Table of Contents I. Literature and Revolution II. Portrait and Self portrait: The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the New Worlds V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks VIII. Parra anti Parra IX. Anti-literature X. Antipoetry Chapter 10 - Antipoetry To return to reality, renege on the exquisite, burn the hermetic treasures of exoticism, to speak of humble criollo things, to uncover meter and punctuation, to bring Dario off Olympus and seat him before the fireplace or hang him from a nail in the dining room, as Fernandez Moreno did - none of this is antipoetry. It is antimodernism. And it is what differentiates poets like Pezoe Veliz, Lopez Velarde, Barba Jacob, Basso Maglio, postmodernists all four, and the vanguardists like Huidobro, Borges, Novo, Carrera Andrade, among the first Latin American antipoets; for Pablo de Rokha and Cesar Vallejo the revolution of language in poetry in Spanish is no formal phenomenon; it tries not to re-adapt the language to a new concept of poetry (Creationism). It tries to be done with the poetry that agonizes drowned in words and return to the poet the right to express oneself as a person, not as a barrel-organ nor as a dictionary nor as an air traffic controller (in the down-to-earth manner of the minimalists), return to them the right to conversation, the right to confront society and confront themselves to break what is rotten and breeding in the academies. The right to conversation is begun to be given to Latin American poetry, for example, in Ramon Lopez Velarde (1882-1921), not Lugones, nor Herrera and Reissigni Jose A. Silva, because those came down to the patio of the house, roamed for breakfast or appeared in bed with a certain Latin spirit, classical, popularly patrician. Lopez Velarde takes no part in the conflict planted by Gonzalez Martinez in his celebrated sonnet. It is not of swans or of owls that he wishes to speak. It refers, instead, to his first Agueda: Agueda appeared, resonant of starch, and her eyes of jade and her ruddy cheeks protected me against the awful struggle... I was a boy and knew O from the round, and Agueda who wove tame and perseverant, in the echoing corridor, caused me unknown shivering... (I believe that I even owe her the custom of talking heroically insane about her).(1) First contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets: he narrates. He does not sing, nor does he describe. He explains with irrational reasons, with which he produces a counterpoint, that is, his poetry sounds like prose. The effect is deceiving. Lopez Velarde arms conversation with art and the product is almost handicraft. Not altogether. It cannot be. Second contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets: humor. His is not sarcasm; only tender irony, if irony can be tender. Here is how he addresses "The Gentle Country": Gentle Country: Your worth is in the river of the virtues of your womanhood. Your daughters go forth as in a tale, or distilling an invisible alcohol, dressed in the rays of your sunshine, cross like threaded bottles. Gentle Country: My love is not for the myth but for your truth of blessed bread, as to the girl who nears the gating with the blouse pulled to her ears and the skirt hanging on the little bone. Like the handsome knave, my Country, on a floor of metal, you live till the day of miracle, like the lottery.(2) It is not only the nation that Lopez Velarde softens: he also softens poetry, removing the patterned mold, the crests, the cosmetics and ribbons (the precious stones already removed by other postmodernists), he removes the shoes and socks. He is the delicate disrupter of the turn of the century model. Huidobro would turn it on its head. Lopez Velarde proceeds with a smile on his lips, from afar, without compromising himself. His colloquial tone, quickness and provincial elegance, are more than the swan song for the chorus of Latin American poetry. After Lopez Velarde it will be relatively easy for Salvador Novo to say: "Let the lesser ones come to you" and for Carlos Pellicer to exclaim: "Among all the flowers, ladies and gentlemen, it is the gilded lily that is most hallucinatory."(3) The starch has gone out of poetry, and it begins to open and throw off words, like a globe that quickens. From there to fill itself with another mission, will take years and that mission will be existential, never more rhetorical. In Mexico, with Gorostiza, Octavio Paz, and Montes de Oca, for example. Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) affirms in "Altazor" (1919): I am a savage angel who fell one morning Into your plantations of precepts Poet Antipoet...(4) He says it thinking of his role as royal jester who precedes, giving blows, "the burial of poetry." Altazor distrusts in words Distrusts in ceremonious stratagems And of poetry Traps Traps of light (5) His own epitaph is simple and decisive: "Here lies Vicente, antipoet and magician."(6) What Altazor was this to declare such things? A Dada warrior? An angry standard-bearer of anti-rhetoric? A true creator of a new language? Or the great man who strips poetry nude and exhibits it like a woman getting out of bed? We shall try to define the role of Huidobro to see with a certain clarity the situation of the first antipoetic wave in Latin American literature. Formed in the tradition of Modernism (Ruben Dario will come to say: "between the horizon and your breast will not fit the song of a bird"), Huidobro in his first period controlled a language of the clearest gold-smithing, essentially ornamental, of elevated roots and romantic tone. Nevertheless, he suddenly changed in language, moved by an integral vision of the revolution in European art. He discovered a value in the colors, the internal rhythms, the melancholy of a reality always suggested, never directly expressed, the technical value of the image and the false economy of metaphor. That is to say, he sought the shadow of symbolism to extinguish the tropical light of Dario, cut the world into pieces and reorder it like Cubist calligraphy and the result was the invention of a new rhetoric and a priceless dynamic consisting now not of allusions to the surrounding environment, but of superimpositions, collages of the reality characteristic of his epoch; from there the airplanes, the telegraph wires, the rainbows, planets and cataclysms, the zeppelins and kings without crowns, the silver cowboys, the dehumanization of man. Huidobro came not to bury poetry, but to repair it. He was, in reality, not an antipoet. He himself was anti-descriptive, anti-sentimental, anti-urbanist (in the sense in which Chocano was a super-bricklayer, or Lugones pro-peasant), anti-meter and anti-spelling, all in all; anti-academic and head of a foursome of brilliant poets who wanted to fumigate poetry in Spanish and kill its moths in order to replace them with mechanical butterflies. He recognizes it himself: The new athlete leaps upon the magical field Playing with magnetic words... One must revive language With laughing sounds...