Seeing and Touching

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with Cesar Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing a large number of books in the period 1917-1925, and espousing the theory of Creationism, a kind of literary Cubism. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the expatriate Spanish artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris. He reached his poetic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two master-pieces: the long poem, 'Altazor', and the book-length prose-poem 'Temblor de cielo' (Skyquake). Two further collections would follow during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today. 'Ver y palpar' is one of those two books from 1941, which between them include some of Huidobro's finest work, something that most commentators have tended to ignore, preferring usually to engage with 'Altazor' or with the earlier books such as 'Arctic Poems', and their attendant Creationist theory. On the other hand, the rupture between the poetic text and empirical reality, exemplified by Creationist theory (but not always adhered to by the author) may well be embedded in the subtext of these later poems, with their disrupted syntax. Clearly under the influence of surrealism, in many of the poems Huidobro moves towards something far looser than his original theoretical position. There is a deliberate instability in many of the poems, arising from unusual, even awkward phrasing, and the suppression of linkages, something that was also evident in later cantos of 'Altazor'.