"A Mountain / in My Pocket": The Affective Spatial Imagination in Post-1952 Puerto Rican Poetry

Post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry comprises a range of overlapping yet distinctive poetic practices that share a flexible, affective spatial imagination that poeticizes a felt knowledge of geographical and sociopolitical space. After 1952--when Puerto Rico became an Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), or "commonwealth" of the United States, thus formalizing the island's status as an "internal colony"--Puerto Rican poetry became more diverse in form, language, and subject matter. This occurred concomitantly with increased migration to the US mainland, flexibility of travel between the mainland and the island, and expanded bilingualism of Puerto Ricans. Various scholars have demonstrated that this paradoxically entrenched and ambiguous political status has produced a uniquely experienced sense of space and place. (1) I examine the contours of the affective spatial imagination in post-1952 poetry by reading a handful of representative poems, arguing that three seemingly divergent poetic practices embody overlapping conceptions of space and time. These poetic conceptions of Puerto Rican subjectivity are developed through an affective spatial imagination that can be defined as a creative articulation of sensory and emotional perceptions of commonwealth-era spaces. The affective spatial imagination maps the emotional registers of embodied experience to the lived geographical spaces of Puerto Ricans, and in doing so validates feeling as a way of knowing. This historically specific yet linguistically flexible imagination simultaneously connects commonwealth-era Puerto Rican poetry to poetic practices in the Americas (in both English and Spanish) and points to the powerfully syncretic position of that poetry in the hemisphere. Theorizing how an affective spatial imagination anchors selected poems facilitates an understanding of post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry as a whole. The difficulty of conceptualizing post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry stems from the fact that it encompasses two standard languages, numerous nonstandard ones, various local, national, and hemispheric poetic traditions, and different loci of enunciation and practice--one in "developed" North America, the other in the "developing" Caribbean. Despite these various dislocations, Puerto Ricans still "imagine themselves as part of their own national community" (Negron-Muntaner 1). There is in use, after all, just a single "Puerto Rican poetry" meant to conjure and clearly categorize a dizzying array of voices. This essay posits a shared affective spatial imagination as key to understanding post-1952 Puerto Rican poetry overall. I focus on three overlapping poetic "practices"--rather than "traditions," a term that tends to imply a neat, historically continuous and hierarchical process of inheritance--that I believe encompass the finest commonwealth-era Puerto Rican poetry. These practices share many characteristics with Latina/o, Latin American, and US poetry, and the more homogeneous Puerto Rican poetry that preceded them, but they are new practices that combine and discard a range of others. Each is a syncretic practice that establishes a relationship between various poetics, languages, and sensibilities in and through the affective spatial imagination. In his article on Clemente Soto Ve1ez and la vanguardia atalayista (the literary movement Soto Ve1ez helped to start in the late 1920s), Rafael Catala suggests that one of the movement's goals was to establish an innovative relationship (entroncar) between poetics and politics while also following Jose Marti's, Eugenio Maria de Hostos's, and Ramon Emeterio Betances's objectives to gain cultural and political independence from Europe and the US. Catala writes, "El movimiento literario atalayista proporciona una oportunidad para pensar y cuajar una practica cultural. Esto es, la literatura entronca con los diferentes elementos que la componen" ("The Atalayista literary movement provides an opportunity for thinking through and gelling together a cultural practice. …