Preface

Summary

This book arose out of my successive attempts, over the past decade, to define the state of contemporary Spanish poetry. The final section of my 1994 book, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness, was a critique of what I then perceived to be the dominant trend in Spanish poetry of the 1980s: the rejection of avant-garde/ modernist values. In an article written in 1997 and published in Hispanic Review in 1999, I extended this critique by analyzing the explicit rejection of the avant-garde in the poetry and poetics of Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes. This article, now chapter 1 of this book, has provoked many reactions. In Spain, it was applauded by poets and critics who shared my own avant-garde bias, and deplored, naturally enough, by the targets of my critique. Many colleagues in the field, including Laura Scarano and Chris Perriam, probably believe that I have gone too far in rejecting the “poetry of experience.” They are correct that my perspective in this article, and in subsequent writings, is a partisan one. Taking the position of a defender of avant-garde values in literature, I attempt to dismantle the arguments made by García Montero and his supporters in order to demonstrate their essentially conservative nature. Others in Spain, on the other hand, have been working along similar lines. Antonio Méndez Rubio's essays, for example, present a similar critique of García Montero and the “poetry of experience,” using a different theoretical metalanguage but arriving at a conclusion perfectly consonant with my own.