On Matters of Form in Contemporary Latino Poetry

Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved.
May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S.
Introduction
On Mat ters of For m in

Contemporary Latino Poetry
4
L ati n o Po ets in Time and Pl ace
T his is a book-length meditation on and analysis of the formal and
thematic features present in the Latina-feminist-focused poetry of
Julia Alvarez and Rhina P. Espaillat (Dominican Republic ancestry)
as well as the gay-physician-oriented poetry of Rafael Campo (Cuban
ancestry) and C. Dale Young (Asian, Latino, and Anglo ancestry).
While most of the book will attend to an analysis and discussion of
their poetry, this poetry is made in time and place. They do not live in
a sociohistorical vacuum. Their lives and work are deeply immersed in
a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States, where,
among many other happenings, Latino novelists and poets were com-
ing into their own; their making of poetry and its consumption takes
place at a time when Latino poets could choose whatever form neces-
sary to convey whatever subject imagined. They make and we con-
sume their poetry during a time when for Latino poets (and readers)
nothing is off limits.
This moment of the great flourishing of Latino poetics did not
arrive ex nihilo. There were many before who fought and overcame
or applicable copyright law.
many of the barriers put in their way by gatekeepers of the literary

industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, many Latino authors (poets, novel-
ists, playwrights), scholars, and editors established publishing venues
such as Bilingual Press (1973); Cinco Puntos (1973); Tonatiuh-Quinto
Sol, or TQS (1975); Arte Público (1979); Floricanto (1982); Lalo
Press (1983); and Third Woman Press (1979), to name a few. Non-
print venues such as Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, and Pedro Pietri’s
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/20/2020 2:41 PM via AUBURN UNIV
AN: 645496 ; Aldama, Frederick Luis.; Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry
Account: s4594776
2 Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry
Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S.
Nuyorican Poets Café (1973) allowed for the dissemination of poetry

within communities.
Many Latino poets across the country were giving shape to a Latino
literary landscape during this period of the 1970s and 1980s. They
include Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Alurista, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lucha
Corpí, Cherríe Moraga, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lorna Dee Cervantes,
Sandra María Esteves, Virgil Suárez, Lourdes Casal, Judith Ortiz
Cofer, and Bernardo Vega, to name but a few. Alurista’s Floricanto en
Aztlán (1971) is in many ways exemplary (in form and content) of
the poetry of this era. In the poem “Libertad,” he invents a poet-voice
that moves back and forth between Spanish and English—a bilingual
code-switching aimed to affirm a Latino identity: “Sin lágrimas /
sin dolor / and with pride / la Raza nosotros.”1 Like Alurista, many
other of these Latino poets sought to make visible what had long been
swept under rugs by the mainstream literary establishment—the long
history of the presence of Latinos—as well as affirm ancestral cul-
tural and historical roots in an otherwise unfriendly, racist, and hostile
United States.
In the 1980s, too, we saw the shaping of a Latino poetic with a
feminist and queer bent. The poetry of Anzaldúa, Moraga, Corpí, and
Francisco X. Alarcón, among others, exploded many prejudices and
assumptions within the Latino community (creative or otherwise). It
affirmed the significant presence of Latina authors as well as Latino
gay and lesbian creators generally. In Spilling the Beans in Chicanolan-
dia, for instance, I consider how gay Latino poet Francisco X. Alarcón
both affirms “his Amerindian heritage and a venue for coming out as
a gay poet” and uses the poetic form “to creatively and powerfully
interrogate an otherwise homophonic and heterosexist Chicano/a
community.”2 Alarcón considers his poetic voice (often in a hard-
hitting rhythm and staccato in tone) “less an antidote to his pain than
a violent lash against a racist world.”3 Attracted to its economy of
form—it “has the power to say so much with so little”4 in order to
“open up that realm of multiple imaginings that you just don’t find
in prose”5—he discusses how poetry “affirms the grief and joy that
my people bring to the world.”6 While he considers himself, along
with other Latino authors, as part of America’s “great promise,” he

holds no romantic illusions about what it is like to be a gay Chicano
poet: “I know that I’m going to be neglected, silenced by mainstream
America. This is a fact. At the same time, just like others that have
been silenced, I’m a part of our country’s great promise.”7
Standing on the shoulders of these early path carvers (Juan Bruce-
Novoa called them pioneers in his 1980-published Chicano Authors:
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On Matters of Form in Contemporary Latino Poetry 3
Inquiry by Interview), today we have Latino authors of all types (gay,

lesbian, young, old, formally trained, and self-taught, for instance)
creating a rich array of poetry—and in all poetic forms from the more
metrically formal to free-verse (rhymed or unrhymed but with no
fixed metrical pattern) formats. In each case, poets seek to create an
aural (and often visual) aesthetic experience through the simultaneous
use of the shaping or the patterning of sounds in the poem and the
formal choices made in its visual presentation on the page.
Several contemporary Latino poets craft with both the sound and
the visual centrally in mind. Bilingual poet Urayoán Noel chooses to
shape his poetry with the aural (spoken-word-like) and visual (paint-
erly) impulse in the making of his radically conceived and executed Kool
Logic Sessions (2010) and Hi-Density Politics (2010). In the latter he
includes the poem “co-opt city,” which visually falls from high to low
down the page like a thin skyscraper as a series of two- to three-word
lines in Spanish and English. For instance, its opening lines read, “hi
then, city / cooped, recouped / hi-density / hidden / sí, tú / quién?”8
In Hi-Density Politics, he includes a performance DVD made in
collaboration with composer Monxo López. Others, such as Mónica
de la Torre in Public Domain (2008), create poems that likewise defy
the spatial layout of poetry, spilling out all over the page in Apol-
linairean fashion, including photos and email-shaped poems. Others
like Scott Inguito also push the envelope on poetic form. In Inguito’s
lection (2005), words appear, but only to resist our meaning-making
impulse. And Rodrigo Toscano creates a disorienting performed-word
poetic (it actually appears like a play or film script) for his borderland
poems collected in Collapsible Poetics Theater for Sustainable Aircraft
(2009).
Yet others chose to continue and expand a poetic that explores and
affirms ancestry. We see this impulse, for instance, in Cuban Amer-
ican Richard Blanco’s poems, which gravitate toward the maternal
figures of the mama and abuelita. In the poem “América” (in City of
a Hundred Fires, 1998) he invents a poet-voice that reflects on the
making of strange food (turkey and candied yams, for instance) that
stand in stark contrast to cultural customs and meals of the homeland.
We see it also in Ray González’s Southwest-set Consideration of the

Guitar (2005) and Naomi Ayala’s bilingual, Boricua-affirming This
Side of Early (2008). We see a new generation of Latina poets such as
Rosa Alcalá (Undocumentary, 2008) and Emmy Pérez (Solstice, 2003)
exploring issues of gender within and outside the Latino community.
And others choose more of a metaphysical path, such as that seen in
Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s Parable Hunter (2008), Dionisio D. Martínez’s
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prose-poetry collection Climbing Back (2000), and the typographi-

cally fractal-like poems collected in Edwin Torres’s In the Function
of External Circumstances (2010). Others like Paul Martínez Pompa
(My Kill Adore Him, 2009) and John Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie,
2010) choose to create a hard-hitting street (rap-like rhythms) poetic
voice that shakes to the bone any essentialist constructions of Latino
identity. And the street poetic is given new meaning with Latina poet
Sarah Cortez using the verse form to reframe her experiences as a
police officer in How to Undress a Cop (2000).
Some choose to create poet-voices that are ironic, satiric, and
comical. In Long Distance (2009) Steven Cordova invents a tongue-
in-cheek poet-voice that chronicles everyday life with HIV. In Eduardo
C. Corral’s Slow Lightning (Yale Younger Poets Prize, 2012) he uses
a chiastic rhyme and word-sound scheme to crisscross in the reader’s
mind concepts of desire, sex, liberation, and servitude; in this same
collection, Corral also code-switches (to pay homage to the poet José
Montoya) and invents different poet subjectivities to explore the mul-
tilayered experiences of Latinos and Latinas. For instance, in “Border
Triptych” the poetic persona, Sofia, makes the dangerous crossing
from Tijuana to San Diego, poignantly observing, “I was one of ten
women. Our mouths were taped. / I was spit on. I was slapped. The
other women were raped.”9
The subject matter of Latino poetry can be anything—and is any-
thing under the sun. Martín Espada characterizes Aracelis Girmay’s
first collection, Teeth (2007), as “hard, cutting, brilliant, beauti-
ful.”10 In her second collection Girmay chooses to anthropomorphize
any and all things in the elegiac-toned poetry collected in Kingdom
Animalia (2011). In the poem “Mi Muerto” the poet-voice gives
animal flesh to images, describing the neighborhood with its “jackal-
mouthed, murderous streets” that swallow its children11; in “Science”
the wind is monstrous with “ten hands” and even more “mouths”;12
in “Self-Portrait as the Skin’s Skin” Girmay invents a poet-voice per-
sona that is identified in its extreme physicality: “the red skin of the
snake who leaves / the thick meat of your muscle.”13 In The Outer
Bands (2007) Gabriel Gomez plays with words and line breaks to
crisscross disparate landscapes in our mind: the deserts of Texas with

