Canto llano / Cintio Vitier

I've been reading a magnificent edition of Cintio Vitier's selected poetry: Antología poética (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002). Going back to his early poems in the collection Canto llano, written during the early 1950s. I sense an affinity between his tendency toward the use of traditional forms or meters and that of poets such as Auden, Lorca, Vallejo, and in Venezuela, Ana Enriqueta Terán, Vicente Gerbasi, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Fernando Paz Castillo.

Maybe in alternative ways certain Venezuelan poets follow this formalist passion today: Rafael Cadenas, Luis Alberto Crespo, Jacqueline Goldberg, Patricia Guzmán, Yolanda Pantin, Elizabeth Schön, Alfredo Silva Estrada, and Esdras Parra (among others).

Cintio Vitier is the most important Cuban poet now writing. His extensive bibliography of publications spans from the 1930s to the present. The poems in Canto llano use the quatrain and couplet as a pattern in a formalist gesture, while the context of each poem breaks up the frequencies of those set forms.

Dama pobreza (1992) reminds one of Derek Walcott's creative use (and deconstruction) of traditional English (or, in Vitier's case, Spanish) forms: "Tan cerca de la nada que es lo poco / a que puedo acercarme todavia."

Vitier is, like his friend Ernesto Cardenal, a mystical Catholic poet. Interestingly enough, he was born in 1921 in the United States, in Cayo Hueso, Florida. Reminding us of the proximity of Cuba and Florida. And so, in that geographical sense, Cuban and American poetry are linked. Vitier can also be read as a universal poet, one of the major poets of the Latin American 20th century.

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Hay una gota en el mar
que es la que está sustentando
su masa verde y amarga,
la opulencia de su llanto.

En el fuego hay una chispa
que es la que está alimentando
como la envidia de un oro
en otra parte llameando.

Hay un soplo entre los aires,
en la levadura de un grano,
tiempla en el todo una nada
que es lo que estoy deseando."

{Cintio Vitier, Canto llano, 1953-1955}