Sestina

I have taught Gil de Biedma's "Apología y petición" in graduate courses. Invariably, they will say that it is "repetitive." Well, yes, it is, because it is a sestina, something that few students have ever noticed. They usually don't even now what sestina is in the first place. If you don't read the poem through its form, so to speak, then you won't get it: the language of the poem is flat and prosaic, its message is a straightforward denunciation of a political situation. So why do this in a sestina? That is the question that you have to answer in order to read the poem at all. There are varying answers to this question, but it seems to be that if you don't ask the question in the first place you are reading the poem as though it were just a political statement in verse. The end-words for the sestina generate the poem, they are words that are heavily charged: España, demonios, gobierno, historia, pobreza, hombre.  This is formally clever, but also could be read as a parody of Marxist discourse. Remember that the Communist Party didn't let Gil de Biedma join because he was gay, and that he defined himself as a "compañero de viaje" and someone whose politics stem from bourgeois guilt or "mala conciencia."   

In a book I blurbed recently, and which arrived in the mail two days ago,  The Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets, by Daniel Aguirre Oteiza of Harvard, I saw that Daniel cites my discussion of Gil de Biedma from my 1994 book The Poetics of Self-Consciousness. I did not even remember my discussion until I read Ghostly Poetry  in manuscript form for U of Toronto P a few years ago. Now I am reminded of it yet again. Daniel notes that the "straight" reading of the poem is still prevalent. One example he cites is from Almudena Grandes--one of my least favorite writers for reasons other than this. 

Anyway, it is odd to think that, while my book is 25 years old and I don't think about it very often, it contains insights that hold up well and are still as relevant now as they ever were. The content-mining approach to literature, if anything, is more prevalent than it was when I was first approaching GdBiedma in the early 90s. I could go out today and give this chapter as a talk and change nothing.  

This book of mine rode the metaliterary mode of the early 90s in Hispanism. In this sense it might seem dated. But really, this is still the best of way of reading Gil de Biedma, ¿no es cierto? As far as I know, nobody else has cited my reading of Gil de Biedma, either. It took a Harvard professor who has translated Ashbery and Stevens into Spanish to even see the value of what I have done.