Circe Maia's Work: Poetry and the Radical Experience of Time

Abstract

This article examines the work of the Uruguayan poet Circe Maia (Montevideo, 1932), focusing on the central theme of temporality in her poetry. The aforementioned temporality is conceived not only as a thematic construction –a differential and continuous feature of her creation– but as an embodied part of an experience from which she constructs and enunciates a subjectivity. Emerging at the end of the 50s, Maia’s poetry develops different lyrical accents and the social consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the drama of time, every day life, domesticity, colloquial imprint and social commitment, Maia’s work also engages with the philosophical ideas of Bergson, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty were a substantive fact. Maia, author of a major work of Latin American letters, rather than adopting a philosophical lexicon, Maia employs the language of poetry to explore these concepts and the intricate search for the past and memory.