In his fourth book of poems, Habitaciones parcialmente destruidas (Editorial Aparte 2023), Nicolás Letelier Saelzer takes on the allegory of language as a prison house, always with irony, subtlety, and dissonance. The “prison house” of language refers to the idea and image employed by Friedrich Nietzsche of words as a constitutive condition of thought. This means language is familiar to us, while it also determines us.

Two dramatic monologues, of different styles in terms of register and versification, open the collection of poems. “Dramatic monologue” is understood to be a rhetorical mode or lyric subgenre capable of evoking the speaker’s temperament from their most private thoughts. The first poem, “Of the Middle Middle Class,” probes into the euphemistic nature of this social category from a place of anonymous subjectivity: “work / produce / maintain / this / throng / of luminaries / who / live / in / all / this / that / is / beautiful.”The second poem, “Charles Robert Darwin / (1809-1882),” interweaves Chilean registers and modern allusions with the mindset of a high bourgeois Victorian character: “Modest as I am / I wrote the most elegant / treatise on ethics / more elegant than / Duke Ellington / but the scatterbrains / from here don’t understand / anything.” In both texts, irony constitutes a core resource for casting doubt on the speakers’ assertions and the motivation for social mobility.

As its epigraph (“From Paul Klee and Gordon Matta-Clark”) indicates, the title poem of the book uses ekphrasis, understood as the verbal representation of a visual representation, but which, through an exercise of imagination, is capable of emulating, translating, and questioning the compositional patterns employed by both artists. In the manner of Matta-Clark and Paul Klee, the poem seems to “perforate and intersperse” phrases and images related to language with lines and figures from the realm of construction: “cement reinforced concrete of organic forms / relations between what is said and what is projected what is wanted.” As this excerpt reveals, the principle of juxtaposition, taken up later in the sentence “all that is left is to superimpose,” falls not only between the verses but also within their interstices by means of the radical, but meditated, suppression of connectors and conjunctions. Thus, the processes of enjambment and superimposition crumble the foundations of language, where the poetic image, that “hologram of the mind,” acts as a cognitive projection, influenced by the work of Paul Klee and Matta-Clark. Based on such poetics, Letelier conceives of the poem as a partially destroyed room, belonging to the prison house of language.

“If language is that which ‘domesticates’ us, then the poem is responsible for denaturalizing and partially destroying everyday speech”

If dramatic monologues explore the rhetorical possibilities of irony, defined in a literal sense as the formulation of an opposite meaning, the poem “And” contemplates the difference between false and true statements. With elegant audacity, the speaker interrogates the true quality of “each sentence” and “each word.” For the subject, language lies not precisely because of the referent (“it is not the dog”), the signifiers used (“the vocalized sound”) or the non-verbal expressions (“here the / arm holds points at a / dog”), but rather due to the social character of everyday speech, which is capable of naturalizing its uses and conventions: “it is only sound that / we domesticate with word.” Therefore, if language is that which domesticates us (and here is the double meaning with the initial reference to the dog), then the poem is responsible for denaturalizing and partially destroying everyday speech.

The use of enjambment, consistent and extended throughout the collection of poems, disrupts the tension between rhythm and syntax, while reinforcing a metaliterary meditation on the process of poetic composition. In “Balcones II / Vanitas MMXX,” the speaker reflects on the creation and reception of an everyday event (“It is a nice gesture to intone / a song in the morning”), where the aesthetic pleasure resides not only in harmony, but also in dissonance: “and find beauty / not only in the melodic / lines that overwhelm / the brain and enjoy the / offbeats and basses.” In these last two lines, the enjambment is able to break the syntactic link established in the phrase by separating the article (“the”) from the noun (“offbeats”). In this way, the enjambment embodies the syncopated rhythm articulated by the speaker.

The variety of rhetorical modes in Habitaciones parcialmente destruidas is proof of Nicolás Letelier’s enduring craft and the intertextual fabric of his literary work, while demonstrating the poetic possibilities underlying everyday speech from an ironic, reflective, and skeptical lens regarding its means of expression. In the face of the prison house of language, the poem becomes not a construction site, but rather an occupied ruin.

 Translated by Whitni Battle

Previously published in the book El margen de la propia vida (2013), the sequence Gardens underlines, through the problem of scale and the agency of matter, a formal register, depersonalized tone, and scientific rhetoric. These attributes comprise visible signs of the literary and experimental trajectory of Carlos Cociña (1950) within the contemporary poetry scene in Latin American literature. In this reprint by Cardboard House Press (2021), masterfully translated into English by Ian Lockaby, the Chilean author avails himself of the fragmented connection of nine works of poetic prose, anchored at the syntactic level through parataxis to connect physical and psychological gardens, expansive and minuscule, visual and tonal.