(7) Huidobro dazzles and disconcerts the spectator of poetry. Magician. The spectator cannot catch up with the velocity of his images. Huidobro is concerned with "a lovely insanity in the zone of language," an "adventure with the language." He says: While we live let us play The simple sport of naming From the pure word and nothing more Without imagery stripped of jewels...(8) Skilled in scenery. Because he knows that "the pure word and nothing more" will not suffice, and from imagery he will serve a royal plate while he lives. Grounded in the lectures of Bergson, of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, witness to the Armistice and to Dada, known to Picasso and Arp, Huidobro is surely the most characteristic (at the same time, the most brilliant) of the vanguardists of the Spanish tongue and, therefore, the exclamations of "Altazor" are equivalent to the poetic art not only of creationism, but also of ultra-radicalism, stridency, futurism and the other "isms" of the year 20. But let us make a sketch of place. In Argentina, Lugones had offered an approach to reality that he considered rustic. His language, nevertheless, did not correspond to that reality and its image would seem literary, superimposed upon the complex of classical allusions that served as his pedestal. Nor can Macedonio Fernandez or Jorge Luis Borges undo the toil of linguistic polishing nor the use of surprise mechanisms, the inheritance of postmodernist vanguardism. The case of Borges is more serious because he feels an Argentine reality for which he lacks expression; he alludes to it and it surrounds him stylistically but he never manages to speak for it, given that the language of that reality does not correspond to his experience. This, between parentheses, makes us think of Cortazar who, in my judgment, suffers the drama of the searcher for real words who knows where they are and who says them and which destinies they determine, but upon adopting them they sound like the voices of a song. We deal with both cases, that of Borges and that of Cortazar, of writers overfed with culture, tragically disposed to defer to it so as to describe essential acts, the anti-literary signs of an epoch. The inability to prevail in that task gives them greatness. Neither Lugones, then, nor Macedonio Fernandez, nor Borges, will be precursors of an antipoetry; only partisans of a rusticity that, in contrast with Modernism, sounds beautifully real. One needs to read Fernandez Moreno to feel that an antipoetic attitude is not only a literary revolt of a vanguardist nature or a tendency to ugliness, but a proximity to an individual non-transferable human condition. The anti-academic position of Vicente Huidobro, it is worth saying, the abandonment of meter and punctuation, the use of the Bergsonian image instead of metaphor, the tendency toward abstraction from pictorial nature and a transcendent conception of poetry and of art in general, make of him a precursor of a certain aspect of contemporary anti-literature. I refer to what in him there is of formalism: Huidobro cuts to the word for the object it represents, but without committing an essential act so that, on stripping the language of its exterior rhetoric and returning its primordial sentiment, it is given back its authentic reality. As a natural reaction, it is exposed that it comes full of an anti-literary mission. The falsified signs will disappear and the action will appear. The poets will dot their i's and unleash their calligraphy. Huidobro invents words, exclaims beautifully, deep in the emptiness of his riddles. He destroys no poetries. He remains in the middle road of his rebellion. The other half was already run in those years by James Joyce. What was going to stay at the bottom of the language of which Huidobro and the ultra-radicals were capable was a very bitter substance. It required not only magicians, in the style of Huidobro or Borges, to transform itself into antipoetry, but also the Anti-Christ, in the manner of Vallejo or of Rokha. In 1916 Pablo de Rokha (1895-1968) said in his poem entitled "Mood and Form": "Even my days are parts of enormous old furniture." And he adds, by way of conclusion: "The man and the woman have the odor of the tomb."(9) Speaking this way, strictly, directly, De Rokha began to beat upon poetry with an intent that was, after all, close to Lopez Velarde, to Huidobro and his ultra-radicals. Naming was an immediate necessity for him. The noun of animist content, in his case a dreadful passionate content, served for de Rokha in the place of poetic crime. Abusing the concept, proclaiming the infallibility of the image, de Rokha entered chaos via a subconscious path and there where Huidobro was putting up a verse as a luminous warning, he uncovered a sack of immense proportions from which then fell dialectical stones in between baroque explosions that blemished for always the clarities of Chilean neo-romanticism. De Rokha, then, not only entered into Chilean reality from above, from below and from the sides, not only represented the first Surrealist attack in our midst, but also used a language that, suddenly, gave reality to the antipoetic attitude of the vanguardists. De Rokha would say later that he wrote "as a broken half-brain." In truth, he wanted to say that he destroyed rhetoric between us with the only true weapon: the language of a broken humanity and universe, a language not learned, that he carried with him like a birthmark. "U," published in 1927, is a key book to verify what I say. A companion of Huidobro, in the first verse of the poem de Rokha leaves a declaration of creationist faith. Huidobro had said that the poet was a small god and that one should not describe the rose but instead make it bloom in the poem. De Rokha supports that as he can: I perceive the world coming as image, only as image I feel, think, and express in irremediable images... further, I have no conceptual sense... I do not know - I say, do not define - I name, adding to nature.