Poetry in J. Goytisolo

Sometimes his more experimental prose is so defiantly violent it is hard to pinpoint.  I have maintained that Makbara is entirely poetic in its distant engagement with orality.

It is also possible to add to the list these lines from the opening of Señas de identidad, which cycle through a few different mediums and thoughts in the same sentence:

lo que de lejos o de cerca huela a anti-español por haber rodado un breve documental de planificación defectuosa y chata pésimamente amalgamado y carente de garbo fotográfico y de poesía no es cosa que pueda extrañarnos acostumbrados como estamos a hechos y actitudes cuya triste reiteración revela el odio impotente de nuestros adversarios cualquiera...

Documentaries, photography and poetry work in connected cycles or spheres here.  The comment about poetry certainly reminds me of what I tried to express to my students: we need poetry.  Each briefly making contact before the sentence churns to another medium.  In spite of the anger and bitterness in Goytisolo, the motor of his prose is always impressive.  It tries to keep up.  The last chapter in Makbara also comes to mind here, "Lectura del espacio en Xemaá-el-Fná", which also maintains insanely persistent prose-locomotives attempting to keep up with the encryption of space into place...

Senyora Carlota de Torres + the Dionysian instrument

As a trombone player, I know this sentence and its feeling (taken from a piece of criticism on Jesús Moncada's Camí de sirga).  It is also, perchance, why trombone players are often found riding unicycles...

For example, the ageing Senyora Carlota de Torres, reminiscing about the celebrations held when the Second Republic was declared in 1931, is haunted by the memory of a trombone which stood out from the rest of the band.

Right.  Trombone players and their axes clownishly make impressions...

Ameztoy evading

Reading through this interview today with the Basque painter, Vicente Ameztoy.  The last question was: "¿Cómo definiría su obra y su trabajo?".  Really a hard question to even answer with a modicum of sincerity.  To which he replies:


No lo sé porque yo la veo de una forma completamente distinta que cualquiera que ve el cuadro desde fuera. Además, supongo que dentro de unos años ya habrá especialistas que se encarguen de calificar mi obra.


I like two things about this response.  The mention of an outside reality, in this case, that of the spectator, is very sincere and present in his painting.  The outside (outside perception, outside the home, outside the polis) is mentioned repeatedly in the interview.  It appears to work as a point of departure for the kinds of intertwining we see between landscapes and humans in his work.  Like this:

Secondly, I always find the evading answer that a team of specialists will soon take over the responsibility of answering what it all means to be humorous -- because it is, on some level, very true.

Nature in major and minor keys

Today I turned back to re-writing an essay on the baroque and J. Talens, thinking about his disordering and dismissal of landscapes and Nature.  While certainly pertaining somewhat to the novísimos movement, Talens reacts differently to the conclusions after the end of la poesía social of the 1950s.  There is the familiar refrain:  “Si la poesía ya no puede hablar del mundo, hablará, al menos, de cómo otros poemas han hablado del mundo” (La coartada meta 56).  This is a two-fold admission on the part of the poet: 1) complete sincerity on the part of lyric poetry appears to be problematic if not impossible 2) However, the lyrical I will continue to bob on the surface of an alyrical sea, through a variety of mouthpieces.  This is the project of many novísimos, in particular Pere Gimferrer and Guillermo Carnero, who delve back into baroque poetry and their topos and voices (in particular ekphrastic poems about Venice).  I have found this crisis of subjectivity and, therefore, of representation is also a crisis of backdrop, place, landscape and Nature.  And the response is not negation, denial and *mere* postmodern irony, but of proliferation, continually churning out landscape even if it no longer appears possible to "order" them.  Hence my interest in these lines from "No es el infierno, es la calle":

¿Qué ibas a hacer, ordenar los paisajes?…

Aquí sólo las cifras crecen y se multiplican.

The Baroque was about proliferation on major and minor scales (cf. Egginton's The Theater of Truth, pulling the terms, obviously, from D&G on Kafka).  I follow Rem Koolhaas to think about space (and what we want to think of as place) in the same manner.

    

Sorting through Catalan with Perejaume

With no formal background in Catalan, I do find that an awareness of surrounding languages (French, Spanish and Portuguese) quite helpful for reading.  And clearly the sense of Perejaume in El paisatge és rodó is one that I am sympathetic to: "La natura entesa com a objecte de l'explotació humana enfront de la natura bella per a ser contemplada és, en gran mesura, un fals dilema pel fet que la contemplació comporta, així mateix, una part d'explotació" (91).  Perejaume goes on discuss the strong link created, maintained and forgotten on our (human part): the landscape is captured or apprehended in sight, given horizons and maintained as place, the stable signifier.  As P. mentions about the capital of Garrotxa, Tal és l'Olot d'Olot.  


The critique of landscape painting as estheticism clearly resonates with Sabadell Artiga's work in land art and installation pieces.     

Nature for poetics or poetics for Nature?

"The poetic real" -- J.V. Foix

Today I was confronted with same important question on a few different fronts.  If a poet does not explicitly engage in an overt concern for the environment as an environmentalist or conservationist, how is it possible to argue that the work is indeed doing good for nonhuman entities?

The question is hugely important for my work right now.  As I see it, following the work of others and in my own readings, the question is a most pertinent one for first wave ecocriticism, which insists on bringing Nature writing back into the forefront of academic research and pedagogy because it is overtly environmentalist, a term to be understood as historically specific, placed-based and nature-obsessed.  As ecological criticism begins to expand outward into other cultural interactions with nonhumans the same esthetic dam does not always hold against the flood (Heise gives a great example of African American conceptions of the rural as an example of this).

My own view, following Morton and U. Heise in particular, maintains that texts can be more provocative if they are implicitly ecological.  That is, they don't issue performative statements proclaiming some position, but rather enter into a certain type of relation with nonhumans.  I usually find this non-position more subtle and productive because it becomes indicative of other positions yet to come.  This might involve a conscious utilization of "Nature" for a poetics.

After being pressed on the question in some helpful comments, I found myself reading a commentary by Perejaume on Joan Brossa: "Let literature come down to earth".  This paragraph and poem come from his marvelous essay:

That literature come down to earth, that both the direction of Brossa's images and the density and weight of the written work lead literature to touch down, presupposes, in effect, at the very least a certain literary conception, a certain earth(l)y conception.  The earth on which Brossa writes, the earth of which Brossa speaks, the earth in which he inscribes himself, is as close and as remote as the closest and the most remote things we can imagine.  The capacity of this earth is enormous, unfathomable, inexpressible.  Brossa embraces, with an exceptional degree of breadth, the obsession with the marvelous and the common sense of reality.  It is for this reason that literature and things are indissociable in his work.  The enigma is totally earthly, manifest, as near and as vast as the earth itself, with no doctrines, with no dogma, to shield it.  And Brossa wanted his literature to be as real as the earth.

And P. gives the following example from B.:

Harlequin I: He crosses a bridge.
Harlequin II: The ruin of a bridge.
H.I. A bridge over the river.
H. II: The bridge has no balustrades.
H. I: The bridge that will serve.  The
H. II: bridges, exactly.
H. I: A bridge curves.
H. II: Over the bridge.
H. I: The bridge a woman sees.

And follows with a great phrase: "everything invokes the strangeness of what is closest, the experience of strangeness, the mysterious suspension that is produced in our understanding by the powerful presence of objects".  

I do not want to suggest, however, that writers how openly identify themselves as part of some ecological/environmental movement are less worthy of discussion.  This is certainly not the case (e.g. my interest in J. Riechmann).  I think it is the case that we are not entirely certain about what this means yet and, as many have pointed out, environmentalism is an ideology historically specific to parts .  To me, this is the exciting part about the work to be done.

José Ángel Valente

This will hopefully mark the beginning of a few different posts on some of my comments after reading and re-reading Los fragmentos de un libro futuro from José Ángel Valente, quite possibly one of the most difficult poets to fascinate me.  (Right alongside, of course Lezama Lima -- indeed, they kept correspondence and read each other's work.)

