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An Introduction to the Poetry of Cristian Aliaga

In an essay published in 1992, the writer and anthropologist Néstor Perlongher coined the phrase “the secret poetry boom” to describe the flourishing of poetic groups and publications as an unexpected side effect of the proceso military regime’s violent suppression of political dissent in the late 1970s. If the poetry boom of the 1980s was a surprising repercussion of the proceso dictatorship, the political and financial crisis of 2001, and its effects on the cultural sphere – the closure of publishers, funding cuts for cultural organisations, contraction of the book market – would be the equivalent context for today’s poetry. Talk of a “boom” is still pertinent and much has been written on the surge in activity of the poetry scene in Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities. Commentators note the advantages that writing poetry has in times of economic shock: poetry is cheap; poets don’t earn a living from their poetry; works circulate, often by hand and in cheap copies or Xeroxes, within small groups; and poetry is wellsuited to new electronic forms of circulation, including chatrooms, web pages, and ‘blogs. Centres of poetic production away from Buenos Aires have also been increasingly influential in recent years. The town of Coronel Pringles in the Pampas recently celebrated its literary heritage – Arturo Carrera and César Aira are both famous residents; Osvaldo Lamborghini wrote much of his later poetry whilst living in the town – with the inauguration of the Estación Pringles cultural space, which organises workshops, poetry readings, residences and prizes. The city of Bahı́a Blanca has seen an upspring of poetry workshops and events; its local imprint VOX published an anthology of Bahiense poetry which included the work of Sergio Raimondi, recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2007 and director of an important cultural museum in the town of Ingeniero White. These places are of course never immune to the vagaries of economic development and disaster; the literary utopia may also have dystopian characteristics: in the case of Estación Pringles, the building occupied is a disused railway station; the Ingeniero White Museum is an abandoned port building. In both cases, cultural projects coexist with and struggle against abandonment. One of the most notable poets of recent years in Argentina, and whose work illustrates many of the tendencies outlined above, in particular tensions between local cultural efforts and global economic trends, is Cristian Aliaga (Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires, 1962). Based in Patagonia, Aliaga is a journalist, academic, and poet. He edits a cultural supplement, Confines, for the newspaper El Extremo Sur de la Patagonia, which has included, amongst other features, a dossier on Palestinian poetry, and articles on poetry as a form of political intervention. He also plays a prominent role as a cultural promoter, working with university presses, independent imprints, and in the publication and promotion of work by other Patagonian writers. His edited