Why poetry in times of inequality? Imagination, memory and politics of writing in the context of a “market culture” in the Chile of the Bicentennial

Abstract

A significant portion of chilean poetry seems to have substituted authentic
liricism for a hypertrophy of the metapoetical, which correlates with the high degree of specialization of writing. This specialization occurs less as forms of vanguard or post-vanguard (re)writings, and more as a sociocultural consequence of the clouding of the political and historical horizon; a clouding that makes a poetic imagination without reference to reality possible and sustainable. On the contrary, writings whose rhetoric transmutes cultural memories of a specific territorialized community, function in order to assure that the poetry not be the end in and of itself, but the medium through which to read/write “strongly” history, the world.