A Celebration of Failure:
Latin American Poetry in the 20th Century

Maria Negroni
mnegroni@slc.edu

John Ashbery said in an interview, "Poetry would seem to point to failure, the celebration of a state that has not been achieved." Written in the midst of a reality frequently torn by social and political unrest, twentieth-century Latin American poetry indicates a spiritual and aesthetic quest that seems to confirm Ashbery's dictum. Utopia and conflict, identity and loss, beauty and a sense of urgency are all present in a corpus that defies traditional barriers between the private and the public, proposing new paradigms to read it. In this course students will reinforce and strengthen their process of language acquisition through the study of poetry. The ultimate objective will be to consolidate, increase, and refine oral and written expression, with a special focus on the main aspects of syntax and morphology. As for poetry itself, we will concentrate on the relationship between imaginary time and history, tradition and subversion, the sacred and the search for the absolute as they appear in the works of Octavio Paz, Julia de Burgos, Ernesto Cardenal, Blanca Varela, and others. We also will attend poetry readings in Spanish, search the Internet for information on contemporary poets, and participate in translation practices. Students will meet individually with the teacher to further discuss individual projects and assignments. Weekly meetings with the language assistant also will be part of the course. Advanced.

Ms. Negroni:

María Negroni was born in Argentina. Three books of her poems have been published by Libros de Tierra Firme (Buenos Aires): De tanto desolar(1985), Per/canta (1989) and La jaula bajo el trapo (1991). La jaula bajo el trapo will be printed next year by Sun and Moon Press (Los Angeles). Her two latest collections of poetry, Islandia and El viaje de la noche, were respectively published in 1994 by Monte Avila Editores (Caracas) and Editorial Lumen (Barcelona). Islandia will be printed in a bilingual edition by Station Hill Press (New York) next year. Her most recent book, the novel El sueño de Ursula was Second Planeta Prize 1997 in Buenos Aires. She has translated Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Robert Duncan, Charles Simic, Susan Howe and Rosmarie Waldrop, among others. María Negroni received a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 1994 and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1998. She has also received a National Book Award for her collection of poems El viaje de la noche. She directs a poetry magazine edited in Buenos Aires, Abyssinia.