So I Wrote This This Morning

10 Footnotes

In 2009, I published Apocryphal Lorca: Parody, Translation, Kitsch, with University of Chicago Press. Although I wrote this book quickly, beginning in 2006, much of what I had been studying all my life went into it: American poetry, translation theory, jazz, Lorca himself. A friend and colleague of mine, Jill Kuhnheim, told me that it was fun for her to read it because there was so much of me in it. I did not abandon Lorca after the publication of Apocryphal Lorca. My first thought was to write a book on the contemporary Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda, but this soon morphed into a project on Spanish modernism, and then, eventually, into What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity.

Although I have written other books and articles on Spanish poetry, I remain most closely identified with my work on Lorca. My current project, while substantially different in its conceptual scheme, continues to draw out some the implications of the central idea behind Apocryphal Lorca: that a poet like Lorca becomes strangely unrecognizable in a foreign context—in this case a foreign context that happens to be my own, domestic American literary culture. Of particular interest to me is the discovery of things that I might have explored in this book, but that either escaped my attention or did not seem significant enough to me at the time. Some of this material has worked its way into What Lorca Knew, but not in any systematic manner. Hence the idea of offering up these “Ten Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca,” which I conceive of as an exercise in scholarly humility.

I am not a modest person by any means, and a display of false modesty is unlikely to convince anyone to the contrary. Still, in scholarship I maintain the posture of epistemological skepticism: the idea that one’s own conclusions are inevitably questionable and incomplete. Some of the discoveries I have made after the publication of the book confirm my insights into Lorca’s North American reception; others reveal my blind spots and lead to significant revisions of my ideas or to new directions of research.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (6): Vallejo

6. Ahora bien, al trabajar en mi segundo libro sobre Lorca (inédito todavía) me di cuenta de que había una comparación lógica entre Lorca y Vallejo, como dos poetas modernos de subjetividad fragmentada. A la vez hay una diferencia de recepción, entre el lorquismo desbordado en EEUU y la presencia menos destacada de Vallejo. A pesar de haber sido reconocido como uno de los grandes poetas latinoamericanos, Vallejo no era "surrealista" (tampoco Lorca, pero le pusieron esta etiqueta). Uno de mis apuntes al libro podría tratarse de esta comparación.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (5): Lorca / Rilke

5. I discovered this interesting pattern, that mentions of Lorca tended to be found in proximity to those of Rilke. I mentioned this in my book but I don't know if I said enough about it. That might be part of this essay I am planning to write called "10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca." First would be noting the instances of this, then trying to figure out why.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (4): Theater

4. My biggest omission was Lorca's influence on American theater, and the influence of Lorca's theater in general. I had it in my head somehow that Lorca was not significant for American dramatists. This is obviously not the case, and I have a chapter in the new book which I am now completing on this very topic. This is a rather strange case of me missing something that should have been right in front of me. A disturbing lack of intellectual curiosity and tunnel vision. Once again I believe that the lesson to be drawn is one of humility.

I did look for theater influence by Lorca, but not hard enough. I was not as expert in American theater as I thought I was in American poetry.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (3): Hughes and Intersectionality

3. I did deal with Langston Hughes a bit in one of my chapters, but inadequately. What was missing was the intermediate step, someone who had already "queered" him so that I could make the argument that his interest in Lorca was as a fellow gay writer. I didn't want to make this argument, because it would have been overstretching a bit, from my posture of epistemological skepticism. In other words, I could guess that this is behind some of Hughes's interest in Lorca, but I didn't have enough evidence. It seems clear that Lorca's influence in the US is intersectional (to use a popular term). That is, someone who taps into several dimensions of identity politics at once.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (2): Strayhorn

2. I discovered that Billy Strayhorn had done music for a Lorca play when I was doing reading for a course on jazz that was going to teach, shortly after submitting the final copy-edited and proof-read ms. to the publisher. I read two biographies of Strayhorn. The idea was to take me out of Lorca and into something else. I couldn't have known that I should have been reading about Strayhorn while working on my Lorca book. Once again, the lesson is kind of intellectual humility. Something relatively close to me (jazz, and all things Duke Ellington and Strayhorn) that had enclosed a Lorca reference that escaped my attention. Once again, this discovery confirmed a central thesis of the book: the interest of gay and black intellectuals in Lorca.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (1)

1. One of my chapters dealt with Creeley's "After Lorca" and Spicer's After Lorca but I missed Padgett's "After Lorca." One of my ideas was that New York School poets were the unheralded champions of Lorca, and I had chapters on O'Hara and Koch. I am a great admirer of Padgett, since my high school days, and yet this poem escaped my attention until yesterday, literally, when I was leafing through a copy of his collected poems that I had had since the summer. None of my New York School contacts told me about it; they probably never remembered it existed. I got it for my birthday in August. It is not an extraordinary poem for all of you, maybe, but it demonstrates a nice parodic vein in American Lorquismo. It's got that nice silly repetition vibe going on.

The lesson is a bit of epistemological humility. The new things I discover in the American reception of Lorca are things that are close to me, but that had escaped my attention. I find them when I am not looking for them, but pursuing other interests.

12 Themes in the Reception of Lorca

Romantic Hermeneutics

Elegies

Stagings

Flamenco Sketches

Queer Encounters

Alibis and Displacements

New York Variations

Visualizations

Modernism

Multiculturalism

Parody and Kitsch

Translation


The idea would be to write a paragraph on each theme, the further develop it. The result, a synthesis between my two books.