(10) It is a salute to the flag. In the verses that follow, de Rokha proceeds to leave inscriptions which represent direct violence against bourgeois society and against the man accommodated to it. He strips the poetry of all artifice, except one: grandiloquence. To arrive at his inscriptions it is necessary to open the way with the machete and cut explanations, exclamations, repetitions, oratory. What remains is astonishing: with the myth of the beautiful poem overthrown, with the language freed, with the power of the popular idiom and divinitory faculty recognized, not analytical, of conversational tone, with the hybrid value of the eschatological vocabulary accepted, his humor visceral and his social place primitive, there appears an aggressive condemnation of the cultural apparatus in which the man has been castrated. I shall cite certain of the sayings of Pablo de Rokha warning that I have trimmed off the unnecessary, that eloquence in which he frequently drowned. They have punctured the divine tires... In truth, brothers, in truth the hour of the bald things is here, is here, the hour of the bald things say the crucified. Women are a problem with little hairs... Benedict XV ministers with fallen teats over Christendom. The false idiots wet the only walls of the asylum. The spider grows hair and becomes a philosopher. The ocean resounds like a bank filled with the public. Pio Baroja moves the theatre from his belly. The sultan of philosophy is three buttons and a testicle (11) For show, those buttons. Among them there is another language of abstract temperament, extensive philosophical concatenations and metaphysical apostrophes, allusions without apparent order to the great historical cycles and religious systems. De Rokha, like Sabat Ercasty and Armando Vasseur, felt himself to be a cosmic individual, mover of masses, poet-mountain. On that plane he unfolds himself so as to organize his system of images and militantly stick with them and a Marxist position; then, he quits being an antipoet and his task is national reconstruction and revolutionary agitation. His political impetuosity is not always equal to the lively patterns of his antipoetry. De Rokha will continue being a great poet in proportion to the enormity of his demolitions, not for his harangues nor his "slogans." He shall be that too to the degree that he expresses the desolation of his last years: see his monologues over the demise of Winnet. In 1918, a few years before de Rokha would say "they have punctured the divine tires," Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) said from atop Dario's school: "There are hits in life, so strong... I don't know, hits like hatred from above..."(12) Vallejo impersonated God, not like Rokha with a stone in his hand, but as one neighbor to another. Vallejo's eye was strong and moved toward being cruel. He says: I am the blind Sierran who watches through the lens of a wound.(13) In 1916 de Rokha had said "The man and the woman have the odor of the tomb." In 1918, year of the Armistice, Vallejo recomposes his speech: The tomb is still of female sex and attractive to man! (14) Vallejo consistently initiates, systematically, a labor of the trenches into which his life will go. His language, modernist in "The Black Heralds," breaks the conventional logical bonds, and adopts free association of images and follows a bitter tone of conversing with and confronting the false face of the world, spitting on it, hitting it, distorting it. That face, we assume, is the image of a mask that Vallejo wears like his crown of thorns.(15) Such that the process is, at root, self-destruction without rebellion. We have here the difference between Vallejo and de Rokha. The latter destroys from within and never feels sorry for himself, attacks, dynamites, shoots, like a soldier on the ground spraying with shrapnel the area that surrounds him; furious, cruel, de Rokha is an unleashed power, his poetry an automatic pistol from which he emits rounds. Vallejo, on the other hand, proceeds laden with an image of Christ suffering but pious. He goes at Christ's haunches recounting the human miseries in plain, bald, bloodied language, showing his wounds and those of his companion, howling in a low voice, depending on the chaos he produces, not the reverse. Vallejo attacks from beneath, towards the inside, knowing that man, at times, covers humanity when it lies down to die in the open. His poetry is a reflexive act, a stone which Vallejo returns to whoever throws it, be this god or society or man. So many stones are thrown that, at last, they add up, not for sure aim, but as accumulation. Vallejo wraps the commiserating tone in trivial colloquial formulas; it is one of his ways of deflating the poetic globe. He says: A little more consideration insofar as it will be late, early... A little more consideration.(16) We'll see. That is and no more We'll see. It doesn't transcend itself.(17) Sex, mortality, the orders, friendships, the country of origin, the family, in his poetry lose the institutional aspect and sense; they turn into very concrete forms of his suffering, his solitude, his sickness; they are marks on his face and body, wounds and scars. Without ornamentation. For example: I think of your sex... touch the button of speech, ripe in season. That elastic holding the material in. Those buttocks seated high. Today you come I am barely up. The stable is divinely watered and fertilized by the innocent cow. At this my spittle drools, I am a beautiful person... Confidence in many, but not now in one; in the river, never in the current in the stockings, not in the legs and in you alone, in you alone, in you alone. From between my own teeth I emerge steaming, giving voice, pushing, lowering my pants... A cow my stomach, a cow my bowel, Misery picks me from between my own teeth, caught on a stick by the cuff of the shirt. A stone to sit on would there not be for me now? I would like to live forever, escaping the belly, because, as was said and I repeat, so much life and then never! Later, I have washed everything, proud profile, dignified; I have turned to see what gets dirty, I have scraped on what takes me near and have laid out the map that assented or cried, I don't know which.(18) One could add to all this, as a compendium, "The violence of time." This is, then, the antipoetry of Vallejo: a pendulum that, to move, erases itself, a constant negation of the deed at the moment that it strikes blows at man, a contrast between existence and non-existence. It is Vallejo's own mode of self-destruction: to negate the poetry affirming it, to affirm life negating it as consummate sarcasm and bitter brutality. It is the necessary expression of someone who has discovered the mechanisms of the trap and awaits the moment of its springing, reluctant to betray it by hurrying. Nicanor Parra (1914), speaking of traps, conceives the modern world as a monumental sewer for hunting rats and men. Before arriving at that conclusion he says: I laugh behind a chair, my face filling with flies. From his axles man finds the necessary wax to shape the visage of his idols. And from the female the straw and dirt for his temples.