The numinous site
Subtitle: the poetry of Luis Palés Matos
By: Julio Marzán.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Madison [N.J.]; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
Subjects: Palés Matos, Luis -- Criticism and interpretation.
Description: Luis Pales Matos, a white man who began the poesia negra movement in Latin America in 1925, is the subject of The Numinous Site, Julio Marzan's latest book. Unlike its English-language counterpart, poesia negra refers to its subject and not the poet's race, so white poets are credited with writing poesia negra.

Pales's poesia afroantillana popularized the "dark" forces (African roots and unprestigious language) that were the white society's antimatter, an antipoetic consciousness that, complemented and refined by other poesia negra, opened the Latin American poem.

Perhaps influenced by Heidegger, throughout his work Pales reiterated his obsession with the frontier where the mundane touches the spiritual or metaphysical. His poems take the reader on a passage to an encounter with the imagistic representation of that force informing the soul of the individual, the collectivity, and the physical world.

All his poems take us on that passage, including his socially conscious Afro-Antillean poems, because they originate from Pales's sense that language, including "Boricua," is synonymous with time and our sense of being. For Luis Pales Matos, poesia was an altar, and style a liturgy that, whether performed in drumbeats or words, invoked the poetic essence that he called the "numen."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-195) and index.