I got a book in the mail that I had contributed to with a chapter about Gamoneda. I read about half of the book and then re-read my own contribution. I hadn't remembered every sentence, because I wrote it in 2008, but it was nice seeing it in that context, complemented by and complementing other articles not by me.

Gamoneda establishes a unique relation between verse and prose in his work by lengthening the line to such and extent that it becomes a paragraph. I'm exploring his relation to Juan Ramón Jiménez, who increasingly turned to prose in his old age, converting free verse poems to rhythmic prose. So maybe Gamoneda is not so unique after all: he represents a culmination of a long process.

Gamoneda takes some more or less narrative prose and turns it into prose poetry, then takes those same sentences and weaves them into his autobiography many years later. The same phrase or sentence can shift prosodical contexts.

We don't experience Shakesperian blank verse in the theater as "lines" of verse, but as a rhythmic flow. Oral poets, even those composing in isometirc units, probably don't conceive of their poetry in terms of visual lines on the page. Even if they do, that visual representation is not primary.

Finishing my commentary on Varela's Libro de barro.

XIX "You rang the empty bell three times and nobody responded." Can you still make music in the absence of human throat and ear? Can you "translate silence." In other words, what is at stake here are the grounds of communication. The speaker call for god to exist and to illuminate an imaginary cavern, a blue darkness.

XX The newly born moon is a "mutilated ear of silver." The speaker and an unnamed oyente are unable to hear the music, and there is a goddess who is somehow inaccessible.

XXI We've shared a table, sat down at the table, but not at the same time. So experience is shared, but not communicated. "I don't know how to give names to these things." The sequence as an urgent, anguished tone at this point. The last three poems have been about missed chances for communion.

XXII This next to the last poem, rather than the last poem, feels like a conclusive ending to the sequence. The poem is defined as an attempt to find "the border between what isn't and what won't be." The specifically female imagery (blood between nubile legs) is surprising, since only a few poems have identified the sex of writing up to this point.

XXIII No more "anecdotes." "These were its [your life's] letters.

Now that I've taken these very sketchy notes I can write a bit about this book in a chapter I'm writing. What I've discovered here is that Varela is closer to Gamoneda than to Valente.

(262)

*Antonio Gamoneda. Lápidas. Madrid: Abada, 2006. 121 pp.

Here is a magnificent edition of a book originally published in 1987, with a brilliant epilogue by Julián Jiménez Heffernan.

I read Gamoneda's book of lectures on Valente. It's a little disappointing because I didn't learn much new from it. On the other hand, it confirms exactly what I already thought, so that's a good thing: it shows I'm on the right track.

I got Un armario lleno de sombras, Gamoneda's memoir, in the mail yesterday. It provides the referential frame for much of Gamoneda's poetry, in the sense that he will insert lines or images from his poetic works directly into his prose texts, with no quotation marks even, or retell a story implicit in a poetic text with a referential framework. At other times he will quote from his poetry with quotation marks.

At one point, my project was going to be a book about Gamoneda emphasizing the theme of historical memory. That has now become a mere chapter of the book. I don't feel like doing a monograph on a single author right now. My working title is Fragments of a Late Modernity: Lorca, Valente, and the Intellectual Traditions of Spanish Poetry. This is my outline:

Introduction: Chasing Tigers in Red Weather

PART ONE: LORCA

1. Lorca and the Paradoxes of Modernity
2. The Contested Legacy of the Duende

PART TWO: MODERNISM ACCORDING TO VALENTE

3. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism
4. From María Zambrano to José Ángel Valente: The Origins of Late Modernism
5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett

PART THREE: THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

6. Claudio Rodríguez
7. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity
8. Ullán and Núñez
9. Olvido García Valdés

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

I've written chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7, though 1 is in Spanish and translating it will involve adding material and totally recasting everything as though I had written it directly in English. It may not be worth translating. I'd rather start from scratch.

"Su muerte me ha entristecido. Era un hombre necesario que destacó por su honradez intelectual y capacidad de crítica. Lo que intentó hacer lo hizo bien. Cumplió su propósito ampliamente. Respeto su manera de entender la poesía pero no la comparto. Para mí, la palabra meramente informativa y la crítica moral tiene su lugar en los periódicos, en la televisión, en los púlpitos si se quiere, pero la modalidad esencial del pensamiento poético no es ni reflexiva ni crítica sino un tipo de otra naturaleza, y determina un lenguaje que también es de otra naturaleza..."

[His death made me sad... stood out for his intellectual honesty and capacity for critique... did well what he proposed to do... I respect is way of understanding poetry but I can't share it. For me, the merely informative word and moralistic criticism has its place in the newpaper, on televsion, even from the pulpits, but the essential modality of poetic thought is not reflexive or critical but something of another nature, which determines a language also of another nature...]

When they asked Gamoneda about Mario Benedetti, who had just died, that was what Gamoneda said, more or less. Very respectful, but basically saying that Benedetti wrote entirely outside of "the essential modality of poetic thought." Of course Gamoneda thinks that. So do I.

Of course, the poets who don't like Gamoneda had a field that with that, attacking him in the press, as they did after Ángel González died and Gamoneda also said the truth about him, getting attacked by that same group--Benítez Reyes, Luis García Montero, Sabina... Of course Benedetti lived in Spain for years, and had more of a base of support there than anywhere else, with the possible exception of his native Uruguay.

The problem is that, since he is a huge leftist icon, nobody can come right out and say that Benedetti is (was) a crappy poet. (There, I've said it.) Everyone knows this, of course, probably even the people defending Benedetti, who represents the absolute worst dimension of Latin American crappy political poetry. I'm sure if I read more of Benedetti's poetry, I would hate it even more.

The Lorca copy-editing is coming back on July 7, giving me a little over a week to write as much as I can of an article on Gamoneda and thoroughly learn Basque. (Maybe just learn the conjugations of the verbs to have and to be.) Akiko is in A Coruña for a conference on Pardo Bazán. Julia is reading The Da Vinci Code of all things.

Basque (Euskara) is great for the morphemes, especially the suffixes. The way I see it a language has a certain amount of tasks it might think of doing. Indicating spacial and temporal relationships; gender, person, and number. And it has different ways it might think of doing those things. Basque likes doing many of these things by attaching morphemes to the end of words and phrases. So the make things plural it attaches -ak to the end. (But -ak is also a morpheme used to mark the singular ergative case.)

The definite article is -a attached to last word of the NP. If you take a word like neska [girl] that already ends in a, you don't need the article, it's just neska and neska in both forms, as opposed to mutil and mutila.

Basque is not big on gender. No separate pronouns for female and male subjects, [unlike nosostros /nosotras or él/ella.] Nouns don't have grammatical genders.

The verbal system marks for perfective/imperfective aspect, past, present and future. Skipping ahead of myself there are different verb forms for ergative vs. absolutive and dative? There are not tons of conjugations to memorize, though, because most of these markings are done through the auxiliary verb + one or two forms of participle.

Phonology seems close to Castilian [Spanish] in some respects. There's always the theory that Castilian is the Romance dialect of people whose first language was Basque, or at least one that developed in proximity to Basque. I've been listening to the radio a bit over the internet to get a feel for it.

70% of teachers who study Basque [in the Basque country] in order to get certified as Basque-competent teachers do not do well enough on the test to qualify. Yet somehow I am stupidly overconfident about my ability to get a reading knowlege of it. At some point I'll hit a wall, I'm sure, but I'm not going to worry about that now.

I'm psyched about my Tenerife trip in May. Antonio Gamoneda is going to be there. Eduardo Milán. Some serious heavyweight poets of the Spanish-speaking world. I'm the only yanqui on the program and they're paying my way. And it's in Tenerife where I've never been.

There is actually a connection between Gamoneda and Levinas, visible in certain key words. I'll give the Spanish, the French, and the English in brackets too.

rostro / visage [face]

amor / amour [love, charity]

dulzura / douceur [sweetness]

verdad / vérité [truth]

misericordia, piedad / misérícorde [pity, compassion, forgiveness]

justicia / justice [justice]

... and probably a few more...

