In that sense there are dozens of alterations and tendencies and forms of poetic saying through the ineffability of the verb: from initial Rubendarian Modernism to the neobaroque originated not only in Argentina but all throughout Latin America. Movements as important as Neosimbolism, Nativism, Cosmogonism, Colloquialism, Intimism, Antipoetry, Realistic Poetry, Conversational Poetry, Hermetic Poetry, Popular Poetry, Indigenous Poetry, and Folkloric Poetry are part of this history. In general, these innovations regard the syntactic disposition of words, altering their sequencing and creating rare combinations, to the point that particular styles are created (or collective styles when regarding poetic movements).
Another place for innovation concerns the strength of the topics, determined by the attitude toward technological advances of the era, id est, if the past is craved or the future is praised (for example: Rubendarian Modernism or Ultraism), or a fluctuation among personal and subjective topics (Hermetic Poetry, Neosimbolism, etc.), or among social and/or objective subjects (Conversational Poetry, Antipoetry, etc.). In all cases the confidence and security offered by the established linguistic coding does not encourage questioning, and therefore perpetuates poetic expression of the dominating tendency only through words and those particular forms called "verses", such as described by Samuel Beckett's poem: "Listen/join/words/to the words..." (who, on the other hand, cannot avoid whatever he condemns).
Concomitantly, the preservation and reinforcement of the official system of the arts is performed: by not questioning the present system, the existing one is legitimated, preserving the structures untouched. Paradoxically, the system can be reinforced by questioning its ideological contents: what matters are the media, the forms of expression. For that reason, when referring to ruptures in the field of poetry, we will regard the situations in which the vernacular principle stating that poetry is only possible through words and verses is transgressed, that is, when, together with the verbal expression—if it exists—is detected the existence of other languages or supports.
In this sense, three moments may be observed in the Argentinean poetic
tradition. The first occurs at the light of Vicente Huidobro, either under
the sparkling star of Ultraism (the Spanish version of Chilean Creationism)
mainly with the work of Oliverio Girondo, in Buenos Aires, in the mid '20s;
or under the glitter of his Manifestos ("To make a poem in the same way
as nature makes a tree") which already towards 1940 prompted the movement
Concrete-Invention of Río de la Plata and, later, Madí
art. The second occurs with the eclosion of visual poetry and other tendencies
in the mid '60s, including Edgardo Antonio Vigo's proposal for a participatory
poetry. And the third happens in the mid '80s with the creation of Paralengua,
the ohther poetry. The alterations may be basically grouped in two
main orders: in the use of the space in which the symbols are rendered
and in the writing-reading field (oral).
The first rupture takes place with the incidence of Ultraism in Latin America and Argentina in the early 20s. Ultraism is a poetic movement that originated in Spain in 1918 started by Vicente Huidobro, a Chilean poet who introduced in Spain the novelties of French poetry along with his own movement, Creationism. Ultraism, which comes up at the moment in which Rubendarian Modernism was fading, spread rapidly: in Uruguay it appears around the 20s in the magazine Los Nuevos (The New), directed by Morador Otero and Ildefonso Pereda, being a prominent figure, and Alfredo Mario Ferreiro, author of El Hombre que se Comió un Autobús (The Man Who Ate a Bus, 1927); in Chile operates the Runrunist movement, in Mexico the Estridentism, guided by Manuel Maples Arce and, in the rest of the region, renewing poets supersede.
The greatest contribution from the ultraist movement was a new treatment of metaphor, also called "image", without the habitual nexus of the classic metaphor and, regarding the contents, new topics which imposed the changing ways of living due to the new technologies derived from scientific developments: railroad, aviation, skyscrapers, radio, etc. In Argentina Jorge Luis Borges was prominent especially for his work in diffusing the movement along with Oliverio Girondo, a poet that not only exploited the possibilities of linguistic orality in a form similar to Alfonso Reyes' "jitanjáforas," but who also took advantage of poetic space as a privileged component of poetic creation by including iconic images—as in the poem Croquis en la Arena (Croquis on the Sand)—or by interpenetrating the verbal and visual elements of the poem in the manner of ideographic poetry in which the shape of the poem takes the form of the verbal object, as in the poem Espantapájaros (Scarecrow).
The New poetry
The second rupture took place in the mid '60s, starting with magazine Diagonal Cero (Zero Diagonal), edited and directed by Edgardo Antonio Vigo in the city of La Plata (Argentina). In those years several experimental tendencies flourished, from French Lettrism via the Cuban author Robert Altmann and the magazine Signos (Signals) edited by Samuel Feijóo in Santa Clara de Cuba, to visual poetry, principally produced in Mexico by the German-Mexican poet Mathías Goeritz in the field enriched by the Madí group from the River Plate area (River Plate (Río de la Plata) is the river at which margins was raised the city of Buenos Aires; the other margin of the river leads to Uruguay) and the Latin American constructivist tradition; from Brazilian Concretism with its three structuralist, metaphysical, and spacial characteristics to the Italian Poesia Visiva; from Pierre Garnier's Spacialism to Phonic Poetry, of lettrist origin, that had grown stronger thanks to the appearance of magnetic recorders, etc.
