This is a similar text to the one I'm talking about in the post below.

Ullán, I'm coming to realize now, is a really key figure of Spanish culture of the past 40 years. I'm thinking I do need a chapter on him--or at least a good part of a chapter.

Collaborated with artists: Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, etc...

One of the only major poets who experimented in visual poetry.

Early translator in Spain of Jabès. Valente himself comes to Jabès through Ullán.

Knew María Zambrano; his poetry was admired by Octavio Paz.

Friend of Miguel Casado...

A significant career in journalism, in a country where the cultural supplements of newspapers have an importance they don't have in the US.

Yet Ullán never won the major awards and prizes. In a literary world where such prizes really are a driving force, and come almost automatically to writers with a certain longevity, he was not the one raking in all those awards. Perhaps it's better that way, because it makes us realize that prizes recognize value rather than creating it.

i feel horrible about not writing about him when he was alive. I was always too intimidated by his work, I suppose.

One of my favorite poems by Ullán is a sonnet, consisting of 14 lines of hieorglyphics of his own invention. There is a rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet-- ABBAABBACDCDCD--since the characters that end the lines recur in that order. Some are mimetic images--a fish, a bird, etc... Other glyphs are more abstract, but still highly expressive, hand drawn or maybe stenciled with real craftsmanship. It's visual poetry of the highest order, because it's not just conceptual: the written signs are dense and meaningful, and recur in a classic form, that of the sonnet.

***

If you google "Mayhew" with "García Montero," as I did last night, you will see that several people disagree with my most notorious position. This doesn't bother me. In the first place, if your work has a polemical edge, then people are bound to disagree. Protesting that is like protesting the fact that the player on the other side of the net is hitting the ball back at you. Once a critical position is a virtual consensus, then the issue is a closed one. Secondly, it's me they're disagreeing with. That is, I'm the one defining the terms of the debate. Thirdly, I am still right; I still have the stronger arguments on my side as far as I'm concerned. My position has always been that I could be mistaken, but you'll have to show me how. Fourthly: I don't take it personally if someone doesn't agree with me, even when their responses take on a personal or insulting tone (which is rare in any case). When I read that "Mayhew" says this or that, it almost seems like a different person to me. Seeing my own name in print has always done that to me.

Crítica poética y contracrítica: Resumen de premios en los últimos meses

This is really depressing. I'm glad now that I wrote a book "contra García Montero. Crítica poética y contracrítica: Resumen de premios en los últimos meses. I didn't even know all this shit when I first decided to take on LGM.

Basically, a good number of the panels for all the prizes have him or his cronies on the jury. The winning books are predictably mediocre.

I've been fooling around with the outline of my project. This is what it looks like today. Two asterisks mean a finished chapter, one means a chapter begun. I've decided not to write only about Ullán and Núñez but to write a more panoramic chatper about poets of the late 60s / early 70s. That really should be a book of its own. What the critics have neglected is scandalous.

FRAGMENTS OF A LATE MODERNITY: The Intellectual Traditions of Modern Spanish Poetry

Introduction: Catching Tigers in Red Weather*

PART ONE: LORCA

1. Lorca and the Paradoxes of Modernity*
2. The Contested Legacy of the Duende*

PART TWO: VALENTE, GAMONEDA, RODRÍGUEZ

3. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism**
4. From María Zambrano to José Ángel Valente: The Origins of Late Modernism*
5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**
6. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
7. Claudio Rodríguez*

PART THREE: MODERNISM AFTER MODERNISM

8. The novísimos: Modernists or Postmodernists?*
9. The Catalan poetry of Pere Gimferrer
10. Olvido García Valdés*

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

I'm thinking I should do at least one chapter on Latin American poets who belong to the same general movement of late modernism in Spain--the transatlantic dimension. From Lezama Lima (Cuba) and Octavio Paz (Mexico) to Eduardo Milán (Uruguay) and Blanca Varela (Peru).

Gamoneda wrote an epilogue to Varela's complete poetry in Galaxia Gutenberg. Milán wrote the introduction to García Valdés's poetry in the same collection. Valente, Sánchez Robayna, Milán, and Varela did an anthology together of both peninsular and lat am poetry--also published in Galaxia Gutenberg in Barcelona. So evidently something is going on here on the level of publishing.

***

I'm working at least one hour a day on this project throughout the summer. Now I have twelve potential chapters so something might have to give way. I count time blogging about this project in the one hour. Once I do the one hour then I am free to work longer on it in the bonus zone, or to do other things.

I find myself using a lot of re- prefixes: re-evaluating, recuperating, restoring, rediscovering. So my book is really about remodernizing modernity, keeping it fresh.

