Luis Fernando Chueca

Luis Fernando Chueca (b. Lima, 1965) studied literature at the Universidad Católica del Perú where he is a professor in the department of Humanities and director of the Masters in Hispano-American Literature. In 2015 he received his doctorate in literature from the Universidad Católica de Chile with the thesis Nación y Violencia en la Poesía Peruana (1983–2014). His research on Latin American poetry revolves around the relationship of poetry and violence, and the development of the Latin American literary vanguards and neo-vanguards. Among his most recent critical work, in addition to articles in scholarly journals and anthologies, is the edition, edited with Giovanna Pollarolo, Poesía Peruana: Entre La Fundación de su Modernidad y Finales del Siglo XX (PUCP and CASLIT, 2019), and the books Umbrales y márgenes: El poema en prosa en el Perú contemporáneo (Universidad de Lima, 2010), and Espléndida Iracundia: Antología consultada de la poesía peruana 1968–2008 (Universidad de Lima, 2012), assembled together with Carlos López Degregori, José Güich, and Alejandro Susti. In 2009 he edited Poesía Vanguardista Peruana (PUCP). He has also published the poetry chapbooks Rincones (Anatomía del tormento) (1991), Animales de la casa (1996), Ritos funerarios (1998), and Contemplación de los cuerpos (2005).

By this author

Political violence in ‘The War with Chile’

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza