Animal Concert: Post-Metaphysical Poetics in Peruvian poetry

• In Event: Animals in Latin American Literature and Visual Arts

Abstract

This paper will study the poetry collection entitled Concierto Animal by the Peruvian writer Blanca Varela to explore animal metaphors in the configuration of post-metaphysical poetics. It is argued that even though concert music is a product of creative human invention, the paradoxical image of an animal concert opens the possibility to re-think how music has been used to establish boundaries between humans and animals. In Varela’s poetry the elimination of those borders configure an attitude toward death that works poetically to highlight vulnerability and mortality as part of an existentialistic gaze, close to a Heideggerian scope about Being- toward-death, and also close to R.M. Rilke’s concept of ¨the Open¨. Finally, it will be discussed the dialogue among Varela and poets from the Peruvian Fifties’ Generation such as Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Augusto Salazar-Bondy in regard to post-metaphysical writing.

Author

• Ethel M Barja Cuyutupa