At the same time, the mechanisms of creation, distribution and the reception of works of art (including poetry) were being revisited through the situationists and other revolting tendencies that would appear due to the French May: Poesía Dos Puntos (Two Points Poetry), Public Poetry, etc. Amid this fermenting broth would appear all over Latin America groups involved in the "New Poetry" who distributed their materials through magazines, publications and (principally) exhibitions. In that sense we could mention in Chile Ediciones Mimbre, directed by Guillermo Deisler; in Brazil, after an early start of the concretist Noigandres group and its magazine Invençao, the magazines of process-poems, Virgula, Ponto, Proceso and others were founded; in Venezuela, Dámaso Ogaz's Pata de Palo (Wooden Leg) and, peripherally, El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale); in Cuba, the already mentioned Signos; in Uruguay, Los Huevos de Plata (The Silver Eggs) and Ovum 10, and in Argentina, apart from Diagonal Cero, WC and Hexágono 70 ( Hexagon 70) have to be mentioned, all of them directed by Vigo.
Initially, Vigo re-elaborates the texts in visually structured configurations by using letters as well as numbers. Later, the concept of participation directs most of his work, proposing objects and situations in which the active and creative participation of the spectator is crucial for the creation of the poem. This characteristic, which would be a constant factor in his work, can be already observed in Poemas Matemáticos Barrocos (Mathematical-Baroque Poems, Ed. Contexte, Paris, France, 1967), and would crystalize later in his most important theoretical text De la Poesía Proceso a la Poesía para y/o Realizar (From Process-Poetry to Poetry for and/or Realize, Ed. Diagonal Cero, La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1970), in which after analysing all the changes that occurred in poetry during the latest years, proposes "the most profound activation of an individual: his own realization of the poem", id est, translates the center of artistic creation to the enjoyer—now creator—reserving for the artist the role of projector.
To the same poetic group belongs Luis Pazos, a visualizer of sounds and onomatopoeias, forms which he regards as "poetic realism"; also Carlos Raúl Ginzburg, who visually elaborates linguistic matter according to the rationalist principles of symbolic logic which he alters and reconstructs; Jorge de Luxan Gutiérrez who proposes the expression actualidad (here and now) instead of poetry and primarily uses graphic images as his expressive element.
Not part of this group but also worth mention is the lettrist poet Mirta Dermisache and the author of phonic poems, Ana María Pelli. Also Luis Catriel, Alberto Pellegrini, Marie Oresanz, Luis Benedit, Luis Turcovich, Horacio Zabala, Armando Zárate, Bertetche, Héctor Puppo and others closer to conceptualism than to visual poetry.
The Ohther Poetry
The third and last chronological era of this subverting process of verbal poetic language takes place in the late '80s with the appearance of the group Paralengua, propeller of the Ohther Poetry, and constituted by Roberto Cignoni, Fabio Doctorovich and Carlos Estévez. Their organs of expression are the magazine Xul directed by Jorge Santiago Perednik and the various poetic actions and performances organized from 1989 by the group together with other experimental poets.
The best description of Paralengua, The Ohther Poetry, may be
found in the homonymous article written by Carlos Estévez in Xul
#10, December 1993:
"Paralengua is a poetic space which aggregates
those proposals that attempt an alternative to the traditional techniques
represented by books and other publications printed by the usual methods.
The ohther poetry is then defined from the use of a different medium
(stage, cassette, illustration paper, voice, etc.) and a different interpretative
technique (gesture, orality, vacillate, etc.). In this way, to the classical
but revamped modes of theater, drawing, singing, sculpture, dance, photography,
recitation and typography, the more novel ones such as video, multimedia,
computing, recordings and all their possible combinations are added. Paralengua
is then converted into a magnet that attracts poetics and, for the same
reason, into a hyperactive melting pot which is the product of this attraction/interaction.
This gives Paralengua an autodefying status that seems to create its own
esthetics on the basis of change.
The ohther poetry implies also a modification of the relational
spaces, for these can change to more immediate and shareable forms, generating
ways of direct participation such as in Ricardo Castro's ludicrous poems,
Fabio Doctorovich's chorused poems, or Cazenave-Cignoni dialogued ones.
The use of open and closed spaces, modern technologies, mass-media and
the increasing participation of the public give to Paralengua a non-marginal
character (even considering its scarce diffusion and its intermittent appearances),
therefore preferring a frontal attitude with respect to the rest of society.
Maybe that is the reason why there are strong referential components in
most of the presented works, although these elements have been meshed up
to subtle suggestions or buried under deceiving illegibilities.
The amplification of the concept of poetic matter, the redefinition
of its specificity, the poetic corporeity and the disolution of the limits
between poetry and the rest of the artistic activities are some of the
matters derived from the exposed premises. In summary, Paralengua has a
tentacular and proteinic character which does not lack desprejudice, festivity,
intellectualism, sensitivity and, above all, a passion which possesses
all the dimensions of the WORD".
Acknowledgement: to Jim Andrews for his corrected version of this essay.