a post-Katrina New Orleans. In Rebozos (2012) Carmen Tafolla (Poet
Laureate of San Antonio) chooses the ekphrastic mode, creating
interpretive poetry that reaches out to the world of Latina art. In
her collection Goodbye, Flicker: Poems (2012) Carmen Gimenéz Smith
chooses to include poems that largely fall under the conceit of the
fairy-tale story to revise and reinhabit mainstream mythologies. For
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instance, the poet-voice begins the poem “Mother, Mother” by identi-

fying the mother as snow white or Blancanieves, then reflects “white
snows. white girl, I thought” as the “rain tick-marks / the window.
tick, it says. here is your time passing. tick tick. / you grow old, it tells
my mother. late for graveyard shift.”14
By degree, Latino authors choose more or less strict formal con-
straints. John Olivares Espinoza and Francisco Aragón consistently
use a straightforward free-verse format in their respective collections:
The Date Fruit Elegies (2008) and Puerta del Sol (2005). Others shape
their poetry consistently according to identifiable European meters:
sestina, sonnet, or villanelle, for instance. We see this in Ada Limón’s
pull toward the sonnet form in the third part of Lucky Wreck (2006).
She uses the sonnet to convey a sense of dislocation, fixity (kinds of
felt imprisonment), and desire for freedom generally. Her poet-voice
asks, “Are we scared to discover that in fact, we are not alone? / That
the windows open out and the wind blows in.”15
And the Latino experience is significantly expanded in the formal
verse patterns of Alejandro Escudé. In his first collection, Where Else
but Here (2005), he chooses formal meter as the constraint to convey
themes of migration (from Argentina to California), class (the poet’s
persona talks often of his father as the patrón to Mexican workers),
rural and urban life, and art. In “After the Country’s Collapse” the
poet-voice reflects on the moment of forced exile when he is forced to
leave his “backyard eucalyptus” behind: “I knew we couldn’t take the
tree with us / so I put it in a tear, small enough to fly / within the belly
of that great, orange plane.”16 And in “Early Morning Disturbance”
the poet-voice finds solace in reading the poetry of Czesław Milosz
in the “subway stations of sleep,” where “a poem arises in my canary
heart and I listen / for night’s silent echo to feed me the appropriate
rhythm.”17 Notably, Escudé is not fixed to form. In Unknown Physics
(2007), he uses free verse.
The Latino poets mentioned here (and there are many more) live
and make their poetry mostly in and around urban centers all over
the country—from the coasts to the interiors, the Southwest to the
Midwest, the Northwest to the Northeast. Several of the early collec-
tions focused on writers from the Southwest. In Five Poets of Aztlán

(1985), editor Santiago Daydí-Tolson seeks to make visible a tradition
of Chicano writing that at once differs from and is in dialogue with US
American and Latin American literature. In more recent collections
we see Latino poets gathered from other regions. In Primera Página:
Poetry from the Latino Heartland (2008), the Latino Writers Collec-
tive brings together Latino poets from the Midwest whose poems,
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according to Rane Arroyo’s foreword, “denotate specific places, pop-

ular culture objects like Barbie (the doll used to Americanize Latinas),
gang wars in absurdly non-critical turfs, love, and of course, the family
with its offers of safety and danger. Their words wear the landscape
of green, flatness, cornfields, cities abandoned by corporations, and
inland beauty.”18 In the anthology Between the Heart and the Land/
Entre el corazón y la tierra (2001) Brenda Cárdenas and Johanny
Vázquez Paz also set their sights on Latino poets in the Midwest.
And Martín Espada’s El Coro (1997) presents an anthology of Latino
poets living in New England—especially in the areas of Massachusetts
and Connecticut.
Latino poets are transplants of all different kinds: Chicanos from
California living and creating in Chicago; Nuyoricans living and cre-
ating in Kansas City; Cuban Americans living and creating in New
York. And they come with all different ethnic ancestral genes. C. Dale
Young is Asian, Latino, and Anglo, and Aracelis Girmay is Puerto
Rican, African American, and Eritrean. John Murillo is African Ameri-
can and Chicano.
In today’s Latino poetry we see a smorgasbord of sorts when it
comes to ancestry, geographic location, subject matter, and formal
device. Nothing is off limits—that is, if we can even speak of limits in
the first place. In El Coro poet Martín Espada remarks how today’s
“Latino writers face various challenges: they must reject formula, the
hollow imitation of a previous generation, the indulgence in their own,
distinctly Latino clichés, the temptation to indulge in political rheto-
ric, the ironic exclusivity of a Latino canon.”19 Moreover, while Latino
poets have focused on cultural identity and political sensibility in the
past, as Espada reflects, “today these poets are willing to explore vir-
tually any subject, reaching out to an increasingly wider audience.”20
In “Bodies That Antimatter: Locating U.S. Latino/a Poetry, 2000–
2009” Urayoán Noel seeks to map this new Latino poetic topography.
He asks how we might read formally and politically “recent Latino/a
poetries far removed (temporally, and sometimes aesthetically as well)
from the 1960s and 1970s zeitgeist?”21 Given that Latino poets are
today everywhere in the United States (“from coast to coast and from
M.F.A.s to slums,”22 Noel remarks) and that they create all variety
of kinds of poetry (“attuned to bodies as well as to ‘antimatter’ and
the complexities of circulation in the post-millennium,”23 Noel iden-
tifies), we need to develop a more flexible and capacious framework
for analyzing their poetry. (See also Noel’s detailed entry on Latino
poetry in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, 2012.)
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Today’s making and dissemination of Latino poetry certainly dif-

fers from earlier epochs. While it is unlikely that Latino poetry will
squeeze itself into that 24-minute-a-day period of reading for all 315
million of us that make up the United States, it is being created, pub-
lished, and read. Important institutions have sprouted up to support
the making and dissemination of Latino poetry. These include estab-
lished and newer venues such as Arizona State University’s Bilingual
Review and its poetry series Canto Cosas, the University of Notre
Dame’s Momotombo Press, Texas A&M’s “America’s Book” series,
New Mexico State University’s journal Puerto del Sol, the San Antonio–
based Wings Press, and the El Paso–based Cinco Punto Press. Tupelo,
Southern Illinois University, and Carnegie-Mellon have started pub-
lishing Latino poets as well. Latino poets continue to create important
venues for publishing Latino poetry, such as Ray González’s Mesilla
Press and Carmen Giménez Smith’s Noemi Press out of Las Cruces,
New Mexico. Many Latino poets have moved into important posi-
tions at established journals. C. Dale Young served as poetry editor
of the New England Review, as did Paul Martínez Pompa for Indi-
ana Review, to name a few. There are important literary prizes, too,
including Wings Press’s Poesía Tejana Prize and the Andrés Montoya
Poetry Prize out of the University of Notre Dame’s Letras Latinas pro-
gram. And, for his second presidential term, Barack Obama selected
gay Latino poet Richard Blanco to read at the inauguration ceremony.
At first blush, it may seem that to write poetry one needs only
a pencil and paper and that the composing can be done anywhere.
However, an author requires certain social conditions for the writing
work to be done. This includes leisure time to write—and read other
writers. Historically we know that authors learn from other authors.
This is the case today in an even more formalized way with the estab-
lishment of MFA programs in universities.
With a few exceptions (Dionosio Martínez, for instance), most of
today’s new generation of Latino poets have had greater access to a
university education, including MFA programs around the country.
Latino poets have found creative writing programs to be fertile ground
for the growing of their poetics. After earning a BS in engineering,
Richard Blanco went on to receive an MFA from Florida International

University. Naomi Ayala earned an MFA from Bennington College
Writing Seminars. Rosa Alcalá received her MFA in creative writing
from Brown University (and a PhD in English from the State Univer-
sity of New York [SUNY], Buffalo). Sarah Cortez took courses from
the University of Houston’s Creative Writing department. Emmy
Pérez studied at the University of Southern California and received
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an MFA from Columbia University. Paul Martín Pompa earned an

MFA from Indiana University’s creative writing program. John Oliva-
res Espinoza received his MFA in creative writing from Arizona State
University, Tempe. Carmen Gimenéz Smith received her MFA from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Francisco Aragón studied creative writ-
ing and received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame; he went
on to win the Academy of American Poets Prize. Ricardo Pau-Llosa
did graduate work in creative writing and English at Florida Atlantic
University and the University of Florida. Aracelis Girmay, Ada Limón,
and John Murillo all received their MFAs in poetry from New York
University’s creative writing program. Alejandro J. Escudé received
his MA in English from the University of California (UC) Davis; he
also won the UC Poet Laureate award. Gabriel Gomez received an
MFA from St. Mary’s College, California. Julia Alvarez studied at
Middlebury College (BA), Syracuse University (MA), and later the
Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Others might not have studied for
an MFA but did go to college, where they were able to enroll in
poetry writing workshops and be more generally exposed to the craft
of poetry. For instance, Carmen Tafolla received her PhD in bilin-
gual and foreign language education from the University of Texas.
Urayoán Noel received his PhD in English from New York University
and teaches poetry among other subjects at the University at Albany,
SUNY. And David Colón received his PhD in English from Stanford
and teaches avant-garde poetry at Texas Christian University.
Today Latino poets often work as either teachers or university pro-
fessors; teaching allows them to earn a living and the time to write
poetry. They also, however, work in other professions such as medi-
cine, for instance. The poets I focus on in this book are a representative
sample of this range. Campo is associate professor of medicine at
Harvard’s teaching hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center,
where he also directs the Office of Multicultural Affairs; his primary
care practice serves mostly Latinos and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender (GLBT) community. Campo is also on the faculty of
Wesley University’s Creative Writing MFA Program and frequently
teaches writing workshops in Massachusetts and California. Alvarez
teaches at Middlebury College. Young is a practicing physician and

