César Vallejo: Trilce (1922–) [Spanish, English]

Trilce is the second and the most well-known book of poetry by the Peruvian author César Vallejo.

Pared of all ornamental language, Trilce introduces the wrenched syntax that allows Vallejo to get beyond the constraints of received linguistic conventions. Writing in A History of Peruvian Literature, James Higgins catalogues the elements of Vallejo’s diction: “Vallejo confounds the reader’s expectations by his daring exploitation of the line pause, which often leaves articles, conjunctions and even particles of words dangling at the end of a line, by his frequent resort to harsh sounds to break the rhythm, by employing alliterations so awkward as to be tongue-twisters. He distorts syntactic structures, changes the grammatical function of words, plays with spelling. His poetic vocabulary is frequently unfamiliar and ‘unliterary,’ he creates new words of his own, he often conflates two words into one, he tampers with cliches to give them new meaning, he plays on the multiple meaning of words and on the similarity of sound between words. He repeatedly makes use of oxymoron and paradox and, above all, catachresis, defamiliarising objects by attributing to them qualities not normally associated with them.”

D. P. Gallagher suggests in Modern Latin American Literature that Vallejo was “perhaps the first Latin American writer to have realized that it is precisely in the discovery of a language where literature must find itself in a continent where for centuries the written word was notorious more for what it concealed than for what it revealed, where ‘beautiful’ writing, sheer sonorous wordiness was a mere holding operation against the fact that you did not dare really say anything at all.” (from Vallejo’s biography by Poetry Foundation)

With a Foreword by Antenor Orrego
Publisher Talleres tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, Lima, 1922
136 pages
via Biblioteca BBVA

Commentary (Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, 2011, 329 pp)
Wikipedia (ES)
Wikipedia (EN)

PDF (Spanish), other editions: 1961, 1982, 1986, 1987
HTML (Spanish/English, trans. Clayton Eshleman, 2007)

Richard Kostelanetz (ed.): Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism (1990)

An anthology of critical essays focusing on the more experimental Stein texts, with Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Bernstein, Donald Sutherland, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, John Ashbery, Robert Marx, David Antin and others.

Publisher McFarland & Co., Jefferson/NC and London, 1990
ISBN 0899504337
224 pages
via waskleist

PDF
ARG

John Byrum, Crag Hill (eds.): Core: A Symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry (1993)

“CORE consists of materials sent in response to a questionnaire on visual poetry developed and distributed by Crag Hill and John Byrum. The questionnaire was distributed to approximately 200 people in several countries whose efforts have been largely concerned with visual poetry. Nearly all of the respondents consider at least some of their literary work as visual poetry or visual literature.

The responses constitute a core sample of the issues, methods, and practices of contemporary visual poetry, and of the respondents’ perceptions regarding its situation within contemporary culture. Respondents were encouraged to deal with the ‘spirit’ of the issues raised by the questionnaire as much as with the particular questions themselves.” (from the Introduction)

Contributions by Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Dick Higgins, Richard Kostelanetz, Steve McCaffery, Eduardo Kac, among many others.

Publisher Generator Press, Mentor/OH, and Score, Mill Valley/CA, 1993
ISBN 0945112165
156 pages
via imagenigma

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