Romance Studies, Vol. 25 (4), November 2007

PARODY AND METAPOETRY IN TWO POEMS BY GLORIA FUERTES

Hilde ten Hacken

Department of Spanish, University of St Andrews, UK

Like many of her contemporaries, the Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes (1917–1998) explores metapoetic themes such as the essence of poetic language, the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet and the reader in her work. This article considers metapoetry and the closely related concept of parody in two of her poems, ‘El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte’, fi rst published in 1954, and ‘Maletilla’, from Poeta de guardia (1968). Both poems reveal her experience of being sidelined by literary critics, which she responds to by including deliberately non-poetic language in her work, thus emphasizing her aim of reaching ordinary people and her rejection of élitist writing. On the basis of these two poems, references to some other poems and the critical context, the article points to the different purposes that defi ne Fuertes’s poetics. One important consequence of her use of parody and metapoetry was that she was able to include a message about the need for social change in her poetry without being overtly didactic. In doing so, she succeeded in reaching an audience where some of the other politically committed writers failed.

Many critics have commented on the prevalence of parody — often focusing on the intertextuality this involves — and metapoetry in the work of Spanish poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s. They establish a link between a perceived crisis in poetry at the time, and the use of such strategic tools as a vehicle to expose and confront what were regarded as outmoded poetic conventions, which no longer attracted an audience. Gloria Fuertes (Madrid, 1917–1998) was one of the poets who used parody and metapoetry to explore new ways to express herself and engage the reader. Following a brief résumé of some aspects of poetry from that period, the terminology used, and some characteristics of Fuertes’s poetry, this article will discuss two of her poems in detail, and examine the role and effect of parody and metapoetry in her poetics.

There were various reasons why poetry was perceived to be in a state of crisis. The state-promoted poetry of the garcilasistas, which emerged in the early 1940s, was criticized for its artifi cial aesthetics and lack of substance. The poetry that had come to be known as poesía social was partly a critical response to that of the garcilasistas, but was increasingly thought to be lacking in quality as it was based on imitation of the fi rst authors of this kind of verse, such as Celaya, Crémer and Otero. As Payeras Grau explains, ‘a fuerza de extenderse y repetirse la poesía social se pobló de tópicos que la empobrecieron, y el lenguaje directo y sencillo utilizado por ella acabó por ser intolerablemente prosaico’.1

Address correspondence to: Hilde ten Hacken, hildetenhacken@hotmail.com

© 2007 Swansea University DOI: 10.1179/174581507x235651

340 Hilde ten Hacken

Furthermore, although it addressed social injustice, it had not been able to gain a readership among the working classes. The new generation of poets, including Ángel González, Claudio Rodríguez, José Ángel Valente, and also Gloria Fuertes, began to reintroduce more personal elements in their writing, and they used their work to explore metapoetic aspects such as the purpose and unique quality of poetry.2 Such metapoetry, which can be defi ned as poetry that ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact’3 and explores poetic theory through the practice of writing it,4 contributed to the process of redefi ning poetry. This kind of self-conscious writing was a consequence of poets’ search for poetic language that would attract a readership,5 and also of what Mandlove describes as the ‘mistrust of language’ perceived by poets and readers: ‘a deep skepticism of the capability of language to break the barriers separating one human being from another’.6 The other strategy relevant here is that of parody, which, if we follow Hutcheon, is a form of metapoetry, as it is self-referential and involves critical commentary, and therefore has a metadiscursive level. It consists of two texts: the new composition and the parodied text in the background, ‘against which the new creation is implicitly to be both measured and understood’.7 The parodied text, which will be referred to as the intertext, can be another poem, a genre, a speech act, or any other form of discourse.

