those who are able to attend. Many performers in Mexico are working in the spoken word, such as Edmeé García (“La Diosa Loca” [The Crazy Goddess]), whose work is yet to be explored. There are myriad examples of poetry and performance from Central America and many from the Caribbean, especially in popular poetry, such as the décima in Puerto Rico and Cuba. There are sustained performance traditions in many countries—what I offer here is a model of what is possible when we read poetry and take performance into account. I was not able to include many instances I came across in my research, performers important to performance history, like Cuban Luis Carbonell, or works in indigenous languages, and I only touched on the area of musicalized poems—all of these are topics in their own right, and I invite my readers to continue my work and explore what these poets and traditions have to tell us about the values and practices of different cultures and time periods when performance is included as an element of analysis. An attention to performance and poetry also calls for the need to document these. During my research I heard many anecdotal accounts of performances, such as those of the Argentine Juan Gelman reading his poetry in Cuba while wearing a white suit with blood dripping on him, or Néstor Perlongher reciting his poem “Cadáveres” in the streets of Buenos Aires, just at the end of the dictatorship; some of these anecdotes include reports

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of the range of reactions of their listeners. If performance is increasingly taken into account when thinking about poetry, perhaps the archives of information about specific events will grow and thicken, developing a performance history for a poem and giving us more diverse insights into the lives that poetry has lived in a certain society. For, as we have seen, analyzing poetry and performance also means examining alternate means of disseminating poetry—one of the other principal topics of this book. All performers—authors or readers—become mediators of an author’s work, and in this they are like editors who concern themselves with the physical aspects of production and reception; they are one of the several cultural actors orchestrating how poetry circulates. Some time ago now (circa 1968), poet and anthropologist Jerome Rothenberg observed, “We can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension” (quoted in Quasha 489). This oral dimension is not only present in popular poetry, ethnopoetics, or folklore but is an essential element in the circulation and understanding of many poems and their audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Language is an interactive medium, and we need to regularly reassess how we take this into account critically as well as what taking it into account demonstrates—in this case, the myriad audiences for poetry and poetry’s changing relationships to its listeners and readers and to the societies in which it is produced.

Appendix “TwoMilMex”

TwoMilMex I know that you do not have a definite form Yet I know that you lie between the Rio Bravo and the Usumacinta1 Between the Pacific and the Gulf petroleum and all I know that you are covered in gold and silver and snow with trash with shaved ice, vol-au-vents,2 Verse-makers of Rapantla, braids, hustlers, trucks few grants given by the FONCA,3 Hero pirates made in China, gangsters, microbus drivers, Chichimecs,4 warriors, garnachas,5 ski masks, ataris, bearings and chrysanthemums// I know you have a—zures, ambers, greens, reds, similares,6 joaquins, joses, marias, juanes, López, Pérez, Martínez, Beltranes, Pemex, Cemex, 1. Rivers separating Mexico from the United States and Guatemala, respectively. 2. A Mexican puff pastry of French origin. 3. Acronym for the National Fund for Culture and Arts. 4. The Aztecs called the nomadic tribes of present- day central Mexico and the US Southwest “chichimecas.” 5. Mexican dish made of fried corn dough and topped with meat, beans, cheese, and salsa. 6. “Farmacias Similares” is the name of a drugstore chain selling generic medications.

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Jumex,7 you have beards, ruins, ruffians, ceramic frogs cheap cheap, plums, apricots, cantaloupes and watermelons let it rain let it rain,8 wetbacks, paid protesters, insurgents, kidnapping victims, rich people, proletariats, centenarians, retirees, detainees, medalists, footballers, baseballers, little peas,9 tomatoes, onions, nenepil,10 brisket, metro, buy it! buy it! coral snakes, rattlers, brown sugar loaves, saint Charbel,11 Teresa Urrea,12 ritual specialists, metallers, roads, “The Disobedient Son,” “The Sinaloan,”13 pot holes, tripe, nana14 and parsley, public universities, privates, Otomies,15 armadillos kukulcans,16 leather cowgirls and Guelaguetzas,17 snappers, chiles in walnut sauce, Saint Isidores, Sor Juana,18 preschool migrants, sotol,19 mole lizards, agaves and cathedrals / Huichols, Tzotzils,20 muxes,21 machos, gigolos, Mixtecs, gringos, maras,22 moors, walls, chicks, hills, bus drivers, chipotle, moon flowers, tehuanas,23 peanuts, bread pudding pit barbecue, Mennonites, whales, dark-skinned-Nazis, monarch butterflies, candied pumpkin, 7. Three companies: Mexican Petroleum, Mexican Cement, and a Mexican juice brand. 8. Line from the children’s song “La víbora de la mar” [The sea snake]. 9. “Chicharito,” or little pea, is the nickname for the famous Mexican football player Javier Hernández Balcázar. 10. Taco filling made of stomach and uterus. 11. Patron saint of the ill. 12. Faith healer turned folk- saint of northern Mexico and the US Southwest. 13. Song titles. 14. Taco filling made of uterus. 15. Indigenous community of east- central Mexico. 16. Kukulcan, a Maya deity. 17. Annual folk- dance festival in the state of Oaxaca. 18. Intellectual nun who lived in seventeenth- century Mexico. 19. A traditional alcoholic beverage. 20. Indigenous communities of the central states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango and Chiapas, respectively. 21. In Zapotec communities of Oaxaca, muxes are biological males who dress and act like women. 22. Members of the Salvadoran gang “La Mara Salvatrucha.” 23. Women of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, known for their costumes.

