The Committed Word: Studies in Spanish American Poetry by Merlin H. Forster (review)

104 The Latin Americanist Fall 2004 psychology to political cultures, but Auyero’s sample, lacking broader supporting evidence from other individuals in his group of interviewees, remains somewhat awkward. Regardless, Contentious Lives not only makes an important empirical contribution through material gathered from exemplary fieldwork; it is also a great read. Tina Hilgers York University The Committed Word:Studies in Spanish American Poetry. By Merlin H. Forster. University: Romance Monographs, 2002. 199p. $35.00. Merlin H. Forster has cultivated a long and fruitful engagement with Spanish American poetry throughout his career. From his fundamental Historia de la poesia hispanoamericana and his seminal bibliography Vanguardismin Latin American Literature: an annotated bibliographical guide (compiled with K. David Jackson), to his monographs such as Fire and Ice: The Poetry o f Xavier Villaurrutia and La muerte en la poesia mexicana, Forster’s convincing analyses grapple with the essence and practice of poetry throughout the region. A succinct yet wide-ranging collection of insightful essays, The Committed Word offers a culminating potpourri of Forster’s approaches. The essays,uniformly displaying the author’s patience and diligence in pursuing original editions and critical references, range from monographic studies to stylistic, national and gender comparative analyses. As Forster highlights in his prologue, the connection between poetry and society in Latin America forms a unifying thread in his poetry research. His overview uses Huidobro’s metapoetic phrase from Altazor “magnkticas palabras / caldeadas” as a touchstone for exploring reactions to and engagements with the poet’s role among representatives of four “strata” (generations) of Spanish American poets. He arrives at five conclusions that roughly affirm a continued poetic production in Spanish America characterized by increased international awareness, a greater canonical openness , a variety of styles, and the diminished (though not vanished) influence of vanguardists like Huidobro. Although this overview specifically concerns poetry in Spanish America since 1960,Forster ’s next chapters return to poetic precursors. His first grouping of essays, “A Backwards Glance,” includes two analyses address- Book Reviews 105 ing, respectively, the classification of Sor Juana’s villancicos as a hybrid genre borrowing from poetic as well as theatrical conventions , and the influence of the Mexican landscape-particularly volcanoes and pyramidal temples-on JosC Maria Heredia’s poems of sublimation and despair. The second grouping, “Twentieth-Century Vanguards,” contains five essays that develop areas of Forster’s main interests. His solid and incontrovertible first essay, including several illustrations , explores JosC Juan Tablada’s fascination with Japanese and Chinese verse forms and visual poetry as early vanguard experiments . The essay on Vallejo engages exile and orphanhood as aspects related to Vallejo’s own life experiences and representative of the more general theme of alienation in his works. Forster gives close readings of several well-known poems here, such as “Espergesia,” “LXI,” and “Acaba de pasar el que vendra.” The third essay in this section traces the influence of Fernando Pessoa (and his heteronyms) in Spanish American poets, beginning with Paz’s highly influential essay “El desconocido de si mismo.” Aside from tangential relationships to the poetry of vanguardists like Borges and Huidobro, Forster identifies Pessoa’s strong influence on JosC Emilio Pacheco, who invents the personalities and styles of poets to whom he attributes certain verses in the “Cancionero apbcrifo” section of No me preguntes cdmo pasa el tiempo. The remaining two essays in this vanguards section explore national and stylistic tendencies. In the first, Forster outlines and exemplifies the “atypical” progression of vanguard movements in Colombia. Instead of the general Latin American evolution from radical beginnings to more simplified expressions over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Colombian process moved from the weak, misnamed group “Los Nuevos” through the “Piedra y Cielo” and “Cantico” groups to the highly iconoclastic “nadaistas” in the late 50s and 60s.The second essay constitutes a general survey of visual poetry in the vanguards (with illustrations) from the influence of Mallarm6 and Apollinaire through Huidobro, Tablada, Vallejo and the lesserknown Peruvians Albert0 Hidalgo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Forster supports the thesis of Johanna Drucker (in her study The Ksible Word) that typographic experimentation engaged the materiality of poetry for a new generation of boundary-breaking artists...