(19) That gender and those temples immediately establish the line which unites the antipoetry of Parra and of Vallejo and of de Rokha. To arrive at the conclusion that the world is a sewer, Parra performs a prior ordering and synthesis of vices, crimes, lies, hypocrisies, swindles. He shows everything immobilized and pathetic as in an ancient comedy of errors. The antipoetic line arrives at its highest tension. Parra perfects the precursors of destruction. His talent for synthesis, unequaled in contemporary antipoetry, permits him to define human anguish in the exact measure of our inefficacy and impotence. Parra controls an everyday language mixed with pedagogical formulas and sentences from popular parlance; it is his warhorse, the same one used by the anonymous voice who when talking reveals desperation. His antipoetry is the poetry of the insurance salesman, of the grade school teacher, or the traffic cop, unionist or secretary, dentist, captain of the army, theatre attendant, school inspector, zoo administrator, that is, the poetry of respectable and honest people complaining naked beneath the sheets with as much right as the bard of long ago who lamented crowned with laurel above the sheets. Like Breton, Parra too speaks of a violent coupling that, joining obscurity and clarity, will produce antipoetry. Parra needs clarity to provide a concrete image, not wholly logical, although sufficiently rational, but more absurd and eccentric, of the human condition. That image contains hidden a strong sense of sin, of failure and emptiness. Its expression is sarcastic, full of a rage which does not become blows, but instead is gestures, voices, movements, and it remains in the air, threatening yet useless. The antipoet returns to process the disorganization that surrounds him and give form to society with an arbitrary order. This permits him or her to reduce the world to the absurd. I do not know if Parra may have foreseen that his most recriminating and expository antipoems, with time, have become immobile and are like posters stuck on certain wall in central homes, forums and public libraries. They turned in the four winds and determined their deposit. They settled down. Like good wines, these are navigated poems. I refer to "The Snake," "The Trap," "The Vices of the Modern World," "The Tables," "Soliloquy of the Individual." Extensive and transcendent expositions of chaos. Afterwards, Parra had had to take antipoetry to his extremes, converting his speeches into axioms; key phrases that represent the direct objectification of the philosophical absurd and of social anarchy. He has arrived, then, at a muralistic poetry, a true mural poetry, not that subtlety that the radicals pasted on the walls of the great city, but instead an activist poetry that violently writes on the wall in a mood of confrontation. Our equivalent to the wall inscriptions of the May Revolution in Paris. Parra calls them "Artifacts." He says, for example: "In the United States liberty is a statue." It could have been written with chalk on a wall in Berkeley. If in his antipoems Parra held to a line of sarcasm, frontal attack on the bourgeois establishment and demolition of institutions, in his "Artifacts" he removes all elements of eloquence, all vocal trickery, all suspicion of rhetoric and didacticism, and is left with those phrases that represent the nude body of poetry, those words of stone, pure, torn by the roots from the literature and re-incorporated in the common language, that one which gives the true idea of existence and not the idea of existence that the writer decrees and adorns so as to fabricate their own deception and the deception of the naive and the swindlers. I insist that Parra isolates and burns the bridges and fills the moats behind himself. The circle of chalk is now a circle of fire. Within his poetry Parra is like a frantic woodsman, hatchet in hand, cutting away and destroying the tree of life to its last vestige. There is becoming little left. Stumps and smoke and sticks. Scarcely. While he continues to sharpen his hatchet blade. He had never been so alone, as when other antipoets from all over appeared and extended their arms. "Thick Work" (1969) suggests a beginning, a first stage in construction, but in reality it refers to the pavement, the mix, the nails, the sticks and the cardboard that spin after the catastrophe. The carpenter is ready, hammer in hand, to pound spikes like heads. In the expository tradition of antipoetry (yes, I believe there is that tradition), the inclined plane where humanity opens and extends like a leather fur on the floor, they mark the holes and put on a loincloth to hold back the blood, Nicanor Parra headed on a definite course. I think that Gonzalo Rojas, Cesar Fernandez Moreno, Ernesto Cardenal and Roque Dalton, among others, undoubtedly accompany him. Gonzalo Rojas (1917) was brought up in the Madragon's surrealism alongside Braulio Arenas, Teofilo Cid, Jorge Caceres, Enrique Gomez Correa. Already in 1948, when his book appears, "Man's Misery," it is evident that Rojas does not want to fight only with the white arms of Chilean surrealism: chaotic enumeration, the disintegrative act, the cumulative process of an decorative anguish. He attacks, instead, certain basic aspects of the human condition with arms characteristic of antipoetry: the sudden shift, the secret phrase, sarcasm, the formulas of dogmatic ratiocination. His parentage with Parra is clear. Perhaps it stems from a common devotion to Vallejo. But those would be distant parents. It treats more likely a fury and a desperation which grow together and which are ended by separating them. Both strike at the old door of the bourgeois home and they strike not to open it, but to throw it down. They are ferocious destroyers of the institutional. They deal in an erotic, essentially aggressive "machismo." Parra presents it with irony and takes it to the limits of cruelty. Rojas wraps it in bags of seminal cargo. The differences between Parra and Rojas are important. Parra is schematic and possesses a cyclical sense of form; his perfection is circular; his proceeding is always allusive and, from there, comes his brilliant consciousness of reality; with his power of synthesis he acquires an expression that is broader and, at the same time, more complete than that of Rojas. In Parra's antipoems one notices a tidy conception of the world (neatly critical) and a firm consciousness of mankind's limits. Rojas, on the other hand, does not but outflanks his building; he overflows it. Form is not his fundamental preoccupation, but the idea and its reverberation, like sunlight upon reality at noon. Rojas squeezes the poetic object, concentrates it in search of the seed and later opens it, extends it, shakes out consequences. Parra is a social critic. Rojas is precisely lyrical and transcendent; he does not shine, but instead illuminates continually. He is friend of definitions and in them finds that most provocative in his antipoetry. Let us see. May those that know know what they can know and those who are asleep may they still sleep. Between one sheet and another or, even more quickly than that, in a snap, we became nude and leaped into the air already ugly and old, without wings, with the wrinkles of the earth. Dylan Thomas: the star of alcohol shines for us to see what we bet, and lost. Mortal, mortal error for anyone to do this being born; we are hunger. One is here without knowing they are not, causing them to laugh at having entered that delirious game. God is no good for me. Nothing for me is any good for anything. They speak of a god or they speak of history. I laugh at having to go so far for an explanation of the hunger which devours me. I am, then, the dog that divines the future: I profess. Take out the deceased. It is time to take away the body that grew beneath the skin like a wounding vice!