It has become fashionable among younger Spanish poets to denigrate the avant-garde “excesses” of the previous generation, that of thenovísimoswho came of age in the late 1960s. According to poets such as Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes, the “sacralization” of art characteristic of avant-garde poetics is no longer viable (García Montero, “Felipe Benítez Reyes” 11). The time has come for a more commonsensical conception of poetry, which is to be “un arte sensato” (a sensible art) capable of giving voice to experiences which are verisimilar to the common reader. Poetry should be, above all, “excelente literatura”...

The place of poetry within the cultural context in which it is produced and consumed is a particularly vexing question for contemporary poets and critics in Spain. How and why does poetry matter? What is its standing among the myriad discourses of postmodernity? The most readily available answer to this question, of course, is that the genre has lost whatever larger significance it once possessed: aside from the poets themselves and a few academic specialists, the familiar argument runs, poetry has scant resonance with the public. The emerging field of Hispanic Cultural Studies grants only minimal importance to poetry, a...

Many might consider poetry to be culturally insignificant in the contemporary period. Although the audience for the genre remains relatively small, it could easily be demonstrated that more Spaniards purchase and read books of poetry now than in previous decades. The problem, in my view at least, lies elsewhere: despite modest gains in readership, poetry remains the genre most heavily dependent on “cultural capital.” In a climate that increasingly privileges market forces over seemingly outmoded notions of literary quality or prestige, poetry is bound to seem diminished in stature. Yet the genre apparently retains enough of its lustre to be...

It would be hard to underestimate the significance of the group of Spanish poets who began to write in the 1950s. Poets like Claudio Rodríguez and José Ángel Valente seem to dominate the entire second half of the twentieth century, shaping the development of Spanish poetry for nearly fifty years. From a traditional perspective, the high-water mark for this poetic “generation” is the period stretching from the late 1950s until about 1970.¹ Taking a longer view, however, it becomes apparent that a second period, from the late 1970s through the end of the century, deserves equal or even greater attention:...

The career of José Ángel Valente (1929–2000) took shape slowly and organically over the course of several decades. As he himself suggests in this prose-poem fromMandorla, his writing is an unhurried process of development analogous to the formation of natural substances. Ultimately, the process by which his work assumed its definitive identity, especially in the final two decades of his life, was both prolonged and coherent, yielding a poetic work of enormous seriousness and depth.

Valente emerged in the 1950s as one of several poets subsequently included by literary historians in the so-called “Generation of the 1950s.” However,...

Poetry is not so much a genre of “literature” as it is a mode of signification. Such, at least, is the view of many contemporary poets in Spain. This proposition can be justified on historical grounds, since poetry predates the modern concept of “literature” by thousands of years. It is also clear that poetry cannot be confined to a singlegenre: although the word is often used as short-hand forlyricpoetry, contemporary poets also work in longer, more ambitious forms of more nebulous generic identity. The opposition betweenpoetryandliteraturecan also lead to a more constrained view...

The most cursory look at the best-known anthologies and critical studies of twentieth-century Spanish poetry reveals an overwhelmingly male canon: women poets, when they appear at all, are treated as minor figures or as problematic exceptions. The so-called “boom” in the publication of women’s poetry in the 1980s, then, represents a fundamental alteration in the literary landscape.¹ The vitality of contemporary women poets stands in sharp contrast to the rather pallid neo-conservative aesthetics of some of their most prominent male counterparts.² While general anthologies of contemporary Spanish poetry tend to remain almost exclusively male, it is clear that these compilations...

It is not hard to grasp the reasons for the keen interest sparked by the poetry of Ana Rossetti since the publication ofLos devaneos de Eratoin 1980. The attraction of her work has been both strong and immediate. While feminist critics have been especially interested in her play with gender categories, many readers have been drawn in by the powerful and explicit eroticism of her work. One significant source of appeal is Rossetti’s appropriation of images from advertising and popular culture, as seen in her two best-known poems, “Chico Wrangler” and “Calvin Klein, underdrawers.” Not least of all...

Left out at the last minute of Ramón Buenaventura’sLas diosas blancas, the controversial anthology that helped to foster the so-called “boom” in women’s poetry in the 1980s, Concha García has gained recognition more gradually than some of her more celebrated contemporaries. Her poetry, which can seem off-putting, tedious, or even grotesque on occasions, offers neither immediate sensory gratification nor the expectation of a transcendent epiphany. Despite these seemingly “unattractive” qualities, her work has gained a small but significant following. She has published nine books of poetry since the late 1980s and been included in several anthologies. Concha García’s work...

Lola Velasco’s poetry offers the critic no immediate “hook,” that is to say, no obvious point of departure for the elaboration of a critical argument.¹ Indeed, critics have been remarkably silent about her work. While Velasco’s poetry is not incompatible with the “essentialist” tendency inspired by José Ángel Valente, it is free from obvious stylistic debts to Valente, or to any other contemporary Spanish poet for that matter. It appears to spring, in fact, from a desire to elude classifications, alignments, and ideological alibis of any kind. The epigraph to the 2003 workEl movimiento de las floresis from...