Secondary Literature: Arts of Reference in the Americas

Abstract

Secondary Literature examines a growing body of contemporary experimental hemispheric poetry that cites from dictionaries and encyclopedias and imitates their form. This poetry addresses an excess and an inaccessibility of fact; ultimately, I understand this poetry as a kind of craft that allows readers and writers to make a means to live, not in possession of truth, but in relationship to it. I define poetry broadly to include hybrid examples of photography, essay, and the book arts, as well as more traditional poetic forms. My consideration of dictionaries and encyclopedias includes formats like archives and notebooks that lead to the writing of reference books. The works examined mobilize these genres to reorder pathways between words and their referents. Through haptic reading practices and paradigms like translation, they urge readers to participate in the formation of meaning. In so doing, they decentralize communities of language and knowledge to disrupt the totalizing tendencies of history and the state. Secondary Literature traces an arc from illegibility to hyperlegibility, from resistance against dictatorship to the reconstruction of lives that leave little information in their wake. Objects studied include Brazilian visual poet Wlademir Dias-Pino’s Enciclopédia visual (1970–2018), an unfinished, 1001-volume collection of images that responds to inequities in the distribution of information; the photographic series “Los archivos” (2001) by Argentine memorial artist Marcelo Brodsky, depicting archives of the trials against the military dictators; the multivolume essay-poem Cuadernos de lengua y literatura (2000–present) by Argentine writer Mario Ortiz, which studies the word as thing; and Canadian writer Anne Carson’s book Nox, which addresses history through a lexical translation of Catullus. While previous studies of encyclopedism emphasize its universalizing ambitions, I approach reference genres not as ideal forms but as media whose influence can be understood through histories of collective composition and popular use. This project integrates the study of peripheral literary movements, like the process poem in Brazil and the rise of small presses in Argentina, with that of perennial issues Latin American and hemispheric studies, such as the preservation of historical memory and relationships between politics and the avant-gardes.