Sarduy and [the Gift of] the Poem-Object With a previously unpublished essay by Severo Sarduy, “La escritura como regalo japonés”

Resumen

This article deals with Severo Sarduy’s materialist poetics of the sign and its connection to the work of other writers like Mallarmé (Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hassard) Octavio Paz (Blanco), Haroldo de Campos (Galáxias), and the Noigandres Group’s “concrete poetry.”  It puts Sarduy’s and Ramón Alejandro’s collaborative poem-object, Corona de las frutas in conversation with the poem-objects of contemporary writers Ramon Dachs and Pedro López Adorno.  As a created object (of poiesis), Sarduy felt, the poem has the possibility of being presented as a gift, whose meaning is in the wrapping (or the poetic language) itself. This is best expressed in his previously unpublished essay, “La escritura como regalo japonés,” published here for the first time. Lastly, this article, briefly suggests that Sarduy’s materialist aesthetic ontology may be seen in light of Ortega y Gasset’s notion of “aesthetic objects,” Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of “concrescence,” and more recently, Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology.