Jordon Davis writes in the Boston Review:

American poet-translators, when trying to account for the thrill of particularly successful poetry, have often seized upon duende, a term introduced by Federico García Lorca in a lecture on ecstatic reactions to flamenco music. Through overuse it has become a cliché, signifying depth, surface, darkness, light, death, and life all at once. In other words, it has become meaningless. Critic Jonathan Mayhew lampoons American duende merchants effectively in his new study Apocryphal Lorca: “While [Robert] Bly echoes [Jerome] Rothenberg’s interest in heightened emotions, he presents a much simpler, hydraulic view of poetic creation, in which ‘duende water’ overflows powerfully into the writing of the poem” (emphasis in original). There is more to poetry than sensation and mystification, or, if you prefer, reason and piety, form and content, jouissance and restraint.