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ravines, pigs’ feet tostadas, trains, woodpeckers, sapote fruit, agave nectar / I also know you have Nahuas,24 mambo, techno, Mayos,25 rumba, salsa, mole, Mayas, bamba, samba, cassava, coconut, Tojolabales,26 brothels, swamps, quetzals, the Chontals / Zempoala,27 chiclets, Cacomixtle, Atzcapotzalco, Poza Rica, cream, Zapotlan, Chocolate, Chava Flores,28 Mexicali, Tzin Tzun Tzan29 chipi chipi, The Piporro, José Alfredo,30 Juanga, Chalino, Chente, Armando31 Comala, Hidalgo, Huapango, chito,32 Catemaco, Guanajuato,33 line 2, line 3, line 4, the pug-nosed, the darkies, shorties, gangsters, kingpins, toads of the Jicuri-Parangaricutiri-Raramurira-Ikikunari,34 asphalt, marbles, jacks, Real del Catorce, Olmec heads, Goya Goya35 Goya and Goya, / Pepsicoatl, Peyote, Ecatepunk,36 The Sierra Gorda, Santa Rosa, Anarcocumbia,37 Nezayork,38 CalakMUL,39 Band music of Iztapalapa, The Nine Guardians, Rockma District, Xitle,40 Ixtle,41 chili, Chiapas, Cuatilicue Choper, pistachio, red currant, Pitahaya, Tijuana, 24. Indigenous communities residing primarily in central Mexico. 25. Indigenous communities of Sonora and Sinaloa. 26. Indigenous community of Chiapas. 27. Archaeological site in the state of Veracruz; also, a group of lagoons in the state of Jalisco. 28. Singer- songwriter. 29. Town in the state of Michoacán. 30. Singer- songwriters Eulalio “El Piporro” González and José Alfredo Jiménez. 31. Singer- songwriters Juan Gabriel, Chalino Sánchez, Vicente “Chente” Fernández, and Armando Manzanero. 32. Dried strips of meat covered in chili. 33. Except for chito, the rest of the line consists of place-names. 34. References to different indigenous groups. 35. The cheer for the Pumas, the football team of the Autonomous University of Mexico. 36. Punks from the municipality of Ecatepec in Mexico State. 37. Punklike musical genre. 38. Nickname given to New York City by Mexican migrants from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. 39. Archaeological site in the state of Campeche. 40. A volcano near Mexico City. 41. Agave.

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Tlacuache, Sinanche, Grupo Niche,42 Angel’s kiss,43 eggnog, pronghorn, Mapimí Silent Zone, River Nazas, Chihuahua, its horchata,44 its basil, sacred herb for the sore throat, escamoles,45 coconut sweets, sweet potatoes, pellizcadas,46 smacks, insults, massages, tlayudas,47 dips, Pulque made of guava,48 White Cities, donkey’s jaws, dog’s eye crust, stuffed animal in your car, its churros,49 its cowboys, spurts, lies, water poplars, carps, tubas, tubes, bottles, Pumas bulls, brawlers, faces,50 the Areeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena Mexico, yeah, YOU! And your 364 languages and dialectal varieties that you yourself are killing YEAH, I’m talking to you!!

42. Salsa music group. 43. Popular ice cream flavor. 44. Drink made with rice, milk, and cinnamon. 45. Dish of ant larvae. 46. Dish made of dough with pinched edges, topped with beans, cheese, and salsa. 47. Dish consisting of a crunchy tortilla covered in beans, cheese, lettuce, and salsa. 48. Alcoholic beverage made of fermented guava. 49. Mexican pastry made of fried dough and covered in sugar. 50. In Mexican wrestling, the brawlers, or rudos, play the role of the “bad guys,” and the faces, or técnicos, play the “good guys.”

Notes

Introduction 1. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2. A recent comprehensive book on this topic is Araceli Tinajero’s El lector de tabaquería: Historia de una tradición cubana (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2007). 3. Roland Barthes, in his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” discusses the quality of the voice in music and differentiates between the “pheno-song”—“everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression”—and the “geno-song, or “the volume of the singing and speaking voice,” which forms “a signifying play” having nothing to do with the aforementioned listed qualities but is where melody really works at “the voluptuousness of its language,” exploring “how language works and identifies with that work” (182). 4. One of her most fascinating analyses deals with the popularity of Longfellow’s poem Evangeline. In the section titled, “Converting Evangeline to Evangelina,” she finds that the poem shifts meaning as it is “ ‘translated’ into the language of Catholicism” (94). 5. Spanish American modernism is different from “modernism” in European, North American, or Brazilian contexts. This early twentieth-century movement reacted against positivism (succinctly stated, a belief in a scientific ethos and the values of order and progress) and the mercantilization of art as poets from the region responded to their new roles in society and the high cultural demands of a small, Europeanized audience. No longer state poets or visionaries, modernist writers reacted to their more marginal status by, as Cathy Jrade has explained, putting their “faith in the epistemological power of literature” (4).

Chapter 1 Epigraph: No author is cited for the poem, which is quoted by Aura Rostand in Repertorio americano, 1932.

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1. Some of these authors, such as Jijena Sánchez, have biographical data available, while others are not as well known. This Argentine, born in Rosario in 1920, was a professor of diction and declamación. In 1964 she founded the Instituto del lenguaje, published several collections of popular poetry during her lifetime, and wrote the lyrics to the “Himno a Buenos Aires” (http://www.patrimoniosf.gov.ar/ver/0–4785/). 2. My colleague Michael Doudoroff had the following comment about this observation: “In ceceo dialects there is only the interdental silbilant. In seseo dialects there is only the alveolar sibilant. In distinction dialects (orthographic) c before e, i and z contrast interdental with the alveolar (orthographic) s. This source appears to be using the term ‘ceceo’ colloquially (and incorrectly) for distinction” (conversation with the author, February 2011). I am grateful to him for his insightful feedback throughout this chapter. 3. “Bipolar” is my expression for what Gruesz describes as “top- down” and “bottom-up” models of cultural transmission. The former model comes from the culturally dominant institutions of taste and prestige—the letrado [lettered] tradition in Latin America—and the latter model comes from the reactions of readers, whose interests and values may be very different. 4. Both Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano and Francisco Monterde García Icazbalceta are well-recognized figures in Mexican letters. The former was a member of the literary group Nuevo Ateneo de la Juventud and cofounder of Contemporáneos. The latter founded the avant-garde magazine Antenae in 1925 and later was a professor of literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. 5. In her book on the uses of poetry in America, Joan Shelley Rubin examines the variety in the printing industry and the presence of poetry in popular venues to document the importance of poetry for readers who represent “alternative cultural authority.” 6. Zouroff is the pseudonym of Esmeralda Zenteno de Leon, a Chilean author born in 1880, who became interested in oral presentations of poetry through theater, started a school for declamación, and later published her manual (http:// books.google .com/books). 7. There is a long history of dialogue about the relationships between language and music in European thought, from Rousseau to Derrida and Barthes. While which came first remains undecided, what this discussion makes clear is that speech and music are intertwined, and especially so in the case of performed poetry, which draws additional attention to the multiple roles of voice in this genre. 8. Luis Alberto Sánchez claims that there is a comma after América in the original version of “Blasón” that does not appear in many editions (63); this shifts the meaning, making the speaker instead of América “autóctono y salvaje” [native and wild]. 9. José Vasconcelos’s Raza cósmica (1925) may be the best example of the ideology of mestizaje at this time. 10. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, in the Ayacucho edition, places it in Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas [1914]. 11. Grínor Rojo and Karen Peña offer fascinating rereadings of her “Sonetos de la muerte,” for example.

