Place holders (2)

Here is some placeholding writing I did a few days ago:

Like Valente, Antonio Gamoneda reinterprets Lorca’s poetics in his own terms. He is Lorquian for three reasons: (1) begins with pain and suffering as the basic premise. Writing toward death as slow progress, in contrast to Lorca’s duende which emphasizes immediate danger. Heidegger's "ser para la muerte"(2) Fully modernist in his use of language, his theory of signification. The use of metaphor as a “porque sí” and his via negativa. (3) A negative vision of modernity itself. He also uses specifically Lorquian language, including words like llanto, but transposes it to a different landscape, identified with the North of Spain rather than Lorca's Andalusia

This became this:

Antonio Gamoneda, unlike Valente, engages in a dialogue with Lorca’s poetics without marked anxiety or subterfuge, openly acknowledging the strength of his precursor rather than holding him at arm’s distance. Gamoneda, generally speaking, is less self-consciously concerned than is Valente with his own place in the literary pantheon, and hence less preoccupied with claims about lineage, or with establishing his own originality. That being said, Gamoneda’s poetics is both rooted in Lorquian principles and profoundly transformative of them.

Like Lorca, Gamoneda begins with a negative view of modernity itself and a referential field situated in a timeless, rural landscape. He also shares Lorca’s tragic vision of pain, sorrow, and death. Gamoneda’s poetic language is fully modernist in its radical mode of signification. These Lorquian elements, however, reappear in the poetry of the younger writer in an altered state. Gamoneda’s landscape is cold and snowy, in contrast to Lorca’s Andalusian heat. For Gamoneda, human life is a Heideggerian being-toward-death very different in tone from the idea of the duende as a heightened awareness of the ever-present possibility of tragic violence. Finally, Gamoneda’s language maintains a distinctively Lorquian resonance, but one that reflects these other transformations.

What's the difference? In my placeholding note-taking, I didn't articulate the relations between the elements I had enumerated. I didn't articulate the compare / contrast with Valente. I am still not happy with the last sentence here, because of its vagueness, but you can get the idea.

We still have to do compare / contrast moves like a high-school student, just at a higher level of critical sophistication (one hopes). That's why it's important to have learned those skills early on.