On the plane yesterday I got an idea for an article on Montejo. You could study his heterónimos as a kind of displacement of an avant-garde impulse. Montejo is a kind of mainstream post-vanguard poet, all about Essential Human Experience. He is very good but not particularly exciting.
So he shoves all of his avant-garde ideas into these other poetic voices, some of which are not avant-garde per se, but all of whom are different from Montejo-Montejo. The radical theories of language of Coll Blas.
Naturally you would compare the Venezuelan poet to Pessoa and Machado.
So you can have this idea if you want. I don't have time to write it. I would only ask that you say in the article that part of the inspiration for it came from me.
5 comments:
Muy intersante todo, but the most interesante part is about Don Perimplín. You know all these poets I do not. What do you actually think of G. Montero?
(I am not impressed and am wondering what fine sensibility I am missing -- my reaction is, oh this again, another Alfaguara product --.)
You don't know but I am the main enemy of García Montero in the US. I said he was aesthetically conservative in an artile in the Hispanic Review in the late 90s, and that became the centerpiece of my book The Twilight of the Avant-Garde.
I should actually read Twilight of A G, have never even laid eyes on the physical book. I read a fairly virulent review of it just now on Amazon ... someone quite threatened or so it seems to me. I can see the article.
Reading list of works cited in article I made a visual Freudian slip. Read Calinescu, 5 faces, as "Fear of Modernity." Started hoping he did in fact have such a title.
Ah... now I have seen the 1999 article, which is quite entertaining. G M is middlebrow, yes.
Created for the FNAC? (My student in creative writing says they are advised to write somewhat mainstream things, with the market in mind.)
Yes, that was one of my famous articles. My only famous one before Apocryphal Lorca, really. My PMLA article on Guillén was kind of boring and mainstream.
Sharon Ugalde gave me my only negative review of Twilight. She can barely speak Spanish. I remember suffering through an MLA talk she gave in Spanish in which she pronounced every dipthong as two distinct syllables. It was painful.
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