(20) Rojas is narrative, exclamatory, irreverent, close to women upon a mortal floor, following the path of a fly and chaining his thoughts in a series with muralistic impact. Examples: Now in the light and in the speed, and their soul is a fly that buzzes in the ears of the newly born. Cosmonauts, advise us if that star is real, or is also a line in the farce. Not to confound the grubs with the stars: Oh the old record player of the sophists. They kill, kill poets to study them. They eat, continue eating through bibliography. Books and books, books unto the clouds, but poetry is written alone. It is written with the teeth, with the danger, with the terrible truth of each thing.(21) A poem like "Why Should We Lie?" is already a decisive proclamation to surround Rojas' final intention. Just as in Parra's "Vices of the Modern World," who covers and researches the deeds of mankind and is left for dessert with a spot on the tie, so Rojas views humanity with an incessant, heavy, bleeding, sad headlong fall toward the coffin, a sort of silent cinema, accelerated, infinitely repeated. To say it with anguished sonority, with defiant sarcasm, is the mark of his antipoetry. Rojas witnesses the act of his destruction as an individual being; he does not destroy with his own hand. There is in his poetry a permanence that is not the effect of the words, yet instead of the movement that he gives them around his desperation and his solitude. The antipoetry of Cesar Fernandez Moreno (1919) contrasts with the sacred and blasphemous oratory that is continued from Pablo de Rokha to Gonzalo Rojas. Fernandez Moreno, although rendering homage to his father and to Vallejo, fires, avoids everything that could demoralize him: reflection as much as pronouncements. He speaks with extreme velocity in a sort of agitated monologue of one who recounts the film and, recounting it, contradicts it, gets it wrong, reversed, advanced with flying commentaries. To be the antipoet that he is, Fernandez Moreno had to change his biography and the history of his nation. When he lost respect for Argentina (with love, man, with love) he gave it to himself. He says: You have seen how many great-great-grandmothers one has - I accuse seven Spaniards, six natives and three French, the match will end thus Hispano-argentine combination, 13, French, three.(22) From Paris, that is to say, from where come the well-born children hanging from their carriages, Fernandez Moreno leaps with nonchalance: Because neither my brothers nor Buenos Aires were here they brought me from Europe, they brought me in pieces.(23) Thus I am in any case Spanish French Indian who knows soldier peasant merchant poet "quizas" rich poor of every and no class and yet am Argentine.(24) Fernandez Moreno in search of a place of origin. Hurriedly. Because Argentina unites and divides. "Hey, of what Argentina do you tell me?" Of the limits: our limits already ceased to be limits they are questions of limits to the west the question of the Chileans a type of Argentine furious with themselves.(25) To the east the question started with Brazil who took the colony who took from you the colony a question of a haircut.(26) About Patagonia: The only sure thing is that Patagonia sounds like "pata."(27) ...from Patagonia only the gas matters an endless eruption of gas that Buenos Aires turns pure.(28) Of the Mar del Plata river: nevertheless they call it silver as often the silver sea as the silver river just as with this so Argentine republic what a metallic obsession, my lord (29) From the Atlantic that bathes us: 70,000 kilometers of coast and no restaurant with a view of the sea.(30) Of our human quality: somehow we always lose the final against the most developed rivals god is native but the arbiters are foreign (31) Fernandez Moreno describes the place before the tourist takes the photograph and the military geographers print the maps, in his domestic portion of chaos, beyond the monuments and boulevards, beyond stadiums and beaches, beyond casinos and quarters. Add Gardel, put down tangos and soccer and meat, mountain range, prairies and Argentinians forever. His roll of film is always accelerated and is never over. He snarls it, jumps scenes, swats it, but it continues--how can it continue--with the voice of the neighborhoods, the retinue at the beck and call of the travelers, the Frenchified and the cineasts, the commanding voices of the generals and the subordinates (as he himself says), the slow solitude of the truckers and the final wreck of the cyclists. His antipoetry is a bazaar. It is also a pianola and a biography of the barrio. Sired close to the novelists; with Sabato and Cortazar. How he endeavors to change the sound of the language: forgive if I speak to you disoriented thus the ice ices my tongue yet I keep on uttering that the Malvinos are Argentine as they taught me in school (32) let us sing in the world's jails the Falklands are British (33) Just as Sabato is always in the track, the hearing ready to hear pulses the breadth and the length of the country which still does not awaken. Fernandez Moreno fights this. The political line runs through his antipoetry like a subterranean train that, in moments of crisis, departs and blows its horn in the open stations. Nothing of formulas nor of passwords. Only exclamations, one like another propaganda mural, remembrances of the Spanish Civil War, of Peronism and vague plans for the moment of truth. But always a voice, a tone throughout the poems and antipoems, a pair, firm, remembering certain anniversaries of long ago, some names and the hands of the people in the process of lifting itself. This voice never grandstands, on the contrary, when most serious, least eloquent, when most emotional, most terse, hard and abrupt. Fernandez Moreno thinks within the chaos that he goes creating. That could situate him on the less exposed wing of antipoetry. But his penitences carry force and point. He says: I want to marry a young lady with legs crossed in a perfect cross where I remain trapped between two stockings that soon end.(34) This young lady multiplies geographically and erotically. Antipoetry remembers her in cafes, in taxis, in theaters, restaurants and multifaceted beds. Not frantically, but instead in cubist foldings, where to each image there corresponds a hat, a glove, a purse, a stocking, but always the same belly and the same rubber ring that opens and closes unhurriedly, with authority and dominion. He says: I walked along the main road mixing in with the princesses of my youth pot-bellied drunks.