This scholarly monograph offers a fresh look at modern experimental poetry in Spanish, Portuguese and French produced in Latin America. The work uses a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to examine how these experimental poetic forms can be best interpreted and understood through a performative lens. Examined structures and textures inherent in these performed works vary: they include paintings, typographical art, optophonetic (visual representations of sounds) techniques, and music, to name only a few examples. The investigative scope of the study is large---it includes texts from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil and includes texts in Spanish, Portuguese and French. Through detailed analysis Professor Huizar demonstrates what we can read in the visual and sound components of these poems as performance on a page, and while these may be limited on the bound text, they do produce a “performativity” that is predictive of current technological innovations of the canon whose performative and interactive aspects include the latest multi-media technologies resulting in forms as cyper poetry and hypertextuality, electronic music and pictorial language.

The textual analysis is informed by a variety of semiotic performance theories (Elam, de Marinis and Pavis). The final chapter deals with currents in today’s Latin America poetry world with an emphasis on the technological and cultural energies that are revolutionizing the poetic and linguistic content of the region.

“This is one of the first studies in this area of research and opens new ground for specialists. It offers a comprehensive as well as an analytical view of the interdisciplinary practices …something lacking in previous studies in Latin American poetry. Recommended.”
Professor Laura Lopez-Fernandez
University of Canterbury