Parody is a particularly useful strategy when the poet wishes to engage the reader and give him or her a more active role in the poetic process. As Hutcheon points out, readers have to decode the poet’s encoding intent, and therefore ‘are active co-creators of the parodic text’ (1985: 93). In the poetry that Gloria Fuertes writes in the 1950s and 1960s, she frequently uses parody to draw attention to her metapoetic concerns and appeal to the reader to participate in her poetry. The texts she imitates and then subverts are usually non-literary, alternative discourses, such as informal letters and dialogues, forms, question-naires, advertisements and telegrams, while she also uses the conventions of children’s verse and fairytales. Debicki regards such intertextuality, and the surprising effects it often involves, as the most characteristic feature of her poetry. He claims that by undercutting conventional texts and attitudes, she reverses reader expectations, and that ‘all of these poems depend on the reader’s “horizon of expectations” to furnish these conventional notions, making the reader anticipate attitudes which are then dramatically undercut within the text’ (1982: 87). Two examples of such poems which are interesting for comparison, as they have some features in common but were written at different points in Fuertes’s career, are ‘El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte’, an early poem, included in Antología y Poemas del suburbio (1954), and ‘Maletilla’, from Poeta de guardia (1968).8

In ‘El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte’ (01:52), she parodies a market vendor’s street language, which functions as the intertext:

— Muy barato,para el nene y la nena,estos cuentos de risay novelas de pena¡aleluyas a diez!Vendo versos,liquido poesía,— se reciben encargospara bodas, bautizos,peticiones de mano —,

341Parody and Metapoetry in Two Poems by Gloria Fuertes

¡aleluyas a diez!No se vaya,regalo poesía,llévese este cuartetoque aún no me estrené!Para la madre,para la novia,el mejor regaloun verso de amor!

Desperate to sell his goods, the luckless poet reduces the price of his merchandise, and when he notices he is losing his audience, he even offers his work free of charge. Extolling the virtues of his wares and using street-market clichés such as the notion of ‘liquidar’ a range of goods and selling unique products ‘que aún no me estrené’, the speaker offers a mixture of products which are all equally cheap: children’s books, popular genres such as ‘novelas de pena’ and the ‘aleluyas’, but also the ‘cuarteto’, associated not only with high culture but also with the traditional verse forms cultivated by the state-promoted garcilasistas. The spoken — or shouted — language is interpolated with the three lines starting with the advertising convention ‘se reciben encargos / para’, a text one might expect to fi nd on a placard on the vendor’s stall. In spite of the non-poetic vocabulary, there is no doubt that we are dealing with a poem: the text is presented as such in a poetry collection, it has the verse form associated with the genre, and it uses the traditional poetic devices of rhythm and rhyme.

The effect of Fuertes’s metapoetic use of the street vendor’s words as the parodic frame for her poem is that it debunks the special status of poetry. By setting off the mundane market scene against the poetic structure of the text, and referring to the tradition of selling cheap love poetry on a market, she challenges the elevated status of Poetry. While the ‘cuartetos’ may refer to what was thought of as ‘offi cial’ poetry, the poem can also be seen to ridicule poesía social: although the poem’s social context is that of the working classes, the use of parody introduces an element of light-hearted humour which is the complete opposite of the solemn and often pompous tone of much social poetry. Although the poem can be seen as a reference to the unpopular status of the genre in general at the time, the luckless poet using the market as a venue is also an indirect autobiographical reference to her own experience of being a ‘poeta sin suerte’. As a working-class, self-taught woman poet with a completely unconventional style, she was aware of being excluded from the select — almost exclusively male — world of poetry at the time. She was still a virtually unknown writer, and the speaker’s idea of selling his work cheaply or even giving it away, refl ects her own wish to be read. Although the poetic persona created in this poem is an anonymous male poet, the speaker may nevertheless be associated with Fuertes. Both Fuertes and other commentators have frequently remarked upon the deliberately autobiographical aspect of all her work,9 and in this case some of the poem’s specifi c elements make it clear that Fuertes indirectly refers to herself here: she starts the poem by mentioning children’s literature, and she herself wrote many children’s poems and stories, while it concludes with a remark on a love poem; love — both personal love and the importance of love and friendship in the world — is the overall most important theme in her work. Finally, the text’s boisterous tone refl ects her own exuberant personality. By using parody, she is able to express her discontent with being neglected as a writer in a way that avoids sentimentalism and self-pity.