After surveying the criticism on Valente, I recently confirmed some suspicions with a friend of mine: while there has been attention given to the poet, holes are lurking everywhere in the reading of Valente:

Saber de la palabra perdida, de la palabra que es la transparencia del ser.  Antepalabra o palabra absoluta, todavía sin significación, o donde la significación es pura inminencia, matiz de todas las significaciones posibles: palabra naciente.  Tal es al palabra del claro del bosque.

The careful attention to language (so surprising from a poet) perhaps speaks to the aforementioned lack of (some) critical attention.  There is no overt gesture towards the social poetry of the 1950s, or any other ideological positioning for that matter.  His literary touchstones may also be puzzling to one in search of overt radicality, for example Saint John of the Cross.  Mysticism and christianity appear more overtly than other political shades.

In reference to the above, what is intriguing to me is the disucssion of language as something like a terrain, a comparison like Lacan's the unconscious is like a language  (cf. David Abram).  The claro del bosque (a clearing, also a title of M. Zambrano) is an iteration of the forest around it, but also a glimpse into an isolated moment.  The reference to forests and trees is also surely a reference to Saussure.  Elsewhere Valente writes of Saussure: "Un árbol se esconde en el bosque; una palabra, en las palabras.  "Bajo las palabras del poema está sembrada, distribuida, o diseminada --disjecta membra--otra palabra, un nombre...".  This leads us back to the question of the pure moment in the clearing of the linguistic forest, when is it that we recover or uncover la palabra naciente?

Manifesto coding and decoding

A "manifesto against" is a strange type of manifesto because it delivers an affirmative position from the negation of another.  Sabadell Artiga's "Manifest contra el paisatge" is a warranted negation because it reacts against paisajismo as a symptom of viewing Nature from an entirely human(ized) perspective.  This "act" of viewing works like a freeze frame, stopping the confluence of relations between objects in a pure attempt to evaluate their esthetic "charm".  Under the hypnosis of paisajismo, we are unable to act or comprehend the ecological crisis before us.  I am fascinated by extracting the extremely nonhuman presence in this supposedly humanist act.

As Morton pointed out in a recent talk on his hyperobjects, splicing these freeze frames together with time does not do the trick: "something remains the same" (contra parts of Deleuze's cinematic theory).  And so we have place: the zipping up of horizons from outside interference and, more strangely, internal chattering.  Towards the end of his text, S.A. discusses three types of landscape that need to quietly disappear: paisaje natural (what he provocatively calls "pornografía paisajista), paisaje urbano and paisaje emocional.  These structural categories bring to mind Guatarri's work on The Three Ecologies.  If memory serves, the correlation is almost exact.  There are certainly many challenges in any attempt to make art "against" these structures, but as he states in his "coda finale" "pero las mariposas seguirán voalndo" (Paul Ehrlich dixit).

On J.R.J.

Reading through an unedited version of Ramón Jiménez's La realidad invisible, I fell on this epigraph:

La poesía debe tener una apariencia comprensible, como los fenómenos naturales; como en ellos, su hierro interior debe poder resistir, en una gradación interminable de relativas concesiones, al inquisidor más vocativo.

Interesting here is the artifice (to push this, the edifice) of the poem, like natural phenomena, looks comprehensible.  Yet its gradation, its progression, is its resistance to these outwardly exposed elements. Its inner core, again thinking through Graham Harman is withdrawn even to the most "vocative inquisitor".  Interesting here is the vocativo notion in Spanish as a type of declinación, running in a different direction to the "gradación intermina" of the poem, meaning: our attempts to shout of "hey you"  do receive responses, often enough indicative of stranger meanings and essences.

It seems to me that the second terceto below from La realidad invisible talks about shells, houses and soul casings in a similar.   Strange here is also the hiperbatón that slightly feigns a correlation between alma, cuerpo & casa.  In the first stanza, levante plays between (Levante, identifying Mediterranean atmospherics and the subjunctive of levantar, a rising up).

¡Ay, la blanca tierra,
el silencio, el humo
que al hogar levante!

Ahora, caminando,
es el alma cuerpo,
la casa es el alma.
   ("Fuera")