I feel compelled somehow to include a chapter on the Catalan poetry of Pere Gimferrer in this book. I am still struggling to justify the book to myself. so the more new things I can put in it, the better.

***

The Belgian Hispanist Elsa Dehennin has passed away--noted for her books on Guillén and Salinas. I met her a few years ago in Paris at a conference. There is also a book coming out soon that she edited, which includes an essay I wrote.

Put another way: 1922-1923 were the years of The Waste Land, Harmonium, Spring & All, Ulysses. That's only 38 / 27 years before The New American Poetry (1960). We are 49 years beyond that. Ginsberg and Williams might seem almost equally distant in time to an 18-year old today.

Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York was written in 1929-30 and published in 1940. The books of the novísimos were published in the late 60s / early 70s, so about forty yearrs afterwards. We are now in 2009, so that's another forty years. At this distance, modernism and postmodernism often look very similar.

BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SQUARE

I hate people who say surreal
when they mean unreal

We killed dozens of moths in in sticky little traps
in the pantry and on the piano

I hate these people
hate them with a passion

When things mean other things
instead of themselves

the moths, the traps, the piano
there is no room in the pantry for the tomato paste

I hate people who say surreal
when they mean unreal

You want to forget forgettable things,
Don't you?

Those towns you passed through
Los Angeles with its petulant physicality

I hate these people
hate them with a passion

Johannes makes some flattering observations on Apocryphal Lorca.

I got my copies of my other book Twlight of the Avant-Garde yesterday. It's kind of anticlimactic after Apocryphal Lorca. But then I think that parts of this book have been published in Diacritics and Hispanic Review, that this book represents much of my best work between 1996 and about 2005. The $95 price tag means that I will be giving away a lot fewer of TOTAV than copies of AL, which is $45 with a 40% discount.

The Tàpies cover is nice, and they spelled my name right. I found a typo on the first page of the acknowledgments so I am a little hesitant to read the book. Post-publication blues are a bummer.

The novísimos were a group of poets inspired by a lot of things "in the air" in the late 60s and early. The neo-avant-garde of the Italian novíssimi, from which the name was taken, the breaking down of barriers between high and low culture, the Parisian May of 68; the poststructuralism of Barthes and Foucault. All these things, taken together, have a convenient name: postmodernism. The argument that these poets were historically anomalous, that somehow what they were doing is out of sequence, anachronistic, is ridiculous prima facie.

What happens to this postmodernism, however, is very revealing. On the one hand, it is attacked (by those making the anachronism argument), in the 1980s and 1990s. It's an embarrassment to have even have had a postmodernism, apparently!

At the same time, in some sense it becomes folded back into a more mainstream high/ late modernism, with highly uneven results. One of the first things to go by the wayside is the interest in pop culture--precisely the element that made these poets seem more postmodernist than modernist. In retrospect this interest seems merely epidermal, in the case of many poets. The (apparent) suspicion of high culture gives way, in many cases, to a rather unproblematic celebration of the same.

Some poets just repeat themselves in book after book, hardly varying their position and writing worse and worse. This is a kind of fossilized late modernism. I won't mention any names.

***

Aesthetics functions as a kind of radar. The late modernist aesthetic is stringent. Since it doesn't admit other alibis, commercial or political, it pretty much stands or falls by quality. Of course, you will tell me that quality is a subjective determination, a mere value judgment. Yet somehow these value judgments won't go away. The main arguments against modernism (and experimental variants of postmodernism) are

(1) Commercial. It responds to no economic demand. (Note that this is, typically, the objection, not just to modernist poetry, but to poetry itself, and to all but the most commercial forms of literature.)

(2) Political. Modernism does not promote the correct social causes, or does not espouse them efficiently or efficaciously, and may even espouse some incorrect ones.

(3) Social. Modernism is "elitist" in its forms.

Usually (1) or (2) is combined with (3). Note, however, that a 4th kind of objection, aesthetic, is rarely made (any more). You are not going to fight modernism on its own terrain because you will lose. So the argument for quality is almost tautological. If I say Zukofksy and you way Woolf, we are really in agreement. In other words, we don't have to agree about the exact works or authors that our individual subjective taste leads us to in either case. On any given day I might prefer Arlen to Porter, or Gershwin to Rogers.

Can Poets & Writers be taken seriously? What is the source of its gravitas? First of all, a poet is a writer, so the very title of the journal contains a sort of category error, as though one were to say "dogs and animals," or "girls and children." You wouldn't have a journal called Novelists and Writers or Playwrights and Writers.