I don't know much about Levinas (yet), but I was reading him and thinking I should convert to Judaism. Then, my next thought, was that it would have to be a totally secular Judaism, an affiliation with an intellectual tradition. Sign me up.

It's often seemed to me that the canon of high/late European modernist literature and the canon of capital T "Theory" were co-extensive. Thus an interest in Celan, Char, and Beckett goes perfectly well with an interest in Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Heidegger. Foucault wrote a book on Roussel, after all, and Barthes was an early defender of the nouveau roman. Blanchot himself was a novelist.

This idea is hardly new with me, but I think it has certain implications that haven't been fully spelled out. One is that a certain intellectual proximity between theorists and writers is taken for granted in certain circles. When French theory is applied in English departments, it is often done in a way that doesn't presuppose this proximity. In other words, the "leap" is greater from the theory to the text because there is not that ready-made connection that you find when Derrida writes about Jabès. It's the complaint that French (or European) theory is de-contextualized in the US academy. It would be like taking an essay by Charles Bernstein and "applying" it to some French poet, without taking into account the intellectual milieu of Bernstein, his own intellectual habitus and the way Charles might have been influenced by Creeley or Kerouac or Grenier.

Now when Gamoneda translates Mallarmé (with his daughter who is professor of French), then there is a desire to lay claim to that particular high modern / Blanchot tradition. That is the way Gamoneda is championed, in this kind of language and rhetoric. It is not so much that you need modernist theory to deal with Gamoneda or Valente, but that you want to establish a kind of affiliation, and this takes place through a kind of "high modern" rhetoric that draws on Heidegger and Blanchot for its vocabulary.

Here the theory is not necessarily de-contextualized, because these are indeed European poets, albeit Spanish ones. (The idea that Spain merely aspires to Europeanness!) I'm the guy in the back of the room who wants to raise his hand and say wait a minute, what's going on here? I want to question the naturalness of the move that sees European high modernism as the culmination of everything worthwhile. At the same time, I love this European late modernism myself, so I don't want to question it too loudly either. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather look at the problematics of affiliation rather than simply produce a high-modernist reading that applies Levinas to Gamoneda, or what have you. Let other people do that.

I've decided to write a review essay on Gamoneda for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Of course they'll have to accept it first.

How much image-repetoire is shared between Lorca and Gamoneda? There is a key area of difference, in that Lorca is completely Southern, Andalusian, and Gamoneda Northern. Hot and cold (Gamoneda's Libro del frío). Yet no other Spanish poet of recent memory has that Lorquian power:

Sábana negra en la misericordia;
tu lengua en un idioma ensangrentado.

Sábana aún en la sustancia enferma,
la que llora en tu boca y en la mía
y, atravesando dulcemente llagas,
ata mis huesos a tus huesos humanos.

No mueras más en mí, sal de mi lengua.
Dame la mano para entrar en la nieve.

The poets share a sense of the body itself: the body as it suffers. Lorca was dead before the age of 40, Gamoneda has done his best work after the age of 45. Only a poet antithetical to Lorca in many respects could be truly Lorquian, and not just a pastiche of Lorca. It's as though Gamoneda were the logical continuation of Lorca, filtered through modern French poetry and returning to a Spanish terrain devoid of Andalusianism. Even with the stress on aging in Gamoneda vs. the violent, dramatic deaths in Lorca, I feel there is a kinship.

***

Stuck in Kansas by ice-storm for the second time in as many months.

From "Aún"

Place your lips on the reeds just like the god who
weeps in your wardrobes, who speaks among yellowed
fingernails; whistle in the reeds of suffering and,
in the purity of empty hours, remember your father's
swab, the solitude of doves lost in eternity.

The Watchman in the Snow


The watchman was wounded by his mother;

his hands sketched the shape of sadness and he caressed hair that he no longer loved.

Every cause was eradicated in his eyes.

***

In his drunkenness, women, shadow, police, wind surrounded him.

He put veins in the purplish tree heath, vertigo in purity; the furious flower of hoarfrost turned blue in his ear.

Roses, serpents, and spoons were beautiful while they stayed in his hands.