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12. In the Ayacucho edition of this poem, it is grano rather than granado that the child leans toward; grano would anticipate the espiga and harina that follow, but granado fits with the fruta encendida, so either word works. 13. This reading is supported by the preceding poem, “Piececitos,” which follows a similar structure in which the third stanza of six also introduces an unobservant man/mankind: “El hombre ciego ignora / que por donde pasáis, / una flor de luz viva / dejáis” [Blind man does not know / that where you passed / a flower of life / you left] (Mistral 90). The panales in “Manitas” are also curiously phonetically reminiscent of “pañales” [diapers], which opens up even more ironic possible readings for this poem.

Chapter 2 1. This is Joan Shelley Rubin’s term for the changing status of poetry in the United States (Rubin 10). 2. I am again following Rubin’s lead in my thinking here, for she discusses the historical status of poetry as a text genre relative to a range of reading practices (Rubin 8–9). 3. I am grateful to Emily Maguire for sharing an early version of her essay with me; it was later published in a 2012 collection edited by James Conrad. 4. Ironically, perhaps, it is easier to gain access to her films than to recordings of her poetry recitals, while it is her work as a declamadora that earned her fame. 5. Handwritten note, dated December 21, 1939, New York, The Eusebia Cosme Papers, The Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 6. “Juicios sobre Eusebia Cosme,” program for Cosme’s seventeenth recital (no date, Cosme Papers). 7. Federico de Onís, “La Poesía Mulata: Presentación de Eusebia Cosme, la recitadora,” El Liceum, la Habana, July 23, 1934, Cosme Papers. 8. “Katherine Dunham Stages a Cuban Evening,” May 29 (no year), Cosme Papers. 9. The word “unsayable” comes from Federico de Onís’s “La poesía mulata,” Cosme Papers. 10. Margot Arce, El Mundo, San Juan, 1939, Cosme Papers. 11. “Eusebia Cosme: Only New York Recital of Afro-Antillian Poems,” program of February 7, 1939, Cosme Papers. 12. In dealing with colonial per formance and the problem of understanding theatrical moments to which we have only indirect access, Diana Taylor has noted that descriptions of these per formances may reveal “not just what we know, but the complexities of how we know it,” an observation I find equally pertinent to Cosme’s case (Taylor, “Scenes of Cognition” 356). 13. In The Numinous Site, Julio Marzán explains that while Palés uses musical language, it also has semantic value, belonging to the “formal or informal lexicon of the Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico.” His research shows that Palés translated in the poem “adombe ganga monde” as “ahora vamos a comer” and “ahora vamos a bailar” [now we are going to eat / dance] (132).

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14. Maguire argues that Cosme also “created a speaking black female subject whose vocal presence visibly contested the objectification this same female figure receives in much negrista and Afro-Antillean poetry” (Maguire 80). 15. Analyzing the musical forms of the African diaspora, Paul Gilroy observes that performers must “ceaselessly reconstruct their own histories [ . . . ] to celebrate and validate the simple, unassailable fact of their survival” (quoted in Roach 286). Part of this reconstruction may be seen in the circulation of Afro-Antillean poetry in contemporary art forms. The Bronx-born Puerto Rican musician Willie Colón, for example, has a 1977 recording entitled El baquiné de angelitos negros that reworks the idea of the baquiné and the white-black, oral-written dialogue and maintains this ritual in a popular cultural context. It is based on the poem “Píntame angelitos negros” [Paint black angels for me] by Venezuelan Andrés Eloy Blanco, which criticizes the absence of black people in representations of heaven; Cosme often closed her per formances with this poem. 16. López includes an excellent chapter on Cosme within his study of AfroCuban American modernism. He offers a detailed study of how Cosme used per formance as a vehicle to traverse racial, linguistic, and gendered boundaries of Afrolatinidad. While some of our observations are complementary, my emphasis is more on how poetry is performed relative to other factors, and López’s is on how Cosme fits into the “diasporic cultures of Afro- Cuban America” (his subtitle). 17. At the end of her intriguing study of Santería in Santiago de Cuba (not, incidentally, Cosme’s birthplace), Kristina Wirtz speculates that Desi Arnaz’s famous rendition of “Babalú” has been seen by some Cuban believers as his open communication with the divine, thanking him for his success (Wirtz 200). 18. There is no source or translator noted here, but other transcripts refer to the book Negro Poets and Their Poems, compiled by Robert T. Kerlin, and the translator for other such poems in the transcripts is Enrique Portes (Cosme Papers). 19. The term mestizo generally refers to a person of mixed race; cholo is a term that is more par ticular to Peru and refers to a person of another race mixed with indigenous or with descendants of indigenous residents of the sierra or highlands. It is used as both an affirmation of Peruvian identity, that is, “Todos somos cholos” [We are all cholos], and as a derogatory term. A very pertinent analysis of its use is Guillermo Nugent’s Laberinto de la choledad (Lima: Universidad Pontificia Católica, 2012). 20. Otis Handy’s dissertation, “The Spanish American Décima and Nicomedes Santa Cruz” (University of California, Berkeley, 1979), is a good example of this early scholarship that is invaluable in recovering the Peruvian’s work, but it does so by reading him in terms of the literary tradition, making only passing references to how important per formance was to the circulation of his poetry. 21. The harawi is a traditional indigenous form of music and poetry; Santa Cruz describes it as “la canción triste y nostálgica que en el incario entonaron los mitimaes añorando su tierra natal y lamentando la desintegración de su comunidad o ayllu asimilada al Tawantinsuyu” [the sad and nostalgic song that in the Incan era those who were transported elsewhere for work intoned, longing for their homeland and mourning the disintegration of their traditional community, which was assimilated to Tawantinsuyu] (Santa Cruz, La décima 25). 22. I am grateful to Pablo Celis, who helped me with the nuances of the translation of this poem. I chose “knuckle-blows” as it suggests raps on the head, which the

