Abstract

SANDOVAL, Adalberto Bolaño. Poetics of Descent in Colombian Caribbean Poetry. La Palabra [online]. 2017, n.31, pp.101-118. ISSN 0121-8530.  https://doi.org/10.19053/01218530.n31.2017.7284.

The poetry of the Colombian Caribbean contains several recurrent themes pertaining to this region: mestizaje, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, neoregionalism, "laric poetry" [poesía lárica], identity, otherness, orality. This paper examines the way in which several poets of the Colombian Caribbean (José Ramón Mercado, Meira Delmar, Jorge García Usta, Gabriel Ferrer, and Raúl Gómez Jattin) develop a poetics of descent, celebrating the conjunction of the epic and the mythical, sacrality and death, where the epic is understood as "mythical narration of lived experience", founded on descent as a category for valuing the other, including the family and friends, in death or the celebration of life. These poets also reveal a "laric poetry" or poetry of the home and loved ones: which includes landscapes and the time of memory, identity of place, but also elegy. In these poems, memory is not tragic, but nostalgic. Memory is conjugated as specific remembrance, as a song to that which no longer exists; "flowered memory" of the absent image.

Keywords : elegy; poetics of descent; laric poetry; value of lineage; mythical.

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