On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics
Don't miss this review : On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics by Leonard Schwartz. Stunning.
An excerpt:
Grace of its linguistic and visionary commitment, its capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience, Zurita has written a poetry that surpasses what a more politically committed poetry could have achieved. Zurita’s poems might be figured as an eco-poetry in which the space between nature and history is closed up, once we realize that the work reimagines the entirety of the ocean in such a way as to include those thrown from planes into that ocean. And reimagines the mountains in such a way as to include the Disappeared thrown from planes into their snows until one can only speak of those mountains as containing those people. And renders the desert no longer conceivable except if the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. It was Camille Dungy, the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry who pointed out in her CCP appearance (
#221)
that the poets in her book do not necessarily view a tree as simply a
tree, since it might also be the case that someone was lynched from that
particular tree; they do not look at an agricultural site as an idyl,
since one’s ancestors might have worked that land in slavery. Indeed,
only certain privileged, bourgeois perspectives can divorce “nature”
from “history” in order to yield a “nature poetry” that refreshes us in
its aftermath. I have argued that to view Nature apart from other
discourses and entities (like language for example) is analogous to the
pornographic (without taking any position pro or con on pornography),
where one function (Nature) is fetishized and isolated from other
functions and possibilities (as sex is in pornography). By contrast to a
nature poetry, an eco-poetics seeks out complicated interrelationships
between multiple modes of the sensual. Zurita’s is one of the great
poetries to overcome the artificiality of the nature/history
distinction, to give us the Tree and the invisible histories enacted in
and around the Tree, as Dungy calls for.
An excerpt:
Grace of its linguistic and visionary commitment, its capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience, Zurita has written a poetry that surpasses what a more politically committed poetry could have achieved. Zurita’s poems might be figured as an eco-poetry in which the space between nature and history is closed up, once we realize that the work reimagines the entirety of the ocean in such a way as to include those thrown from planes into that ocean. And reimagines the mountains in such a way as to include the Disappeared thrown from planes into their snows until one can only speak of those mountains as containing those people. And renders the desert no longer conceivable except if the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. It was Camille Dungy, the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry who pointed out in her CCP appearance (
#221)
that the poets in her book do not necessarily view a tree as simply a
tree, since it might also be the case that someone was lynched from that
particular tree; they do not look at an agricultural site as an idyl,
since one’s ancestors might have worked that land in slavery. Indeed,
only certain privileged, bourgeois perspectives can divorce “nature”
from “history” in order to yield a “nature poetry” that refreshes us in
its aftermath. I have argued that to view Nature apart from other
discourses and entities (like language for example) is analogous to the
pornographic (without taking any position pro or con on pornography),
where one function (Nature) is fetishized and isolated from other
functions and possibilities (as sex is in pornography). By contrast to a
nature poetry, an eco-poetics seeks out complicated interrelationships
between multiple modes of the sensual. Zurita’s is one of the great
poetries to overcome the artificiality of the nature/history
distinction, to give us the Tree and the invisible histories enacted in
and around the Tree, as Dungy calls for.
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