Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (review)

With his Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times Roberto Márquez makes a significant and substantive contribution to scholars, students, and general readers of poetry wishing to explore the breadth and nuances of Puerto Rican poetry, from its indigenous and inter-racial roots and colonial underpinnings, to its Creole-conflicted national formation and contemporary diasporic experimentations. Presenting more than 60 poets and nearly 200 poems from 1589-2003—many in English for the first time through his own translations—Márquez admirably achieves his goal of providing Anglophone audiences with a vast and varied selection of poetry from an emphatically multi-faceted Puerto Rico.

Particularly noteworthy is his contribution of lesser known and anonymous historical voices, countering both what he calls the "presentist partiality" of most anthologies to date and the usual Spaniard-dominant selection of early texts with circa 1400 Taino-Arawak areyto acknowledgements, "proto-Creole" retorts, and popular ("vox populi") re-significations of décimas, coplas, and bombas. Márquez also contributes to bridge-building and current transnational approaches by including a significant range of mainland-based poets who write in English, characterizing them by the very apt term, diasporícans. By presenting together this diversity of poets and poetries, Márquez achieves his second aim: to give "emerging new generations of AmeRícan boricuas" (p. xxxvii) the texts and contexts by which they can access and assess Puerto Rican poetry and the complex foundations and on-going interplay of poetic forms and political issues that characterize and inform it.

Indeed, in his twelve-page "Introduction," Márquez argues for a reading of Puerto Rican poetry that recognizes "an unfolding dialectic of successive—... and never uncontested—rehistorizations, (re)creolizations, cultural tropes, and lyric (re)articulations" (pp. xxv-xxvi). He then charts the development of that poetry within and against the historical shifts from colonial isolation and neglect to a developing national consciousness and the ensuing debates about that national identity and political status. He also situates the poetry in relation to global and hemispheric literary movements, particularly addressing its uses of and reactions to Romanticism, modernismo, and vanguard movements, leading to the "radical break[s]" of both insular and Nuyorican contemporary poetics—a contextualization that finds elaboration throughout the introductions he provides for each poet that follows. In addition, he theorizes the act of translation, acknowledging his own emphasis on structure and form, but referencing Haroldo Campos' idea of "transcreation," an approach Márquez enacts most effectively in less structured poems, such as Lloréns Torres' "Song of the Antilles," Vizcarrondo's "En Yo Granma, Where She at?," and the later, contemporary poems.

Márquez organizes this wealth of material chronologically into four "Books" of nearly equal length: "Book One: Before Columbus and After, 1400-1820"; "Book Two: The Creole Matrix: Notions of Nation, 1821-1950s"; "Book Three: Critique, Revolt, and Renewal," which covers insular or island-based, Spanish-language poets from 1950-2000; and "Book Four: Of Diasporas, Syncretisms, Border Crossings, and Transnationalizations: An AmeRican Sancocho," which includes, as entitled, peripatetic English-language poets from the same period. Within each book, Márquez also proceeds chronologically by the birth date of each poet, a standard practice, but one that occasionally disrupts the inter-plays and overlaps among poets that he so ably elucidates in their individual introductions—either via family, poetic school, literary journal, or physical local (The dates of each poem, given only in the Table of Contents, also invite some questions or confusions.). In those introductions, however, Márquez's own story-telling flair engagingly provides the pertinent, often colourful biographical details, educational background, and political affiliations or inclinations of each poet, as well as an account of the poet's major works, insightful critiques, and contextual analysis of her or his stylistic techniques and thematic concerns.

In the first section of Book One, "Aboriginal Beginnings: The Areyto," Márquez describes...