sometime teacher at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for
Writers as well as at writers’ conferences (Catskill and Napa Valley);
he, like Campo, is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim fellow-
ship. Espaillat was a schoolteacher and is a founding member of the
Fresh Meadows Poets in Queens, New York, as well as a founding
member and former director of the Powow River Poets.
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Today, the presence of Latino poets teaching in university and

workshop settings has certainly expanded. Juan Felipe Herrera and
others talk about how Anglo-dominant programs were in the past,
such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (See Spilling the Beans in Chi-
canolandia.) For instance, in The Date Fruit Elegies (2008) John O.
Espinoza talks about how he mastered syllabics and meter under the
tutelage of Alberto Ríos at Arizona State University. And as he writes
of his experience at UC Riverside, it is not of alienation in a sea of
whiteness but as “[a] brown kid excited enough about poetry to buy
a black-and-white marble composition notebook and spend an addi-
tional $6 worth of quarters on foil stickers of Aztec warriors, low
riders, cholos, and payasos to decorate the front and back covers.”24
These contexts allow us to consider Rafael Campo, C. Dale Young,
Julia Alvarez, and Rhina P. Espaillat as poets of their time—this
contemporary epoch. While they range in chronological age—from
Young (1969) then Campo (1964) to Alvarez (1950) then Espail-
lat (1932)—they all began to publish poetry in the two decades that
straddle either side of the year 2000. As I briefly sketched, this was
a moment in the cultural history of the United States when Latino
authors were much more established than those Latino poets who
started publishing in the 1970s—or even the 1980s. In the 1990s, we
began to see Latino authors making for our consumption all variety
of lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow literary texts. These include
Michael Nava’s bestselling detective fiction series that featured a gay
Latino private dick; Ernest Hogan’s cyberpunk, pre-Colombian-
mythology-dimensioned novels such as Cortez on Jupiter (1990) or
High Aztech (1992); Ana Castillo’s Rayuelaesque The Mixquiahuala
Letters (1992) and telenovela-style / magical realist So Far From God
(1994); Junot Díaz’s anything-goes historiographic short fictions and
novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); and Alisa Valdes-
Rodriguez’s (now just Alisa Valdes) bestselling chica-lit novel, The
Dirty Girls Social Club (2003), which was advanced contracted with
St. Martin’s Press to a tune of $475,000.
The almost exponential growth of the historical, economic, politi-
cal, and social weight of Latinos in the 1990s and 2000s is central to
the great development of Latino authors and artists in the last two
decades. In the past, our numbers were not the roughly 50 million
(plus the 11 million undocumented) that we are today, and we were
not conspicuously present in all socioeconomic layers. For many years
we were mostly a rural, overexploited working-class population who
did not have time to read and write in numbers significant enough to
allow for the development of a Latino literature.
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In contrast, Latino authors are everywhere in bookstores today:

general literature, mystery, romance, poetry, and many other sections.
I mentioned a few of the poetry awards scooped up already, but Latino
authors have also been picking up awards in the general category of
literature. They include the National Book Circle Critics Award (Julia
Alvarez and Junot Díaz), the PEN Oakland / Josephine Miles Liter-
ary Award (Alvarez and Dagoberto Gilb, among others), the Pulitzer
Prize (Junot Díaz and Oscar Hijuelos), the International Award
(Jimmy Santiago Baca), Guggenheim fellowships (Campo, Young,
Dionisio D. Martínez, and Junot Díaz, among others), and National
Endowment for the Arts grants (Dionisio D. Martínez, Alvarez, and
Young, among others). Latinos have also been more visible writing
scripts for Hollywood, like Neil Jimenez, Reuben Contla, and Robert
Rodriguez; still others are being churned out by The Latino Writers
Lab in New Mexico. And we have Latinos helming important publish-
ing empires, including HarperCollins (Rayo Press) and even Marvel
and DC comics with the likes of Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso.
Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat began publishing poetry when
we can say that Latino literature had come into its own. Authors were
no longer appearing scattershot, and the literature offered all entrées
from the genre menu. Part and parcel with the cooking up of this
smorgasbord was the shift in social, economic, and demographic
numbers of Latinos. Whereas in earlier historical moments there was
a rather limited Latino audience, toward the mid- to late 1990s we
saw the beginning of what has become solidified today: a massively
urban, higher-educated audience. In The Routledge Concise History of
Latino/a Literature I identify this as the nascent moment in the fash-
ioning of a Latino urban worldview that expresses itself in the growing
of all variety of tastes for all variety of cultural products.
The fact is, up until the last few decades, most Latinos were work-
ing as agricultural exploitable labor 14–16 hours a day; in these
conditions authors could not have a readership, for neither lowbrow,
middlebrow, nor highbrow literary products. There can’t be in strictu
sensu a Latino literature where conditions do not allow for the emer-
gence of a Latino readership. It’s only when the socioeconomic and
political conditions begin to change, and when the Latino population

begins to reach not only high numbers but a high degree of cultural
diversification and of education (often linked to our urbanization),
that a Latino readership can begin to appear and Latino authors to
reap an economic benefit from their work. The shift from Latinos as
farm workers to urban dwellers working and forging for themselves
an urban worldview with new cultural needs and tastes then seems to
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be the historical and social prerequisite for the building of a Latino

literature (to be distinguished from works of literature by a tiny cluster
of isolated authors; an aggregate of authors is not per se a literature.)
What I’m briefly texturing here is the literary tissue in which
Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat write and publish. Even this
cursory explanation shows that they don’t write in a socioeconomic
historical void. They came of age as poets the moment certain social
and economic conditions were met and Latino authors and their prod-
ucts emerged in a continuous and varied way. This is a time when gay
Latino figures like Campo and Young can become MDs and distin-
guished poets. Campo attended Harvard Medical School and received
a scholarship to study creative writing at Boston University with Robert
Pinsky and Derek Walcott. Young attended Boston College, where he
studied studio art and poetry all while earning a BS degree in molecu-
lar biology. The existence of this momentum allows for the production
and the reproduction of writers. So when a Campo, a Young, an Alva-
rez, or an Espaillat comes along, they can tell themselves, “I want to be
a writer,” and they can consider this as a likely possibility.
It is not, of course, just a question of demographics. Also, and most
important, the development of an urban worldview among the Latino
population is a key factor in the presence of these poets as several of
many Latino authors that now make up what we can properly call a
Latino literature. In other words, with the population becoming more
clearly, definitely urban in its ways of life, outlook, ideology, tastes,
and material needs, new cultural needs appear that demand satisfac-
tion and are sufficiently diversified to accommodate the production of
so-called high-, middle-, and lowbrow cultural products.
While Latino poetry has played an important role in establishing
Latino letters, surprisingly only a few scholars have spent time ana-
lyzing its form. Those who have studied Latino poetics in the past
include scholars such as Alfred Arteaga, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Corde-
lia Candelaria, Maria Damon, Martín Espada, José Limón, William
Luis, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Marta Sánchez, and María Herrera Sobek,
to mention the few who come readily to mind. This was a body of
scholarship that attended to Chicano (Mexican American originated)
poetry—not Latino poetry as a whole. The authors studied here

would not have made the cut: Rhina P. Espaillat and Julia Alvarez
as Dominicans Americans, Rafael Campo as Cuban American, and
C. Dale Young as Latino, Asian, and Anglo American. This scholarly
purview aside (arguably shaped by the greater dominance of Chicano
literature as part of Latino letters), these investigations generally pay
more attention to matters of content than form.
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Again, this is understandable. In the past only a few of Chicano

poets like Luis Rodriguez, Francisco X. Alarcón, Lucha Corpí, and
Juan Felipe Herrera would occasionally use forms such as the sonnet.
As Steven Cordova notes after reading poetry from these earlier peri-
ods as well as attending poetry readings and writers’ retreats today,
“the use of narration is one aesthetic of Latino poetry.”25 Indeed, we
can say that the scholarly gravitation toward thematic analysis in Chi-
cano poetry in the past was an appropriate response to the poetry that
was being made: poetry that subordinated formal matters to empha-
size issues of history, ancestry, roots, and resistance to a racist and
sexist United States.
In Contemporary Chicana Poetry (1985) Marta E. Sánchez does
attend to form, but in such a way that puts the focus on the narrative
quality of the form. For instance, she identifies contemporary Chi-
cano poetry as necessarily reclaiming the form of the ballad or corrido
because of the need to impart information about a historical event or
figure of central importance to community: “It was communal more
than personal, written for the ear more than for the eye, and con-
cerned with the communicative more than with the expressive aspects
of language.”26
A decade later Rafael Pérez-Torres published his Movements in
Chicano Poetry (1995), which attends to how Chicano poetry tells
stories of local acts of resistance that crystallize “around sexual and
gender issues, worker’s rights and environmental issues, worker safety
and immigration laws.”27 While he identifies in Chicano poetry gen-
eral categories such as “love poetry, the lyric poems, the experimental
texts,”28 little attention is paid to the formal matters. Rather, in Pérez-
Torres it is once again an excavation of theme and a resistant narrative
subtext. Chicano poems one way or another are “political discourses
crossed at the site of the individual.”29 In the more recent interpretive
work, we also see scholars attending to issues of content—arguably
because the scholars direct their attention to an earlier era when
Latino poets sought to create an art of resistance and political change.
Andres Rodriguez, for instance, formulates a like social sensibility. He
identifies Chicano poetry as preoccupied with giving voice to “one’s
immediate social environment as well as the presence of history.”30

