Montalbetti’s contentions on poetry turn on two basic forces: a) sense as direction and promise, and b) the sign’s becoming. These are two opposing forces.
Within language there are tensions, transverse lines of force, continuities pointing toward a given sense, in a given direction. They are forever pointing toward a destination that will not necessarily be reached. But there are also points, discontinuities, instances at which sense pauses in its movement, when the human forms or makes a sign. Such is the dance between the promise of sense and the desire or drive for the sign.
The poem is thus a strange—shockingly strange—mechanism, in which this dance is danced. This is why the poem gestures toward one of the limits of language (a limit, not a limitation): semantic closure. The poem places itself at the brink, it is the brink: between what is meant and what is not meant; between sense and nonsense.
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Perhaps, chronologically, these matters came to the fore in Montalbetti’s thought, in the first place, as subject matter: a resistance to identity, mistrust in national canons, in the literary history that circumscribes poetry by country (there is no such thing as Peruvian poetry, Ecuadorian poetry does not exist). All faced with the certainty that there is, in poems, a remnant that can be neither interpreted nor recovered through the aforementioned categories (2007).
The idea of an uninterpretable remnant (in the poem) leads us to “En defensa del poema como aberración significante,” an essay published in 2009. Here, Montalbetti starts rounding out his ideas: the poem does not work like any other discourse in communicative action. While we speakers might place a barrier between signifier and signified, situating them in relation to the sign, this drive for the sign fails when faced with the poem. Because, paradoxically, the poem is more than the sum of its parts; the poem as a whole exceeds the sum of its verses. This is not a tendentious statement. Montalbetti describes a tension between horizontal force—that of the verse—and vertical force—that of the poem as a whole.
When studying literature, many of us learn to read philologically; we learn that internal rhymes, resonances between one word and another, relationships between the paradigms of two words in a poem suggest a convergence; we learn that they accumulate, they add up toward the poem’s meaningful whole. Montalbetti tells us something very different: there is an anarchic force, a horizontal force within the verse that only produces relationships (magnetic, let’s say) between the verse’s words; and there horizontal forces diverge, rather than converging, in the vertical line of unifying force.
There emerges the difficulty of reading a poem: the drive for the sign clashes with the poem’s divergence. The poem resists interpretation. Evidently, we can always interpret a given poem, and we can always make a sign, but then sense escapes us. And if we remain in the hazy region of sense (made of other drives, of rhythms, of feelings), we will be unable to capture said sense via sign.
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The tension between sense and significance broadens in Cajas (2012), a book that is curious even in its design: each page appears to be a slide, the outline of a presentation. With this book, Montalbetti seems to let his hair down, or to let his hair down again, and to fall into a free-form writing that, later on, will lean into the poem-essay and the essay-poem. He explores forms of thought. Cajas is not an academic essay, though it is rigorous. Its form is, ironically, that of lecture notes and class materials. And it lays out an argument that seeks to distinguish “sense” from “meaning.” The movement of sense is doomed to “run aground,” to grow still and become meaning. Sound develops into melody or word. But the work of art resists standing still in this promise of unity. The poem resists becoming sign.
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These questions are not arbitrary. Not just any poem resists becoming sign—in fact, most aspire to do so. In a short essay from 2016, “Si todo el verde de la primavera fuera azul…”, Montalbetti adds an important nuance: while every occurrence in our world is possible, while the human being is possibility, in the poem we find a necessity. The poem is a necessary object in a possible world. This is not a moral argument; it’s not that we need more art, more poetry, in order to be better people, etc. The argument is that each word in the poem is necessary and is in its place. Here, Montalbetti recalls one of Vallejo’s ideas: removing a word from a poem is like amputating a vital organ, killing it.1
What’s more, the work does not end here. Once the poem exists as a necessary object that will never change again, the time has come to return it to the world, to return it to possibility: to expose it to contact with readers and listeners.
A new nuance appears: a liquid state exists, a natural liquid flow of language that is altered in the poem. In the poem, the state or states of language change. The expectations that fluency predicts to us are broken. It’s not that the poem can say something “beyond language” (we cannot speak, in language, about that which is outside language—period), but that certain poems manage to say that which can only be said with language.
What does it mean that something can only be said? In the beautiful, ironic poem-essay Sentido y ceguera del poema and in the seminar-shaped poem Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, Montalbetti puts forward some memorable distinctions. I wish to highlight two: the distinction between the absolute visible and the absolute sayable, and the distinction between language and tongue.
There are things that can only be seen and not said, he says, we said. But, conversely, there are things that can only be said and not seen (for example, denial and contradiction). Montalbetti revindicates the absolute discrepancy between saying and seeing. The limit of language is not the unsayable, for the unsayable is part of what is said. Nor is it silence, which always comes either before or after what is said. The limit of language is the visible. That which can only be seen. That which is visible in an absolute sense.
Take, for a moment, the verses that give this note its title: “Esta es la casa del hombre. / Esta no es la casa del hombre” [This is the man’s house. / This is not the man’s house], from the poem “El peruano perfecto.” We can interpret this poem: say that, in it, there speaks a Peruvian migrant in Tucson, Arizona, suspiciously reminiscent of the M. Montalbetti who surely, in those same years, was missing his wife and child in Peru. It makes no difference. What’s relevant here is the gap that opens between the claim and its denial. An unsayability by disjunction, as Montalbetti would say Badiou would say. The fact that denial unexpectedly follows claim interrupts the liquid flow of language. And, what’s more, it points to a lack, an emptiness. This gap can only be pointed to, indicated. To a certain extent, this denial functions more as an index than a sign. The source of the poem’s strength is what is unsaid, what falls into the gap. And, as if that weren’t enough, these verses are pointing toward language, toward the consistency of language, toward its syntactic movement. The poem, the poem’s movement, “talks about” what is not there—and about language.
