Poetry begins where tendency is found. Body and poetry between 1937 and 1997

Abstract

In this text I analyze the relationships between poetry and body. In the first section. I introduce the subject through an essay by Vladimir Maiakovski. In the second, I enquire into the topic of sacrifice in the poetry of José Lezama Lima. In the third, I connect these ideas with a cover of the Juventud Rebelde newspaper from December 1989, referring to the repatriation of the Cuban soldiers killed in the Angola war, and I describe the formation of a political theology that articulates the body, sovereign power and war. In the fourth section, I describe Cuban writers from the 1980s who switched that perspective by thinking about the body from a Foucauldian “care of the self” perspective. In the conclusions I highlight the importance of poetry as a marker of the tendencies of a certain period of time and reflect on the possibilities of extending this analysis to other areas of Latin America.