342 Hilde ten Hacken

Another reason why this poem is particularly effective as a parody, is that Fuertes saw herself as an oral poet, and — like several of the exponents of poesía social — gave many public readings of her work in bars and at local events. Reading aloud to an audience, Fuertes would take on the role of the vendor, and the audience would be forced to act as the vendor’s target and possible customers, and so become part of the text. This would have had a shock effect on those expecting a different kind of poetry, while working-class people would have identifi ed immediately with the situation and have felt included in the poem, the parodic text. Ynduráin, in his ‘Prólogo’ to Fuertes’s Antología poética (1950–1969) emphasizes the importance of the oral aspect of her poetry and the impact of her public readings, saying that ‘es la suya, inevitablemente, una poesía oral, y esta Antología no puede ser sino muy lejano eco de su verso, al faltar su interpretación recitada’.10 Elsewhere, he discusses what he calls her ‘madrileñismo’, which refers to her use of the vernacular of Madrid and her specifi c sense of humour, giving local colour to many of her poems (1979: 34–35). Two other poems that, in a similar tone, evoke street scenes in Madrid are ‘Puesto del Rastro’ (OI, pp. 66–67) and ‘El sacamuelas’ (OI, p. 240). ‘Puesto del Rastro’ consists of a vendor pronouncing a long list of objects for sale, and is reminiscent of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s treatment of used objects in El rastro (1915); according to a footnote added by Fuertes, ‘el poema es una especie de auténtico pregón’ (OI, p. 66). The speaker of ‘El sacamuelas’ uses similar commercial jargon as that in the above poem to try to sell his goods — which include ‘píldoras mensuales’, ‘hojas de afeitar’ and a ‘crecepecho’ — to the women walking past. As, like the ‘vendedor’, he has no luck and is ignored by the public, the poem ends with the aside placed between brackets: ‘y recogo y me marcho ...’

An important characteristic of ‘El vendedor ...’ is that it involves what Hutcheon (1985: 6) refers to as ironic inversion, which she defi nes as a characteristic of all parody: a specifi c convention, genre or poem is replaced with its opposite, which is adapted in such a way that it provides an ironic comment on the practice or text it refers to. She later mentions Bakhtin’s theoretical observations on carnivalesque and social inversions (such as the crowning of fools) in Rabelais and his World as a specifi c example of this (1985: 74). Although Bakhtin’s study focuses on folk humour and carnival in the Renaissance, some aspects of his discussion, such as the emphasis on the culture of the marketplace, the folk parody associated with carnival, and its participative element — in the above poem, the reader’s involvement or the audience’s participation in the poem — seem particularly relevant to Fuertes’s poetry.11 Sherno, who has explored the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory on carnival to many of the aspects of the work of Fuertes, establishes a link between folk humour’s purpose of rebelliously inverting the offi cial order, and its relevance within Franco’s oppressive regime.12 In the above poem, by encoding her message of protest against offi cial culture and her marginalization as a working-class woman poet within a parodic structure, she is able to challenge prevailing ideas about poetry in general and about her own work and role as a poet in particular.

To conclude the discussion of ‘El vendedor ...’, it is interesting to consider how its effects are enhanced by its position within the book. As we have seen, it is irreverent in its treatment of poetry because of its non-poetic language and the suggestion of poems as cheap merchandise. In addition, the rhythm of the short lines and the exclamation marks suggest a declamatory voice. Both the poems that precede and follow it carry a contrasting message, as they both deal with poetry in a more reverential tone and refer to its special purpose and meaning. The preceding poem, ‘Inesperada visita’ (OI, pp. 51–52), gives a list