In more recent approaches we see a complication of the sociopoliti-
cal approach. In Chicano Timespace: The Poetry and Politics of Ricardo
(2000) Miguel López analyzes Ricardo Sánchez’s poetry as a critique
of linear time (Western European imperialism) and the affirmation
of an alternative, cyclical time concept; he does so to show how Sán-
chez’s poetry resists and undermines a European time that asserts its
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“dominance over a degraded space (the natural environment) and

an alienated time (human labor)”31 in order to exploit, oppress, and
increase its wealth. That is, like the others he focuses on theme more
than structure.
Of late, however, several poets and poet-scholars have turned their
attention to formal matters. In the introduction to The Wind Shifts
(2007) poet Francisco Aragón remarks how today’s Latino poetic
canvas is “larger, its border expanded to include subject matter that
is not overtly political [as well as poetry that explores] language and
aesthetics.”32 This canvas includes poets who also gravitate toward
themes of ancestral affirmation, colonial history, socioeconomic and
gender exploitation, for instance, but do not do so at the expense
of not attending to “to language and sound”33—to aesthetics writ
large. Others, such as poet-scholar David Colón, seek to identify
a Latino formalist poetic tradition that is continuous with and pre-
dates the twenty-first century. For Colón, Latinos drawn to traditional
poetic forms can be seen especially in the long poetic career of Miguel
González-Gerth. (See Colón’s Between Day and Night: New and
Selected Poems, 1946–2010.)
Aside from Aragón, Colón, Noel, and possibly a few others not
known to me, most scholarly investigations have focused on an older
body of Latino poetry—poetry that was usually written in free verse
or as prose poetry and that sought to recuperate ancestral lineage and
history as well as posit a position of resistance to a hostile, oppres-
sive, Anglo-identified power structure. That is, most scholarship on
Latino poetry focused on the post–civil rights, Brown Power move-
ment epoch of poetry making. Such scholarly approaches pull toward
these themes present in Latino poetry from the late 1960s through
the 1980s because the poetry itself focused on reclaiming roots and
resisting mainstream and communal forms of racism and sexism.
I make no value judgment here. The scholarship that attends primar-
ily to content is needed. So too do we need scholarship that attends to
how Latino poets use formal means to give shape to all variety of sub-
jects today: from the radically avant-garde poetics of a Noel or Pompa
to those with a formalist inclination such as Campo, Young, Alvarez,
and Espaillat. We would do well to attend to their creative use of both

meter and lineation as well as characterization, theme, and event.
Latino New Fo r mal i s m

Rafael Campo, C. Dale Young, Julia Alvarez, and Rhina P. Espaillat use
formal constraints. However, they do so to agitate and make new our
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perception, thought, and feeling about people, things, and the world.
They gravitate toward orthodox structures as a means to express an
oft-unorthodox content. In this sense, they should be seen within the
larger context of American poetics. They form what we might call a
Latino New Formalism—not as a movement per se, but as a poetic
orientation.
What is identified as New Formalism appeared in the 1980s. Again,
it was not a movement but rather a moment in the history of US
poetry when poets wanted to be free to use formal techniques and
structures that had been rejected by prior generations of rebellious
poets who denounced the form as reactionary—dead, even. Up until
the 1980s the use of traditional poetic form was considered, as Dana
Gioia tells Michelle Johnson, “retrograde, repressive, elitist, antidemo-
cratic, phallocentric, and even (I’m not making this up), un-American.
It was impossible to publish a formal or narrative poem in most maga-
zines. One journal even stated its editorial policy as, ‘No rhyme or
pornography.’”34 On another occasion, Gioia declares that it is this
return to form that will save poetry; it will get people talking about
poetry again. This debate will be triggered by, among other things,
the New Formalists putting “free verse poets in the ironic position
of being the status quo.”35 And he is quick to remind that there is
nothing intrinsically good or bad or ideological about formal verse or
free-verse forms. Rather, “they define distinct sets of metrical tech-
nique rather than rank the quality or nature of poetic performance.”36
The New Formalists, Gioia contends, would turn the debate among
poets and critics from a focus on form in the narrow sense (metrical
versus nonmetrical verse) and ask instead, “[H]ow does a poet best
shape words, images, and ideas into meaning? How much compression
is needed to transform versified lines—be they metrical or free—into
genuine poetry? The important arguments will not be about tech-
nique in isolation, but about the fundamental aesthetic assumptions
of writing and judging poetry.”37
Gioia, along with David Mason, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Tom
Disch, Vikram Seth, Timothy Steele, Mary Jo Salter, A. E. Stallings,
Christian Wiman, and Marilyn Nelson, among others, went against
the grain (prose poetry, free verse, etc.) and chose traditional forms
as vehicles for their poetry. And in this sense, they directly (Gioia’s
controversial Can Poetry Matter? [1992]) and indirectly (simply the
writing of formalist-governed poems) sought to explode the prescrip-
tive measures of the day: to write in a free-verse confessional style.
The New Formalist poets had their fair share of detractors. Those
like Monroe K. Spears considered their identification of only metered
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verse as poetry (and not prose) a reduction of form to meter that

excludes “the middle ground between metrical and free verse.”38 Oth-
ers were less kind, hurling criticisms at the New Formalists for being
reactionaries. This was the epoch characterized as the “Poetry Wars”
whereby many scholars and poets considered form and ideology to be
one. If you chose a traditional form, you were conveying a reactionary
worldview. As David Caplan reflects, “In the best cases it was consid-
ered a ‘return’ to form and in the worst cases the metrical technique
marked a deplorable ‘complicity’”39 with reactionary politics.
Leaving aside the spurious notion that form and ideology are one,
the formalist poets themselves were not a uniform bunch. Paul Breslin
distinguishes between “high” and “low” brands of New Formal-
ism. For Breslin, the high brand would read in the poetry of Brad
Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, for instance;
the low brand would include poetry by Dana Gioia, Andrew Hudgins,
Vikram Seth, and Molly Peacock.40 Caplan considered the choice to
use form more capaciously. For Caplan it was one of the many means
for the poet to express him or herself. The use of form is simply a
poet’s way, according to Caplan, “to contend with new linguistic,
aesthetic, and formal challenges.”41 Formal constraint (whatever that
may be) is not in and of itself ideological; neither does it reflect in
any way a poet’s politics or worldview. Moreover, for Caplan poets
such as Donald Justice (his late poems), Erica Dawson, and Rafael
Campo, among others, use formal constraints to inject “a conspicuous
contemporaneity.”42 So if one attends carefully to such poems by Jus-
tice, Dawson, and Campo, for instance, one can see how they “strain
against group principles, not demonstrate them.”43
The choice to use traditional form was and is an option for the
poet. With this in mind, however, one can still slip into the trap of
habituation. This did happen with the most avant-garde forms such
as used by the Imagists or Futurists, for instance. When the Modern-
ist credo “to make new” becomes a formula, it no longer makes new.
It can happen with today’s formalist poets, too. By using traditional
forms in a sea of radical, free-verse confessional poems, say, the New
Formalists made new their content. However, this content itself con-
cerned largely, as Breslin mentions in passing, a “white middle class

life.”44 And in the hands of a few poets, the emphasis on using metri-
cal form itself became a new prescriptive: as “a cure for confessional
narcissism” it turned free verse into its other on which “to purge the
grossness of self,”45 Breslin writes. And Rachel Hadas, who mentions
how “well-turned rhymes and shapely stanzas” put the “raw intimacies
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of confession” in the back seat, warns that they too can become “dull,
dull, dull.”46
The most sensible position concerning the use of form in poetry
comes from Breslin, Caplan, and Spears, who variously speak to how
poetic device should be the choice of the poet. Caplan writes, “The
best poets remain the most opportunistic and observant, alert to the
artistic resources available to them, impatient with limiting notions
of what poetry should and should not do. Literary criticism needs a
corresponding nimbleness.”47 As Breslin remarks of his own choice
to write in meter, “It is a free, gratuitous act. Neither the authority
of tradition nor the authority of nature compels it. [It] appeals to me
because it enacts a parable about the encounter of self and others: the
demands of form are like the desires of spouses or close friends, which
constrain one’s own until, educated by the constraint, it discovers its
realization depends on theirs.”48 More generally speaking, as Spears
concludes, “All good poetry has form, but every good poem at once
embraces and resists formal order. And every attempt to define form
ends in delusion or despair.”49
While certainly not visible as a major thread in the Poetry Wars,
Latino authors were likewise pressured to write prescriptively. The
choice to write in nontraditional forms was to de facto convey an
ideologically resistant worldview. The prescriptive pressures were
present, just expressed differently. To use traditional forms was akin
to selling out to Anglo, patriarchal imperialism. In many ways, then,
that the New Formalists of the 1980s were able to establish venues for
disseminating their work (conferences and journals) arguably helped
open doors for Latinos such as Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat
who came of age as poets in the 1990s (with the exception of Gioia,
who is Southwest Los Angeles–born and raised Latino, all the New
Formalists were non-Latinos). They could choose to use traditional
metrical forms just as they could free-verse forms.
L ati n o Fo r mal ist Po etry as Poetry

