Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

César Vallejo wants us to know: When poetry's really being poetry, it's mind-blowing.

He's evoking a notion widely resonant in modern poetry and poetics, chiming not least with Emily Dickinson's great kindred insight that we "know" that it "is poetry" when it "feels physically as if the top of [the] head" has been "taken off." Like Dickinson and others, Vallejo emphasizes the centrality in poetic experience of charged, sensorial, electrifying feeling and physicality becoming interfused with intellectual, cognitive, critical activation. The limit-boundary or border or top of the mind's previously held knowledge feels like it's being blown open, its ceiling, roof, or outermost barrier lifted away. Familiar tools of knowledge that have been stored downward from that previous limit--in our brain's warehouse of already known, often invaluable, CONCEPTS--are not so much erased as appearing, now, no longer to be the summit, zenith, or whole of the story. Poetry's thought-process thus think-feels its way towards the sensing of a "more," of a greater critical capacity--to encounter, experience, know, assess and address, judge, be activated by, the world and ourselves--than we might have been aware was available, approachable. That expanded formal and critical capacity, Vallejo thinks, is a crucial resource of agency for much-needed transformations in modern socioeconomic, political, cultural, and ethical life.

Vallejo has various ways--within his letters, café and political-meeting conversations (and shouting matches), essays, criticism, newspaper articles--of exploring , discussing, showing poetry's mind-blowing character and activity. But here are three celebrated moments from within Vallejo's poetic art itself that convey something of his ongoing attempts, in distinct poetic forms, styles, and modalities, to make mind-blowing experience into poetry, and vice-versa:

II

Time Time.

Midday stagnated between night dews.
Jail cell's bored pump drains
time time time time.

Was Was. . . .

[Tiempo Tiempo.

Mediodía estancado entre relentes.
Bomba aburrida del cuartel achica
tiempo tiempo tiempo tiempo.

Era Era. . . . ]


LXXVII

It hails so much, as if to make me remember . . . .

How far will this rain reach me? . . .

Sing, rain, on the coast still without sea!

[Graniza tánto, como para que yo recuerde . . .

¿Hasta dónde me alcanzará esta lluvia? . . .

Canta, lluvia, en la costa aún sin mar!]


A man passes by with a bread on the shoulder
I’m going to write, after that, 'bout my double?

. . .

Builder falls from a roof, dies & now doesn’t eat lunch
Innovate, after, the trope, the metaphor?

. . .

Someone passes by, counting with fingers
How speak of the not-I without cr—screaming?

[Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro
¿Voy a escribir, después, sobre mi doble?

. . .

Un albañil cae de un techo, muere y ya no almuerza
¿Innovar, luego, el tropo, la metáfora?

. . .

Alguien pasa contando con sus dedos
¿Cómo hablar del no-yó sin dar un grito?]

The Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) is one of international modernism’s greatest and—at least posthumously—most influential poets, known for twinned radical commitments: to artistic-aesthetic experimentation with lyric form; and to progressive and Left politics (a political commitment that eventuated in Vallejo’s intense, complex involvement during the last 15 years of his life with marxian theory, along with connected activism in three "fraternally aligned" communist parties, those of France, Spain, and—albeit from the distance of exile in Europe—his homeland, Peru). He's known too as a fascinating, important instance of tensions—seen by some as generative, by others, as worrisome or problematic—between leftist theories of "committed art" on one hand, and the art itself actually made by some of the very artists apparently advocating theories OF "commitment." The clearly-evident tensions between Vallejo's own partisan writings as a journalist-critic (often seeming to argue in favor of "commitment" theory), and his own poetry—a poetry which manifests profound sociopolitical motivations, involvements, materials, etc., but which nonetheless almost constantly exceeds or even shreds the established CONCEPTS or TENETS that comprise "commitment theory" (by granting highest value to the ability of poetic FORM'S experiments to to blow the mind,rather than giving such pride of place to the themes, ideas, concepts or CONTENT central to commitment theory)—have made his art, criticism, and life stand out as being among the richest and most generative in longstanding debates and criss-crossed lines of art and influence in 20th and 21-st century poetry, poetics, politics (not least, about precisely the historical and still ongoing "aesthetics and politics" or "culture and politics" debates). In significant ways, the issue of mind-blowing form returns as a kind of capstone, near the end of Vallejo's life (during his active involvement with the Spanish Civil War), as a pronounced distancing from and critique of his own previous attractions and adherence to orthodox, deterministic, doctrinaire strains of marxism (along with suggestions, underscored in his ways of writing--in prose and poetry both--about the stakes and meaning of modern democracy in the Spanish struggle).

