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  • Havana as Poetic and Personal Space in the Works of Nancy Morejón
  • Gabriel A. Abudu (bio)

The city has functioned as object of creative activity for many centuries. John H. Johnston in his book The Poet and the City. A Study in Urban Perspectives traces the development of what he calls "city poetry"—poetry inspired by the city, written about the city, written about human experiences and relationships with the city—back to Virgil's Georgics. Starting with Virgil's nature-inspired poems, which he considers appropriate frameworks for later preindustrial and postindustrial poetry about the city, Johnston examines a number of English topographical poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For nineteenth-century city poetry, he examines the reactions of Wordsworth to cities in England, Whitman's image of New York, and Baudelaire's vision of Paris. Finally, Johnston examines T. S. Eliot and later poets of the twentieth century, including such figures as E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, and Allen Ginsberg. All these poets were variously fascinated, awed, inspired, and amazed by the city, and much of the poetry they wrote expressed their reactions to the experiences produced by association with, or close observation of, their respective urban settings. Of particular interest are Whitman and Baudelaire, who wrote during a time when the industrial revolution was rearranging geographical landscapes, reshaping the relationship between the individual and society, and defining the modern metropolis. Both Whitman and Baudelaire have influenced generations of poets after them, and together they "produced two of the most original and influential volumes of nineteenth-century verse: in a sense, our contemporary literary heritage might be seen as a division between the powerful currents and undercurrents generated by Leaves of Grass (1855) and Les fleurs du mal (1857)" (Johnston 106).1 Burton Pike, in the preface to his book The Image of the City in Modern Literature states that "during the nineteenth century the literary city came more and more to express the isolation or exclusion of the individual from a community, and in the twentieth century to express the fragmentation of the very concept of community" (xii). While nineteenth-century writers such as Baudelaire and Whitman reflected in their works the growing phenomenon of industrialization and urbanization and the new social problems that accompanied these phenomena, later twentieth-century writers tended to internalize more and more the existential conflicts raised by the complex urban landscapes where they were living.

In his search for an adequate definition of the term "city poetry" Johnston defines it simply as "poetry (or a poem) directly descriptive of the real physical city as an experiential entity, or poetry descriptive of people whose lives are obviously affected [End Page 1012] by that entity" (xvii). This kind of poetry should describe the different features of a city, how these features impact the lives of the inhabitants, how the inhabitants react to the environment in which they live, and how they relate with each other. The present study proposes to analyze different aspects of Nancy Morejón's poetry in which the city of Havana is the inspiration for her poetic discourse. Havana has already served as literary space for numerous works of literature, as Ineke Phaf demonstrates in her book Novelando la Habana. Phaf examines thirty-seven Cuban novels written between 1959 and 1980 to show how the city of Havana has functioned as a fictional locus for many Cuban works of literature. From Phaf's study, it is evident that the urban landscape of Havana has inspired literary works with varied perspectives, often using the city as the social, cultural, historical, political, or mythical background for fictional characters.

Havana is the setting from which Morejón constructs her poetic universe; it is the nurturing and inspiring source to which she returns time and time again after her numerous trips around the world. Havana has the people and places that have, in a way, guided Morejón's formation as a person and as an artist. It is not surprising, then, that a reading of her poetry from the beginning up to her recent publications will reveal to us the constant presence of Havana. As Morejón...

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