13 ene 2006

Voices from the silence. Silencio inmenso. Darkness falls from the air. When I show myself as I am, I return to reality. Vestida con mantos negros. Somewhere else, sometime. Walking in the rain.

When I show myself as I am, I return to reality. Piensa que el mundo es chiquito. Goes green, goes white. Weather falls out, raining. Applause at the edges. Seeing wind. When I show myself as I am, I return to reality. People should think of themselves when they live alone. Goes white.

Vestida con mantos negros, piensa que el mundo es chiquito. Thinks white. Falls from the air [...]


I've always loved this Lorquian riff in Creeley's Presences. It's the last thing in the book before the "Postscript."

Vestida con mantos negros
piensa que el mundo es chiquito
y el corazón es inmenso.

In Spain, Lorca is only about the fourth or fiifth or maybe even seventh most influential poet of the century. Machado , Cernuda, and Jiménez--even Guillén, Aleixandre, and Salinas--have had a more direct impact on subsequent Spanish poets. His poetry is not iterable. You can't write a Lorcaesque poem without it being obvious. You can only come by his influence honestly if you write in a language other than Spanish.

A weaker poet like Cernuda can be appropriated. A whole generation of Spanish poets riffed off of him. It took Hefferman, a Spanish critic who had studied with Bloom at Yale, to finally point out that Cernuda's reading of the English Romantics was superficial, "weak" in Bloomian terms.

Even Juan Larrea is usable, in a way Lorca is not. The Spaniards tend to want to keep Lorca "chiquito" when he is really "inmenso." A kind of Andalusian folkloric figure or a minor writer of songs and quaint plays. I'm not saying Lorca is not revered in Spain--he is, obviously--but that he is kept at a distance and in the diminutive.

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