A Review of Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (translated by KM Cascia) June 21, 2023, by Zach Savich
Manuel Maples Arce (1900–1981), the first avant-garde poet in Mexico, led the Stridentist movement with a barrage of manifestos, promotional savvy, and three books of the era's most radical poetry. Born in Papantla, Veracruz, he studied law in the city of Veracruz and Mexico City, where, in his early twenties, he published the first Stridentist manifesto and followed it with several poetry collections. In 1925, he returned to Xalapa to serve in the revolutionary government of Vera Cruz and used his position to turn the city into a center of revolutionary art, attracting artists from throughout Mexico and the world. When the Vera Cruz government was deposed in 1927, his artistic community scattered and Maples entered the foreign service, serving in numerous foreign diplomatic posts. Though he later abandoned both the politics and the Stridentist poetry of his youth, his major works of the period, Andamios interiors (1922), Urbe: superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos (1924), and Poemas interdictos (1927) remain key texts of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
KM Cascia was born in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1979. They are the translator of Manuel Maples Arce’s City: Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) as well as numerous translations published in small outlets on- and offline, such as Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Asymptote and Calque, they are also the author of two collections of poems, Goethe and Days.
The final sentence of KM Cascia’s translator’s note to Stridentist Poems, their translation of the poetry of Manuel Maples Arce, might chasten a reviewer: it advocates for “real engagement with the cultures under the imperialist gun, rather than the usual passive consumption of literary commodities like this book.” In this case, that culture is Mexico’s in the 1920s, a time of avant-garde provocations, personages, and politics that many readers in the US might be most familiar with from the fizzy poetic coteries and lost heroes in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. Cascia notes that, because of the “systematic erasure of communist literature both from Latin America itself and in the yankee imagination of the region,” many of those readers might have “assumed that [all of the] the poets and movements mentioned [in Bolaño’s work] were fictional.” This new collection gives the lie to that assumption, while highlighting the period’s flourishes and failings.
Maples Arce’s life and work were vital to those phases. He helped launch the radical Stridentism movement in 1921; he authored seminal manifestoes and poetic texts; he advanced the movement’s “most ambitious, most controversial, and least understood project of all: the creation of their own city, Stridentopolis.” And when political winds changed, he studied law and served as a diplomat in Canada, France, and elsewhere. He continued to write but he distanced himself from Stridentism until the 1970s, “when revived interest in Stridentism made such erasure impossible—at which point,” as Cascia recounts, “he simply resumed trying to take all the credit for it himself.” In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño dramatizes an interview he conducted with Maples Arce in that last period, and in fitting counterpoint with the final sentence of the translator’s note, Cascia’s introduction lays bare the intersections among books and legends and lives at the heart of Maples Arce’s poetics and legacy. No mere commodity, he receives Bolaño and his friends coolly, much as he antagonized the literati of his youth. In a politicized poetic movement, such as Stridentism, ideology and milieu can intermingle—the final section of Maples Arce’s first manifesto was a list of names, an “Avant-Garde Directory”—so it makes sense that Bolaño’s characterization is a keyhole to the era.
So what can a reviewer do to approach “real engagement” with that context, in discussing the poems in this edition, which are drawn from Inner Scaffolds: Radiographic Poems (1922), CITY: Bolshevik Super-Poem in 5 Cantos (1924), and Prohibited Poems (1927)? First, he might consider what he elided, in the paragraph above, in the workaday phrase “and when political winds changed.” Those gusts, as Cascia’s immensely valuable notes make clear, attended the “rise of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).” The PRI suppressed communist art, including the “agitprop fabulism” of Stridentism, as happened throughout the rise of “right or center-right governments” across the region, abetted by the United States. Despite that history and the incendiary style of Maples Arce’s first manifesto (“Chopin to the electric chair!”), the radicalism of Stridentism’s ideas might not be initially apparent to all readers a hundred years later. Cascia represents its central tenets as “dispensing with extraneous elements…so as to focus on a deepening of the poetic image” and emphasizing “emotional realities rooted in the material, i.e., modern, world.” They note the movement’s debt to Italian Futurism and to earlier Spanish-language avant-gardes (Ultraism, Creationism). Still, those tenets might also appear in a general overview of Modernist poetry.
Yet their specific import and incitement are clear from the first poem in the collection, “Prism.” After two lines of immeasurable geometric exactitude, we enter a startling urban landscape:
I’m a still point in the middle of the moment, equidistant to a star’s castaway shout. A handelbarred park goes shadow numb, the wound-down moon oppresses me in shop windows. Golden daisies wind-plucked. Rebel city of luminous news afloat in almanacs, and where, from time to time, electricity bleeds in the ironed street.
