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Reign of rhythm Shrieking and brandishing a 6-inch knife like a woman in need of a good exorcist, Elizabeth Neira is every guy’s worst castration nightmare. She’s also a rising young Chilean poet who wields words like sharp, lethal objects. Outside a cavernous cultural centre in Mexico’s rough Jamaica neighbourhood, a furious downpour is turning the streets into roiling open sewers, and the sky echoes with angry thunderclaps. Inside, Neira is acting out one of her poems, a jilted woman’s harangue that makes rhythmic sport of Spanish words as well as colloquial expression. Her audience, consisting mostly of other Latin American poets younger than 35, plus a few of the curious from the community, clucks and grins at Neira’s intentionally over-the-top performance. Not to mention the "souvenir" tarot cards paired with pornographic photos that she tossed into the audience a few minutes ago. Pablo Neruda this ain’t. But the latest poetry from Latin America isn’t lacking for energy, craft or ambition. What it frankly could use is more events like "Estoy Afuera," or "I Am Outside," a weeklong poetic happening. Ever since the Spanish conquest of the New World, poetry has held an exalted status in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Top word maestros are feted like film stars. Some hold high public office. Others are made into cultural emissaries and rewarded with coveted European ambassadorships and the like. But for younger poets struggling to make their voices heard above the blather of "telenovelas" and "futbol" matches, Latin America’s exalted poetry inner circle can feel like an exclusive cul-de-sac. Old-school publishing houses are few in number. So are government grants. The mainstream media tend to ignore poets who aren’t big names. The big names themselves rarely lend a hand to talent surfacing from below, younger poets say. Most poetry criticism tends to be stuffy, academic and hostile to newfangled experiments. That is where "I Am Outside" comes in. "We aren’t exactly looking to make a group to clash with these social cultures, but rather we’re looking to generate spaces where things can flow in an alternative manner," says Jorge Solis, director of the online poetry and cultural magazine Mexico Volitivo. "The thing we most lack in Mexico is an opening for new dynamics, new voices, new propositions. We believed it was better to make a space than to whine because the rest won’t open a space." For many young Latin American poets, that new space is cyberspace. Among the 40 poets invited to take part in "I Am Outside"—half from Mexico and half from other countries, all of them born after 1970—were a large number of bloggers. Many poets maintain personal Web pages. Five-year-old Mexico Volitivo is but one of a growing number of online Spanish-language poetry journals that facilitate writers scribbling away in Lima, Peru, or Santiago, Chile, to expose their work to a broader audience and keep up with what their colleagues in Guadalajara or Buenos Aires, Argentina, are doing. Solis says the process of assembling "I Am Outside" began several months ago with "an open convocation" to solicit participants via e-mailings, posters and notices in magazines and on Web sites. In putting the group together, the organisers sought to achieve an array of poetic styles and temperaments. The offerings included the quietly literate verse of Peruvian Pablo Salinas and the sacred and profane incantations of the Chilean poet Hector Hernandez Montecinos, a budding post-punk Baudelaire. Similar young poet gatherings have been held recently in Chile and Peru. Mercedes Gomez de la Cruz, 31, making her first trip outside Argentina, says the selection process ensured that the "encuentro" (encounter) would be more than just a popularity contest. "They invited me not because I was a friend of anyone, but rather for my work." "It doesn’t matter if we are not supported by Coca-Cola, or that General Motors doesn’t support us, or American Airlines," Peralta says. "We don’t have large diffusion. We have great content." — Los Angeles Times |
