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5. Sound, Shape, and Space: Received and Invented Forms
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7. Telling Secrets: The Lyric “I,” Epistolaries, and Confessions
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9. The Poem in Telephone Lines and Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry
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11. Writing Out of Surrealism
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13. Duende, Deep Image, and The Poetics of Spells
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17. The Poetics of Liberation
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19. Writing the Body
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21. The Racial Imaginary
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24. Writing in the Field
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26. Docupoetics and Other Forms of Lyric Research

Duende, Deep Image, and The Poetics of Spells

For Further Reading

If you are hungry to read more poems rooted in the spirit of duende, we recommend a deep dive into Lorca’s writings, as well as others from his generation of Spanish poets.

• Federico Garcia Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende”
• Lorca’s “Romance Somnámbulo”
• Lorca’s “Rider’s Song”
• Antonio Machado
• The Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, was another influential poet working very intentionally with the spirit of duende
• Raphael Alberti

 

You’ll have to order Lorca’s Selected Letters from the library to read the correspondence between Lorca and Emilio Prados, but we do love this letter Lorca wrote to Melchor Fernandez Almagro as a beautiful example of epistolary literature and the spirit of duende.


• Pablo Neruda

Poems by Emilio Prados can be found at

• here
• here, and 
• here

We wish more of her poems were online, but we definitely recommend ordering Carlos Reyes’s translations of Josefina de la Torres’s poems from your library.

 

From Duende into Deep Image

While the concept of duende was largely incubated in Spanish language poetry, it was the major influence on English-language poets working in a tradition they describe as “the deep image.” If you are interested in exploring this tradition, we recommend these poets’ works as good places to dive in.

• We recommend you look up Robert Bly on Deep Image, but in the meantime, check out this take on it by Lawrence Kramer, “A Sensible Emptiness: Robert Bly and the Poetics of Immanence,” from Contemporary Literature
• James Wright
• Robert Bly
• Diane Wakoski, one of the poets first described by Rosenberg and Kelly as a “deep image” poet
• Galway Kinnell
• Brigit Pegeen Kelly
• Ray Gonzalez
• & we highly recommend the biography on Wright, by Jonathan Blunk: james-wright-biography
• We absolutely recommend Imagist poets from the Modernist movement that informed ideas about the Deep Image, such as H.D. and her poems like “Oread”
• We first learned of the term from the poet and editor (and our former teacher) Chrisopher Howell, whose poem “A Last Walk in the Quabbin” is dedicated to Galway Kinnell

 

The Recent Duende

As we discussed in this chapter, a number of contemporary poets can be seen writing very explicitly in the Spanish-language tradition of duende, sometimes with Lorca clearly at the front of mind, other times with the influence of the Deep Imagists permeating their work.

• Ariel Francisco, “Reading James Wright on the L Train,” in Duende
• You can hear Ariel Francisco discuss James Wright’s influence on his work and read his duende-inspired poetry on this New Yorker podcast episode
• Natalie Diaz’s “From the Desire Field” (which quotes/alludes to Lorca)
• Diane Seuss
• Tracy K. Smith, who has a book called duende
• Greek poet Elena Penga: elena-penga 
• Gabrielle Bates's visual poems

 

The Poetics of Spells

In this chapter we also proposed that aspects of duende can also be found in poems rooted in poetry inspired ecofeminist pagan and agrarian shamanic traditions. Some of the poets we have in mind when thinking about this vein of contemporary poetry are:

• H. D.
• Annie Finch
• Faylita Hicks, whose debut collection, Hoodwitch, we recommend in its entirety
• This amazing Amy Key poem, “My Narrative Costume is a Witch Without Reputation”
• Vanessa Angélica Villareal: f-root-future
• Rebecca Tamás, who you know from our Forms chapter, is a fabulous spellcaster: two-poems-tamas 
• Jennifer Givhan
• Evie Shockley