The Serpent and the Fire: intersections and disjunctions

Abstract

This essay explores the different pathways of reading which Rothenberg and Taboada’s Anthology of Poetries of the Americas offers. Given the vastness of the geographical terrain and the long historical span proposed (from origins to the present), the capacity of this gathering to induce connections is astonishing. It offers a multiplicity of ways of reading across inherited lines of division (aesthetic, geographical), acts of reading which the chosen poetry energises. These articulations work not by association patterns or other kinds of flattening but by following through the occurrence of disjuncture inside intersections, and of connections within disjunction. The essay describes the large- and small-scale mappings and discusses how they intersect with two overall types of motion, the one consisting of what the editors call an “omnipoetics,” an expanded sense of what poetic art consists of, and the other of history in its relation with the imagination. The principle of comparability (“ all things come into their comparisons” —as Robert Duncan says) comes up against certain specific limits, these arising from the differential history of Latin America, and relating to the long span of colonialism in the South and to a stronger presence of the unrequited dead.