(35) It turns me toward suicide every wrinkle on that grown woman (36) The Argentine antipoetry, as with other Latin American countries, quickens the pace in recent years seeking the vanguard where it will carry out its final attack. From the "cinema" of Fernandez Moreno there remains, at times, the speed, but not the control of the voice. The verses fall now like bricks into the water. The anguish is more immediate: it comes from a very real incarceration, very much at hand, of a miserable village or a disaster, of an obligatory exile. The revolt is neither announced nor analyzed: it is produced. The language of solitude is the same as that of the indebted family, the prisoner, the striker, the wounded on Public Assistance; we do not have a literature that is transformed into memory; it is immediate reportage, with hair and expression. What is curious is that the voice sounds like a chorus from one side of the earth to the other. The demolition noise is universal and the dust still floating covers the sun. The walls of the Paris May appear in Mexico. The writing is unmistakable. They also write on the ground. From outside it one can follow this movement through key publications: "The Gold Bug" in Argentina, "The Feathered Horn" in Mexico, "G. B." in Sausalito, "Kayak" in San Francisco, "The Painted Bird" in San Salvador, "The Belly of the Whale" in Venezuela, "Fire" in London. In 1965, awarding the work "Mortal Hearsay," by Victor Garcia Robles, winner the the House of the Americas Contest, Nicanor Parra said the following: Opening the envelope it was seen with astonishment that the author is an almost adolescent youth, apparently unpublished in his own country, Argentina. And recalling that the other two favored poets, Jitrik and Szpunberg, are also youths of the same nationality we should recognize that something important is happening in the new Argentine poetry, whose immediate objectives would seem to consist of the synthesis of the popular and the erudite, the native and the foreign, the personal and the collective.(37) Parra, between the lines, sees a prolongation of his antipoetic line. In reality, Jitrik, Szpunberg and Garcia Robles share the tendency towards newsreel, but they add to it the destructive system of Parra and, as such, put a hole in the boat wherein they sail. The fury comes like the shells of barreled wine: immobile, impure, absorbing, mortal. No unnecessary expenditure on munitions. The rope is only long enough to reach the hanged. The antipoets come directly from the disorder or from the outskirts. The fierce mark is not a tattoo, was left there by infancy, perfected by adolescence. It was a gift from the father and the mother to hang up the whole family. When one thinks of Cortazar and appreciates the humor he lends to the popular language, and thinks of Borges, who lends it everything, one sees that these youths provide nothing: they say something and the noise of teeth and of tongues has the same sharpness, the ferocious sarcasm and the beaten tenderness of the language of the house in which they were born. See this self-portrait of Garcia Robles, for example: I never got off cheap: the clothing full of shadows the coins dusty. Never a drop for me; the time sold to the devil, laughter pawned in a thousand terrible jokes. It was always my part to dance with the most painted monkey: the tenderness won at blows, the heart eaten by dogs. Yes, it seems a lie: the more I look, the more darkness I find. The more I descend through the deep days, the more stones I have. It is not something to joke about...(38) There is something that sounds like Vallejo, not coincidentally; it is wheat from the same field, plea presented to the same god, body broken in the same joints. Garcia Robles hits. He strikes hard. If some pain overwhelms, dizzies you, take crying the burning of your bones, cloud over, seasonally rain, thunder, but do not forget that the pain no is no more than pain out of season, that one storm does not make a summer, here or anywhere else.(39) Then I saw the bourgeois arrive: -O, old friend, you belong to us, we have given you food year after year and educated with care your evanescent culture, and with respect we have ironed the implacable lapels of your suit, we the happy ones, happiest of parties we party seated with a plastic napkin on the ass, ten rings and the deadly foxtrot one finger short of the void, we sing like buttery eunuchs celebrating ashes, we sing celebrating our contemptible lucha for vida.(40) The light that Garcia Robles seeks he finds slicing to shreds the great sacred shadows of his neighborhood. He sticks to the everyday pattern where the neighbors come together to pick over the bones of the student. But where he strikes true longings and draws responses is in his poem, "Know what happens with live tears and bad words." The title is an exact summary of the poem: a counterpoint of tears and insults. It gives me a sense of how the new generation feels when it runs throwing accusations in front of embassies and imperialist companies, tearing trees and stands from the plazas, breaking lampposts, crying and stinging from the tear gas, to end in a police barracks beneath a rain of clubs. The race through the city streets is called impotence. The discourse before the newsstand draws tears. The sentry of order listens with a club in his hand. Does the country cause you pain, young man? This blow should hurt you more. With little bombs for us? So says the oilman, the broker, the importer, the wheat lord and the cold lumberman. Take this little taste of napalm under consideration. You could. The young antipoet then says: Yesterday while I wrote another poem tears fell from my eyes you know, they fell like a quarrel, I heard inside my head the soccer ball kicks, the shouts of the ardent fans, even while I was writing a poem I put my hands in my pockets looking for the last peso, the tears fell which hurt me, while I thought of the railway strike, the mobilization, the rise of the dollar...(41) but the radio tells us: -Agrarian reform was approved-, and the radio gives the names of the political prisoners, the radio tells us who killed Satanowsky and Ingalinella, the radio tells us a load, sticks in boleros and questions and answers, the papers are the same, what the heck good are the papers, they focus on the east, they focus on the west. the magazines distract us with various old tales.(42) They name what they must: the miserable villages, and Loeb, Shell, Standard Oil, the aircraft carriers, the liberating Revolution and draw their conclusions. What is happening, they say, is that they are "butchering" the country: They are so many sons of a great whore who laugh at the son and at the earth, at loves, at happiness, at the black depths of the plowed fields, at the necessary wheat, for bread and barbecues, they do not care about the hands of the women and the infants, the babies, for shame! nor the dark hands of work... They are so many suits who love no one, who have not blood, who will be repaid one of these days.