Throughout this chapbook, the problem of scale frames the ever-mobile cartography of space, a matter inaugurated by the speaker’s initial rhetorical question: “¿Qué jardín es ése que se extiende en una estepa por kilómetros y que se alcanza a ver desde el satélite?” [“What garden is that which extends on a steppe for kilometers, and which can be seen from satellite?”]. Here, not only does the sequence distance itself from the religious and symbolic echoes of the garden, including its different historical and aesthetic lines—consider, for example, Eden and its medieval versions, or the neoclassical French landscape and its romantic English counterpart. It also updates the genre of topographical poetry; that is, the literary representation of a natural view from the peak of a hill or mountain—recall Gray, Wordsworth, and Keats, or Neruda himself in The Heights of Macchu Picchu. In this excerpt, the digital image can delimit and visualize the contours of the garden through a satellite’s eye, edges that stand out through their virtual amplitude and constant expansion. In turn, this aesthetic gaze echoes in the formation of the poetic voice, objective and depersonalized, pausing over synesthetic and minuscule, almost microscopic details within these verbal spaces, a matter approached by Lockaby in his short—but illuminating—final note: for example, in the image of the perfume with lavender and “hojas de tomate y quilas de cincuenta años” [“tomato leaves and fifty-year-old quilas”].

Furthermore, the agency of matter comes into view through a careful use of characterization or personification, capable of establishing interdependent relations between its actors while directing its permanent transformation processes: “En la madrugada, la humedad se expande y el retorno de la luminosidad activa de distinta forma la permanencia de las plantas” [“In the dawn the humidity expands, and the return of luminosity activates in different form the permanence of plants”]. In both artifice and nature, public and private spaces, the garden is configured as the ideal territory for the reformulation of personification, no longer as a pathetic fallacy in service of the subject—consider Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example—but as an ecological gesture: the communication of matter with matter through its networks, patterns, and assemblages: “Poco a poco me fui alejando de ese movimiento cuando aparecieron y armaron su materialidad” [“Little by little I withdrew myself from that movement when they appeared and armed their materiality”].

In this perceptive and linguistic exercise, the speaker focuses on shape as a potential detention of matter. That is, the subject evocatively exposes the virtual sedimentation of the elements: “la solidez de las formas plantadas elabora los campos de luz” [“the solidity of planted shapes develops the fields of light”]. From there, the agency of matter is represented as work and alliance: a synthesis, in turn, of the metaphorical juxtaposition between space (“the fields”) and the senses (“of light”). This transposition functions not only figuratively and rhetorically, but also at the syntactic and structural level. Within the sequence, clauses are assembled without discursive connections through parataxis: “Only in the vault can light be seen passing by. The other illuminated area is underfoot.” In this sense, language acts as an immanent force and a material continuum with the ever-changing elements of the garden. Thus, words are interconnected with the landscape. This phenomenon is also present at the aesthetic and paratextual level on the front cover, skillfully and accurately designed by Mutandis. The three pages and vertical cutouts of abstract territories, resembling geological formations or microscopic images, embody the different assembled layers of the garden and the collection of poems. In other words, the transposition acts as a force field, capable of being irradiated in the diverse states and interstices of matter.

Indirectly, Cociña’s writings and the style of the collection respond to the rhetorical question posed, almost as an imperative, by the speaker themself: “What other gardens are possible?” This call, of ontological resonance but also metafictional, reinforces the different literary readjustments of the Chilean author with respect to the topic of the garden, the genre of the topographical poem, the reach of synesthesia, juxtaposition as assemblage, and the use of personification. Thus, this renovation, re-elaboration, or reconstruction is distinguished through the problem of scale, the view of language as a continuum, and the agency of matter. From there, the reprint by Cardboard House Press and the translation by Ian Lockaby are an invitation to travel through the verbal, immanent, and imaginary spaces of Carlos Cociña.

Diego Alegría
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Translated by Gary Soza

In his illuminating foreword, Carlos Almonte discusses uneasiness towards spiritual gestures as a symptom of today’s reader. This uneasiness presents itself not only as ignorance of religious history and its symbolic codes, a sign of our secular age, but also in the very act of interpretation. Today’s reader averts their eyes in the material presence of the sacred, be it ripples in the water, striations in the rocks, or the shoreline. This reader is in constant search of discursive manifestations: of what is said and not the act of saying. In Visiones de María Magdalena, Juan Carlos Villavicencio not only works with the spiritual gesture, but also creates a dialogue between the mediums of words, music, and images. From this hushed conversation, the Chilean author conceives of writing as a synesthetic experience; that is, the poem is a forcefield beyond but also behind language.