343Parody and Metapoetry in Two Poems by Gloria Fuertes

of poets who once came to see the speaker. The visit was important, as ‘¡Todos venían para salvar el mundo!’. Written at a time when many poets were still confi dent that their work could have a signifi cant impact on the social and political situation in Spain, poetry here is described as something sacred. The poem concludes with the lines: ‘Encendimos la lumbre del misterio / y yo los recibí en mi misma celda’. The association of poetry with mystery, the seclusion of her cell, and the religious connotations of both clash with the content of ‘El vendedor ...’. The poem that follows the vendor’s words provides a similar contrast. Its title, ‘A lo mejor un día ...’, has a dreamlike quality; its content deals with the abstract, transcendent meaning of poetry, and its structure of long lines suggests a soft-spoken, thoughtful reading, rather than the market vendor’s shouting. While the conclud-ing lines of ‘Inesperada visita’ associate poetry with ‘misterio’, both the fi rst and last lines of ‘A lo mejor un día ...’ (OI, p. 53) describe poetry as a ‘milagro’. The poem opens with the abstract comment, apparently beginning in mid-sentence, ‘Porque la poesía es un milagro. / Algo que puede ser y no sabemos en qué consiste’, which again clashes with the tone and context of ‘El vendedor ...’. Thus, the three poems, in spite of their colloquial language and apparently simple messages, together make a complex metapoetic statement about Fuertes’s purpose, experience and defi nition of poetry.

In the poem ‘Maletilla’ (01:168), published fourteen years after ‘El vendedor ...’, Fuertes again uses parody to comment on her poetry and her experience as a poet:

Maletilla de las letraspor los caminos de España;sin hacer auto-stop a los catedráticos,ni a los coches ofi cialesni a las revistas que pagan ...— sólo a los camioneros y las tascas —;... y no me dieron ninguna oportunidadpor ser nieta de puta y basta.Ya toreo por mi cuenta,sin permiso salto vallas,siete corridas ya tengo, toreadas,— quiero decir siete librosigual que siete cornadas —,maletilla de las letraspor los atajos de España.

While ‘El vendedor ...’ refers to a specifi c intertext, ‘Maletilla’ can be regarded as a parody of the poetic genre in general. Using colloquial language and convoluted sentences suggests that these are thoughts that have been penned in haste rather than a well-planned structure and complex language that are based on learning and intellect. However, a careful reading of the poem shows that it is far from straightforward, and that it constantly requires the reader to adjust his or her expectations. Her defi ant use of language underlines the poem’s metapoetic theme of her independence as a poet and her rebellious attitude towards cultural authority. If the fi rst poem challenged art as an elevated system, in ‘Maletilla’ the special status of those who have the power to take decisions on art are challenged.

The semantic complexity of the fi rst line shows that we are dealing with a poem which is not as simple as its linguistic register might suggest. The word Fuertes has chosen to describe herself, ‘maletilla’, is well-suited to defi ne her career and personality, and to

344 Hilde ten Hacken

introduce the poem’s subject: the fi gure of a bullfi ghter suggests a strong, defi ant personal-ity ready to fi ght, while a ‘maletilla’ also suggests a self-taught bullfi ghter coming from the margins, who has had to make his own way.13 However, by combining the word with ‘letras’, she also hints at a poet’s struggle to subdue language in her poetry, while the suggestion of travelling evokes a completely different meaning of the word: that of a small ‘maleta’. The reference to travelling is relevant in that Fuertes from the 1960s onwards gave many recitals of her work in rural parts of Spain, in order to reach those who would otherwise be excluded from poetry.14 Finally, the word ‘letras’ suggests the study of literature, and therefore points forward to the ‘catedráticos’ of the third line.