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Spanish indicates. Grades are given on a scale of 0–20 in Peru, so the speaker in the poem receives very low scores. 23. Most writers see Hora Zero as a Peruvian movement, but Mora’s book incorporates writers from the “infrarealist” movement, which includes a few exiled Chileans and Mexicans (the best known of whom is Roberto Bolaño). 24. Mora affirms this connection between this generation and the Beat writers, as does Maureen Ahern in her interview with Zevallos-Aguilar; Chueca also notes the influence of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (32).

Chapter 3 1. In a manifesto that appeared in Martin Fierro (vol. 4, number 15, May 1924), Brando observes that Girondo “hizo gestos desesperados frente a la impermeabilidad hipopotámica del ‘honorable público’ y frente a la solemnidad que momifica todo cuanto toca” [made desperate gestures against the hippotamic impermeability of the “honorable public” and against the solemnity that mummifies everything it touches]. 2. “Coloniality” is a word that comes from the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano; it refers to the “continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administration” (Mignolo and Tlostanova 110). Walter Mignolo’s series of books and essays charts the relationships between modernity and coloniality in Latin America, and his ideas also subtend some of Fernando Rosenberg’s thinking about the avant-garde, as we will see. 3. I could also have included Nicolás Guillén in this chapter; I did not because the connection between Guillén and oral per formance is more obvious. This is due in part to the intrinsic orality and musicality of the poetry itself and in part because of its subsequent musical incarnations in Cuba. The connections have also already been widely studied; because his poetry highlights Afro-Antillean cultures, it has more frequently been read in oral and performative terms. Per formance features have not been taken into account as much in Neruda’s and Vallejo’s poetry. 4. Enrico Mario Santí has also made this association, which he sees as “an emblem of the entire second book” (74). 5. I believe Dorfman is using the 1972 translation of the poem by Donald Walsh (which I also use here). 6. I could have examined Neruda’s per formances in a more chronological order, starting with his own recitation and arriving at more contemporary versions. I chose instead a more up-to- date logic, which begins looking at how Neruda’s work circulates now (which may be how younger readers or listeners know him best) and then moves to how it circulated in the twentieth century. 7. Volume 1 came out in 2000 and volume 2 in 2004. 8. Brian Reed asserts that “a written text and a live per formance are not related in the manner of original and copy. One may precede the other, in which case one can talk about its ‘transmediation’ from one medium to another, but they remain different instantiations of the same work and should be judged separately, on their own terms” (278). In a Latin American context, the tensions between the original and the copy are exacerbated by coloniality.

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9. And, in fact, extend beyond it, for Neruda’s fame as a poet and his role as a politician made his work controversial throughout the Pinochet regime. Neruda is idealistically linked to the end of an era, for his death practically coincided with the beginning of the dictatorship, and, during the 1970s and 1980s, there are many accounts of his poetry and places of residence being celebrated or defiled by Pinochet’s opposition or supporters. 10. Teitelboim mentions numerous readings, both in the early stages of Neruda’s career in Chile and later at the University of Madrid (179), at the World Congress of Peace Supporters in Paris (310), in Moscow (318), and in Italy (334). He notes incidences in which young audiences “frantically begged him to read “Poema 20” (325), and how the crowd surged in an apotheosis of the poet at one of his readings (412). 11. Teresa Longo’s collection of essays charts Neruda’s presence in the United States and also finds that many manifestations essentialize Latin American culture and skirt “important issues related to transnational politics and power ” (xvii) Her collection complicates this stance by offering perspectives that analyze how the Chilean poet has been packaged by the US culture industry. My analysis of per formances of his work that circulate in transnational media should serve as a complement to Longo’s book. 12. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v58WIVOIUGo 9–26–11. 13. Perusing the selections of Charles Tomlinson and Henry Gifford, and those of H. R. Hayes, these earlier translators tended to choose poems that had an autobiographical focus or were easier to narrativize; neither collection includes Trilce 1 or LXVIII, for example. 14. Ortega notes that other editions use “caudillos” here, which fits better with afiles, although cadillos, a plant, may go with “lupinas parvas” (small plants from the pea family, although “lupine” may also pertain to wolves, a choice made by several of these translators). According to Ortega, cadillos are also the first threads woven into a cloth, which he connects to the general sense of unraveling in the poem (César Vallejo 138). 15. Curiously, in a similar vein, another US poet, Sampson Starkweather, has published “transcontemporations” of Vallejo’s work. In yet another aesthetic response, pertinent to filmic resonances of Vallejo’s work, Daniel Reeves produced an art film called Sombra a Sombra, which he calls “an elegy of remembrance and meditation on the architecture of the abandoned as evoked in the writings of César Vallejo” (1987). 16. Usually published as Poemas humanos, scholarship demonstrates that Vallejo had planned three collections: his España aparta de mí este cáliz, fifteen poems that he left in order, and two others whose content is still debated (see Hart, Stumbling . . . , for recent insight into this). 17. My colleague Jonathan Mayhew observed that the verbal patterns in this poetry are very “performance based,” and that, like “Pedro Rojas,” many of these appear to have been written for oral transmission (note to the author, November 2011). 18. A 2009 rock tribute to César Vallejo, Los pasos lejanos, includes a versión of “España aparta . . .” by the Peruvian group Los Drugos. When voiced or musicalized by contemporary Peruvians, the perspective and the potential audience shift so that “mother Spain” becomes the colonial madre patria whose future is still intertwined with that of Latin America in a global context.

