Ornithological Competence and Literary Biodiversity in Spanish American Poetry

Abstract

Porque sé el nombre del pájaro, lo veo. —Carmen Camacho In Artefactos—a book published in 1972 which was not in fact a book, but a box of postcards—Chilean “antipoet” Nicanor Parra included the image of four fraught-faced men exclaiming: “In the name of God, what flowers are those?!” The only calm-looking character in the drawing replies: “Water lilies” (Parra 397).1 This “artifact” alludes to a well-known anecdote about Spanish modernist2 poet Francisco Villaespesa, who once, as he walked through Madrid’s Parque del Retiro with fellow poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, is supposed to have pointed to a pond and asked the name of the flowers covering it. His friend answered, with disdain, something on the lines of “they’re the water lilies your poems are so full of.” Villaespesa’s ignorance is revealing in two ways: firstly, because since the days of Modernism many poets...