Excerpt from the book Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico

From the Preface by Luis Cortés Bargalló

The poems in this volume were written from the seventies onward, when the younger poets in this book were born. That is, the volume contains texts written in the amphibian and chiaroscuro Mexico of the end of the 20th century (one nearly unknown and highly stereotyped by the average American): traditional and modern; illiterate and cultured; cosmopolitan and provincial; ancestral and displaced. A country in which both the experience and memory of the authoritarian regime that drained the country during the people’s movement of 1968 (the words of Tomás Segovia after the Tlatelolco massacre come to mind: “today it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that there is no generation left; there are no more groups, not even a conversation”) and the successive economic, political, moral and social crises, as well as their amends and corrections have left a deep, and often painful and persistent mark. A country that despite the euphemistic and aligned rhetoric of neo-liberal administrations and an impoverished middle class, finds a more accurate expression of itself in certain daily images that have become emblematic. I am thinking of a photograph published in newspapers in the late nineties: a college student and activist not lacking in merits, before his detention and ulterior decline, cuts his hair in front of a graffiti that reads “There is no future.” Another image: the presence of indigenous Zapatistas in congress, the delicate and fragile figure of an immensely dignified Comandanta Ramona as she delivers a lesson on humanism, civility and history to a political elite debased by power struggles, skirmishes between parties, deafness and business deals. A country caught between the ancestral and endless wealth of its heritage and the emerging culture of its misery; in other words, one divided by the “innumerable un-cultures” of which Gabriel Zaid speaks.


This book contains poems written during a shift in artistic discourses that were driven by what Octavio Paz calls the “spirit of the times.” From their marginal and peculiar origin these discourses have sought, in some way or another, a place within the major international contexts: Abstract Expressionism, neo-figuration, the avant-gardes; serialism, microtonality and informalism; the performing arts’ new landscape; post avant-garde literary movements of all kinds; as well as constant revisions rooted in Surrealism, the classics, the Neo-Baroque and popular culture, which sometimes prove to be outdated and sometimes are relevant and become truly refreshing currents.


Furthermore, this poetry was written after the now canonic anthology Poesía en movimiento (1966) edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco and Homero Aridjis had delineated the horizon of Mexican poetry. This editorial project had aimed to present a part of Mexican poetry—both contemporary and historic—which involved a rupture with the literary establishment and a change in attitudes regarding the poetic phenomenon. It featured poetry impregnated by the air of modernity that, shortly after, with its criticism, its crises and shortcomings, would end up flooding all poetic atmospheres, breaths, and the majority of forms and artistic procedures.

Vicente Quirarte, in the prologue to Poetas de una generación 1940-1949, explains the traits shared by poets born in the forties and identifies their generation as one “of solitudes (a trait also shared by the ‘groupless group’ of Contemporáneos, according to how they defined themselves.) This isolation has to be emphasized in order to understand the intensity, the pursuit of a distinct voice and the authenticity of the generation’s best work. Without manifestos and group statements, these poets channel their respective individualities toward that space where solitary rebelliousness can be shared: the poem.” The general panorama that Eliot Weinberger surmises is not different: “Mexican poetry, as it is written today, cannot be conveniently characterized: like American poetry, it is made up of a large number of soloists who do not form a choir.”

The group of poets presented in this volume share other peculiar traits, which of course, by their own nature, are in no way permanent or exclusive. Evodio Escalante has said that poets born in the fifties “comprise a generation of wreckage, one that probably has understood history as nothing but the blind alley to which they have been led by other generations under the hallucinatory effects of ideologies and firm beliefs in the salvation of the human race. These poets have lost their naiveté […] Thus their disenchantment […] and, especially, as a hypothesis, their striking instinct for the concrete, which frequently makes them pare reality down to personal scenes that the reader can relate to in an immediate and elemental way […] history recedes so as to become incrusted in letters in a different manner.” This strategy is, by the way, not foreign to those poets whose extreme and deliberate vocation is critical and testimonial, such as Rubén Bonifaz Nuño in Los demonios y los días and Fuego de pobres, Eduardo Lizalde, Juan Bañuelos and José Emilio Pacheco. This line can be traced back to Salvador Novo, the Octavio Paz of Trabajos del poeta, and also Efraín Huerta, Jaime Sabines, and a host of poets from other latitudes (for we must not forget that in Mexico poets pay as much attention to Mexican poetry as they do to foreign one and that most poets have undertaken noteworthy translation projects.)

In our days, this strand of poetry, with varied and often contrasting formal strategies, is intrinsic to the poems most framed by the transfigured realm of immediate experience, those by authors like Orlando Guillén, Elisa Ramírez Castañeda, José de Jesús Sampedro, Héctor Carreto, Ricardo Castillo, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Luis Miguel Aguilar, Andrés Ordóñez, Juan Domingo Argüelles, and Luis Vicente de Aguinaga in his first books.