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19. The film is available at http://corinto.pucp.edu.pe/sen/node/134; it also is available on DVD, with the book of the same title. 20. Her remark brings to mind Michel de Certeau’s explanation of “la perruque,” in which a worker diverts time from the factory for “work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit” (25).

Chapter 4 1. I was not able to obtain permission to reproduce this image, but it is available at multiple places on the web, as well as in Parra’s collection, Páginas en blanco. See, for example, http://rodillogris.blogspot.com/2012/12/artefactos-parra.html. 2. Concrete poetry is a Brazilian movement of the 1950s and 1960s that advocated viewing the poem as an object as well as a sign, making meaning visual as well as textual and loosening conventional reading and viewing practices. 3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbOib4Z08Co. 4. The 2008 edition of Los papeles salvajes includes her collected poems from her first book, Poesía (1953), until the last poems published before her death in 2004. The first edition was published in 1971, and there were subsequent editions in 1989, 2000, and 2008. Much of my reading of Diadema here comes from a longer essay on di Giorgio that I coauthored with Jacob Rapp; I am grateful to him for working with me on these ideas, which grew out of a graduate seminar in which he was a lively participant. 5. Although the speaker is not specifically identified as a woman, since I am referencing the per formance and the voice is female, I use feminine pronouns in my analysis. 6. Examples of these can be found on her blog at http:// Lilianamendez.blogspot .com/2009/01/luminile.4.html. 7. www.youtube.com/watch?V=Aa3BYSInR30. 8. Pitas is cited in “The New Resistance: Making Books, Reading Poetry,” at www.strangelastname.com/2010/08/printing.and.poetry.html. 9. Bravo recently published Voz y palabra: Historia transversal de la poesía uruguaya 1950–1973 [Voice and word: A transverse history of Uruguayan poetry] (Montevideo: Estuario Editora, 2012), which includes needed attention to poetic per formance throughout the time period under consideration. 10. I chose this poem as my example, in part because Bravo’s per formance is circulating on the Internet and is therefore widely available. 11. According to Milton, “During three democratically elected governments (Belaúnde Terry, García Pérez, and early Fujimoro) the worst violence and human rights violations suffered in Peruvian history came to pass” [ . . . ] with statistics that “exceed the number of human loss suffered by Peru in all the external and civil wars that have happened in its 182 years of independence” (6). 12. The poem also appears on the web at http://poeticasdelaresistencia.blogspot .com/. 13. There are similarities here with what Drinot observes about the monument “El ojo que llora” [The eye that cries], which was called a “monument to terrorism” when its intention was to represent the victims of this (20).

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14. Guillermo Rojo Córdova’s poems have been published in literary magazines in Mexico City, such as Lenguaraz, Velocidad Crítica, Registro, and Trifulca; he has poems included in the anthology Cuarto Recital de Poesía Chilango Andaluz (SevillaUltramarina editorial, 2009), and some of his work will appear in Dulces batallas que nos animan la noche. Antología del encuentro de Letras Independientes: 2006–2011, which includes authors such as Guillermo Samperio, J. M. Servín, and Carlos Martínez Rentería. For his prizes and participation in and organization of slams and oral poetry presentations, see his blogspot or the Facebook page SLAM POETRY MÉXICO: www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_54030334314. 15. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IIsjkGtYso. 16. One Giant Leap is the title for a series of projects exploring music and ideas throughout the world through video and sound, orchestrated by Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto. 17. In 2011, when I attended, it took place at the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec Park. It has since moved to the Museo del Chopo, closer to the UNAM.

Conclusion 1. Belloc: http://glossemata.wordpress.com; http://evolucionariarevolucionaria .blogspot.com/; Abrapalabara- Poesia argentina actual (http://cristinaarostegui.blog spot.com/2011/09/poesia-argentina-actual-poemas -de.html); La infancia del procedimiento (www.lainfanciadelprocedimiento.blogspot.com/); Las afinidades electivas (http:// laseleccionesafectivas.blogspot.com/). 2. Santiváñez’s book is Amaranth precidido de Amastris (Madrid: Amargod Ediciones, 2012); his presentations are widely available on YouTube. Frido Martín can be seen reading in silence at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMrpXPPTuCw& feeature=related.

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Index

Abrapalabra-Poesía argentina actual (digital anthology), 141, 156n1 Aching, Gerard, 39 affect, 24, 28–29, 46, 55, 89–91, 134 Afro-Latino: Afro-Antillean, 5, 55–57, 60; Afro-Caribbean, 27, 54, 58, 62; Afro-Cuban, 49, 56, 61, 62, 64, 68, 77, 152n16 ; Afro-Peruvian, 12, 52, 66–69, 70, 75–78 Alberti, Rafael, 98 Anabantha, 84, 86 Andersson, Roy, 102–7. Works: Songs from the Second Floor (film), 102, 104, 107 Appadurai, Arjun, 52, 61 Arce, Margot, 57, 151 archive, the and the repertoire. See Taylor, Diana Arreola, Juan José, 113 Ashcroft, Bill, 76 auralgraph, 97, 98 Avant-garde, 12, 13, 28, 34, 45, 62; and Hora Zero, 73–76; Latin American and European, 79–82, 88–91, 104, 107; Magazine, Antenae, 150n4; post-vanguards, 109–13, 117, 125, 136, 140, 141; segunda vanguardia, 13, 111

Barbero, Jesús Martín, 77, 78 Bardanca, Héctor, 142 Barthes, Roland, 109, 110, 150n7; grain of the voice, 8, 149n3 Basoalto, Manuel, 85 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 9, 115, 128 Beat poetry, 13, 111–12, 153n24 Bello, Andrés, 23 Belloc, Barbara, 141, 156n1 Bernedo Morales, Karen, 129 Bernstein, Charles, 61, 140 Betancur, Patricia, 114 Bhaba, Homi, 53 Bial, Henry, 141 Black Atlantic, 61, 66, 69. See also Gilroy, Paul Black Pacific, 12, 67, 69. See also Feldman, Heidi Bourdieu, Pierre, 52, 75 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 61 Bravo, Luis, 119, 124, 155n9, 155n10. Works: Árbol VeloZ, 124; “Hipogrifo,” 124; Tamudando, 124 Brooksbank Jones, Anny, 74, 76, 77 Brun, Josefina, 113 Bulteau, Michel, 136 Butler, Judith, 10, 52

169

170

Camino, Graciela, 122. Works: Lumínile, 122 Camnitzer, Luis, 110, 123 Campa, Román de la, 107 Carbonell, Luis, 55, 143 Carnegie, Charles, 52, 56 Carrera, Arturo, 138, 139 Casa del lago, 113, 135, 156n17 Celis, Pablo, 152n22 Cerna-Bazán, José, 94 Certeau, Michel de, 87, 98, 155n20 Cheveski, Ana, 142 Chueca, Luis Fernando, 84, 126 circulation of poetry: assumptions about, 53; beyond the lettered elite, 45, 64, 77, 82, 137; multimedia means of, 9, 14–15, 111, 140–44; on CDs: 13, 85–86, 122–28, 141 ciudad cantada, 67, 70 ciudad oral, 70 Clayton, Michelle, 88, 91, 92, 94, 101 Concha, Jaime, 88 Córdova, Rojo, 130–36, 156n14. Works: “DosMilMex,” 131–34 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 92 Cosme, Eusebia, 11, 25, 52–67, 77, 139, 151nn5–11; 152n14, 152n16, 152n17 Crisólogo, Roxana, 125–30. Works: ludy d, 125; Poéticas visuales de la resistencia, 126, 128; “Yo era una níña,” 127 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 51, 113. Works: “Hombre necios,” 51 Cureton, Richard, 87 Cursi, 24, 27, 45, 90 Damon, María, 14 Darío, Rubén, 8, 11, 17, 18, 20, 26, 27, 34–42, 44, 46, 92. Works: “Los motivos del lobo,” 26, 38; “Marcha triunfal,” 17, 20, 26–40; “Margarita,” 26, 27, 38; “Salutación del optimista,” 39; “Sonatina,” 8, 26, 27 Décima, 12, 52, 67–71, 74, 76, 77, 143, 152 Declamación, 28, 36, 40–41, 48, 55–57, 64, 78, 138, 150n1; history of, 18–24

·

Index

Declamadores, 8, 11, 17, 25, 28, 47–48, 56–57, 64, 138 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 150n7 di Giorgio, Marosa, 117–25, 155n4. Works: Diadema, 119, 120, 155n4; Historial de las violetas, 120, 122; “La flor de lis,” 120; “Los hongos nacen en el silencio,” 120, 121; Los papeles salvajes, 120, 155n4 dialect, 61, 65 diaspora, African, 55, 60, 65, 77, 152. See also Afro-Latino Dickinson, Emily, 122 Digital technology, 9 Dorfman, Ariel, 82–86, 153 Doudoroff, Michael, 150n2 Drinot, Paulo, 126, 129–30, 155n13 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 65–66. Works: “Little Brown Baby,” 65 Ebron, Paulla, 11, 53 Echevarren, Roberto, Jose Kozer and Jacobo Sefamí. Works: Medusario, 118 Egea, Juan, 104 Eshelman, Clayton, 95–96, 112 Espinosa, César, 114 Estela, Carlos, 142 Feldman, Heidi, 12, 67–69, 77–78. See also Black Pacific Fiol-Matta, Licia, 41 Foucault, Michel, 109–10 Frenk, Margit, 5 Gallo, Rubén, 48–49 Gálvez, Manuel, 28 García, Edmeé, 143 García Márquez, Gabriel, 8 García Velloso, 25 Gardel, Carlos, 29–30 Gauna, Cecilia, 122 Gelman, Juan, 143 Gianuzzi, Valentino and Michael Smith, 95–96 Gilroy, Paul, 61, 66, 69, 152n15. See also Black Atlantic

Index

Ginsberg, Allen, 111. Works: “Howl,” 111 Gioia, Dana, 3, 51 Girondo, Oliverio, 80, 153n1 González, Aníbal, 8, 48, 54, 57, 147 González Echevarría, Roberto, 57 grain of the voice. See Barthes, Roland Grínor, Rojo, 41, 150n11 Grossberg, Lawrence, 46 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 9, 24, 43, 141, 149n4, 150n3 Guevara, Che, 30, 93 Guillén, Nicolás, 13, 27, 54–57, 62, 65, 66, 77, 153n3. Works: “José Ramón Cantaliso,” 62; “Sóngoro cosongo,” 57 Hall, Stuart, 46, 54, 66 Handy, Otis, 152n20 Harawi, 152n21 Harlem Renaissance, 60, 66 Hart, Stephen, 91, 99–101, 154n16. Works: Traspie entre 46 estrellas, 99 Heredia, José Félix, 22 Hernández, Francisco, 135–36, 146 Hirsch, Edward, 4, 5 Hoffman, Tyler, 111 Hora Zero, 73–76, 109, 153n23 Horan, Elizabeth Rosa, 41 Hughes, Langston, 56, 65 hybridity, 46, 53 Icazbalceta, Francisco Monterde García, 24, 25 Il Postino (film), 90. See also Poetry and film Infrarealistas, 113, 153n23 Iñiguez, Dalia, 17, 20, 40, 44, 57 International Poetry Festival, Medellín, Colombia, 115, 116, 124, 143 Jaramillo, Ana Lucía, 20 Jijena Sánchez, Rosalía de, 19, 150n1 Jiménez, José Olivio, 28, 34, 136, 147 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 56 Jiménez, Rosalía, 136 Jrade, Cathy, 149n5 juglares (bards), 19, 76

