You will be happy to know I finally figured out how to begin the blogroll (i'd like soup with that puleez). Well, Mark, since you recently commented on the boob comment, I have added you first, right between google and edit-me. (Yes, I knew it was about Fence--such small talk in the poetry world, cloistered big talk...what the hell am I saying.) So, stay tuned for other blogs I peek at once in awhile since I am not a hefty duty email or blogger player.
Ok. I'm procrastinating at 12 a.m., making bean soup and blogging, instead of reading about the Ultraists. I have been figuring out the differences between the Spanish and Latin American avant garde movements called creacionism and ultraism. I've been reading the original ultraist texts published in Spanish magazines in the early 1920s. I'll try to say more later.
Oooo! That sounds great. What are the magazines? Which Latin American countries?
ResponderBorrarI have some cool stuff by Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva that you might like -from around 1922, Venezuela. I am not sure if she called herself Ultraista but she probably should have. Critics I've seen usually just call her part of the Vanguardist movement. All that "movement" stuff is imprecise, really.
But anyway, write me if you have time, we might have good info for each other as we're researching the same period. I am happy to share.
- Liz
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
Liz, thanks for the post. You are going to make me stay on track, I know it. I feel it. I've been distracted by Dada, and classes that keep coming....
ResponderBorrarI will check out Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva!
Yes, the movements are quite imprecise. However, it has been interesting to see how, at the onset on ultraism in Spain, before it later expanded to Argentina when Borges moved back, the group comprised of people such as Guillermo de Torre, Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, etc and they wanted an avant-guard movement distinct from the others, a movement for the Spanish-speaking world. They had the need to react against the modernism of Ruben Dario of Nicaragua--a particular history to which they wanted to respond.
When Vicente Huidobro from Chile showed up on the scene in Madrid, he was en route from Paris, and I believe they thought his ideas were "tainted" by those foreign influences. Or, at least, Borges was quite militant about his reactions at the time, which he later denounced. People such as Guillermo de Torre was likely less interested in such distinctions. Huidobro would often be a part of these literary conversation circles, and it seems he "recruited" people to creacionism by the nature of his exuberance.
As you've said, these distinctions are so slippery. At the same time that Borges was trying to make these distinctions, he was drawing upon the work of Apollinaire or Mallarme. As do many manifestos, they embrace others from history too before the movement, in this case Ultraisim, was even named. (To me, the study of manifestos can be one big psychological study of the literary psyche...but that's another topic.)
What makes a creacionist poem in comparison to an ultraist poem? That's another possibly impossible question for another day.
Well, there is some information about the social scene, and I will try to write more later about the diverging aesthetics.
(Sidenote: One of Borges' first published poems was a poem for the Russian Revolution.)