Modern Spanish American Poets

The essays in this book, groundbreaking for its focus on teaching Latin American poetry, reflect the region's geographic and cultural heterogeneity. They address works from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Uruguay, as well as from indigenous communities found within these national distinctions, including the Kaqchikel Maya and Zapotec. The volume's essays help instructors teach poetry written from the second half of the twentieth century on, meaningfully connecting this contemporary corpus with older poetic traditions. Contributors address teaching various topics, from the silva and the long poem to Afro-descendant poetry, in ways that bring performance, digital approaches, queer theory, and translation into action. The insights offered here will demonstrate how Latin American poetry can become a part of classes in African diasporic studies, indigenous studies, history, and anthropology.

Essays on authors considered to be among the most representative writers of each of the eighteen Spanish-speaking American countries, including the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Within this context "modern" refers to those poets writing from the 1880s to the early 21st century.

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.

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

A bilingual edition of major poets representing the many movements and varied spirits of contemporary Latin American literary ferment. The book begins with poems published after the death of Ruben Dario in 1916, with this esteemed poet serving as a demarcation of older tradition.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

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.

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