The sociohistorical context in which Campo, Young, Alvarez, and
Espaillat write their poetry is significant. They likely would not have
gravitated so consistently toward the formalist poetic mode at an ear-
lier moment in the shaping of Latino letters. To contextualize their
making of poetry in time enriches our appreciation of their work. It
paints a fuller picture of the push-and-pull pressures on Latino poets—
and poets more largely—during the end of the twentieth century.
That said, I can say that taking the time to sleuth out such contexts
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is a consequence of being engaged by the aesthetic significance of

their poetry. If their poetry were less than zero in form and content, I
would likely not be writing this book. That is, my point of departure
and arrival with Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat is their poetry:
the poem as a poem. I’m not here going to replace an analysis of the
poem by talking only about the sociohistorical (or biographical) con-
texts that grew, so to speak, these Latino formalist poets. Indeed, it
enhances our understanding of the context in which their poetry is
made—and consumed—but remains ancillary to the understanding of
their poetry as poetry.
Taken as poetry, then, I ask what is it about their work that makes
it recognizable as poetry? That is, what are the defining characteristics
of poetry—if there are any?
Brian McHale brings to the fore a potentially powerful characteriza-
tion of poetry found in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Manifests”50 (1996;
Diacritics 26, nos. 3/4) and again in Blue Studios: Poetry and Its
Cultural Work (2006). DuPlessis identifies this as “segmentivity”—a
potentially powerful tool for understanding how the words laid down
on the page by a Campo, a Young, an Alvarez, and an Espaillat are
what we characterize as poetry—and not prose fiction or something
else altogether wrapped up as poetry.
DuPlessis has written that poetry as a genre “is just selected words
arranged by segmentation on various scales.”51 She has also said that
poetry “is the creation of meaningful sequence by the negotiation of
gap (line break, stanza break, page space).”52 Following these gen-
eral characterizations of poetry as a genre, DuPlessis offers a more
specific definition: “Poetry is the kind of writing that is articulated in
sequenced, gapped lines and whose meanings are created by occur-
ring in bounded units precisely chosen, units operating in relation to
chosen pause or silence.”53 In Blue Studios, DuPlessis further identifies
how the making of lines—the making of “particular chains of rupture,
seriality, and sequencing”54—is “fundamental to the nature of poetry
as a genre.”55 According to DuPlessis’s generative characterization,
then, meaning making in poetry depends crucially on what appears to
be the poet’s willful segmentation of lines and their sequencing. The
poet’s careful use of space design creates a blueprint for the reader
whereby one jumps from one line to the next—and from one stanza
to another—moving from last and first words of each line in ways that
generate semantic significance and energetic charge.
At once commonsensically apt and foundationally generous, this
characterization of poetry as a genre can offer a productive heuristic
that we can refine and eventually probably make something close to
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airtight. For now, McHale uses it to measure various degrees of inter-

play “among segmented units.”56 In prose poetry, for instance, the
segmentivity (spacing design) of the prose is, according to McHale,
“conspicuous, foregrounded against the background expectation of
verse lineation: prose where there ought to be verse.”57 Here the
poem “semanticizes prose spacing, making it signify, if only as dif-
ference and deviation from a norm.”58 And in poetic narratives, for
instance, we see how, as McHale states, the “narrative’s own segmen-
tation interacts with the segmentation ‘indigenous’ to poetry.”59 The
poet’s will to segment, so to speak, creates various “complex inter-
plays among segments of different scales and kinds.”60 And for Emily
Rosko and Anton Vander Zee, segmentivity is the very architecture of
the poem. Without it, the white space around the poem is gratuitous,
extra—random—and so we perceive the lines within this space as no
longer kinetic. (See their edited volume, A Broken Thing: Poets on the
Line, 2011.)
Poets have, of course, remarked extensively on the power of
segmentivity—without necessarily calling it such. It is what Alberto
Ríos identifies as giving the poem the power to control that rhythm,
pace, and movement generally of the reader’s meaning making: “They
help us to see what makes a poem a poem.”61 And Kathy Fagan writes,
“Most poetry is encountered visually. If we agree that a line of poetry
is a rhythmic construct of written language, whether we be traditional
or non-traditional versifiers, we might agree that the only control
poets have over their words, once set, is how they are arranged within
the line, and the effect the whole has on a reader, cognitively and
physically.”62 This will to segment is something one works hard to
learn, sharpen, and perfect. In The Date Fruit Elegies (2008) John O.
Espinoza remarks how his work at Arizona State with Alberto Ríos
taught him the power of line cuts to create clusters of meaning and
to give the poem kinetic charge: “The assignment was to take a poem
that wasn’t quite working for us, triple-space it, scissor out each line,
and dump it into a receptacle, so that each day I would pull out a
strip and read it like a fortune from a fortune cookie before taping
it to my wall. Do this once a day until you’re done. Finally, type out
this ‘revision’ of the poem, make copies, and bring to class.”63 Such
exercises allowed him to see just how bland and senseless lines could
be when not carefully segmented. Ríos wanted those like Espinoza
to find those patterns that, as he writes, “hindered us from writing
good lines” and to “see how much of the poem depends on how
strong the lines are.”64 Espinoza further recalls, “After the last line was
drawn, taped up, after the new version was typed up, and after all the
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dismemberment and suturing, if the poem still stood to make some

sense, according to Ríos, then the lines work.”65 Espinoza learned
from Ríos that the line cuts should have an “energy and economy to
move the reader to the next line.”66 In so many words, Espinoza alerts
us to the power of segmentation.
When Debra Fried considers the stanza to be the “workhorse”67 of
poetry, she is identifying the process of segmenting clusters of lines.
She writes, “Divider and connector, trellis and climbing vine at once,
the stanza is as subject to the individual poet’s crafting as the line, as
freighted with the history of its uses and as ripe for reinvention. In
any particular poem, the stanza may hand off the sense of the suc-
ceeding stanza, take a stand and stop the sense, or nonsense, in its
tracks, take a breath for a brief aria, murmur an aside, or look at itself
in a mirror (momentarily finding a figurative slant in its own sche-
matic design).”68 Such segmentation can lead to shifts in plot as well
as bring to light something new and unexpected in the poem. It can
function powerfully as the “structural grids to stage the poem’s play
with chance, invention, and necessity.”69
Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat often use traditional forms
of meter, rhyme, syllabic stress, and the like. However, we see quickly
and clearly that in a given poem they will deform an established rhyme
or meter pattern to generate the greatest syntactic, semantic, and
phonetic charge. In their “will to segment” they change the verbal
material of that end of the line, and by changing this verbal material
they alter not only a given verse convention but also the conceptual
or thought content of the line. Their full command of rule-bound
segmentation is why we often recognize their use of ingredients of the
English sonnets, French villanelles, Malay pantoums, Persian ghazals,
and Italian sestinas and at the same time recognize that they do not
strictly adhere to these forms.
To sum up thus far, poetry is characterized by a certain kind of
segmentivity we have come to associate with it in order to construct
a spatial design that has the greatest syntactic, semantic, and phonetic
charge. Here, too, McHale reminds us of the work of John Shop-
taw on measure and countermeasure as also an important ingredient
in giving kinetic energy to the segmentation in poetry. Any given

poem can have a measure at various levels and scales within phrase,
line, and stanza that is set up against the following phrase, line, or
stanza. McHale gives the example of Milton’s enjambed blank verse
where we see the sentence countermeasured against line. No mat-
ter the countermeasure, as McHale reminds, “segmentation must
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always contribute meaningfully (for better or worse) to the structure

of poetic narrative.”70
It is segmentivity in this sense that offers a useful characterization
of poetry—a distinction that makes a difference and that will be kept
centrally in mind in the analysis of how Campo, Young, Alvarez, and
Espaillat construct various spatial blueprints whereby the parts add
up to a total unity of affect in the reader. The poets decide where
segmentation intervenes, even when following preestablished poetic
forms to achieve this unity of affect. They choose where to segment
along with other devices to take the reader more deeply into their
objects—to engage and focus the reader’s attention and, in the words
of Gioia, “create a moment of imaginative openness and emotional
vulnerability.”71 They exercise the will to segment to satisfy at once
the reader’s need for pattern and the reader’s hunger for the newness
that comes with the playing of pattern. (For more on the cognitive
dimension of this play with pattern in poetry, see Brian Boyd’s Why
Lyrics Last, 2012.)
Clearly, segmentivity happens differently in prose and poetry. In
prose grosso modo we generally fit and order all the writing material
within the default modes of the right and left margins. For Brian
McHale, prose constitutes the “‘zero degree’ of segmentivity—spacing
that is by design neutral and insignificant (or rather, that signifies
nothing beyond ‘prosaicness’).”72 While prose fiction is segmented
(paragraphs, chapters, volumes, installments), this is a segmentivity
that is “subordinated to its narrativity.”73 Segmentivity in prose allows
a writer to change pace, speaker in dialogue, narrator in point of view,
subject matter, or time or place of events.74 While segmentivity has
many functions in prose, it is usually semantic in nature, whereas in
poetry, segmentivity is usually semantic and aural and visual. Sound
and sight segmentivity in poetry is very important; we read and hear
poetry, but we also see it. We see it when we read it. So it is hearing
and reading. This means that in poetry, we usually invest two of our
senses—seeing and hearing. This is why we see in Campo, Young,
Alvarez, and Espaillat how their will to segment seeks to educate the
readers’ senses (seeing and hearing) as well as to reinforce and give
charge to meaning. It is why many of their poems appeal aesthetically