On the other hand, language is that abstract thing, or rather that formal and potential thing, while tongues are those historic, communal objects made up of more or less delimited contents. Or contents that, at least, seek to be delimited by institutions, are taught in schools, and are laden with ideology. Language has no ideology. While language can be glimpsed in the space of pure power, our mouths and hands produce acts of the tongue. The poem, then, is that strange object that points toward language, that wants to make language visible.
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In 2019, Montalbetti took a more technical turn in a book on certain of Badiou’s ideas: El pensamiento del poema. One of its starting points was this: “The poem thinks where it does not mean, or where, while still meaning, its thought brims over its significance.” This is no longer a question only of the opposition between sense and signified; it is, rather, a question of said tension producing, indeed, a type of thought (if not knowledge) unique to the poem—and foreign, for instance, to the domain of visuality.
This is possible through sophisticated operations of subtraction and dissemination: on the one hand, the poem subtracts semantic matter, transforming words into mistaken objects. And, on the other, dissemination de-objectivizes objects such that they become something other than what they are (through metaphors, anamorphosis, and other misdeeds). Metaphorization, for example, is infinite by definition; in this displacement the object fades away and is lost.
The poem thinks, the poem does not signify; the poem situates itself at a limit of language. And what sustains the poem’s movement? Syntax. That is to say, that which is not seen, what which neither names nor signifies; the framework that comes “logically” before what is said. Thus we meet again, along another path, that which can only be articulated in language. And the somewhat desperate attempt to twist one’s neck around, to look at the back of one’s own head.
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As we have seen, with humor and irony, Montalbetti cycles through the essay, the poem, the essay-poem, the poem-essay, the dialogue. In fact, he writes ever fewer poem-poems. He has stated in an interview that he is interested in putting different forms of thought into motion or confrontation. In 2021, he published the poetry collection Cabe la forma, from prestigious Spanish press Pre-Textos. Could there be any clearer signal that he forms part of the canon? The book went relatively unnoticed, unfortunately. It is a deceitfully serious book, including a great deal of coded humor. It opens with an absurd, arbitrary glossary; and it starts at the ending, we might say: the first section is titled “Otros poemas.” It opens with poem-poems, but it continues with poem-essays: a couple of long poems that string together logical-illogical propositions and a very amusing dialogue between Gorgias and Kaso on the law of noncontradiction.
One more display of Montalbetti’s perspective: the “66 proposiciones sobre un poema de César Vallejo” put the poem “La paz, la avispa, el tacto, las vertientes…” in motion. Montalbetti notes that it lacks connectors, it lacks syntax! But that there is an invisible foundation—infintesimal, we might say. A foundation that is unseen, but is there: a tension between two types of verse (hendecasyllables and heptasyllables) that forms the network on which these verses play out. Words do not seem to matter in and of themselves, but rather as part of a calculus, a formal/structural equilibrium or balance.
A poet can try to rebel against semantic closure, attempting all sorts of metaphors and displacements… only to end up back at semantic closure. Vallejo would subtract, Montalbetti tells us, that which is inevitable and unavoidable: “the unsayable gap of syntax.” This means the poem is an index (not a sign) of the gap. The poem speaks of words, not of things. The poem speaks of language.
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I would like to conclude this meager and schematic note by pointing out what strike me as three possible starting points—all axiomatic, we might say, to a sophisticated and mobile system of thought.
The first is that, for Montalbetti, the verse is the poem’s minimum unit. I do not mean to say this is not so or should not be so; I mean only to recall that other points of view exist. For example, the Brazilian concretists suggested that the phoneme was the minimum unit of the poem. And, from this point of view, other poem-forms can be constructed. By proposing the divergence between verse and poem, Montalbetti still maintains the unity of the verse as a starting point. It is true that this can be nuanced, if we focus on others of his reflections: his emphasis on syntactic structure and on prosody, for example, which highlights structures within the verse.
The second starting point appears: the poem’s success (interesting) is conditional on prosody (the “ear”). The work of rhythm and prosody is important because this is where we approach non-semantic zones; this is where sense and feeling appear. But are we entering here the zone of taste? Must one have a “good ear” in order to write poetry? Yes, to write a certain kind of poetry, one must.
The final starting point I find arises from the two above: Montalbetti’s essays still uphold the distinction between poetry and prose. This is more visible, perhaps, in his attacks on the novel (which I have not been able to revisit due to time constraints). The novel’s prose is situated in the zone of the visible (or, at least, in the zone of convergence between the visible and the sayable), while poetry, as we have seen, is situated in the zone of the absolute sayable. This series of oppositions between poetry and novel, verse and prose, sayable and visible are necessary in order to place poetry-verse outside the regime of capitalist visibility. Placing prosaic poetry and poetic prose on this spectrum of oppositions complicates matters somewhat.
Curiously, Mario Montalbetti practices a form of writing that weakens these oppositions, offering us his poem-essays and his essay-poems.
