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Conversations with Martn Gambarotta (May - September, 2010)
Abstract
Martín Gambarotta is one of the most renowned poets of the poetic generation of the '90s in Argentina. During a period of five months we held an electronic conversation via email. In our exchange we explored themes relating to the cultural scene of the '90s in Buenos Aires; Gambarotta's relationship with various poetic predecessors; the political possibilities arising from what has been considered his return to ‘realism’; and various ‘objectivist’ literary strategies, focusing specifically on his texts Punctum (1996) and Seudo (2000).
Bollig offers a detailed study of the poetry of Martín Gambarotta. He argues that its anti-lyrical and even anti-poetic features run contrary to an apparent faith in the independent publishing sphere. Despite the apparently separate careers of the writer, as both a poet and a political commentator, verse offers a space for the political analysis felt to be missing from other media in Argentina in the 1990s and 2000s. If his poetry seems to attack its predecessors, frequent republishing by independent presses suggests that the writer operates on the limit between the impossibility of writing poetry and the fruitlessness of writing anything else.
In the Introduction, Bollig argues that a culturally and historically situated reading of Argentine poets working in the period from 1996 to date can offer insights into both literary history and contemporary politics. He cites the work of Franco Moretti to support the claim that literary studies has the potential to contribute to a political reading of culture and society. Bollig also engages with influential work on Latin American poetry by William Rowe and recent studies of contemporary Southern Cone culture by Cecilia Palmeiro, Craig Epplin, and others. Bollig argues that poets themselves conceive for their work a political role. This occurs not just in thematic or formal choices but also in the means by which they make their writing public.
Bollig assesses the poetry of Sergio Raimondi, examining the links between his verse and his role as a cultural activist and organizer, first in the Museo del Puerto de Ingeniero White, and later as Head of Culture for the city of Bahía Blanca. The analytical, critical, and at times ironic voice of his poems closely matches the type of work that he conducted in these roles. Bollig links this to Brecht’s ideas on epic theater and the need for the reader or spectator to think away from the work, rather than to be absorbed in it. Raimondi’s poems, rooted in the flows of international capital and goods that crisscross his native city, use research and analysis to critique the contemporary political moment, without demagoguery or the suggestion of easy solutions.
The 2011 republication of Martín Gambarotta’s 1996 poetry collection, Punctum, offers the opportunity for new readers to approach this seminal and striking volume, one that was for some time unavailable. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity to reflect on the complex poetics of a collection that, despite its initial impression of a stark hermeticism or even banality, offers a range of literary, poetic, and political implications. Moreover, it is a collection that, alongside Sergio Raimondi’s Poesía civil, represents the surprising variety of so-called 1990s, or objetivista, poetry in Argentina, and whose unexpected literary complexity runs counter to easy periodizations of Argentine literature. There is, though, a mismatch between the effectiveness of Gambarotta’s poems and the apparent banality of much of the text. Despite reusing clichés and slogans from the contemporary media, Gambarotta’s collection creates striking thematic, sonic, and visual effects on the reader.
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