Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity by Michelle Clayton (review)

Abstract

Clayton, Michelle. Poetry in Pieces: Cesar Vallejo and Lyric Modernity. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2011. 340 pp.I found myself thoroughly enjoying reading Michelle Clayton's book. Her style is clearly inflected both by theory and by familiarity of author with Vallejo's work, but is not inaccessible or unnecessarily abstract. Sometimes her poetic riffs become slightly unmoored, but even at such moments, her readings and interpretations are always worth her poetic license.Poetry in Pieces is a six-chapter comprehensive study of work of poet Cesar Vallejo that perhaps can best be described as a two-part project with a transition essay in between. From this perspective, Clayton divides her book into chapters dedicated to Vallejo's early poetry (chapters 2, 3, and 4 on Los heraldos negros and Trilce), and those dedicated to his posthumously published works (Chapter 6 on Poemas humanos and Espana aparta de mi este caliz). Chapter 5, Literature Under Pressure, is an important transitional chapter that seeks to explain changes in Vallejo's poetic production - which, according to author, are less significant than we have come to believe. More specifically, this important chapter sheds some light on Vallejo's apparent resistance to publishing his later poetry. To this end, Clayton highlights importance of journal and newspaper chronicles in prose that Vallejo published during his self-exile in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1938.The most important claim of several arguments made throughout book is that the occupies a central place in Vallejo's work, and that fragmented and spastic body at center of Vallejo's poetry has ethical, political, and aesthetic implications. Indeed, Clayton convincingly argues that body is what brings together all of Vallejo's work: it is common denominator that has yet to be fully explored, and she brings it to light in her book.Clayton finds a body at center of Vallejo's work that is thrown into a spastic kind of movement (a movement that she associates as much with slapstick of Charlie Chaplin's silent films as with baroque ghoulishness of dance of death). According to author, cause of this paroxysm is effect of a loosely defined modernity and its accompanying economic inequality, deprivation, and threat of death. She further argues that this body functions both as a metaphor for effect of internar modernity on poet and his contemporaries, and as material object and origin of poet's curiosity and writing. Clayton then insists on presence of a fragmented and spastic body at center of Vallejo's poetry. This allows her to make an important contribution to scholarship on Vallejo: namely, that poet's works are indeed not divided into two starkly delineated moments as described in canonical criticism; to wit, one moment before and one moment after his embrace of Marxism and his commitment to political action. While she is keenly aware of differences between these two moments, she also convincingly argues for an important continuity based on Vallejo's body-centered ethics and politics.In her book, Clayton demonstrates her familiarity with broad and growing bibliography on Vallejo's work. Her knowledge of his work is clearly informed by important scholarly work of Jean Franco, Jose Cerna Bazan, and Julio Ortega, while work of William Rowe, among others, informs her knowledge of poets of Avant Garde. Her work on Vallejo is also in dialogue with more recent work of Stephen Hart, Adam Sharman, and Nicola Miller. Her focus on body is clearly indebted to Elaine Scarry's seminal work, The Body in Pain, but also to long tradition of thought about place of body in hermeneutics and epistemology that has perhaps been best developed in feminist and post-feminist studies - including, more recently, queer theory. …