Has poetry lost its relevance in the postmodern age, unable to keep pace with other forms of cultural production such as film, mass media, and the Internet? Quite the contrary, argues Jill Kuhnheim in this pathfinding book, which explores how recent Spanish American poetry participates in the fundamental cultural debates of its time. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, Kuhnheim engages in close readings of numerous poetic works to show how contemporary Spanish American poetry struggles with the divisions between politics and aesthetics and between visual and written images; grapples with issues of ethnic, national, sexual, and urban identities; and incorporates rather than rejects technological innovations and elements from the mass media. Her analysis illuminates the ways in which contemporary issues such as indigenismo and Latin America's postcolonial legacy, modernization, immigration, globalization, economic shifts toward neoliberalism and informal economies, urbanization, and the technological revolution have been expressed in—and even changed the very form of—Spanish American poetry since the 1970s.

A guide to the history of poetic debate and practice in 20th-century Latin America. The book argues that the possibility of universal emancipation is evoked in the transformation of language. Each chapter focuses on key texts by poets such as Cardenal, Neruda, Vallejo and the Andrades.

This Companion provides a chronological survey of Latin American poetry, analysis of modern trends and six succinct essays on the major figures.

In these five essays the Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade traces the evolution of Spanish-American poetry from the sixteenth century to the present. The author shows how Spanish-American literature grew out of the special conditions produced when the New World environment totally transformed Old World culture and society. Initially, the brilliance of the land and its extraordinary peoples inspired European interest in exotic travel and utopianism; later, Old World literary currents came to have distinctive expression in Spanish-American writing. "Poetry and Society in Spanish-America" follows the historic commitment of the New World poets to social issues, particularly such unique ones as the endeavor to bring the Indians into national life, while "Trends in Spanish-American Poetry" dwells on the more purely aesthetic concerns that have stimulated the poets of the twentieth century. Throughout, Carrera Andrade ties his analysis to specific poems and poets. In the last two essays the author presents a clear perspective of his poetic development from 1930 to 1960. "A Decade of My Poetry" and "Poetry of Reality and Utopia" will especially interest readers of Carrera Andrade's poetry, for not only do they elucidate the personal history and philosophy informing his poems, they also reveal how truly his inspiration springs from that unique Spanish-American world he has so clearly delineated.

Poetry began as a spoken art and remains one to this day, but readers tend to view the poem on the page as an impenetrable artifact. This book examines the performance of poetry to show how far beyond the page it can travel. Exploring a range of performances from early twentieth-century recitations to twenty-first-century film, CDs, and Internet renditions, Beyond the Page offers analytic tools to chart poetry beyond printed texts. Jill S. Kuhnheim, looking at poetry and performance in Spanish America over time, has organized the book to begin with the early twentieth century and arrive at the present day. She includes noteworthy poets and artists such as José Martí, Luis Palés Matos, Eusebia Cosme, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Nicolás Guillén, as well as very recent artists whose performance work is not as well known. Offering fresh historical material and analysis, the author illuminates the relationship between popular and elite cultural activity in Spanish America and reshapes our awareness of the cultural work poetry has done in the past and may do in the future, particularly given the wide array of technological possibilities. The author takes a broad view of American cultural production and creates a dialogue with events and criticism from the United States as well as from Spanish American traditions. Oral and written elements in poetry are complementary, says Kuhnheim, not in opposition, and they may reach different audiences. As poetry enjoys a revival with modern media, performance is part of the new platform it spans, widening the kind of audience and expanding potential meanings. Beyond the Page will appeal to readers with an interest in poetry and performance, and in how poetry circulates beyond the page. With an international perspective and dynamic synthesis, the book offers an innovative methodology and theoretical model for humanists beyond the immediate field, reaching out to readers interested in the intersection between poetry and identity or the juncture of popular-elite and oral-written cultures.

The principal developments in Spanish American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.

Poets writing in Spanish by the end of the twentieth century had to contend with globalization as a backdrop for their literary production. They could embrace it, ignore it or potentially re-imagine the role of the poet altogether. This book examines some of the efforts of Spanish-language poets to cope with the globalizing cultural economy of the late twentieth century. This study looks at the similarities and differences in both text and context of poets, some major and some minor, writing in Chile, Mexico, the Mexican-American community and Spain. These poets write in a variety of styles, from highly experimental approaches to poetry to more traditional methods of writing. Included in this study are Chileans Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, Spaniards Leopoldo María Panero and Luis García Montero, Mexicans Silvia Tomasa Rivera and Guillermo Gómez Peña, and Mexican-American Juan Felipe Herrera. Some of them embrace (and are even embraced by) media both old and new whereas others eschew it. Some continue their work in the vein of national traditions while others become difficult to situate within any one single national tradition. Exploring the varieties of strategies these writers employ, this book makes it clear that Spanish-language poets have not been exempt from the process of globalization. Individually, these poets have been studied to varying degrees. Globalization has been studied extensively from a variety of disciplinary approaches, particularly in the context of the Latin American region and Spain. However, it is a relative rarity to see poets being studied, as they are in this work, in terms of their relationship to globalization. Taken as a sample or snapshot of writing tendencies in Latin American and Spanish poetry of the late twentieth century, this book studies them as part of a greater circuit of cultural production by establishing their literary as well as extra-literary genealogies and connections. It situates these poets in terms of their writing itself as well as in terms of their literary traditions, their methods of contending with neoliberal economic models and global information flows from the television and Internet. Although many literary critics attempt to study the connections and relationships between poetry and the world beyond the page, few monographs go about it the way this one does. It takes a transatlantic approach to contemporary Spanish-language poetry, focusing on poets on poets from Spain and the American continent, emphasizing their connections, commonalities and differences across increasingly porous borders in the age of information. The relationship between text and context is explored with a cultural studies approach, more often associated with media studies than with literary studies. Literature is not treated as a privileged object of isolated study, but rather as a system of ideas and images that is deeply interwoven with other forms of human expression that have arisen in the last decades of the twentieth century. The result is a suggestive analysis of the figure of the poet in the broader globalized marketplace of cultural goods and ideas. Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age is an important book for library collections in Spanish, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Chicano Studies.