to the eyes and the ear.
Education of the eye and the ear are therefore part of the process
involved in the reading and appreciation of the poetry. This is almost
never the case in prose, where capturing meaning is paramount. There
are instances in prose writing where the visual or the visuality of the
text is important and has a certain meaning, but it is only a relative
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few statistically compared to the great majority that do not place

importance on the visuality of the text. In fact for many, the way seg-
mentation takes place in poetry is considered the main characteristic
that defines poetry. When we open a book and see lines cut in specific
ways, we automatically (by convention) identify this as poetry and not
a short story or novel, for instance.
Of course, the prose poem defies this visuality as a way to charac-
terize poetry. They often look like short short stories, or flash fictions.
Prose poetry relies on a segmentation that is more akin to prose than,
say, a sonnet. So we can’t say that segmentivity in all cases is the
difference that makes the difference between prose and poetry. Seg-
mentivity, then, is not the defining characteristic of poetry. All poems
that show an aspiration to be artistic are organic wholes that seek—in
their segmentation of sound, sight, and meaning—the triggering of
an aesthetic reaction of pleasure and even displeasure.
Poems are always creations—that is, created organic wholes, and
the proof of the fact that they are organic wholes and that they are
creations is that they always necessarily imply a deliberate selection of
features—a deliberate selection of features that will constitute their
content, form, and substance. This selection implies on the part of the
author the wish to create thoughts and feelings in the reader, and there-
fore this selection also implies a choice of gaps to be filled by the reader.
These gaps are everything that pertains to the poem: from title,
epigraph, to date of composition (if included), to everything that is
in the poem. The poet chooses some words and not others, cuts lines
in certain ways and not others, all to guide our gap filling process. In
a guided way, the poem as blueprint directs how we fill in everything
in the poem that is not in the poem but that we discover to be in the
poem as we cocreate it in the act of our attentive and focused reading.
We cocreate the poem as the sum of these ingredients—ingredients of
presence and absence. It is this sum of the present and absent ingre-
dients that leads to the poem’s emotional and intellectual impact on
the reader.
This implies that no verbal work of art can be a mere reflection of
reality—a mere mimesis. From this point of view, there is no absolute
distinction between poetry and prose fiction. The clearest evidence of

this lack of a wall of China separating one from the other is that (1)
we have prose poems and (2) we have flash fiction. Take as an example
Rodrigo Toscano’s poetry. The first poem in his hard-hitting, no-
holds-barred Deck of Deeds (2012) is the poem “Los Exploradores,”
which looks and reads like a flash fiction: “Last summer, while on
their first gulf-wide helicopter tour, they learned how to increase their
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inner-narrating capacities, with a titanium-coated needle. They prefer

to stoke it in small basements of large soccer stadiums south of the
equator in case they encounter too much cerebrospinal spillage, or
regulation.”75 We can say the same of many of the poems collected in
Roberto Harrison’s 0s (2006). One such poem, “An Hispanic Iden-
tity Meaning Switches and False Twos,” opens, “There’s a dispute as
to whether a name can be given to mills or not. If an essential root is
given to one arm, they might be revolvers in insect’s casings, winding
down a river of dirt in giving you, America, too small a thimble, the
carcass of instruction and wavy, diminutive hand signals.”76
Poetry in whatever form tends toward a concentration of expres-
sion—a compressed use of verbal means. Poetry tends to use more
highly compressed means of expression than narrative fiction in the
form of a short story or novel, for instance, but this is in no way an
absolute distinction. Poetry may use more frequently the device of
segmentivity in a more concentrated form than exercised in the short
story or novel, but we also find segmentivity in narrative fiction. In
poetry we have a compression of detail that is usually absent in novels
or short stories, but it is not absent in flash fiction. What we can say
in general is that poetry more frequently works by sharpening the
selected means of communication by selecting devices and structures
in deliberate and systematic ways. When we read a poem, we follow
the poet’s lead step by step, univocally, and where there are cuts that
leave gaps in the poem we use that singularly human faculty that
Charles Sanders Peirce called abduction—or educated guess work—to
fill in the gaps. It is here that we become sutured, say, to the poem and
that the poem breathes with great vitality.
Yet the fact remains that the writing and reading of a poem implies
the more continuous, frequent, and systematic use of the imagina-
tion. One can read pages and pages of a novel, for instance, without
needing to use to the fullest extent one’s imagination sentence after
sentence, whereas in poetry you do have to find the most adequate
interpretation of each line and stanza of the poem as a whole. What
happens is that the poet uses the means of communication we call
poetry more intensively as a direct appeal to the imagination of the
reader than does the writer of novels or short stories. This is relative,
I insist. These are traits that are sufficiently patent and sufficiently
obvious to keep in mind to better understand the readings we make
of our poems.
It is obvious that each verse in a poem and poem as a whole, for
instance, is a more direct means—a shortcut device—to take the reader
more directly to the effect desired by the author than does the writer
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of a novel or short stories. This means that the poet usually uses all
sorts of devices that allow her to condense her material far more than
the writer of novels or short stories is able to do. This also means that
for the poet the arrangement of all her materials (the form), includ-
ing her devices, themes, rhymes, symbols, and figures of speech, for
instance, is a much more immediate and important matter than it is
for the writer of novels or short stories. This central role of form in
the work of the poet is directly connected with this concentration and
intensity that is very frequently a characteristic of poetry.
L ati n o Fo r mal ist Po etic s as Part of

a Uni fied Theo ry o f Aest heti cs
If segmentation is present in various degrees and different kinds in
prose fiction and poetry, then perhaps I need to move more deeply
still in my formulation of a poetic foundation that informs the poetry
making of Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat. They create poetry
with the goal of engaging their readers in specific ways. I mentioned
pleasure and displeasure, but more generally they create poetry
whereby each poem’s parts add up to a unified whole that exists in a
specific relation to the reader. That is, their poetry belongs within the
system of poetry generally that itself is an entity that belongs within
the global system of aesthetics.
The poetry of Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat exists within
a system composed of many subsystems. Among these subsystems we
can include the segmentation activity that creates meter and rhythm
as well as other prosodic features specific to a given language’s sound
patterns.
Poetry is matter and form, composition and structure, visual shape
together with sound and meaning. It is with these materials that the
poet works. But we still have to specify in each case how each poem is
made, for the materials of poetry are not different from the materials
of language in general.
If we take a sufficiently abstract view, we can say along with many
specialists that language is a mapping between sounds and meanings.
This mapping is quite complex and structured, but each child learns
to do it proficiently at an early age and without specific training. Thus
for every child and adult, the command of language is tantamount
to the effortless and largely unconscious use of an intricate system of
specific rules and guiding principles to communicate thoughts and
feelings, and to elicit them from others.
Account: s4594776
For each individual, human verbal interactions are so common and

frequent that they almost always go unnoticed. They only become
salient in certain cases, such as when reading poetry: an activity usu-
ally rare and demanding attention and focus on language in several
or all its diverse components—sound system or phonology; syllabic
structure and word shape organized in a morphology; words and their
accumulation and storage in a lexicon; ordering of words or phrases
according to links specified by syntax; word and phrasal meanings
organized through formal rules of semantics; and principles of usage
established and ordered by pragmatics.
As is well established, each language has its own system of mean-
ingful sounds—its own phonology: specific vowels and consonants,
syllable and intonation (stress and pitch) patterns, and rhythmic orga-
nization. These and other acoustic features, together with their spatial
arrangements, play decisive (yet diverse) roles in poetry. Being lan-
guage specific, they are the first ones usually (if not always) lost in
translation. And they are also the ones that make the translation of
poetry such a difficult (nearly impossible) endeavor.
Within these subsystems we have theme. We also have quite fre-
quently characterizations: the invented poet-voice as well as actual
characters. We have symbols, metaphors, and allegories along with other
forms of representation such as mythology, religion, and the like. This
is to say, within the organic unity of the whole poem we have a series
of subsystems. For pedagogical purposes, these subsystems have been
studied separately, but their parts make up an organic whole that are
not separated or separable in the actual experience of the poem; their
separation in practice (not in pedagogical formulation) would destroy
the whole of the poem. In this sense, all readers (layperson and scholar
alike) should approach a poem as an organic whole—as an organic
system of interrelated subsystems. This is why it is a mistake to judge
a poem only by a line or a stanza—or even on a first read. Rather, the
poem can and should only be judged as an organic whole—a series of
subsystems adding up to a global act of communication.
Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat write poetry to communi-
cate with the reader specific thoughts and feelings. In this sense, their
poems function as a specific kind of communication whereby each aims

to have a unified effect on the reader—as well as on the poet as maker.
Stated otherwise, a poet finds much satisfaction in writing poems.
They could choose to write poems and then close the drawer on them
forever, and they would still experience that sense of satisfaction. How-
ever, there is an additional pleasure and different kind of pleasure in
having others read or listen to the poems. For the poet as such, the
Account: s4594776
writing of this utterance—this global act of communication—aims to