· 171

Kerouac, Jack, 111, 136 Kittey, Jeffrey and Wlad Gozich, 5 Kuhnheim, Jill S., 142 Kutzinski, Vera, 61, 65–66 La infancia del procedimiento (digital anthology), 141 Las afinidades electivas (digital anthology), 141, 156n1 lector (reader in cigar factories), 6, 7 Le Pera, Alfredo, 30–33 Leal, Luis, 28 lettered city (ciudad letrada); role of poetry in, 7, 8, 70, 78, 107 lettered elite or lettered sphere, 8, 25, 38, 45, 70 Levine, Lawrence, 140 Lewis, Marvin, 67 Lindqvist, Ursula, 105 literacies, alternative or transitional, 6 literatura del cordel, 6 Longo, Teresa, 154 López, Antonio, 56, 152n16 Lorenzano, Sandra, 136. Works: Vestigios, 136 Lucybell, 84–86 Maguire, Emily, 55, 151n3, 152n14 Máncora (film), 93 Manguel, Alberto, 19 Manofalsa editorial, 142 Marciano, 90 Marcone, Jorge, 8 Mariasch, Marina, 118 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 36, 88, 91 Marinero en Tierra (CD), 85, 90 Marinetti, Filipo T., 79–80 Mariñez, Pablo, 67 Martí, José, 7, 13 Martín, Frido, 143. Works: “Mudo,” 143 Marzán, Julio, 151n13 Mathews, Daniel, 67, 70, 77. See also ciudad cantada Mayhew, Jonathan, 154n17 McGann, Jerome, 10 McGuirk, Bernard, 91, 95 Méndez, Liliana, 122

172 ·

mestizaje, 37, 53, 66, 150n9 mestizo, 37, 91; definition of, 152n19 Middleton, Peter, 10, 97, 121 Mignolo, Walter, 6, 153n2 Milton, Cynthia, 126 Mistral, Gabriela, 11, 18, 26, 27, 38, 40–46, 51. Works: “Colofón con cara de excusa,” 42; “Manitas,” 26, 43, 151n13; “Plegaria por el nido,” 26, 42 Modernism, Spanish American (modernismo), 11, 25, 28, 30, 34 36, 40, 45, 46, 60; definition of, 149n5; and modernistas, 27, 29, 35, 38–42; and nuevomundismo, 23, 34 Molina, Juana, 122 Molins, Jaime, 20, 23, 25, 26 Monsiváis, Carlos, 28, 45 Montellano, Bernardo Ortiz de, 150n4 Mora, Tulio, 73, 74, 153n23 “Morenito mío,” 65. See also Dunbar, Paul Mormino, Gary R. and George E. Pozzetta, 7 mulatez, 53, 54 Muñoz, José, 55 nationalism, 35 Nauss Millay, Amy, 8 Negrismo, 54 Neruda, Pablo, 12, 13, 81–88, 90–91, 107–9, 123, 140, 153, 154. Works: “Agua sexual,” 82, 84, 86–88, 90; Canto general, 88–89; “Greetings to the North,” 88; “Poema 20,” 89, 90, 154nn9–11; Residencia en la tierra, 82, 88; Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, 89 Nervo, Amado, 11, 18, 26, 27–34, 42. Works: “El día que me quieras,” 27, 29–32; “Si tú me dices ven,” 29 Nueva canción (new song movement), 13, 110 Ojeda, Marta, 67, 69, 76, 77 Olivera-Williams, María Rosa, 118 Ong, Walter, 5, 6 Onis, Federico de, 56, 68, 61, 151nn7, 9

Index

Oppenheimer, Paul, 36 oral effects in writing, 8, 36, 61, 117, 138 oratory, 21–24, 34–35 orature, 8, 61 Orrego, Antenor, 91, 92, 99, 100 Ortega, Julio, 34, 35, 94, 98, 154n14 Ortiz, Fernando, 24, 53, 56 Padín, Clemente, 114–18, 123, 125, 134. Works: 40 años de performances e intervenciones urbanas, 115; arte correo (mail art), 114; “Homenaje a la Z,” 116; “PAZ=PAN,” 115 Palés Matos, Luis, 11, 52–57, 139. Works: “Falsa canción de baquiné,” 57–61; “Tambores,” 63; Tuntún de pasa y grifería, 54 Paredes Pacho, José Luis, 135. See also Casa del Lago Parra, Nicanor, 13, 85, 109–14, 124, 142, 155n1. Works: Artefactos, 109, 155n1 Paz, Octavio, 112, 113 Peña, Karen, 42, 150n11 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, 89–90 performance: definitions of, 9–10; manifestos, 79–80; as transmediation, 10, 107, 153n8; and voice, 4, 5, 9, 11, 15, 67, 84, 133, 139–40 Perloff, Marjorie, 14, 79 Perlongher, Néstor, 118, 143. Works: “Cadáveres,” 143 Pitas, Jeannine, 122 Poesía en Voz Alta, 113, 135–37, 143 poetry: on CD, 13, 25, 98; concrete, 115, 155n2; and film, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 30, 48–50; Il postino (Neruda), 93–94; and the Internet, 3–4, 12–14, 87, 90–93, 98, 103, 109, 114–15, 123, 125, 131, 136, 140, 155n1; Máncora (Vallejo), 99–101; musicalization of, 13, 29, 78, 87; Nada más que una mujer (Singerman), 90–91; occasional, 25, 39; Songs from the Second Floor (Vallejo), 129, 134, 139, 140, 154n15, 155n19; Traspie entre 46 estrellas (Vallejo), 102–8

Index

postmodern, 30, 76, 77, 115, 130 prose, the rise of, 5 Puig, Manuel, 8 Quasha, George, 137, 138, 144 radio, 11, 12, 23, 48–52, 56, 62, 65, 67, 68, 76, 78, 86, 139 Rama, Ángel, 6, 7, 60, 70, 107 Ramazani, Jahan, 60 Ramos, Julio, 21, 23 Randall, Margaret and Sergio Mondragón, 111. Works: El corno emplumado, 111, 112 Rapp, Jacob, 155n4 Reeves, Daniel, 154n15. Works: Sombra a Sombra, 154n15 recitation: dramatic, 18, 36, 49, 54; and di Giorgio, 119; futurist, 79; and Neruda, 153n6; and theater, 114; valuation of, 22–25; and Vallejo, 92, 100. See also Declamación Roach, Joseph, 8, 61, 152n15 Roca, Rosa, 20, 21, 22 Rodi-Mur, Enrique, 21 Rodríguez-Peralta, Phyllis, 34 Rojo, Grínor, 41, 150n11 Rosenberg, Fernando, 80, 81, 110, 153n2 Rostagno, Irene, 111 Rothenberg, Jerome, 144 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 9, 141, 150n5, 151n1, 151n2 Russell, Dominique, 103 Santa Cruz, Nicomedes, 12, 37, 66–68, 71, 73, 109, 139, 152n20, 152n21. Works: “A cocachos aprendí: la escuelita,” 71; “Ritmos negros del Perú,” 70 Santería, 64, 152n17 Santiváñez, Roger, 143, 156n2 Santos Chocano, José, 11, 18, 26, 27. Works: “Blasón,” 26, 27, 36, 37, 150n8; “Los caballos de los conquistadores,” 26, 27, 35 Schechner, Richard, 124 Schulman, Ivan A. and Evelyn Picón Garfield, 39

· 173

Seiferle, Rebecca, 95, 96 Sendero Luminoso, 129 Sicilia, Javier, 107, 136 Singerman, Berta, 11, 18, 25–27, 47–51, 57. Works: Mis dos vidas, 47–48; Nada más que una mujer (film), 11, 49, 50 Sinta, Mardonio, 135. Works: ¿Quién me quita lo cantado?, 135 slam poetry: origins of, 130–31; 134, 135, 156n14; slameros, 14, 130 Smith, David, 95 Somers-Willett, Susan B.A., 130, 131, 134 Sonnet, 36, 37, 38, 99 Spanish Civil War, 98, 99 Tallet, José Z., 49, 50. Works: “La rumba,” 49, 50 Taylor, Diana; 10, 115, 151n2 Teitelboim, Volodia, 87, 88, 89, 91, 154n10 Terada, Rei, 29 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 61 Tinajero, Araceli, 149n2 Tojolabal poetry, 136 Torres Rotondo, Carlos and José Carlos Yrigoyen, 111, 113 Trabal, Inés, 142. Works: Alloiosis, 142 transculturation, 53, 66 translation: of Dunbar, 65; of Neruda, 82–84, 153n5; of Nervo, 29; as performance, 10; of Vallejo, 95–98, 103, 107, 108; from written to visual, 128 Ulive, Uso, 18 Un chien andalou, 83 Ungar, Roni, 113 Unruh, Vicky, 12, 75, 78, 81 Urbina, Leandro, 41 Urzúa Rosas, Adolfo, 19, 22 Vacarezza, Alberto, 50. Works: “Los pregones de Buenos Aires,” 50 Valis, Nöel, 45

174 ·

Vallejo, César, 10, 12, 13, 73, 81, 82, 91–109, 123, 140, 153n3, 154nn13–18. Works: “España aparta de mí este cáliz,” 98, 106, 154n16; Los heraldos negros, 92, 99, 101, 105; “Masa,” 98, 106; “Pedro Rojas,” 92, 154n17; “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca,” 99, 100; “Poema XXV,” 95, 96, 97; “Traspié entre dos estrellas,” 99, 102, 106; Trilce, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 154n13 Vallejo, Georgette, 99–100 Vanguardia. See Avant-garde Vigo Edgardo, Antonio, 114 Vincenzi, Moisés, 21 von Buelow, Christiane, 91 Wagner, James, 97, 98. See also auralgraph

Index

Walsh, Donald, 83–84, 86, 153n5 Wheeler, Leslie, 125 Williams, Raymond, 73, 118, 124 Wirtz, Kristina, 152n17 Wojciechowski, Gustavo (Maca), 142. Works: Poesía en caja, 142 writing, role in the colonial enterprise, 5 Yauguru Publishing, 142 Yllescas, Edwin and Roberto Cuadra, 112 YouTube, 37, 38, 71, 85, 93, 133, 156n15 Yúdice, George and Toby Miller, 137 Zevallos-Aguilar, Juan, 74, 153n24 Zolov, Eric, 111 Zouroff, Vera, 22, 24, 26, 35, 150n6 Zumthor, Paul, 5, 61

About the Author

Jill S. Kuhnheim is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research has centered on contemporary Latin American literatures and cultures, particularly the genre of poetry. She is the author of two books on Spanish American poetry, Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century: Textual Disruptions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), and Gender, Politics, and Poetry in Twentieth Century Argentina (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). She is also coeditor (with Danny J. Anderson) of a collection of essays on pedagogy and cultural studies, Cultural Studies in the Curriculum: Teaching Latin America (New York: MLA, 2003). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Hispanic Review, Letras femeninas, Hispanic Poetry Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Latin American Theatre Review, Hispamérica, and Modern Fiction Studies. She has served as codirector of a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for college professors on “Critical Approaches to Hispanic Poetry,” is an editor for the poetry of the Río de la Plata for the Library of Congress’s Handbook of Latin American Studies, and has recently published entries on Argentine and Chilean poetry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.