The three types of vehicle that might take her further along the road — both the road she is travelling literally and that of her career as a poet — and which she wishes to ignore, represent the three established routes towards success: recognition by academic critics, promotion and support provided by the regime, and publication in commercially based journals. As all three have scorned her15 because of her supposedly inferior poetic style, her defi ant language and her poor background, she turns her back on them and instead opts for the working-class lorry drivers and the ‘tascas’, cheap bars which, like Fuertes’s poetry, are often frequented by prostitutes. The angry outburst that ends the fi rst sentence contains the ‘taco’ — a word she would later use to refer to the kind of slang words she included in her poetry16 — ‘nieta de puta’. She thus confi rms the prejudices against her poetry voiced by some critics, but at the same time creates the parodic intertext of a verse line with perfectly regular rhyme and rhythm.17 In the second sentence she elaborates the metaphor of the self-made ‘maletilla’ referred to in the title and the fi rst line. Having rejected established, cultural authorities, she now works independently, and can therefore jump across the barriers set up by such authorities without being held accountable. She continues the bullfi ghting metaphor18 to comment on her experience of writing poetry, implying that although the seven books she has published so far have been a positive achievement, ‘siete corridas [...] toreadas’, the creative process has also been a painful strug-gle that has left its mark: the ‘siete cornadas’. In addition to including this metaphor, this part of the poem again makes careful use of rhythm and rhyme, and the last two lines in particular, which refer back to the opening lines, affi rm the text as a poem, in spite of the inclusion of non-poetic register and vocabulary. By replacing the ‘caminos’ of the second line with ‘atajos’, Fuertes again makes sophisticated use of different meanings of a word. In its meaning of ‘shortcut’, the ‘atajos’ suggest back roads rather than the main road ‘cami-nos’, and could therefore be associated with the poet’s sense of being sidelined, while it could also refer to the alternative route she takes and the different audience of ‘los que no compran libros’ (see note 14) she seeks to address. On the other hand, an ‘atajo’ is also a word or sentence crossed out in a text, which at the time would have been linked to censorship. The suggestion here is that by reading her poetry to working-class people in provincial backwaters, she can avoid the ‘atajos’ associated with ‘offi cial’, mainstream culture. The poem, through its use of language, the parodic references to the poetic genre, and its challenging vocabulary that reverses the reader’s expectations of the genre, derides the special status of poetry, promoted and upheld by specifi c cultural institutions.

Hutcheon raises an interesting point about the link she perceives between parody and cultural sophistication, and which is relevant in the light of the discussion of the above poems. As she explains, historians of parody agree ‘that parody prospers in periods of cultural sophistication that enable parodists to rely on the competence of the reader (viewer,

345Parody and Metapoetry in Two Poems by Gloria Fuertes

listener) of the parody’ (1985: 19). Later, she further clarifi es this by saying that ‘parody is a sophisticated genre in the demands it makes on its practitioners and interpreters. The encoder, then the decoder, must effect a structural superimposition of texts that incorporates the old into the new’ (p. 33). What this implies, of course, is ‘the potential for élitism in parody’ (p. 94). Fuertes, however, in the above poems subverts the notion of parody as an elitist form of writing by applying this sophisticated process to texts that are from everyday, non-intellectual situations. Rather than writing language that only academics can comprehend, she uses street language, the parodic connotations of which are immediately clear to the non-educated reader. Fuertes, then, seems to include parody itself — associated with elitist, high-brow erudition — among the targets of her parody. If, as Hutcheon claims, the frequent use of parody indicates a period of cultural sophistication, this could add another facet to the subversive nature of the poet’s work: she not only turns on its head the assumption that poetry and parody are for sophisticated, academic readers, but also, in a sense, ridicules the rhetoric of the Franco regime and its claims that the peace brought about by Franco had allowed the arts and learning to fl ourish, by writing parody which alludes to the opposite of intellectualism and cultural sophistication.19

Although Gloria Fuertes developed her own, recognizable style, her use of apparently non-poetic language, refl ecting her challenging stance towards both traditional, elitist poetic conventions and social standards, is a characteristic of the work of many of her contempo-raries, not only in Spain, but also in Spanish America. One poet worth considering in this respect is the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who developed the poetics of antipoetry. Fuertes herself refers to this term in two of her poems, and several critics have drawn parallels between her work and that of Parra.20 The word ‘antipoetry’ itself suggests opposition towards poetry expressed within a poem, and, therefore, parody as it is referred to here. Other characteristics of Parra’s antipoetry, such as its orality, its colloquial language and emphasis on mundane reality are also prevalent in Fuertes’s poetry, and indeed she herself refers to the term in two poems. In spite of such similarities, however, I would argue that her work and that of Parra are very different, in terms of both style and purpose, and would therefore be reluctant to describe Fuertes’s work as antipoetry. Parra avoids any devices associated with traditional lyric poetry, while Fuertes uses them in order to parody the poetic genre. As we have seen, ‘Maletilla’ incorporates many elements traditionally associated with poetry, which make the non-poetic language stand out. Such elements include the metaphors of the bullfi ghter to refer to herself and the bullfi ghts to represent the process of writing, the inclusion of different types of rhyme and rhythm, and repetition. An even more important difference between the two poets is that of their intent. Both agree that the poet has to put himself or herself at the same level as the reader, what Parra refers to as ‘bajar del Olimpo’, but according to Parra, poetry has no other function than to expose the banality of life:

