Abstract
At the end of the nineteenth century there emerged a set of poetic
principles that considered the existence of the poem beyond verse, feet,
the accepted set of poetic forms and most importantly considered that
the poem did not only belong to the realm of temporal arts, but that also
could have a presence in space. At the beginnings of the twentieth
century Modernism and the avant-garde carried on these principles of
innovation. But by the end of the 1930s these efforts seem to reach an
end. In Latin America in particular poetry by that time seemed to become
more interested in social and historical issues than in experimentation
and innovation of forms. However, there were some poets who never
abandoned their innovative spirit. It was in the 1950s that a second wave
of artists looked back to the spirit of those innovators of Modernism and
the historical avant-garde movements in order to reconnect with that
tradition. They saw that in their efforts there was a lot more at stake
than the simple search for new forms; there was a revolution in the
conception of poetry. In their work they found new conceptions about the
organisation of the work of literature that could be indicative of a new
poetic reality, one where poetry was no longer constrained by time based
structures. Those implications reverberated to the very roots of the
existence of the work of literature. The works analysed and interpreted in
this work belong to that second wave of innovative artists that searched
for the extension of the poem out of the realm of temporality and into the
domain of space. That is, they wanted to make the poem present in the
world.
This thesis discusses the work of Argentinean poet Oliverio
Girondo, Peruvian poet and artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and the
Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poetry in relation to the issues
and concepts of presence in their work. New ways of organising the work
of literature prompted questions about its way of being. Traditionally the
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work of literature had been considered a temporal art but with the
innovative conceptions of literature and art such consideration had to be
put under question. It is not that literature had ceased to be a temporal
art but that these authors integrated into their works spatial elements
that transformed the way they are, and the way they are read. The works
discussed in this thesis indicate their considerations about presence, the
presence of the work of literature both as a concept within the works and
as an issue to be addressed with the form of the work. This thesis shows
the different forms in which these authors explored these issues. Their
considerations about presence are ultimately a way to reconsider the
'place' and therefore presence of the work of literature in the
simultaneously industrial and underdeveloped reality of Latin America in
the second half of the twentieth century.
