Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global and Digital Age by John Burns (review)

True to the subtitle, “cultural production” is the defining criteria for the selection of contemporary Hispanic poets discussed in the most recent volume of Cambria’s Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series. By contextualizing the poet in the global marketplace, John Burns examines how the digital “information” age and the cultural landscape shift the role of the poet in contemporary society. Three forces emerge that mold poetic production: the neoliberal political context, the multinational globalization of the marketplace, and the control of information. For Burns, poetry is a cultural object, so it not only requires a cultural studies approach, it creates culture. Far from an innocent cultural trifle, poetry contributes to the fundamental cultural debates of our time. With this volume, Burns likewise contributes to the fundamental cultural debate of our time, situating and imagining the poet at the center of the debate, rather than at the periphery.

Foremost in these debates is the impact of five 5 “-scapes,” identified by Burns, from which our generation cannot escape: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes.

Owing to its multifaceted nature and its potential for revenue generation at the dawn of the twenty first century, media exploded into a multimedia blitz of genre-bending techniques that break the moldy old molds of poetry. No longer counting syllables and matching rhyming consonants and vowels, poetry is not limited to words on a piece of paper. Now it can be virtual on a computer screen, written in the air with airplane contrails, or carved onto the floor of the Atacama Desert. Poetry, one of the oldest performance arts by roving troubadors who recited heroic ballads, has taken its place among mediascapes as a new form of installation art. Performances enhanced and emboldened by media have taken on new parameters, breaking the physical bounds of the page and the stage. Literally, now all the world is a stage where airplanes trace verses across the sky that float off into vapor in minutes, or earthmovers carve three-kilometer-long trenches into the Atacama Desert floor that will retain the message, “ni pena, ni miedo” (“neither shame, nor fear”) for centuries. Media access and attention appropriate the figure of the poet, turning him into a media figure, culture figure, cult figure, or making the figure of the bad boy poeta maldito appropriate.

Among the carefully drawn portraits of contemporary cultural poets, Raúl Zurita has pride of place. In the ethnoscape of Chilean culture, he was anointed Neruda’s poetic heir by El Mercurio newspaper and Chile’s unofficial literary critic, José Miguel Ibánez Langlois, also known as Ignacio Valente, a direct proof of how the mediascape sculpts the profile of culture. Both Leopoldo María Panero (Spain’s blog cult figure) and Raúl Zurita are painted as “Mad Precursors” since they were both “traumatized to madness” during oppressive authoritarian regimes, Panero by Franco, and Zurita by Pinochet. Both now have similar cultural functions as the voice of conscience in today’s ideoscape of cultural expression. By integrating art and life, Zurita’s 1978 group of writers and artists known as Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) blurred the line between art and politics to transform Chile’s social foundations by creating what Nelly Richard called “Arte Refractario, fragmented and fragmentary art that cannot be distributed for easy consumption.” Their ideoscapes offered an antidote to the intense consumerism and personal isolation by orchestrating collective “happenings” and experiences that involved large groups of people from all classes. Zurita attained both fame and a poeta maldito reputation when he tried to blind himself with lye in imitation of the blind seer. Then, he scarred his own face by burning his cheek in attempt to show solidarity with the wounded body of the Chilean nation under Pinochet. These performance acts drew attention, and branded him as a mystical figure. Zunita literally embodies poetry, to the point that his electroencephalogram (EEG) is included in his first book Purgatorio...