El antipoeta [...] es todo menos un visionario; es, por fi n, ‘el hombre de la calle a quien le pasan las cosas, es el hombre de hoy y de ayer, el hombre de medio siglo que ve lo ‘absurdo’, lo ‘feo’ y lo ‘brutal’ de todo lo que le rodea — y que es existencialmente incapaz de darle sentido al caos. Hace, por tanto, lo que hacemos todos: encogernos de hombros y seguir adelante.21

As the fi nal poem of Poemas y antipoemas concludes: ‘Pero no: la vida no tiene sentido (1998: 116).’ To Fuertes, however, life does have meaning, as is clear, for example, from the many references to her faith in her poetry,22 and her poetry does have a moral and

346 Hilde ten Hacken

didactic purpose, pointed out, for instance, in the poem ‘Inesperada visita’, referred to above, where the poets have gathered ‘para salvar el mundo’. Although she sides with an uneducated, working-class audience, she nevertheless sees herself as a visionary, who inter-prets the ‘milagro’ mentioned in the poem ‘A lo mejor un día ...’. Therefore, while Fuertes’s work has elements of Parra’s antipoetry, rather than shrugging her shoulders and turning away from the ugliness she sees around her, she uses her poetry to expose and challenge what she perceives as injustice, whether this is social or personal. Ultimately, poetry is sacred to her, and through her parodic sacrilege of established notions about poetry and its reception, rather than merely bringing it down, she purifi es it.

As the above discussion of ‘El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte’ and ‘Maletilla’ has shown, Gloria Fuertes uses parody and metapoetry in order to involve the reader in an artistic process that confronts the critical situation of poetry, sides with the working classes, and addresses her personal experience of being marginalized as an uneducated woman poet. In other poems her purpose is to expose social injustice, or deal with themes such as the divine and the all-importance of love. Because her poetry has such specifi c objectives, and therefore often takes on the role of an instrument aimed at bringing about change, it is at risk of becoming overtly didactic. This was, in fact, one of the main objections against writers of social poetry such as Celaya and Otero in the 1940s and 1950s, and therefore one of the causes of the perceived demise of poetry. As Debicki (1982: 12) points out, it is exactly the kind of ‘artistic use of their apparently common language’ — consisting of strategies including parody and metapoetry — that prevented the work by Gloria Fuertes and others such as Ángel González from becoming too plain and prosaic. He later says about Fuertes’s poetry that it is the use of intertextuality and the reversal of reader expectations that prevent the poem from becoming a didactic message, and instead turn it into a ‘vivid poetic experience’ (1982: 87). Cooks (2000: 428) adds to this that, while poets were seeking to ‘engage an audience which, in general, had turned its back on poetry’, unlike Fuertes, most poets continued to maintain a metapoetic discussion amongst themselves (2000: 430). Presenting the poet as a market vendor or a self-made bullfi ghter who shuns mainstream poetry and its critics, then, Fuertes parodically transgresses the limits of traditional, accepted poetry, and invites the reader — educated or not — to become part of the creative process.