(43) "Atenti Springtime" clearly establishes the orbit of this antipoetry; Garcia Robles does not accept being alone, does not shut himself off to snip at his patterned stitching nor to prepare a hole nor search for lime. On the contrary, his antipoetry grows like a plant in a great neighborhood garden. It needs a springtime without disasters, without downpours, selective, revolutionary; not just any that "exposes both the victim and the executioner," that arrives by Cadillac to the meticulous picnic. It will be the people's springtime, a "Sunday that lasts for months": Fertile proletariat, you have to be our lovely word, you have to be our best smile, you have to be, sister, companion, our best grounds for happiness! (44) As a result, it seems that in this case antipoetry strips away poetry to describe a new way of speaking to man of justice and of caring, the way that the virtuosos had seduced, undressed, violated and buried; not a new way, therefore, yet instead the only true one, reborn. This makes me think of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925), who work is one of the most direct and violently anti-rhetorical expressions that I know. Cardenal not only has disarmed the precious idiom of the modernist and post-modernist Central Americans, he also did away with the myth of the creative image, unearthed metaphor, incorporated the popular way of speaking. His symbols arch like a dark curve seeking the indigenous past. On the immediate level one could believe that those symbols function in his antipoetry like the Mayan allusions of Asturias. Error. Asturias' references are mythological and occult; the asseverations of Cardenal are contemporary, social and political. Not even in his master poem, "Dubious Straits" (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1966), where the historical and the geographical are interwoven at times in surrealist trances and where there are frequent mystical lapses and brief visions, like light signals upon a lake, Cardenal loses sight of the immediate mood stretching like a trap at his feet. Jose Coronel Urtecho, presenting this book, says: Leaving aside the allusions and the symbols relating to realities mentioned there, especially the symbolic opposition of earth and water in the road or way to Cathay and province of Mango, where we find the Heavenly City--the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal is voluntarily opposed to all types of symbolism, true with austerity to the immediate exterior reality, or as he himself likes to say, an exteriorist poetry.(45) Coronel Urtecho leaves it without saying something of most importance: that "exteriorism" is never decorative, nor even is pictorial (as an objective image or reality), serves not to place each thing in its place, but instead totally the contrary: its dynamism derives from the disorder which carries the real world, from the absurd and the anger that serves as its ground and, above all, from the essential love of life and of man which comprise his transcendent trap. Cardenal is a harsh and dissonant antipoet who tries to ignite the prosaic with an internal call in order to provoke other fires around him; he is a namer of things and beings, confounder of history, transmuter, revolver. He acts with impetuous revolutionary force. His best lines are barbs directed at those who accost him and dirty the life on his solitary island; imperialism, fascist barbarism, military dictatorship, the Coca-Cola and the face adorned with knives and beads. He has the bitter hardness of Brother Antoninus, the Beat North American priest, but whereas he insists on doing God's writing through trances and twists his expression in search of a violent beauty, Cardenal discovers a truth in the material that will not necessarily be beautiful but which is transcendent beneath the breath of the common man. That is the root of his antipoetry. Cardenal, therefore, like the Argentinian, Colombian (I refer to nihilists like J. Mario--see his poem "Mr. T. S. Eliot has died, etc." in "The Feathered Horn," no.17, Jan. 1966, p.47), Venezuelan, Salvadorean, and Cuban, combat on the plane of the social revolution with weapons conquered in the anti-literary revolution; they use antipoetry to unmask, attack, purify. Thence the importance attained by poems in his work like "Mouse from a Cartoon" and, particularly, "Kayanerenhkowa."(46) In the first of these he says: The singing men are dispersed. The jaguars have been decorated. Military Juntas on mountains of skulls and buzzards eating eyes The sacrifice-by-removing-human-hearts dictator Miss Guatemala assassinated by the "White Hand" And I came to address United Fruit Co., came to address the little man, the widow, the miserable. They have eaten Quetzal, have eaten him fried. Have not we been disgraced enough yet? We govern to return the money to the people so they said And do you know perhaps of our holidays, of the stars? the Calendar like refuse. In "Kayenerenhkowa," the allusion is less direct, but his social intention is unequivocal: The cormorant comes from Michigan to Solentiname here they call it pig-duck. Yes, like the airplanes. The plane from New York above these solitudes. Perhaps viewing a film in color ME AND THEM IN PARIS with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh above Solentiname. And they keep flying in a V the Canadian ducks Will they come from Lake Ontario? Stay. The lake calm. Of the soul. And an autumn moon. Sept. 25th. The first pelicans, three, near La Venada flying close to the water. Tanagers from Ohio. From Kentucky. Like the letter from Merton on Tuesday. And the Kennedy Airport so close to Solentiname. A radio on an island in the Caribbean Indies. (Saba brought me oranges) We all shall eat from the same plate a local meat. Suddenly in the woods a bonfire, loads shifting between the fire and the shadow, and the shadows shifting tan-tan, tan-tan, red tattoos redder now that the constellation rises, om. also children and dogs jumping girls with shells, with wampum. Ah om. The blaze extinguishes. They left. And were never seen again in history. Antipoetry in the service of the revolution: in this enterprise, alongside Cardenal, is Roque Dalton, the Salvadorean who has done the greater part of his work in Mexico and in Cuba. In his first books Dalton moves among surrealist roots searching for luminosities and rhythms in familiar, regional, everyday allusions. The tone of voice possesses a noble, tragic quality. The image disarms, sets countries, persons, schools, churches spinning; a youthful tenderness seeks the abuse, as in the antipoetry