Reversal of Expectation

by Nick Lawrence

I travelled to Cuba in January 2001 with a group of other poets from UB. While in Havana, we attended "Encounter: First Festival of Language Poetry," where we met poets from Cuba and elsewhere around the world.

One night at a restaurant, we - a group of Cuban poets and some of the norteamericanos - came up with maps of our respective poetry scenes, which were basically configurations of proper names.

Our map stretched back to the New American Poetry - Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, and so on. It continued down to our contemporaries, to peers who we thought were worth paying attention to. Carlos Aguilera, a young Cuban poet, recognized a good fifty percent of the names that we put down. For example, he mentioned Ron Silliman, a member of the U.S.-based Language group who is well known here at Buffalo, and Carlos certainly knew the U.S. poets who wrote primarily in the 60's and 70's. So, clearly, he has been following international trends, and there was some reversal of expectation among us about what the Cubans would or wouldn't know.

You couldn't say the same about their cultural map and what we knew. Another young Cuban poet, Javiir Marimsn, gave his sketch of important writers. I recognized a few, like Josi Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piqera, and Reina Marma Rodrmguez, but I left feeling that I had my work cut out for me. I need to follow up not just by learning a language but by learning a whole tradition.

I noticed patterns and, sometimes, weird imbalances in comparative availability of materials across cultural boundaries. You could see that in the bookstore downstairs from the Casa de las Letras, the section of the Book Institute where the festival was held. They had a copy of Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa, which is virtually impossible to find in North America. But there it was, featured alongside the latest bestseller by Ken Follett.

I'm guessing that through other channels - not specifically English-language or North American ones - the Cubans have been picking up literary materials to work with.