1 María Payeras Grau, Poesía española de postguerra (Palma de Mallorca: Prensa Universitaria, 1986), p. 59. Many critics have dealt with the subject of poesía social and post-war poetry in general. An interesting approach is that of Eleanor Wright, The Poetry of Protest Under Franco (London: Tamesis Books, 1986), as it seeks to distinguish between different kinds of socially and politically motivated poetry. Leopoldo de Luis’s anthology, Poesía social española contemporánea. Antología (1939–1968) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000), provides a comprehensive picture of the rise, development and end of poesía social.2 Although Gloria Fuertes was born earlier than the other poets, she is generally included in the Generación

de los 50, or the Generation of 1956–1971, as Debicki defi nes it, because she did not start publishing poetry until the 1950s and her poetry has some of the characteristics of the other poets mentioned. See Andrew P. Debicki, Poetry of Discovery: The Spanish Generation of 1956–1971 (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 18.3 As there is little agreement among theorists about the exact meaning of the terminology referred to

here, I will use the defi nitions that I have found most useful. The one quoted here is in fact an adaptation of Patricia Waugh’s defi nition of metafi ction. Although her study deals with fi ction rather than poetry, much of it is useful for an understanding of other forms of metadiscourse and parody. See Patricia Waugh, Metafi ction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 2.

347Parody and Metapoetry in Two Poems by Gloria Fuertes

4 See Waugh (2003: 2) and Leopoldo Sánchez Torre, La poesía en el espejo del poema: La práctica metapoética en la poesía española del siglo XX (Oviedo: Departamento de Filología Española, 1993), p. 99.5 Maria L. Cooks, ‘The Humanization of Poetry: An Appraisal of Gloria Fuertes’, Hispania, 83 (2000),

428–36, p. 428.6 Nancy Mandlove, ‘Used Poetry: The Trans-Parent Language of Gloria Fuertes and Ángel González’,

Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 7 (1983), 301–06, p. 301.7 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and

London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 1 and 31.8 Both poems are included in Gloria Fuertes, Obras incompletas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999), pp. 52 and 168,

which contains all her poetry collections published between 1954 and 1973. Further references to this book will be made as OI, followed by the page number.9 In Obras incompletas, for instance, she claims that ‘mi obra, en general, es muy autobiográfi ca, reconozco

que soy muy “yoísta”, muy “glorista”’ (OI, p. 22). José Luis Cano, who knew her personally, asserts that ‘conocer su poesía es conocerla a ella en persona, porque la poesía de Gloria Fuertes es fi el refl ejo de ella misma’, and González Rodas says that ‘una característica primordial de la obra de Gloria es el elemento autobiográfi co; para conocer su vida basta leer su obra.’ See José Luis Cano, ‘La poesía de Gloria Fuertes’, Ínsula, 296 (1969), 8–9; and Pablo González Rodas, ‘Introducción’, in Historia de Gloria (Amor, humor y desamor), by Gloria Fuertes (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), p. 33.10 Francisco Ynduráin, ‘Prólogo’, in Gloria Fuertes, Antología poética (1950–1969) (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1979), pp. 9–45.11 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), pp. 3–7.12 Sylvia Sherno, Weaving the World: The Poetry of Gloria Fuertes (Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2001), p. 198.13 The RAE dictionary gives the following defi nition of ‘maletilla’: ‘Persona joven que, desasistida de medios y de ayudas, aspira a abrirse camino en el toreo comenzando a practicarlo, a veces, en las ganade-rías o procurando intervenir en tientas, capeas, becerradas, etc.’ The image of the ‘maletilla’ recurs in the poem ‘Ella pide una oportunidad’ in Mujer de verso en pecho. Here, the fi gure of the ‘maletilla’ personifi es — paradoxically — ‘la Paz’. Referring again to the forlorn, self-made and marginalized aspects of the ‘maletilla’, the poem opens with the lines:

Como un maletilla, ella.(Ella es la Paz.)Va destrozada,mal vestida,delgada,acerico de balas,rasguño de metralla.

It concludes with the comment

La Paz,como un maletillasólo pedía una oportunidad.

