Stridentist Poems

Manuel Maples Arce (trans. KM Cascia)

Stridentist Poems is a complete bilingual edition of the major early works of Manuel Maples Arce, founder of Stridentism, Mexico's most radical avant-garde movement of the 1920s.

Maples Arce's Stridentist poetry appeared at a time when Mexico was the center of the avant-garde, in a milieu that included Kahlo and Rivera, Modotti and Weston. His early books – Inner Scaffolds, CITY, and Prohibited Poems, collected here along with his first Manifesto – advanced the Stridentist program for a revolutionary poetry with increasingly refined precision. Made of the reaction between the poet's material reality and subjective emotional experience, his poems were meant to send "Chopin to the electric chair!"

"Maples Arce appears, passing out molotov cocktails to girls, waving to twenty-eight year old revolutionary generals from a speeding motorcycle, listening to Jazz with his stomach while military trains unload the wounded, telling poetry, From now on your name's Adventure."--Roberto Bolaño

"KM Cascia's versions of these mercurial poems capture the velocity of their pulse and the breadth of their postrevolutionary ambitions, enthralled with airplanes as much as writing machines (typewriters in Spanish). The bravado of Stridentism's inaugural manifesto might be impossible to match, but that's the mark of Maples Arce's utopianism and of his works' avant-garde cred: 'Chopin to the electric chair! ... is a marvelous preparation; in twenty-four hours it exterminates all the germs of a putrefied literature and its use is so very agreeable and beneficial. Shake well before using.' Of his savvy, here is the proof: 'Trademark M.M.A.'"-- Mónica de la Torre