Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Accordian-style binding in a limited edition of 750. Translated from the Spanish by Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman. Carlos Oquendo de Amat wrote 5 METERS OF POEMS (5 metros de poemas) from 1923 to 1925. It was published in a very small edition in December 1927. Carlos Oquendo de Amat's only book of poems bears the stamp of the influence of European Avant Gardes; at the same time it is clearly a corner-stone for what would later become Concrete Poetry. This special bilingual accordion-book edition of 5 METERS OF POEMS designed by Megan Mangum features a new English translation by Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman. Four additional poems are printed on the inside of the book's cover wrap, thus making this edition a complete presentation of Oquendo de Amat's known writings.
Author City: Lima PER
Carlos Oquendo de Amat was part of an extensive and urgent vanguardist poetry world in Lima, Peru, in the second two decades of the 20th century. Oquendo de Amat's only book of poems, 5 Metros de Poemas, is simultaneously one of the most celebrated and unknown examples of the diversity of the poetry of this cultural moment. He was the son of a Sorbonne educated progressive newspaper publisher, who was both a prominent member of the elite of Puno, a highland provincial capital on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and an irascible enemy of Peru's Catholic-conservative establishment. Upon the death of his father in 1918, the teenage Oquendo de Amat and his mother moved from provincial genteel comfort to Lima where they lived in poverty. He was often lucky to have enough money for just one meal a day. Friends say he would regularly skip that one meal to have enough to go to the cinema, a guiding obsession evidenced in his work. Lima in this moment was in a state of rapid, at times violent, growth and transformation as it filled with the members of the new working and professional classes. All social relations were being torn apart and rebuilt and the poets of this strange new old city turned to the works of the various European vanguards for guidance in how to respond to this sudden outbreak of modernity. Oquendo de Amat embodied many of the contradictions of this vanguard. After being imprisoned a number of times, during various crackdowns on dissent, he emphatically embraced Marxism and renounced poetry. During one of his stints in prison he contracted tuberculosis, which worsened rapidly during subsequent prison terms. Released from his last prison term in his homeland he was deported to Panama from where he barely managed to reach Republican Spain in time to expire at the age of 32.
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