I've been playing around with the idea of counter-reformation poetics. What I mean by this is a very specific tradition that looks to Spanish mysticism (16th century) in order to create a Spanish cultural poetics for the modern age. There are a few dots I haven't connected yet, but the figures I am looking at are María Zambrano, José Lezama Lima, and José Ángel Valente, with some Unamuno thrown in. My basic question is how secular intellectuals can sign on to this project. Zambrano and Lezama were both practicing Catholics, of course, but their models are influential on many other, much more secular thinkers.

Mysticism almost has to do the work that the enlightenment does for other national traditions.

The notion of the counter-reformation was invented much later, and the term itself is fairly charged. I'm using it with some trepidation but also with some deliberate provocation.

I remember reading Asbhery's introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. He had a list of authors that O'Hara and he had read. A lot of my reading in those days was reading backwards, from O'Hara to Flann O'Brien, from Ashbery to Henry Green, etc... Pound sent countless readers back to Chinese poetry or the Troubadours.

A large part of my reading of Valente has been of this type. I can read him in terms of Lezama, Celan, Zambrano, San Juan de la Cruz, Unamuno, Lorca... Understanding everything he knew and understood.

The opposite method is to take a single figure like Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, or Pound, or Lorca, and study that writer's influence on everyone else. This is what Marjorie Perloff did in a series of books (The Poetics of Indeterminacy; The Dance of the Intellect; Wittgenstein's Ladder). That's what I tried to do in Apocryphal Lorca.

I've decided Lezama Lima has to go in the book too. I'm going to put him in the same chapter as María Zambrano.

Wish me luck.

Seriously, though, this is the one poet I've devoted most time to that I've never written about (except for one conference paper 20 years ago that I no longer even have.)

I'm sure before it is all over I will have even more Latin American poetry in this book.