Reviewed by: Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics by Scott Weintraub Jill S. Kuhnheim Weintraub, Scott. Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2015. 229 pp. Juan Luis Martínez’s work is very well-known in Chile, despite the fact that only two books were published in his lifetime, La nueva novela (1977) and La poesía chilena (1978), and these in relatively small print runs. Martínez’s books were recognized for their radical experimentalism, for the connections they made between language and visual realms, for their humor, and their impenetrability—a quick glance through their pages that intersperse words and pictures with strange visual graphs and equations warned readers that these works certainly could not be approached with conventional ideas about lyric poetry. But in other ways, Martínez was continuing a tradition of interrogating the boundaries among the arts in Chile (I am thinking here of Nicanor Parra’s Artefactos published earlier in the same decade, 1972). One of the great strengths of Scott Weintraub’s approach to Martinez’s [End Page 790] work is his ability to situate him in Chilean, Spanish American, and broader intellectual traditions, for he reads this writer in terms of Huidobro, Borges, Rimbaud, and Pessoa (among other creative writers), yet also relative to “pataphysical logic, Oulipian combinatorics . . . mathematical reasoning, Eastern thought,” and the deconstructive ideas of Derrida (4). The title of his study is completely appropriate, for Weintraub convincingly demonstrates how Martínez creates a philosophical poetics, which is also a poetic philosophy. In the book’s five chapters Weintraub demonstrates how Martínez employed his poetics to interrupt philosophy’s purported sovereignty over the literary, and how he carried this out through an “ethos of appropriation” and “uncreative writing” (5). Other elements in his poetic-philosophical strategy included continual self-effacement, marked by a yearning for marginality and the desire to write “the poetry of the other” (8). Martínez’s lack of self-promotion combined with the hermetic nature of so much of his work augmented the limited circulation of the books published in his lifetime. After Martínez died in 1993, three more works were edited and published posthumously: Poemas del otro: poemas y diálogos dispersos (2003), Aproximación del Principio de Incertidumbre a un proyecto poético (2010) and El poeta anónimo (2013). These, combined with a website that makes his highly conceptual, visual poetry more accessible, have stimulated renewed interest in Juan Luis Martínez’s poetry. Weintraub’s book will be the starting point for all future research on this poet, for it brings together insightful commentary on the most recently published additions to his oeuvre, includes detailed attention to history of its publication, particulars of the poet’s communication and dialogue with others, as well as a very extensive bibliography of works by or about this intriguing writer. Aside from its important contribution as a very comprehensive approach to Juan Luis Martínez as an artistic and intellectual figure, Weintraub’s study offers multiple approaches to the Chilean’s work. Some of these are evident in the chapter titles, and I will discuss two of these here. Chapter two is “The Book within the Book: Math, Science, and Politics in La nueva novela,” and in it Weintraub demonstrates how Martínez’s 1977 work calls for a centrifugal reading, sending us outside of his text to create a dialogue between scientific and artistic fields. Some of these include links between Martínez’s poetry and formal logics as well as Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics. In an intriguing and well-researched section on the Boubaki group (a name adopted by a group of French mathematicians who published scholarly articles and poetry under one name) Weintraub connects their principles to those of mathematician and Oaoulipian Jacques Roubaud, as voices that form part of the philosophical underpinnings of Martínez’s work. As I read all of the myriad links Weintraub has uncovered (many of them far from common knowledge, even among academics), I wondered if his next project may be an annotated version of La nueva novela? What if it were to appear in digital form with hyperlinks...