Culled from countless books, magazines, and anthologies, the January/February KR issue pays special tribute to the work of Cuban Generation Zero, or Generación Cero, poets, born post-1970 and publishing post-2000. These poems are available here, so feel free to read widely and savor.
I wanted to take a moment to comment on Isaily Pérez González’s poem, translated from Spanish by the editors of the section, Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, “Under the Power of Crinoline.”At the simplest level, this is a poem about watching a movie while your lover sleeps. On a more complex level, however, the poem considers how our world’s casual brutality overflows the containers of the art in which we seek to confine it.
The poem’s speaker dramatizes the experience of watching crinoline float across a movie screen and the way in which “the crinoline’s empire / transcends the glass square.” This transcendence reminds me of what the editors stress in their introduction; social engagement defines this Generación Cero poetry—a move away from the notion of the poet alone in a pasture that seeks readers who are similarly engaged. In other words, “Under the Power of Crinoline” highlights how even this crinoline that exists within a movie can reach out beyond the screen.
Additionally, the editors characterize the Generación Cero poets by their drive to dismantle all forms of tyranny. With this in mind, the word “empire” in the poem is telling. It’s a charged word to say the least, with its gestures towards what Cubans have undergone. But, as the editors rightly note, this poem isn’t going to hit us over the head with it: “Cuban poetry isn’t subject to the market like narrative is, and so it’s not forced to speak of opportunistic bureaucrats, prostitutes with college degrees, blackouts and endless lines, the splendor of the black market. Indeed, the crisis experienced on the island is well-represented in these pages, but without making any concessions to exoticism.” In its own manner that is far from sensational, “Under the Power of Crinoline” explores this “violent present [that] / went off like fireworks above us.”
In the final lines of the poem, the full threat of daily life breaks through. “The plot turned unpredictable / my substance on tenterhooks like now.” The beloved sleeps, already aware of the way the movie, the night, the struggle will end. Even though the sleeping mind might dwell on “bright fiction flashes,” the other life will bust through, and even that onscreen crinoline will menace them with its potency: “the power of the crinoline is frightening / escaping the screen.” These last lines bring home this poem’s recurring image of the violence of our lives that always ruptures the borders of the art in which we seek to imprison it.