trigger thought and emotion not by any one element (word choice
and line break, for instance) found in any particular aspect of the poem
but in the relationship created between the poem and the reader. The
aesthetic in poetry—like all art—is to be found in the purposeful rela-
tionship created by the poet between the poem and the reader. It is
not in the genetics, say, of the poem but in the relationship the poet
seeks between the poem and the reader. In creating the poetic utter-
ance, the poet aims for the poem to appeal to the reader and for the
reader in turn to react in a certain way toward that utterance in its
contents and its form.
Just like all other aesthetic manifestations, the aesthetic is a relation.
It is not found in the object—the poem. It is not in the subject—in
the person reading the poem. It is in the relation between the subject
(reader) and the object (poem). Put otherwise, Campo, Young, Alva-
rez, and Espaillat organize their poetic utterances in such a way and
with such a deliberate purpose as to incite a certain emotional reaction
and attitude in the reader.
In his Nicomachean Ethics and in his Metaphysics Aristotle talks
about all human activity as purposeful. He gives the example of the
carpenter building the table. The carpenter has an idea and then turns
this idea into an object that corresponds to the idea. Just as a car-
penter of furniture makes tables, a poet, as Borges would say, makes
poems. The same can be said of Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espail-
lat. Just as the carpenter needs tools—and needs to know how to use
them to transform (cut, shave, notch, glue, screw) her raw materials
into something stable that we might use to write or eat at—so too do
our poets need tools to transform their raw material (the infinite fac-
ets of reality) into something we might read or hear with an aesthetic
delight. They are makers of artifacts built with tools appropriate to
the trade of poetry and that enable the realization of something that
has a specific purpose in the world: a spatially designed, purposefully
segmented visual/aural artifact that steers the imagination, emotion,
thought, and perception into new territories.
Each in their different way and with different means have a series
of ideas, concepts, and images (mental representations) that they seek

to objectify in the form of a poem with the purpose of triggering an
attitude, thought, action, behavior, and emotion in the reader. When
there is a correlation between the accomplishment of the poet with a
certain purpose and the reaction of the person enjoying the work of
art, we can judge the poem a success.
Account: s4594776
We as readers find a particular aesthetic pleasure in aesthetic shape

and forms especially when they correspond to the content. It makes us
feel good when we perceive a correspondence between the form and
its contents. This is why the reading of the poem that is attentive to
the shape is so important. In the analysis and discussion of the poetry
of Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat, I consider whether there is a
correspondence between the goal and result. I consider each poem as
a total act of communication. A few of the many poems that I discuss
have some extraordinary lines, but the poem as a whole falls flat. This
is why a great poem can meet sudden death if the poet chooses a line
or lines that break the unity of the whole. This results in a breakdown
of the emotive and intellectual connection with the reader established
with the poet through the reading of the poem.
Out of the many poems written by Campo, Young, Alvarez, and
Espaillat, there are a few that are cryptic. The respective cryptic poem’s
resistance to the reader’s meaning-making capacity is intrinsic to the
poem itself. It forms an integral part of the reader’s attraction to the
poem, demanding that we continue our work and effort in penetrat-
ing its meaning with the promise of a big cognitive pay off. This is
not the case with all cryptic poetry. Some of such poetry fails either
because of the inability of the poet to realize his goal or because the
obscurity never delivers; the poem appears to be profound and dif-
ficult to formulate, when there is nothing beneath the surface. When
we as readers sense this, we distance ourselves from the poem and stop
investing emotionally and cognitively in the poem; we no longer do
the work to find any kind of aesthetic pleasure or interest in an inter-
pretation of the poem.
Cryptic or straightforward, to create a unified affect in the relation-
ship between poem and reader requires a certain cold-bloodedness,
say, on the part of the poet. Ivor Wynters is famous for his sense that
the poet puts on hold his or her own emotions in order to use his
or her reason system to find the best means for creating a poem that
would move the reader emotionally and cognitively. He proposed that
the poet work hard at learning how to hold at bay her own feelings
as a poet in order to evaluate and understand the experiences that she
intended to trigger in the reader in his relationship to the poem. (This

same principle is put forth by Cortázar when talking about the writing
of the short story—and Toni Morrison in the writing of fiction gen-
erally.) In the interviews included in this book, we see how Campo,
Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat all aim to control just how and when
their selves or identities (Latino, teacher, doctor, daughter, mother,
son) enter into the shaping of their poetry. In the making of their
Account: s4594776
poems, they seek the best options for creating the kind of emotions
and thoughts in the reader that avoid slipping into sentimentality.
As an aesthetic object, the poem is made to engage and trigger a
response in the reader. This is the sole preserve of neither poetry nor
art generally. Elsewhere in my work I discuss how certain industri-
ally produced objects such as cars like the Ferrari, coffee makers like
those made by Alessi, and Apple computers as well as more artisanally
crafted objects also elicit an aesthetic reaction. They all serve utili-
tarian needs, but at the same time they could be and are the object
of aesthetic contemplation. They produce a sense of beauty, joy, and
wonder in us. These objects have a double characteristic. They are
able to elicit aesthetic reaction and are also made for pragmatic rea-
sons. In the case of poetry, it is made with the purpose of triggering an
aesthetic reaction that is always obtained in the specific combination
of matter and form in and of themselves. Poems are art-for-art’s-sake
objects intended to be used specifically and exclusively for aesthetic
contemplation. This art is not meant to serve any other purpose than
to establish an aesthetic relation.
In the combination of matter and form, composition and structure,
poetry seeks to elicit the aesthetic reaction of approval or disapproval,
attraction or repulsion, in the reader. This aesthetic reaction in the
reader also requires two very important ingredients: attention and
focus. This is why habituation is the enemy of art. It creates blindness
and not attentiveness. And this is not something integral to the art as
object. It could be that I have the original Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona
Lisa hanging on my wall, but if I stop paying attention to it, it is as if
it no longer exists; it disappears from sight. Artists know this and so
they create art that pushes against this natural process of habituation.
(It has to be so. If it were not natural, we would be attentive to all
things at all times thus flattening out and extinguishing any possibility
for a heightened aesthetic engagement and response—or for that mat-
ter, the kind of heightened response needed to escape danger.) This
is the reason for the constant struggle to make new and to innovate in
art so as to capture the attention and bring into focus the mind of the
viewer, reader, and listener.
The Russian Formalists were interested in figuring out this process

of habituation and making new in art already nearly a century ago.
The way out of this habituation trap is what they identified (Victor
Shklovsky in particular) as the device or mechanism of enstrangement.
Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie (nicely translated by Benjamin
Sher with the neologism “enstrangement”) identifies this phenom-
enon and names the set of devices the poet uses to reorganize the
Account: s4594776
building blocks of reality for the reader to experience them in a new