Like many artists who came of age early in the twentieth century, Vallejo began his career with the previous century’s romantic and symbolist poetics all but second nature to him. He then adapted and extended "advanced" formal and thematic experimentation as itself a critique, radicalization, and modernization of romanticism and symbolism, and as an intended contribution towards the development of modern poetry's capacities dynamically to engage, from the Left, a dramatically altered social landscape. While becoming a key figure in modern poetry, Vallejo was also actively involved in the political life of his native Peru as well as that of Spain (whose 1936-39 Civil War became one of the last great causes of his life), and France (his primary country of residence after he left Peru). He also made three decisive trips to the Soviet Union (the book of social and aesthetic-cultural commentary that he wrote about aspects of those visits to the USSR became the one "bestseller" of Vallejo's writing published during his lifetime).

In sustained readings of Vallejo’s poetry and criticism, we'll consider various aspects of Vallejo’s art, while highlighting the ways his poetry approaches the relation of aesthetic form to the sociopolitical realm, and, above all [sobre todo], the way Vallejo understands mind-blowingness to be at the heart of the matter. Along the way, we’ll look briefly at some of the poetry that preceded Vallejo and that he deemed of supreme importance, most notably, that of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío—and likewise the French line of modern lyric that begins with Baudelaire, as well as poets of the Americas besides Darío whose work Vallejo found crucial (perhaps most notably, Walt Whitman, José Martí, and Gabriela Mistral). We’ll also pause to ask what seems or doesn't seem particularly marxian—or even, for that matter, particularly Left—in Vallejo’s poetic art, but "simply," so to speak, "artistic" or "aesthetic": i.e., mind-opening, bodily galvanizing. Vallejo’s formidable imaginative energies and intellectual reach; his terrific feel for how to work with and stretch inherited poetic forms and genres; his singular formal-technical innovations at the level of line, syntax, phrase, syllable, accent, and even phoneme; his virtuosic abilities with traditional and novel orchestrations of lyric musicality; and just his sheer overall poetic talent and ambition will allow us to see, among other things, how his rigorous investigations and enactments, in verse and criticism, of the compound question "what is poetry, what is aesthetic experience, what is modernism, what is political commitment, what might—or should, or should not—bring them all together?" will yield intriguing, often unexpected results. Among those unexpected results are novel ways of grasping the relations obtaining in modern poetry among pleasure, estrangement, judgment, form, structure, genre, aesthetic autonomy, sociohistorical content, and ethical-political engagement. All of which, Vallejo thinks, are made significantly more possible through art's, and especially poetry's, contributions to newly-developed "sensibility"--to minds blown open and sensing their capacities for greater critical and imaginative resources than could previously have been guessed.

We’ll spend somewhere between the first half to the first two-thirds of the course reading Vallejo’s poetry and criticism, as well as some philosophy, literary criticism, and theory that will help illuminate and contextualize the poetry (including work by Kant, Marx, Marx and Engels, José Carlos Mariátegui, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Stephen Hart, Doris Sommer, Beatriz Sarlo, and others). In the second portion of the course, we’ll read as much as we can--time permitting--in works of some of Vallejo's contemporaries, as well as in hte work of later, post-Vallejo poets and critics, along with work from adjacent art forms coming from across the world that have engaged in dialogue with Vallejo.. Those other poets and artists (we'll read their poetry, and in some cases, also their criticism, or watch/listen to their work) will likely include: Federico García Lorca; Blanca Varela; Hans Magnus Enzensberger; Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber); Octavio Paz; Mahmoud Darwish; Nathaniel Tarn; Roque Dalton; Susana Baca; Noel Nicola; Nicanor Parra; Coral Bracho; Ernesto Cardenal; Juan Gelman; Raúl Zurita; Emmy Pérez; Michael Palmer; Fady Joudah; Roberto Tejada; Barbara Guest; Roberto Bolaño; and others.

Much of the poetry—as well the philosophy, criticism, and related materials—that we'll read and write about in this seminar have a deserved reputation for being challenging, "difficult"; and, simultaneously, for being powerful, captivating, exciting, attractive, pleasurable. From Vallejo's point of view, that's because they're fundamental to what is, after all, simply mind-blowing.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills