17 - Fungibility and the Intermedial Poem: Ana María Uribe, Belén Gache, and Karen Villeda

Summary

By calling the letter “h” a centaur, Ana María Uribe (Argentina, 1944–2004) evokes the shape of that animal, while the sizes of the letters mimic depth, and their movement across our computer screen in various iterations suggests the majestic travels of a herd across a barren landscape. In another of her series of “Anipoemas,” one called “Gymnasium,” the “P” stretches itself into an “R” or “I” leaps into a “T” or an “X”; circus jugglers are mimicked by two lower case “i”s exchanging their dots. Spring and winter are evoked by lower case “q” and “p” climbing into each other, then losing their bumps. Belén Gache's (Argentina-Spain, 1960) “Veintidos mariposas rosas” (“Twenty-Two Pink Butterflies” which, indeed, includes twenty-two pink and one blue butterfly) invites the reader to click on butterflies, which flap their way off the page, taking the letter associated with their position with them, and leaving us with a new poem, legible or not. Karen Villeda's (Mexico, 1985) “Poetuitéame” (Poetweetme) gathers reader tweets by way of selected hashtags and converts them into something like cluster poems. Basia Irland (United States, 1946) has a series of mysterious “hydrolibros” created out of rescued ruined paper volumes, or carved out of wood, and another series of “ice books,” seeded and released into waterways, evanescent sculptures that may mimic text, but do not contain any words: “a lyrical and ecological poetry,” says Lynne Cline on Irland's webpage (https://www.basiairland.com/projects/hydrolibros/index.html).

All of these multimedia pieces call themselves poetry, but it is certainly not poetry as we understand it following the most traditional and minimal of definitions: a rhythmical composition, written or spoken, expressed in imaginative words. What they have in common is a focus on some kind of animation and/or interaction, a commitment to some version of rhythm, and a location on the Internet. In this chapter, I want to look at writers/performers/poets like these, by way of a few examples of Latin American intermedial1 artistic practice that is generally still called “poetry,” but which puts pressure on even the most expanded definitions of the genre.