Like Fuertes, for whom world peace became an increasingly important theme in her later work, ‘La Paz’ is marked by her past of poverty and war experience, and feels a compelling need to be noticed. See Gloria Fuertes, Mujer de verso en pecho (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), p. 161.14 In her ‘Prólogo’ to Obras incompletas she says: ‘Voy por los pueblos, aldeas y provincias de España. A los que no compran libros (porque allí no llega el libro, o el dinero, o la alfabetización), yo, humildemente, les llevo mi libro vivo, en mi voz, cascada rota, en mi cuerpo, cansado y ágil’ (OI, p. 31).15 Although this was the case when she started publishing in the 1950s, she was in fact increasingly recognized as a poet in the 1960s, due to the inclusion of her fi rst anthology, ... Que estás en la tierra (Barcelona: Jaime Salinas Seix y Barral Hnos., 1962) in Castellet’s prestigious Colliure series of poetry books.

348 Hilde ten Hacken

16 In the metapoem ‘... Si a veces hablo mal’ she explains her use of ‘tacos’ as a response to being ignored as a poet:

... Si a veces hablo mal,es porque me dejancomo un mueble,como una mesa cojitranca me dejan,sin equilibriome tambaleo,y me tengo que calzar con un taco

¡Coño!Aunque se horroricen los eruditos

¡Leche!

Gloria Fuertes, Historia de Gloria (Amor, humor y desamor) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), pp. 147–48.17 She was frequently criticized for her non-poetic, apparently simplistic style by reviewers of her poetry readings. Although such reviews are now diffi cult to trace, an example I found in Gloria Fuertes’s own collection of articles about her readings — which, as is understandable, mainly consists of positive reviews — is an article by Juan Carlos Molero in a Madrid newspaper, published in November 1967. It summarizes the negative criticism of many contemporary critics: according to his judgement, her poetry ‘es una poesía muy irregular. Junto a poemas francamente buenos tiene otros que ..., en fi n, que no lo son tanto. Falta criba, rigor, selección. Gloria Fuertes tiene, además [...] mucha, demasiada, facilidad versifi cadora y ello le lleva, cuando se descuida, al retruécano y al juego de ingenio’. The rhythm and rhyme of the line ‘por ser nieta de puta y basta’ would deliberately confi rm — and therefore parody and subvert — such criticism (source: Fundación Gloria Fuertes, Madrid).18 In addition to the ‘maletillas’ referred to in this poem and in note 13, Fuertes frequently refers to bullfi ghts in general in her poetry. According to Sherno, in her discussion of carnival mentioned above, such references have special signifi cance in her work, as they enable her to refer to an alternative world with its own set of rules, removed from offi cialdom, where she can express her rebellion: ‘They represent the enactment of communal spectacles which sustain their own rules while momentarily suspending those of the offi cial social structure’ (2001: 208).19 An example of such rhetoric can be found in Luis López Anglada’s anthology of poetry, published as part of the celebrations of the ‘veinticinco años de paz’ in 1964. In the highly propagandist introduction to his anthology, he claims that the peaceful, stable environment created by Franco had facilitated a climate of hope and possibilities in which poetry had been produced that is of a far better quality and much more sophisticated than that of, for instance, the ‘Generación del 27, o de la Dictadura’, or that of the ‘poetas de la España viajera’. Luis López Anglada, Panorama poético español (Historia y Antología 1934–1964) (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1965), pp. 7–8.20 One of her poems has the title ‘¿Antipoema?’ (OI, p. 273), and in another, self-descriptive, poem, ‘Minicursi’, se refers to herself as ‘antipoeta’ (OI, p. 329). The infl uence of Parra’s work on Fuertes’s poetry is suggested in Chris Perriam et al., A New History of Spanish Writing 1939 to the 1990s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 158, and by Sherno (2001: 88–91).21 René de Costa, ‘Para una poética de la (anti)poesía’, in Poemas y antipoemas, by Nicanor Parra (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), pp. 20 and 38.22 The God she refers to in her work mirrors the colloquial, everyday setting of her writing. Like the poet, He puts himself at the same level as ordinary people. One ‘Oración’ (OI, pp. 47–48), for instance, which is a respectful parody of the ‘padrenuestro’, begins with ‘Que estás en la tierra Padre nuestro’, and recognizes the presence of God in everyday, mundane situations.