That “handlebarred park” (“un parque de manubrio”) torques past metonymy. It evokes a park one could steer or manhandle. It might also bring to mind a handlebar mustache; this is a complex and disruptive image. One sees the residue of romantic idioms (shadows, moon, daisies) competing with the drive toward the modern. The moon is “wound-down,” like a clock or an unraveling knot, in Cascia’s moving translation of “sin cuerda.” The image is spatially intricate: we see a viewer who sees the moon (and himself) reflected, and thus commercially displaced, in shop windows. “Electricity bleeds,” and elsewhere in the volume we find “electric roses,” along with “arithmetic flowers,” “aerial roses” (near a reference to propellors), a “mechanical garden,” a “mechanical song’s nest,” an “automobile” that has “mineral tenderness,” and other images that show a poet working to merge a more traditional lyricism with a material, technological vision.
This effect is most spectacular when its imaginative precision approaches convolution, as in the super-saturated construction of “the electric treble clef of every rooftop / dies in the last almanac eaves.” Elsewhere, we see Maples Arce oscillate between the sweepingly lyrical and more brazen statements:
But despite everything, autumn, that lodger, begs her memory from fallen leaves.
Oh distant lover, romantic smoke of my first poems.
Autumn as a lodger, entreating leaves: I hear extremity and pageantry both satirical and earnest in this image, a complexity that inflects the passage’s wistful end. In the next poem in the edition, also from Prohibited Poems, these interlocking tendencies are more pronounced:
And airplanes, birds of aesthetic climate, will not write her name in water of sky.
“En el agua del cielo,” reads Maples Arce’s last line, a moment that shows how Cascia, in their swift and exhilarating translation, regularly loads a lot into a succinct phrase. That is, to have translated the line as “in the waters of the sky” would have risked, to my contemporary English ear, a softly surrealistic lilt, too stilted for the poem. On the other hand, a more compacted syntax (e.g., “in the sky’s water”) or novel construction (“in this sky’s sweat”) might not have shown Maples Arce relationship to foundational elements. The phrase “in water of sky” preserves the syntax (“x of y”) and the most direct diction, but it’s compressed enough to avoid a drowsy murmur; “water of sky” strikes me as more substantial and material than the nested possessives of “in the water of the sky.” This helps emphasize what might be the passage’s most memorable effect: the implication that these literate planes might be expected, because skywriting is possible, to etch a name in vapor. That is, the poet—porous and ecstatic—expects that the technologies of the world might memorialize a personal sentiment, and so it’s notable when they do not.
Cascia reminds us that US audiences can frequently de-politicize writers and artists such as Maples Arce. That led to “Pablo Neruda, a very public communist for approximately forty of his sixty-nine years of residence on earth, [becoming] best known here for a book of love poems written years before he joined the Party” and to the perception of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “a cute old man full of fanciful folklore.” And so, while Maples Arce’s work is rich with moments that evoke the “romantic autumn night” and also question its “chloroformed weariness,” I wouldn’t want to subsume this work into a thesis about sentiment. In CITY: Bolshevik Super-Poem in 5 Cantos, we see Maples Arce’s contention with aesthetics (he’s working to capture the “century’s / sweating new beauty,” not the “moons” that emanate from “intellectual sewers”) collide with his direct declaration that “Russia’s lungs / blow the wind of social revolution / in our direction.” Following a recurring, throat-clearing statement (“here’s my poem”) and catalogues of iconic labor (“The piers. The docks. / The cranes”) amid capital’s oppressions (“Bodyguard streetcars / patrol subversive streets. / Shop windows assault sidewalks”), the political dynamics in the poem’s first section become even more overt:
Red battalions pass under the naïve shutters of the times. Yankee music’s cannibal romanticism has built nest on the masts. Oh international city, to what remote meridian did that transatlantic ship sail? I feel everything moving away. Wrinkled evenings float among the scene’s masonry. Spectral trains go far away, the panting of civilizations
The unhinged masses splash musically in the streets.
And now the thieving bourgeoisie will tremble for their riches, robbed from the people, but someone hid the sheet music to an explosion beneath their dreams.
Again, Maples Arce’s excesses are clarifying. The “sheet music of dreams” could easily risk gauzy surrealism. But “the sheet music to an explosion beneath their dreams,” in Cascia’s translation, offers an image that is deliriously spatial (“beneath”) and convulsive. That is, it challenges the “usual passive consumption of literary commodities,” such as poetic images, with an “explosion” that is at once violently underlying and meticulously scored. The explosion remains, scorching, though its soundtrack is gone, replaced, perhaps, by Maples Arce’s “melodic whatnots” and durably inspired “musical failure.” Cascia’s translation offers a comparable charge and challenge, while also inviting consideration of the fate of an inflammatory and influential poetic movement. “Every artistic technique is destined to fulfill a spiritual function at a determined moment,” Maples Arce writes in the first Stridentism manifesto; this edition should help many readers feel that the appropriate moment for considering Maples Arce and Stridentism might be longer, and now.