This spiritual gesture rests on the figure of Mary Magdalene as a literary source throughout the seven chapters, named “Golgotha,” “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabaktani (Dos visiones de una traición ignorada),” and “Kyrie Eleison,” among others. In the titles of these works, the linguistic intersection between Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin favors openness, translation, and the meeting of different artistic forms, tongues, and historical times revolving around the passion of the Christ. In this poetry collection, the Chilean author neither imitates nor reproduces the biblical tale, but rather advances, molds, and transforms the symbolic substrate with verbal economy, medial negotiation, and expressive subtlety. These rhetorical tools, previously broached in Oscuros rios (2018) with the temporal paradox of the Heraclitan allegory and expanded upon in Antígona en el Espejo (2021) with the radical reversion of the Greek tragedy, make up Villavicencio’s poetics. In other words, we are face to face with truly experimental gestures that form part of the modernist European and North American tradition. These gestures are woven into the Imagist collage of T.S. Eliot (whom Villavencia has translated), and the classic rewritings of Rainer Maria Rilke, a cited poet in Visiones de Maria Magdalena, as well as contemporary literary radicals such as W.G. Sebald and Anne Carson.

At the linguistic level, the Chilean author imagines poetic vision as a verbal manifestation that precedes speech as an instrument of communication. Throughout the collection, the lyrical subject matter is concentrated in the articulation of reading and the gesticulation of language as significant acts of speech because of their negative, material, and affective character. In poem IV from the chapter “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabaktani,” the speaker declares, “However as of now/ nothing exists/ even these words/ are but mere impossible artifices./ The winter of betrayal or cowardice has constructed/ this voice’s every lyrical musing.” Instead of a message or word, the act of reading gets caught up in the material metaphor and lyrical synesthesia of the phoneme, as well as the absence, lack of definition, and impossibility of language as closure, so clearly embodied in the crucial phrase: “but mere impossible artifices.” This poetic attention towards articulation rests not only on diction, which comes from the precise usage, metric variation, and repetition of textual echoes, but also on the metaphorical power of the image. In poem V from the same chapter, the speaker returns to the figure of a fallen leaf to activate the voiced, linguistic, and expressive affects of the dead body of Christ: “an extended howl resounds in the vacuum/ the bubbling of a body/ that rots in abandon.” Similarly to the previous passage, the speaker is concerned with broaching pain as an event incapable of being expressed by articulated, discursive, and arbitrary language. It is a material event that is, therefore, pure potential and gesticulation: “an extended howl” that “resounds in the vacuum.”

Throughout the collection, image and music, the visual and the acoustic senses broaden this expressive commitment. Regarding this first aspect, each section displays Pere Salinas watercolors relating to the poems’ titles and themes. Just like Villavicencio’s writing and his unassuming work, these paintings draw, hint at, and blur Christian symbolism and the biblical icons of the passion of the Christ through the function, medium, and material of the watercolor. In this sense, poem IX from the chapter “Liberación del Pecado” would seem to reflect on the visual dimension of the book as a poetic gesture, contrary to its closing discourse: “Yesterday’s befuddling light will not emerge/ until it decides to speak up.” Regarding the acoustic sense, music manifests as absence through paratextual citations listed in the section “Notas: Referencias de cada poema.” Through Villaviencio’s sustained diction, musical pieces spanning from Bruno Moderna to Gerard Grisey to Helmet Lachenmann, among others, are interwoven into the poetic texture of the book through their titles and movements; they transform and reinforce the biblical substrate. Together with the musical component, these paratextual symbols refer not only to literary citations integrated into the collection of poems, such as those of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Eluard, but also to those that are absent in the final publication, such as Milan Kundera and Hans Christian Anderson. The previously quoted poem IX imagines this silent music as “a chorus of othered visions” that “keeps company with ever-fleeting piety.”

In this collection, Juan Carlos Villavicencio relies on the linguistic, visual, and acoustic gesture to outline a poetics attentive to the strength, autonomy, and vitality of language. The ethical commitment of reading and writing in Visiones de Maria Magdalena gets channeled through the poem’s willingness to explore multiple directions; that is, its rhetorical discourse revolving around Christianity, literary citations, watercolor images, and musical composition. From this interplay, the Chilean author uses not only the biblical imagination, but also a constant meta-poetical reflection about its expressive mediums. This new publication thus returns to the mystical and romantic notion of the poem as a vision, or perhaps a vision of visions.

Diego Alegría
University of Wisconsin-Madison