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Welcome to Colombian Poetry - May 2006

January 18, 2006

Two main trends have predominated in Colombian poetry over the past two decades. In the 1980s, the poet Samuel Jaramillo wrote an interesting essay, ‘Five tendencies in Columbian post-nadaísta poetry’, the title of which already introduced two topics of discussion. The first is controversial and difficult to resolve: it concerns the very existence of nadaísta poetry as understood as a new literary style, or as the existence of a circle of poets with shared aesthetic (and political) principles. One of the unquestionable values of nadaísmo was the fact that it was not an imitative movement, although it did coincide with the Beat generation in the United States and El Techo de la Ballena in Venezuela Equally, it did not have an aesthetic manifesto or any political coherence.

The second topic of discussion has to do with that prefix ‘post-’. Alongside the nadaístas, there was another group of poets who did not share their proposals or take part in their public interventions (even though it was tempting to use scandal and controversy to earn some renown). Yet several poets from the second group have produced organic and consistent bodies of work: Juan Manuel Roca, Giovanni Quessep, Raúl Henao, José Manuel Arango, Samuel Jaramillo, Nicolás Suescún, Darío Jaramillo, Álvaro Miranda, Álvaro Rodríguez and Mario Rivero (whose membership of the nadaísta group is still up for debate). These poets are essential when it comes to judging recent Colombian poetry.

I believe that the best Colombian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century was not written after nadaísmo but alongside it, and, in fact, true nadaísmo bequeathed only one book and one name: Jaime Jaramillo Escobar and his beautiful and unforgettable Poemas de la ofensa.

At the end of the 1980s, Juan Manuel Roca published Disidencia de limbo, an anthology of nine new Colombian poets — Carlos Vásquez, Fernando Rendón, Javier Naranjo, Gabriel Jaime Franco, Eduardo Peláez, and Margarita Cardona among them. These poets, just as their immediate predecessors, did not constitute a movement as such but shared and still share a rejection of common rules, defend creative freedom, and recognize the value of the great poetic and philosophical movements of the twentieth century, among them surrealism and existentialism, and poets such as César Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro.

Perhaps Colombia has fewer poets today who are famous — as was the renowned poet Fernando Charry Lara — throughout the entire Spanish-speaking world (Roca and Quessep aside), and it is therefore difficult to appreciate the spectrum of Colombian poetry. Nevertheless, it is certainly no desert and there is no doubt that there are poets who will endure. We are certain that the voices we have chosen for PIW previously and the ones we choose now — Fernando Charry Lara, Rafael Patiño and Julián Malatesta — will confirm this assertion.

Translated by Nicolás Suescún

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Welcome to Colombian Poetry - May 2006

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