This year 2010 we commemorate the centennial of the death of Julio Herrera y Reissig, an Uruguayan Modernista poet who became an inspiration for several generations of Hispanic writers. His work was admired by authors such as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo or Vicente Huidobro in Latin America, and by José Hernández, Villaespesa and Cansinos-Assens in Spain, among others. His book Los peregrinos de piedra, published in 1914 by Garnier in Paris, circulated widely in both Spain and Latin America. This book was a reference of decadent style, and it was associated with an image of damned poet spread by the first critics of Herrera y Reissig. He was an early explorer of the use of drugs for literary creation in Latin America, and crafted a language that exerted a great deal of influence in Hispanic poetry during the 20th century.

Since the pioneer criticism of Guillermo de Torre early in the twenties, Herrera y Reissig was considered an innovator in the field of poetry; someone whose work on the poetic image contributed to the emergency of the Latin American avant-garde.   De Torre argued that Julio Herrera y Reissig was the first to achieve the “extra-radial metaphor” (as this critic called the avant-gardist image in the Ultraista jargon that he himself had coined to describe the new poetic reality during the first half of the 20th century).  Gwen Kirkpatrick in The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo situated Herrera y Reissig as an introducer of the poetic practice of dissonance, leaving a legacy that radically transformed the poetic expression in Spanish during the 20th century.  Attention has also being paid recently to Herrera y Reissig’s erotic  prose —long time neglected by the literary criticism— in the work of recovery and analysis by Carla Giaudrone, Nilo Berriel and Aldo Mazzucchelli.

Homage to Julio Herrera y Reissig

The Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages will make an homage to Julio Herrera y Reissig on October 15, 2010 from 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in room 5414. This event will gather a group of scholars who have recently focused on different aspects of Herrera y Reissig’s works: Prof. Gwen Kirkpatrick (Georgetown University), Prof. Eduardo Espina (Texas A & M), Prof. Aldo Mazzucchelli (Brown University), Prof. Carla Giaudrone (Rutgers University), Prof. Ernesto Estrella (Yale University) and Prof. Roger Santivañez (Bennington College).

Forrest Gander has generously provided us with the most recent version of his translations of Julo Herrera y Reissig.  Below you can read some excerpts from “Lunatic Tertulia”, and the sonnet “Sad Soul”:

Lunatic Tertulia

VESPERAS
Jam sol recedit igneus…

I.

In this gold crypt, somewhat shot,
A cataleptic fakir
In twilight sleep could partake here
Of a blessed Nirvana, somewhat shot. . .
Objectify an ill-wrought
Execution of thought,
And muffled rumor is begot
Like deaf remorse
From some extrorse
Diffusion of the music of a garrot.

Skies loosen their grimace, green,
And the disequilibrium
Of scorn’s satire hums,
Sick on absinthe, green . . .
Hypothetically, the sheen
In the moving horizon is spent,
And the pensive settlement
Is swarmed, they say, by a squall
As if, in the World’s thrall,
All was tenebrescent.

Already fireflies—witches
With jewels from Salambo—
Wink the “marche aux flambeaux”
Of a Sabbath of witches . . .
The velvet cypresses
Suggest a Carthusian ardor
Which wafts from your collar
In fragrant confidences,
Interjections of absences
And ring-eyed ritornellos of languor.

It’s all posthumous and abstract
And the spirit ideologues
Intimate monologues
Of the Unknowable Abstract . . .
The stupefied forest is ablaze
In an ecstasy of malaise,
And they light up that hirsute
Labyrinth of the proscenium
With a struck match from
The dark genie of the Absolute.
……………………………………………………………….

Its saddle hung up, the somnambulistic
Windmill metaphorizes that
A Don Quixote comes to combat,
On horseback and somnambulistic . . .
The smoke is vexed by an equilibrist,
Guignol of Kaleidoscope,
And in the heady night of dope
Savants tear open a lens
Of the eye of the conscience,
How deep! of a spectroscope.

On the watchtower, enigmatical,
The owl with eyes of brimstone
Suffers its morbid hoot-moan
Like a muezzin, enigmatical . . .
Before the omen—lunatic
Captious, spectral, denuded,
Velvety and muted—
It descends in stirless dress
Like a spider of death:
The immense night of the Buddha . . .

“Tertulia Lunática” by Julio Herrera y Reissig
Translated by Forrest Gander

Sad Soul

Everything was just so.  A lilac malaise
stirred up the illusion of tomorrow
and onto its absurd page, a callow
heron drum-stroked choppy waves.

An enormous shuddering of Sybyls
epilepsied now and again the window,
when, whoosh, an addlepated myth rolled
through the dark behind my eyeballs.

“Bye, bye!” I screamed and into the sky,
the grey sarcasm of your svelte
glove rose with my red jealousy.

A jackdaw Wagnered through wind,
and at that instant the forest felt
an infinite and complex collision.

“Alba Triste” by Julio Herrera y Reissig
Translated by Forrest Gander

Join the GC Poetics Group for a [creative] writing workshop!
No advance reading or preparation required.

“In this frantic, routine-driven world we need freedom from regimented (poetry) writing, and a healthy dose of walking the space between Soma (spirit) and Somatic (body). Using gemstones, trees, and the city itself, we will create deliberate, sustained physical manipulations to generate language to write.”

This workshop will begin with a short talk by CAConrad on the process of (Soma)tic writing, followed by a reading of some of his (soma)tic works. Conrad will then lead us through our own (soma)tic exercise, and by the end of the session, all participants will have a new draft of a piece of writing to work with, and time to consult with Conrad and participate in a collective rendering of the afternoon’s work.

CAConrad is the recipient of The Gil Ott Book Award for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). Conrad has taught (Soma)tic Writing Workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, CA, and locally in and around the Philadelphia area.

Monday, March 15 at 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100) : Beats and Beyond.  Documenting the Poets of the 60’s
with Cecilia Vicuña, Melanie La Rosa, and Henry Ferrini.

Monday, March 22 at 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100):  New Visions, New Activism, New American Poetry:  Margaret Randall in Conversation

Tuesday, March 23 at 6:30 pm, The Ph. D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages (4116):  Memory and Oral History:  A Personal Journey.  Organized by the Literary Theory Study Group and the Colombian Studies Group

These activities are possible thanks to the support of The Center for the Humanities, the Doctoral Students Council, the Lost and Found Project, and the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010. 6:30 pm. At the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue New York, Rm. 9206.
Multiformalisms : Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Essays. Edited by Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz. Textos Books.)

March 26, 4-6pm

CUNY Graduate Center 4th floor English Lounge (4406),  365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016

On Dec. 11th at 5 pm, just before the maelstrom of Winter Revels begins to spin, the GC Poetics Group in collaboration with the ESA will be hosting Image Music Text, our semi-annual reading, in the English Department lounge. The roster is starting to fill up, but we are still looking for participants.

For those unfamiliar with the tradition: each year before the English Department’s winter party we host a reading at which Graduate Center writers perform their work, whether it’s poetry, short prose, theatre, inspired babble, or anything performative.

There are a lot of talented writers at the GC, both faculty and students, and past readings have had impressive and eclectic line-ups. Each performer has 4-5 minutes to do with what you want!

We try to include different people each year, and newcomers are especially welcome. Scientists and philosophers too. If you would like to take part in this year’s reading, please contact us (via gcpoetics@gmail.com) and the sooner the better.

Your hosts,

Erica Kaufman
Ben Miller

We didn’t just meet the requirements, in fact: out of 32 groups, we were tied for fourth place in terms of support (alongside the Social and Political Theory Students Association and the Twentieth Century Studies Group).