Poesía de Mexico

Crawford MacCallum has long been haunted by Nezahualcóyotl's plaintive poetry about the evanescence of life on earth. In Poesía de México, he seized the chance to begin with the "Poet King of Texcoco", intending to continue the show with a sort of bouquet of the best Mexican poems through the centuries to the present. On researching the subject, however, he came to believe that that, with the extraordinary exception of Sor Juana, there was almost no truly Mexican poetry between the Conquest and the early twentieth century. There was poetry written in Spanish in Mexico, of course, but it was not clearly distinguishable from poetry written in Spanish in Spain.

However, some four and one half centuries after the death of Nezahualcóyotl, and led by the Nobel prize-winning literary giant Octavio Paz, a poetic explosion began in our sister country to the south that continues to this day. The cast of Poesía de México will present poems of Octavo Paz, Rosario Castellanos, Jaime Sabines and the still active poets Homero Aridjis and Héctor Carreto. The show will close with Javier Sicilia's tragic poem (written this year) in which he vows artistic silence henceforth to honor his son's senseless death in the ongoing 'drug wars':