way. Thanks to the method of enstrangement, the reader feels in new
ways and rethinks creatively the segments of reality the poet submits
to her senses, while also perceiving with unusual clarity the linguistic
and other devices the poet is using to make her experience reality in
new ways. It is through this mechanism—a device that reorients our
sense of an object—that we make it new, that we “make a stone feel
stony”77—that the picture hanging on my wall makes new my percep-
tion, thought, and feeling about a certain building block taken from
reality. The picture hasn’t changed in content or substance, but my
relation to it is renewed by this mechanism of enstrangement.
Let us not forget, too, Bertolt Brecht’s small treatise on what he
called his “epic theater.” The analysis he makes of this is precisely a
discussion of the distance between the object and the subject required to
establish an aesthetic relation: if the relation is too proximate or too
close, then no aesthetic relation is established.
One way or another, Shklovsky and Brecht talk about how authors
(artists generally) create an object that in its organic unity of form
and content grabs our attention and requires our focus. These are
two essential and external conditions for obtaining the aesthetic reac-
tion in poetry—and art generally. This is because aesthetic pleasure is
triggered as a result of this cognitive awareness and focus. That is, the
aesthetic is once again always a relational phenomenon. It is triggered
by this attentional attitude that creates a discriminating and attentive
relation toward the world through our senses of touch, sight, smell,
and taste—all those fundamental and basic ways of knowing the world
since we were born but that become more and more educated as we
encounter a world filled with Apple computers and poetry.
From this point of view, the aesthetic activity in the sense of the
creation and reception of the work of poetry (and art generally) is
no different from all other human activities. What distinguishes the
aesthetic of the poem from the aesthetic (sublime) of natural products
is in its recreation of the building blocks of reality with a purpose to
move the reader in a specific way. In this sense it is always purposefully
relational. So the aesthetics of poetry is not a property of the object
per se nor does it reside in the subject (the reader), but rather it is
generated out of the way the poem asks the reader to relate to it: to
appreciate, evaluate, and react to it.
Campo, Young, Alvarez, and Espaillat are poets that one way or
another focus on the everyday and commonplace. Their choice of
vocabulary is not in any way surprising or exceptional. And they
often use traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet. However, their
Account: s4594776
poetry makes new the everyday and commonplace. That is, their care-
ful integration of form with content manages to make art out of the
habitual—the new within the habitual. They introduce the enstrange-
ment device within the commonplace that results in a positive aesthetic
response on the part of the reader.
Alvarez is a more accomplished poet than she seems at first read-
ing and at first sight. While I read her poetry I return to the same
conclusion: she submerges herself in habituation in content/theme
and form, yet she always pushes the reader beyond this habituation.
That is, at first glance there is a tranquil force to her poetry, but on a
second encounter we see that she uses her content and form to make
new. In this sense, she builds on and extends the poetry of Edna St.
Vincent Millay, who also uses conventions of meter in ways that ulti-
mately make new the commonplace. Both Alvarez and Millay make
new within the old.
There are many different ways of dealing with the new within the
old. The phenomenon is somewhat more complex than the use of the
commonplace and the traditionally formal, or formally traditional, in
our time of the late twentieth or twenty-first century. There is a lot
of new that can be injected into the old, making this combination
something completely new and effective, as seen in Alvarez’s poetry.
There are a series of formulations I have arrived at that provide a
scaffolding of sorts for an approach to the poetry of Campo, Young,
Alvarez, and Espaillat. There is the principle of segmentation operat-
ing in a way that more or less abides by the devices and structures we
recognize as poetic. At the same time, there is the sense that segmen-
tation alone is not the sine qua non of poetry. Segmentation is at work
in fictions of all formats: written, visual, aural, and otherwise. That
said, the principle of segmentation is potentially more interesting as a
way to understand how poets create objects that more or less loosely
or rigidly educate the reader’s senses and guide the reader’s cognitive
emotional response. This proves much more interesting and produc-
tive than an attempt at identifying what poetry does in an identification
of words, rhythm, and meter as somehow uniquely its DNA. We have
the revered Mexican author Daniel Sada, who writes his crime novels
in verse form, and so too do we have the South Asian author Vikram
Seth, who also chose this to write Golden Gate (1986). This is not to
forget that the jingles used in ads and slogans are metered but not
necessarily poetry. And as I mentioned already, we have poetry that is
not metered that is considered poetry.
Segmentivity seems to be a more productive approach than sleuth-
ing out a distinctive content present in poetry—a high virtuous
Account: s4594776
content as many have argued before me. Already the theoretical and
practical work of the Russian Formalists—a young Roman Jakobson
declared at the time “the object of literary science is not literature
but literariness”—was foiled; just when they thought they found the
elusive propriety in the poem in either words, images, metaphors, or
sound, they realized that this same property could be found in other
utterances. Rather, if there is a distinctive quality—a poeticity—it is
not to be found in making distinctions between one fiction format
and another. It is to be found in the particularized and idiosyncratic
way the poet uses all these elements (and many more) in the making
of a unified aesthetic object (poem) that moves the subject (reader) in
a specific way. It is to be found in the way our Latino formalist poets
do this to remove our “automatized perception” (Shklovsky’s term)
of reality and its representations, and to make new our experiences,
activities, objects, and creativity itself.
Poetry, and aesthetic phenomena generally, involves its making and
its consuming—its appreciation and evaluation. The emotion (plea-
sure or displeasure, as the case may be) is to be found in the poem
that is in strictu sensu a creation. The poet is a maker, as Borges said.
The poet is a fabro or constructor, as Pound said. And her building
blocks are always what is out there in reality—what is read in a book or
experienced personally in a concentration camp, or whatever.
The poet is a creator who adds something to reality when creat-
ing. But the poet does not create anything by chance or arbitrarily.
In this sense, the poet is the subject conceived as Aristotle did with
the carpenter. The poet has in mind an image and seeks to objectify—
make material—this image with the use of tools and devices at hand
(and some that have to be smelted anew) to combine matter and form
in such a way as to achieve the goal of making an object (an organic
whole) that in and of itself creates a response in the reader. As Wil-
liam Harmon writes of the process, “So it goes, from stage to stage,
by winnowing and further winnowing until the original idea finds its
answerable form in a word or image or maybe just a rhythm.”78 (Of
course, as Harmon also remarks, this winnowing quite often leads to
failed results.) It is something that through much hard work eventu-
ally stands by itself and stands against a background formed by the rest
of the world. That is, the rest of the world is a background for what
the poet has just created. It can stand alone as an aesthetic product
and experience.
To sum up thus far, as a work of art, poetry is the realization of
a special kind of relationship the poet creates between the object
(poem) and subject (reader), attentive and focused in appreciating
Account: s4594776
it. It’s a special kind of relationship between the object and the sub-
ject that I have been calling an aesthetic relation whereby the poem
educates and guides (more or less rigidly) the reader’s perception,
thought, and feeling as related to the poem. This relation between
subject and object is the aesthetic relation. So what gives us a work of
art is the production of an organic whole in the presence of which the
reader obtains an aesthetic satisfaction: what we typically call beauty
and ugliness and/or their combination in what I call elsewhere the
grotesque. (For more on the grotesque as an aesthetic, see Aldama
and Hogan’s Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Puzzling
Out the Self, 2014.) Those poets studied herein choose to establish
an aesthetic relationship with their readers by using the constraint of
formal device and structure.
I end this introduction with a brief mention of Borges and his artis-
tic life as it relates to his making of poetry. When he started writing
poetry, it was in a rebellious way; as a teen he wrote poetry exalting
the Russian Revolution. When he returned from Europe to Argentina
after living the whole of World War I in Geneva, where he went to
high school, his family stopped by Spain, where he met many poets.
When he arrived in Buenos Aires, he began to develop this rebel-
lious poetry. With some friends Borges founded a so-called poetic
movement that was supposed to compete with the other avant-garde
movements developing in Argentina and all over Latin America and
Spain. While I’m leaving much out here, of course, what matters is that
Borges began to write poetry under the banner of anarchy in terms of
vocabulary and subject matter; he sought the invention of wild meta-
phors to defy any imposed procedures. Much of this poetry he never
republished; the part of this poetry written in his youth poetry that he
did republish in later years was heavily revised. As a book end to this
story, when Borges was old and becoming blind, he turned to the use
of preestablished forms such as the sonnet. We know from the many
interviews he gave during this latter period in his life that he turned
to the traditional forms because he could more easily keep these in his
memory while shaping the poem in his mind and through dictation.
Having the form forcefully in mind allowed him to shape the content
of the poem without the mnemonic aid of writing.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, Borges’s experience
gives testimony to the fact that form and matter are one. They can’t
be separated except in pedagogical or expository reason. He has a
form in mind and he adapts his matter to this form. He is able to give
shape to his thoughts, images, and emotions through the form he has
chosen. More structured forms are more easily remembered; that is,
Account: s4594776
their more identifiable meter and rhythm work as mnemotechnique

devices—devices that are also present in the epic-length oral poetry
such as Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. (Nursery rhymes and lullabies also
use mnemotechnique devices to great effect. After hearing them as
children they tend to stick with us for life.) Such poetry was born in
this way through rhythm and meter because they provide mnemotech-
nique devices in both the production of poetry and its consumption;
they use rhythms and meters that are more suitable as mnemotech-
nique devices than others.
Blind or sighted, I end by reminding that reading and listening
to poetry attentively requires work, as does its making. The creating
of an object whereby its unity of matter and form establish an aes-
thetic relationship with the reader requires work. It does not come
from divine inspiration. In interviews included here and elsewhere,
the poets themselves attest to this. They have dedicated much of their
day to working hard to be attentive and focused readers of other’s
poetry. They work hard in the making of their own poetry to be read
with attention and focus. As Young wryly comments in an interview,
“Those New Yorker cartoons where the muse comes floating in the
window and whispers and the poet just exudes this poem, it’s a car-
toon. It just doesn’t happen like that. I wish it did. But it doesn’t.”79
Account: s4594776

On Matters of Form in Contemporary Latino Poetry

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On Matters of Form in Contemporary Latino Poetry

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Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved.

On Mat ters of For m in

many of the barriers put in their way by gatekeepers of the literary

Nuyorican Poets Café (1973) allowed for the dissemination of poetry

with other Latino authors, as part of America’s “great promise,” he

Inquiry by Interview), today we have Latino authors of all types (gay,

We see it also in Ray González’s Southwest-set Consideration of the

prose-poetry collection Climbing Back (2000), and the typographi-

crisscross disparate landscapes in our mind: the deserts of Texas with

instance, the poet-voice begins the poem “Mother, Mother” by identi-

tions focused on writers from the Southwest. In Five Poets of Aztlán

according to Rane Arroyo’s foreword, “denotate specific places, pop-

Today’s making and dissemination of Latino poetry certainly dif-

Richard Blanco went on to receive an MFA from Florida International

an MFA from Columbia University. Paul Martín Pompa earned an

teaches at Middlebury College. Young is a practicing physician and

Today, the presence of Latino poets teaching in university and

In contrast, Latino authors are everywhere in bookstores today:

political conditions begin to change, and when the Latino population

be the historical and social prerequisite for the building of a Latino

poetry—not Latino poetry as a whole. The authors studied here

Again, this is understandable. In the past only a few of Chicano

immediate social environment as well as the presence of history.”30

“dominance over a degraded space (the natural environment) and

and Espaillat. We would do well to attend to their creative use of both

Latino New Fo r mal i s m

verse as poetry (and not prose) a reduction of form to meter that

cerned largely, as Breslin mentions in passing, a “white middle class

L ati n o Fo r mal ist Po etry as Poetry

is a consequence of being engaged by the aesthetic significance of

airtight. For now, McHale uses it to measure various degrees of inter-

dismemberment and suturing, if the poem still stood to make some

in giving kinetic energy to the segmentation in poetry. Any given

always contribute meaningfully (for better or worse) to the structure

charge to meaning. It is why many of their poems appeal aesthetically

few statistically compared to the great majority that do not place

distinction between poetry and prose fiction. The clearest evidence of

inner-narrating capacities, with a titanium-coated needle. They prefer

L ati n o Fo r mal ist Po etic s as Part of

For each individual, human verbal interactions are so common and

poems function as a specific kind of communication whereby each aims

writing of this utterance—this global act of communication—aims to

of ideas, concepts, and images (mental representations) that they seek

We as readers find a particular aesthetic pleasure in aesthetic shape

intended to trigger in the reader in his relationship to the poem. (This

The Russian Formalists were interested in figuring out this process

building blocks of reality for the reader to experience them in a new

of the poem without the mnemonic aid of writing.

their more identifiable meter and rhythm work as mnemotechnique

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