Selected Essays by David Colon
Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, 2020
Cambridge Companion to 21st-Century American Poetry, 2021
“Siempre Pa’l Arte: The Passions of Latina/o Spoken Word.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Po... more “Siempre Pa’l Arte: The Passions of Latina/o Spoken Word.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Pop Culture. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Routledge. 2016. 151-161.
Papers by David Colon
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2013
Concrete poetry-the aesthetic instigated by the vanguard Noigandres group of São Paulo, in the 19... more Concrete poetry-the aesthetic instigated by the vanguard Noigandres group of São Paulo, in the 1950s-is a hybrid form, as its elements derive from opposite ends of visual comprehension's spectrum of complexity: literature and design. Using Dick Higgins's terminology, Claus Clüver concludes that "concrete poetry has taken the same path toward 'intermedia' as all the other arts, responding to and simultaneously shaping a contemporary sensibility that has come to thrive on the interplay of various sign systems" (Clüver 42). Clüver is considering concrete poetry in an expanded field, in which the "intertext" poems of the 1970s and 80s include photos, found images, and other non-verbal ephemera in the Concretist gestalt, but even in limiting Clüver's statement to early concrete poetry of the 1950s and 60s, the idea of "the interplay of various sign systems" is still completely appropriate. In the Concretist aesthetic, the predominant interplay of systems is between literature and design, or, put another way, between words and images. Richard Kostelanetz, in the introduction to his anthology Imaged Words & Worded Images (1970), argues that concrete poetry is a term that intends "to identify artifacts that are neither word nor image alone but somewhere or something in between" (n/p). Kostelanetz's point is that the hybridity of concrete poetry is deep, if not unmitigated. Wendy Steiner has put it a different way, claiming that concrete poetry "is the purest manifestation of the ut pictura poesis program that I know" (Steiner 531). In response, I want to argue that concrete poetry, as a hybrid form borrowing from literature as well as design, is an enterprise that should be considered an endeavor of signmaking. In "Semiotic Conditions of Originality in Concrete Poetry" (2005), Elizabeth Walther-Bense invokes Aristotle's theory of signs and the semiotikós, or "signmaker," in relation to the Concretist program: "The signmaker is not only someone who creates signs but also one who frames signs in a new way for better understanding, or representing things or events, and informing someone about something" (205). Concretism's condensation of poetry, achieved through its visual form, renders the interaction between poem and reader an experience of cognition more like the instance of perceiving a semiotic sign than the event of reading a verse poem. This quality of concrete poetry is a direct result of the
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, 2021
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, 2021
Transnational Literature, 2015
They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one... more They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.1Historians of philosophy are well aware of George Santayana's Spanish origin, even if Santayana's legacy amongst literary historians has dwindled. His father Agustin was a lawyer who served in the Spanish colonial service, becoming governor of the Philippine island of Batang in 1845. When Agustin's predecessor in this post, Jose Borras y Bofarull, died, he left behind a daughter. Josefina first met Agustin 'when they were the only two Europeans on [this] little island in the Philippines,'2 although she would soon leave for Manila. There she would marry the New England merchant George Sturgis, who fathered five children with Josefina before dying suddenly in 'the midst of a disastrous business venture.'3 Josefina ...
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Selected Essays by David Colon
Papers by David Colon