Pads and Notebooks

I often have one notebook that is devoted entirely to a project or part of a project. The project develops there in pen and ink; bibliography takes shape there. Right now I have one notebook that is devoted only to planning the summer's work and another devoted to planning the "year of reading Latin American poetry."

I wish that I could redevelop the ability to write actual prose by longhand rather than typing. I cannot shape whole paragraphs in handwriting any longer. I'm sure my writing would improve if I had that extra method.

A Year of Reading

The rules for the year of reading is that I cannot write anything for publication or accept any new commissions. I will write in notebooks about my reading, and maybe blog a bit too. Things I've written previously might come out during this time. I can either stagger the year so that I don't miss an entire calendar year of writing, or else not stagger it so I don't lose parts of two separate years. The idea is that I will have another book coming out before I start the year of not writing, so my scholarly productivity will not suffer.

My topic will be Latin American poetry. I will read almost nothing but that for a year.

More Geography

Mexican poetry, Peruvian poetry, Spanish poetry, Cuban poetry, is all written in the same language. If I gave an educated Spanish speaker a poem written by a Uruguayan, an Argentine, and a Spaniard, sh/e would not be able to identify the nationality of the authors, unless the poems happened to have geographical markers particular to a region or nation. Most poems have nothing of the sort. A lot of contemporary Spanish American poets view poetry written in the Spanish language as a single, unitary tradition.

On the other hand, Latin Americanists tend to specialize in nations and regions. You can be a Southern Cone specialist, a Carribeanist, an Andeanist, a Mexicanist. It makes sense to study particular clusters of poets geographically. And, of course, the division between Peninsular and Latin American studies is strong in the academy.

So we have two ways of dividing up the field: by language and genre, or by geography. With poetry it makes more sense to look at language and its particular traditions, in my opinion. This is borne out by the amount of transatlantic movement and influence, and intracontinental interchanges.

It occurs to me that one measure of this unity might be the number of scholars who write about both Spanish and Spanish American poetry. If I write about both, then I will myself be bolstering the argument for unity, by being one more example of this phenomenon.