***

He watched over the calm that stuck to the shadows, the circles where the parched flowers are deposited, the direction of the vine shoots.

Some afternoons, his indecipherable hand led us to the nameless place, to the melancholy of abandoned tools.

***

He impersonated a face in the air (hunger and ivory of Andalusian hospitals); in the extremity of silence, he heard the little bell of those in their final agony. He watched us and we felt the nakedness of existence. He used to open all the doors quickly and spill the wine over dawn's ice. Then, sobbing, he would show us the empty bottles.


***

Every morning he would pour steel and tears into the brooks and train birds in the song of wrath: a clear stream for the gentle half-wit daughter; blue water for the hopeless woman, smelling of vertigo and light, alone in the gutter amid white flags, cold beneath the willow, her eyelids already yellow with love.

***

He never gave up on his barren passion. Dogs sniffed at his purity and at his acid-scarred hands. At dawn, hidden amid the white wattle fences, he agonized before the highways, he saw the shadows entering the snow, the fog boiling in the deep city.

***

Shadows came, damp animals that breathed in his face. He saw fat glowing in lavender and black sweetness in terrestrial wine cellars.

It was celebration: light and saffron in white kitchens; from afar, beneath dusty garlands, faces in the sadness of carbide,

and its moaning among the remains of the music.

***

The wine was blue in steel (ah Friday's lucidity) and within his eyes. Gently, he distinguished the causes of infections: great motionless flowers and lust, the black ribbon in the silence of serpents.


***

In his song there were hopeless cords: a distant sound of blind women (barefoot mothers in the transparent prison of salt).

It sounded of death and dew; later, he played on black pipes; he became the singer of wounds. His memory burned in the country of wind, in the whiteness of abandoned sanitariums.

***

He ran swiftly over the white grass.

One day he sensed wings and stopped to listen in another age. Surely black petals were beating, but in vain; he witnessed the hard thrushes fly away toward the boughs honed by winter

and once again he ran swiftly without a destination.

***

He was wise in the prison of cold.

He saw omens in the blue morning: the sparrow-hawks sliced through winter and the brooks ran slow among flowers of snow.

Female bodies arrived and he sensed their fertility.

Then invisible hands came. With a precise tenderness, he seized his mother's hand.

Más sobre Gamoneda

The Spanish poet who I consider the best alive, Antonio Gamoneda, has just received the Premio Cervantes. (It's like the Nobel prize for writing in the Spanish language; they usually give it to a Latin American and a Spanish writer in alternating years.)

I was the first to write about Gamoneda in English, in my 1994 book The Poetics of Self-Consciousness. So evidently I knew something then, intuited it almost, because he was not all that well known at that point.

Quantities of time
situate quantities
of sound. I listen
on the other side of death.

Music arises
from a silent well;
it is the farmwork of air
in tympani of fire

and it has entered me. Now
music is my thought.

--A. Gamoneda

To return to work written much earlier and revise it suggests a peculiar relationship to time. I'm thinking of Antonio Gamoneda's book "Reescritura," a book consisting entirely of poems he has revised, spanning his entire career. He claims he finds no difference between "words that hesitate in doubt for an hour ... or for fifty years." The effect is to impose a certain uniformity of style on the earlier works, making them seem more like "Gamoneda" before he was Gamoneda--mostly by the elimination of extraneous discursive or ornamental material. (The loss, if there is one, is of historicity.)

If Gamoneda had not gone on to write great works, these earlier texts would have been forgotten anyway. That is, we are interested in them because they are by "Gamoneda." The book is in essence a selected poems arguing for a continuity in his work that might not be visible without these revisions.

Although I still try to publish poems I wrote many years ago I never revise them: it would be like going back and, impossibly, undoing mistakes in one's life.

***

I've been thinking about the unity of references in contemporary Spanish poets I admire. That is, they all seem to be reading from a common code-book. They use similar references and a common language to talk about poetry. The poets I don't admire so much have a different code book. I'm not sure how to translate this insight into an article. I guess what I'm trying to get at is why a certain Heideggerian vocabulary became so central to so many poets at the same time. Is it because of Valente? Is it just because European poets of a certain type all admire Celan and Jabès anyway?