The Avant-Garde and the Popular: Rethinking Juan Ramírez Ruiz’s Un par de vueltas por la realidad

In 1971 Peruvian neo-avant-garde writer Juan Ramírez Ruiz published his first collection of poems, entitled Un par de vueltas por la realidad (UPVR in what follows). A year before, along with Jorge Pimentel, he had founded Movimiento Hora Zero, an agitprop poetic group that barged into the scene from the margins of the literary institution and soon influenced other Latin American authors and literary movements like Roberto Bolaño and the Mexican infrarrealismo. As Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar has observed, until this moment poetry production in Peru had been characterized by individualities. However, with Hora Zero, the collective organization takes precedence, as its group identity is forged through manifestos, controversies, magazines and recitals (“Literatura” 243).

UPVR was a pivotal publication for Hora Zero, since it included one of the first organic collections of poems to be published by one of its members, as well as the movement’s programmatic documents: “Palabras Urgentes,” “El punto sobre la i,” “Poder de la poesía joven,” and “Poesía Integral.”¹ In these manifestos, Hora Zero espoused a parricidal attitude typical of most avant-garde movements, denouncing the lack of authenticity of almost all previous Peruvian poets. Not even the “poesía social” (politically engaged poetry) of the 1950s and 1960s escaped their ruthless indictment, and it was dismissed as merely “inconsequential screams” (Ramírez Ruiz and Pimentel 17). Their own literary practice, on the other hand, was conceived as the point of departure for the advent of a new poetry that would abolish the separation between art and life. The defining feature of this aesthetic, as formulated in “Poesía Integral,” was the absolute rejection of lyrical poetry in favor of an avant-garde poetry that would reunify the objective and subjective dimensions of experience (“lo objetivo-subjetivo vital”), and would ultimately lead an all-encompassing revolution (110–11).

Despite UPVR’s significance for Hora Zero, its critical reception has varied greatly. After garnering a lukewarm reception during the 1970s, interest in the volume sparked in the mid-1980s, when its poems began to appear in anthologies and critical studies.² Hitherto, UPVR has been studied in the context of Peruvian poetry production as a whole (Zapata and Mazzotti; Cornejo Polar, “Literatura”; Orihuela), and of the Latin American neo-avant-garde (Galindo). Critics have pointed out the experimental attitude of the book and its radical political stance. The desire to represent urban subaltern subjects evinced in the poems has also been highlighted (Vilanova; Higgins; Zevallos Aguilar, “Notas”). More recently, Fredy Roncalla has edited a volume that compiles new readings of, and homages to, Ramírez Ruiz. While several of the texts included discuss UPVR, as a whole the essays do not offer a consensus on its critical value. Juan Zevallos Aguilar stresses the importance of UPVR for the study of migration in Peruvian literature (“Un par”). Yet, on the other hand, Juan Carlos Lázaro celebrates the utopic impulse behind the poems, but argues that the theory behind its poesía integral amounted to little more than a “failed theory … a tautology, without any practical realization” (112).

Most importantly, and despite the amount of critical attention given to Ramírez Ruiz’s poetry, there are still relatively few studies that approach UPVR from the perspective of the avant-garde. This article will attempt to fill this void and highlight the book’s importance for the study of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements in Peru and beyond. I will explore how UPVR’s poems attempt to situate avant-garde poetry in the context of the major sociocultural transformations underway in Peru at the end of the 1960s. Key to this endeavor were Ramírez Ruiz’s efforts to comprehend the material conditions of culture at the time in order to design a strategy to intervene in them.³ In his case, this meant a poetic elaboration of the possibilities to engage urban popular culture and the avant-garde.

Latin American avant-gardes have a long history of...