The poetic spiritualism of Mantecón
There has been a renaissance of bilingual poetry books coming from independent presses this year. Just out from Prickly Pear Publishing is “El Día Mas Delicioso De Mi Vida” (“The Most Delightful Day in My Life”), a hybrid prose-poetry collection from Arturo Mantecón. A recent transplant to San Antonio from Sacramento, Calif., Mantecón’s shtick is dictated in persistent Geistgespraech, a phrase that translates to spirit speaking.
Like Dante Alighieri’s meditation on spirituality found in “Purgatorio Canto XV,” the hallmarks of these experiences involve withdrawal of the soul from the body. The opposite is true in the prose poems found in “El Día Mas Delicioso De Mi Vida.” Ethereal ancestorial voices (three of them) take over and inhabit the poet. Even Dante warns his readers, “Abandon all Hope ye who enters here.”
Is Mantecón a medium? I sat down with him and asked.
With a broad smile, the gentle septuagenarian hedged a bit, saying they are visions, muses, alter egos, all with polyphonic narratives, anxious to tell their stories through poetry and prose. A former arts director, Mantecón is also an apt translator with three books under his belt. This is his first phantasmagorical trip into poetry.
Mantecón historicizes his family circus background between Mexico and the United States. Interspersed between the prose and poetry are madcap interludes of his cousins smashing cascarones with painted faces of Virginia Woolf, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre — with a Croatian female circus performer for comic relief. The overarching spirit who communicates all this is Emeterio Landeros, known as “El Chango” (Monkey), a Caliban figure resurrected from El Gran Circo Mantecón. He says the spirit, the first cousin of his father, is also a playwright, a circus performer and poet. “Why Landeros?” I ask. Mantecón arches his eyebrow, saying, “Landeros is basically one of my heteronyms. One of the voices I hear at night just as I am falling asleep when I am in what some people call the ‘limbic state.’ ”
This edition has an introduction by Iván Argüelles, one of this century’s foremost surrealist poets. A polyglot and classicist, Argüelles provides critical background of Mantecón’s literary antecedents echoing the Mexican Infrarealistas poets as depicted in Roberto Bolanos’ novel “Savage Detectives” and the anti-poetry of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, the latter translated into English by Mantecón. Argüelles cites Mantecón’s referential use of carnivalesque polyphonic voices described by Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin.
Mantecón is one of the few voices discovering a new version of Caló. The term refers to code-switching, the musicality of biculturalism that jumps from Spanish to English and vice versa. Like James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” the event takes place in one day as a stream of consciousness.
Reading Mantecón poetry requires a rudimentary knowledge of Spanglish, Caló or competent bilingualism. Some may find the reading experience like the Gaelic lexicon in the opening pages of Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake.” But he follows the literary traditions of Alurista, Juan Felipe Herrera and Ricardo Sanchez — all word sorcerers — who have used code-switching.
Mantecón has been busy attending readings at the Poetic Republic Café and has joined Voces Cosmicas of San Antonio as its newest member.
Imbibe the spirits! Poetry that is.