of Vallejo, and receives it so as to continue offering itself. Dalton's ascent awakens echoes of other poetic worlds in which the adolescent seeks his nocturnal sunlight. It reminds me of the early poetry of the Chilean Enrique Lihn. In any event, Dalto later adopts the imagist net, Gothic, and he covers it--not destroys it--with a social indictment as strong and aggressive as that of Cardenal. His revolutionary student experience, his prisoners and exiles, his young women who shared the clandestine movement in the Americas and Europe, the familiar ground, the faces of colonels and cops, the green banana Mafia, the siege of imperialist rifles in Santo Domingo, are mingled in his antipoetry and what it Mexico would be a plain youthful ballad (47) is at once converted to an imprecation, cry, expectation of a great battle that approaches. From Cuba, Dalton combines nationhood with choleric voices: Dispersed nation: you fall like a poison wafer into my hours. Who are you, full of loves like the dog who scratches on the same trees where he pees? Who carried your symbols, your gestures of service smelling of mahogany, knowing you demolished by drunken babble? He recounts history as a polluted well: Hernan Cortes was an irritable syphilitic stinking of raw leather in his moments of leisure avenger of his thugs in each Mayan astronomer whose eyes he ordered out. A man dressed in loose fatigues and odors of the fine outcome of the bitter wine...(48) History is a well full of marginal types who came like earthquakes or orangutans with torches to be included next to the big blue lakes with lung disease spas and block the shapes of the statuary and the background mountains of little wise, intriguing prostitutes who make one forget the prairie heartbreaks the demise of quiet woods of dusty and dull towns that hide in their scent the presence of the sea.(49) He addresses his god with the cynical, tired, compassionate voice of the antipoets: Of course that is the way it is, buddy. My god created man in his image and in his resemblance. But He created him on Saturday, reeling from impotent drunkenness and when his image took on an excessive aspect. That is why we have tears, a propensity to hate and other tracks for thirst and love. Which is humbling, buddy, humbling.(50) Dalton focuses on the buzzing, worships Vallejo and crucifies him in an implacable self-portrait pierced by an arrow next to the bloody visages of his parents.(51) Reading Dalton, Cardenal, Garcia Robles, Fernandez Moreno, Rojas, Parra, thinking of de Rokha and Vallejo, one begins to draw their conclusions: antipoetry, which has been an anarchic activity, an anti-rhetorical mantle, appeared with a direct and violent language and began to return mankind to the reality it had lost, not piecemeal, like market theft, but instead all at once. The internal violence became an attack on and punishment of contemporary society, the anguished metaphysic of a confrontation between neighbor and neighbor, as they say "vis a vis," with a god who they consider preoccupied, enclosed, on the point of perishing beneath the assault along with subjects and objects in revolt; the father has returned seeking the son's wife, who hides her; the woman closed as a tomb, toiling in a pile of certificates and testaments. The fly buzzes around the scene of the crime. These are, then, the keys to antipoetry in its first phases, its coat of arms. God on one side of the shield, whose work is reviewed in light of the familiar defeats, without any decoration, alone in the scene, friendly and feeling distraught, as when speaking to a drunken friend; on the other side, the Mosca that already did away with the angels and the swans. So then, the most recent antipoetry, that which follows the Cuban Revolution, introduces certain operational changes into the system of violence: the fly does not disappear, but is a sign of the bourgeois pestilence and of international flight; the duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution; the divine comes down from the cross and gets on his motorcycle and sings, smokes the good herb gilded in Acapulco, amuses his girlfriends, confronts the police. The violence is turned against the imperialist establishment, against the local thieves, against the neo-Fascist cartel, against the embargo on conscience, and for agrarian reform. The Third World has been born. From the surrealist dawn antipoetry has come carrying tools and the components of a time bomb. Meanwhile the time of Molotov cocktails augmented. The antipoets end by negating their own selves, they become emblems of one country or another, they take the crossbar off the door; along the street is coming their revolution. Notes 1 Citation from "La Poesia Hispanoamicana" by E. Florit and J. O. Jimenez, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968, pp.190-91. 2 Ibid, p.194. 3 Ibid. p.334. 4 "Altazor," Santiago Chile: Cruz del Sur Press, 1949, p.31. All the citations are from the same edition. 5 Ibid., p.40. 6 Ibid., p.72. 7 Ibid., p.57. 8 Ibid., p.58. 9 Cite from "Antologia, 1916-1953," Santiago, Chile: Multitud, 1954, p.9. 10 "U," 1927: p.62. 11 Ibid., pp.63-65,67-68,71,75. 12 Quote from "Complete Poems, 1918-1938, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2d ed., 1949, p.23. 13 Ibid., p.50. 14 Ibid., p.61. 15 To Vallejo Borges' poem, "Self-portrait" applies well. 16 Ibid., p.85. 17 Ibid., p.88. 18 Ibid., pp.94,98,99,107,153,158,161,169. 19 "Poems and Antipoems," Santiago Chile: Nascimento, 1954, pp.78,141. 20 "Against Mortality," Santiago Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1964, pp.14,15,16,17,25,26,32,34. The title of this work that absorbs the essence of Rojas' first book, "Man's Misery," shows that the poet remains true to his roots: "Against Mortality" is a subtitle of Andre Breton's in the first "Surrealist Manifesto" (1924); and Vallejo, in "Spain remove from me this chalice" says: Only mortality with perish! Volunteers--for the good, for the living. Defeat defeat! 21 Ibid., pp.23,47,51,53. 22 My citations from "Argentina to the End" are from: "Line Anthology of Argentine Poetry," Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1968, p.361. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p.364. 25 C. F. M., "The Airports," Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967, p.130. 26 Ibid., p.131. 27 Ibid., p.133. 28 Ibid., p.158. 29 Ibid., p.135. 30 Ibid., p.136. 31 Ibid., p.156. 32 Ibid., p.133. 33 Ibid., p.134. 34 Ibid., p.23. 35 Ibid., p.30. 36 Ibid., p.63. 37 Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1965. 38 Ibid., p.41. 39 Ibid., p.37. 40 Ibid., p.171-2. 41 Ibid., p.135. 42 Ibid., p.137. 43 Ibid., p.142-3. 44 Ibid., p.194. 45 Ibid., p.25. 46 "The Feathered Horn," nos.24 and 28, Oct. 1967, Oct. 1968, pp. 26 and 96. 47 "The window in the face," 1961. 48 Ibid., p.85. 49 Ibid., p.92. 50 Ibid., p.121. 51 See pp.90, 99, 116, 166.