La poesia no es de nadie: Se hace entre todos. Julian Hernandez, Legitima defensa OSE Emilio Pacheco (1939) is not only a central figure in contemporary Mexican arts and letters, but also one of the most original and innovative poets writing in all of Latin America today.1 Like Octavio Paz, Pacheco recognizes that literatures are extremely complex realities, involving reciprocal relationships between authors, works, and readers.2 For Pacheco, the objective of any creative act is to communicate an experience to another and make it his or hers. Thus, in his poetics, all true creation implies connection with the other, for without this, the work-a living, temporal being, which exists independently from the writer-ceases to move forward and risks perishing: lo minico que cuenta (decia Revueltas) no son estatuas ni homenajes: es solo aquel dialogo silencioso que el lector establece con cada libro, su libro. Y hay conexion o no circula corriente Porque Flaubert, como todo autor, solo dice lo que cada hombre y cada mujer que lo lea pueda escuchar entre el rumor de sus paginas. (Gustave Flaubert [1821-1880], Los trabajos 71-72)a What is important in the end is not the writer, but that mysterious encounter with the other, that silent dialogue established between the work and its reader. The other nourishes the text, charges it with new meanings through his or her unique experiences, and actually recreates the poem in the act of reading. Thus, Pacheco offers up his work as something not yet finished and searches for a reader to complete a process he could only begin. Moreover, in Pacheco's conception of literature as a network of mutually sustaining relationships, poetry becomes a collaborative effort not only between the poet and the reader, but also between other authors and their works. This idea-what I call poetics of reciprocity-is perhaps the most exciting and innovative aspect of Pacheco's poetics. This study explores the various intertextual techniques he employs to achieve his unique tapestry of interconnecting voices, and shows that through this collaborative process, Pacheco, paradoxically, also finds his own, authentic voice. Before continuing, it might be useful to clarify how the terms and poetics of reciprocity are used in this paper for, although similar, they are not identical. Julia Kristeva is generally credited with having formulated and developed the notion of intertextuality-the idea that a given text's meaning is dependent upon other texts that it absorbs and transforms.4 Nevertheless, as Jonathan Culler points out, the concept itself proves difficult to work with and even more difficult to define specifically, as subsequent theories of intertextuality vary greatly, setting before us perspectives of lost origins, oedipal confrontations, and endless series of anonymous codes.5 A major point of agreement among these theories, however, is that literary works are not the autonomous entities or organic wholes that the New Critics would have us believe, but intertextual constructs-sequences which have meaning in relation to other texts which they implicitly or explicitly take up, cite, parody, prolong, refute, or generally transform (Culler 38). Or, as Barbara Johnson notes, Contemporary discussions of intertextuality can be distinguished from source studies in that the latter speak in terms of a transfer of property (borrowing) while the former tend to speak in terms of misreading or infiltration, that is, of violations of property. Whether such violations occur in the oedipal rivalry between a specific text and its precursor (Bloom's anxieties of influence) or whether they inhere in the immersion of any text in the history of its language and literature (Kristeva's paragrams, Riffaterre's hypograms), designates the multitude of ways a text has of not being self-contained, of being traversed by otherness. …