Living with the wave essay

Octavio Paz is Mexico’s best living poet. But a few face it: that’s just like saying Bill Carlos Williams was Paterson’s best copy writer. For Americans, a better way of indicating Paz’s importance must be found.

Probably it would be even more suggestive to express that in the universe of Latin American writing, Neruda’s poetry is definitely solar: a lavish, Mexican ful-mination”like a Tamayo watermelon”and Paz’s poems lunar: a rarer, Gallic luminosity”like a Magritte moon”; or, to put it another way, to say that even though Neruda is usually directly concerned with the world, it is objects and processes (including poetry), Paz is more frequently concerned with beautifully constructed wording, its types of procedures and words (meaning things).

But discussing really confront it: Paz is an even better essayist than he is a poet person.

His 1950 evocation of Mexican character and culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, is, in fact , devoted to real life and that produces an astonishing image of a complete nation, truer than the profound truths this reveals for presenting them in a mythos manufactured entirely gorgeous.

Drafted in a articulate, rich writing, Labyrinth of Solitude can be Paz’s poetic masterpiece. And his volume of poetics, El meta y la lira (still untranslated) much more indispensable and uniquely significant than most of the poetry he has created. So all of us confront a significant poet who writes important prose, and that is exactly where Bald eagle or Sunshine? omes in. Eagle or Sun? was published 12 months after Labyrinth of Solitude, and, as the title suggests, the publication continues Paz’s search for Mexican identity. (The title pictures refer to the obverse and reverse of the Mexican gold coin; the title poem explains: “Today I combat alone with a word.

What concerns me personally, to which I concern: brain or tails? eagle or perhaps sun? “) But the book also proceeds Paz’s vacillating search for his authorial id, and he may just as well have got written: “Today I combat alone having a form. Minds or tails? prose or perhaps poetry?  because Eagle or Sunlight? s a series of short writing poems (miniature, highly inventive essais, really) marking an important instance in Paz’s career where he has consciously attempted to dissolve the photographs of his poetry in the fluid of his prose without sacrificing the nature of either. Bald eagle or Sunlight?, then, is actually a significant test in the profession of a significant poet, as well as its longest piece, “My Life with the Wave (which tells of a man’s falling crazy about a trend, his currently taking her house and the tides of their affair until the lady freezes in his absence and he markets her to a waiter whom chops her up into little items to chill bottles) is a breathtaking success.

This can be a fantasy while delicate since anything simply by Hans Christian Andersen or perhaps Perrault, as magical since anything by Andre Breton or Dali and as fabulous as anything else by Serenidad. “My Life with the Wave alone justifies the try things out and the volume. For the most part, yet , this book is definitely the self-referring self-scrutiny of an strong artist employing prose to generate words in things (“a bit of surroundings in a pure mouth, a little water upon greedy lips) as he stands in amazement of issues made into poetry (“the cantos of yellow sand ¦ explained by the blowing wind a single amount of time in a single longiligne phrase, sourceless, endless, senseless).

Like a great deal contemporary fine art, Eagle or perhaps Sun? is self-consciously regarding itself; but , for a change, intelligently, illuminatingly therefore. Thus it is not necessarily a happy-go-lucky volume, mainly because Paz clarifies that “Every poem is created at the poet’s expense; even though it performs the discomfort of creation”the Passion of Poetry, not the passion in poetry is usually Paz’s theme”it also commemorates the poetic opportunity simply by rejoicing in the “World to populate, blank page,  privileging us to observe a poet who can effectively say that “From my body images gush when he beautifully avoids that modern literary pitfall, “a bramble of allusions, complicated and perilous. Of course everything in Skull cap or Sunshine? is not as good as “My Lifestyle with the Trend,  nevertheless by pointing always in the direction of itself, the book establishes its own elevated norms and provides a fine summary of all of Paz’ s job.

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