Ivonne Gordon (Quito, Ecuador, 1958)
Álvaro Mata Guillé (San José, Costa Rica, 1965)
Enrique Solinas (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969)
Mario Meléndez (Linares, Chile, 1971)
Néstor E. Rodríguez (La Romana, Dominican Republic, 1971)
Paura Rodríguez Leytón (La Paz, Bolivia 1973)
Federico Díaz-Granados (Bogotá, Colombia, 1974)
Claudia Magliano (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1974)
Shirley Villalba (Coronel Oviedo, Paraguay, 1974)
Harold Alva (Piura, Perú, 1978)
Gema Santamaría (Managua, Nicaragua, 1979)
Claudia Meyer (San Salvador, El Salvador, 1980)
Jamila Medina Ríos (Holguín, Cuba, 1981)
Mariela Cordero (Valencia, Venezuela, 1985)
Gustavo Osorio de Ita (Puebla, México, 1986)
Zaira Pacheco (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1987)
In the late 19th century, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío revolutionized Spanish letters such that his innovations reverberated throughout the continent and across the waters back to Spain. If the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge brought together both the high literary tradition (in the lyrical) and the popular (in the ballads), if their mix of refined sentiment and everyday language, and if their placement of individual experience at the center of lyrical poetry transformed and altered English verse in ways that are still with us, Darío had a similar effect. He shook the Spanish literary tradition to its very core and opened it up to influences from across Europe, on the one hand, and from the breadth of the Spanish literary tradition, on the other, both the foreign (specifically the French in Azul) and the deep historical modes and genres already present in Spanish (in Prosas profanas) were brought together in his work. This union sparked a fire that turned into a continent-wide conflagration once the Avant Garde revolutions took off. These revolutions–Creacionismo, Ultraísmo, Estridentismo, and others–, in turn, helped develop various national traditions that found ways to merge aspects of the more cosmopolitan Avant Garde with the local.
English language readers know the figureheads of some of these national traditions better than others: Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and maybe Nicanor Parra. At times, they might know a woman poet, as well: maybe Alejandra Pizarnik, Claribel Alegría, Nancy Morejón, or Coral Bracho, maybe Gabriela Mistral. But even Mistral, the first Latin American poet to win the Nobel Prize for literature, is more known for having been a pedagogue and for whether or not she was a lonely spinster than for her poetry. At one time US readers might have known the Salvadoran Roque Dalton and the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, but this would have been more for being revolutionaries than poets. There are countless others who have yet to gain the attention they deserve. Any list is going to be incomplete–yet, from Mexico there is Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia, Rosario Castellanos; from Argentina, Roberto Juarroz, Juan Gelman, Olga Orozco; from Chile, Enrique Lhin, Gonzalo Rojas, Pablo de Rokha; from Uruguay, Amanda Berenguer, Cristina Peri Rossi, Ida Vitale; from Colombia, Álvaro Mutis, Jorge Gaitán, Piedad Bonet; from the Dominican Republic, Pedro Mir, Manuel del Cabral, Manuel Rueda. I have barely scratched the surface and failed to include poets, like Jorge Carrera Andrade, Jaime Sáenz, Eunice Odio, José Lezama Lima, and Blanca Varela, among many others whom contemporary Latin American poets would consider part of their canon.
Latin American poets are avid readers of each other, and not just each other, but also of World Literature in a way that tends to make me feel a little embarrassed by readers and writers in the US. When commenting about this with a Chilean poet, he wondered how much of it had to do with a feeling of marginality, even underdevelopment, that at the edge of the world one reads to compensate. Yet, I wonder if it is more than that. I wonder if it is a recognition on the part of Latin American writers that literature is born from literature, that as Goethe noted a national tradition not connected to the wider world becomes an insular and weakened literary tradition. Indeed, two of the major aesthetic moments in Neruda’s career, the hermetic and difficult poems from Residence on Earth and then the sprawling Canto General are deeply tied to his reading and translating English language poetry. Early T. S. Eliot is present in the first movement, while Walt Whitman is woven throughout the second. Likewise, Borges was an avid translator of all kinds of literature, and Julio Cortazar got his sense of the uncanny, in part, through translating Edgar Allen Poe.
This selection of 16 poets provides a variety of styles that can be plotted along a continuum from spare, polished language to lush abundance. Even as we plot these poems along that line, there are still stark differences. For example, Mariela Cordero, Álvaro Mata Guillé, Zaira Pacheco, Nestor E. Rodríguez, Paura Rodriguez, Gema Santamaría, Enrique Solinas, and Shirley Villalba all use a stripped-down language that coaxes lyricism out of the simplest of tools. If Álvaro employs something like a secular apophatic, Mariela turns to metaphor and simile. If Paura calls up the mystical tradition of Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz, Enrique uses the language of love and loss. Gema, in turn, takes up academic and sociological discourse. Néstor, who has long admired George Oppen, brings a similar attention to detail and clarity of language to his verse, a clarity and concreteness also present in Zaira’s poetry. Of these, Shirley’s aphoristic, epigrammatic language is the most minimal of all.
On the other side of the scale, Claudia Meyer, Ivonne Gordon, and Gustavo Osorio de Ita employ a sensuous lushness. Claudia, as a means of exploring despair and Ivonne, nostalgia and memory. In terms of Gustavo, there is almost a neo-baroque quality to his syntax, language, and imagery. Also, the way Jamila Medina Ríos plays with scientific language, creates neologisms, breaks words up, and generally has fun with language also falls closer to the neo-baroque side of the spectrum. While both Mexico and Cuba have strong neo-baroque traditions, I don’t know whether Gustavo or Jamila would call themselves such. There seems to be among Latin American poets less of a need to place themselves within one or another school.
Harold Alva, Federico Díaz-Granados, and Claudia Magliano fall more toward the middle of the plot line. Harold goes for the immediacy of sense impressions, while Federico contemplates experience from a distance. Claudia Magliano finds inspiration in the world of animal husbandry. And then there is Mario Meléndez whose language tends toward an informal speech and builds dream worlds of pure fantasy cobbled together from fragments of a vast library.
As with Darío, who pulled from Medieval Spanish and contemporary French poetry, concision of speech in modern Latin American verse can be traced to the simplicity of diction found in both the Spanish cancionero tradition and in influence from poets like Oppen and other aesthetic experiments in the early 20th century, like Ultraísmo. The same goes with the other side of the spectrum. The neo-baroque turns to Góngora, as well as the metaphorical excesses of Modernismo, Lezama Lima, and others.
There are other ways to have plotted these poets–e.g., poets of the urban experience, poets who use cultural artefacts as a space from which they explore their own concerns, poets of the interior life, poets of migration and return, nature poets, memory poets, and political poets that take up all manner of violence: violence against women, state violence, self-harm, and the violence of modern capitalist food systems. Given the history of Latin America and the current political moment in the US, a number of these more political poems seem particularly needful.
Jeremy Paden (Milan, Italy, 1974) is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. He is a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and also teaches in the low-residency program at Spalding. He is the author of several collections of poetry and translation. Among these: world as sacred burning heart (3: A Taos Press, 2021) and Imágenes del mundo flotante (Alcorce Ediciones, 2024). His Spanish language translation of Ada Limón’s Hurting Kind, De las que duelen, was recently published in Spain with Valparaíso Ediciones and his English language translation of Mario Meléndez’s Esperando a Perec, Waiting for Perec will soon appear with Action/Spectacle. You can find him at: https://jpaden4.wixsite.com/jeremypadenpoet