Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

Even when we cannot find in Actual nº1 any explicit mention to the radio, it
becomes a key referent in later books by Maples and in texts by other stridentist
poets. In July 1922 Marples' book of poems Andamios interiores is publised with
the subtitle of Poemas radiográficos, taking the image of radiation as the principal
metaphor of his poems, that is the emission of rays that transmit, at long distances
and in an almost magic way, images or voices, messages and feelings. Note that
the terms radiographic and radiography refer to both the procedure to obtain
photographs by means of X-rays and to the capacity to transmit news through the
wireless telephony. Note that in Mexico at that moment, the expression wireless
telephony which was also the title of one of Maples' poems and other equivalent
terms, like wireless telegraphy, referred to what later was known as radio
broadcasting shortened as radio. In short, the radiographic aspect, the action at
distance, is the central topic of Maples' book: the poem is a radiography of the
andamios interiores of the poet, a dissection of the structure of his subjectivity
and, at the same time, it is radiated message, broadcast with no space limits.
In the poems that make up Andamios interiores visual and auditive sensations
that are intended to create a comprehensive synesthesic experience gain
extraordinary importance. Probably the most representative is “Prisma”, a title
that gives a name to this synthesis of varied sensations, similarly to the cubist
representation of space or to the color rings in Delaunay's urban landscapes:
railway engines, screams
arsenals, telegraphs
(...)
and everything expands in concentric circles
The oral, tactile or visual images overlap, like the planes in the cubist portraits by
Diego Rivera, as the logical-syntactic structure breaks the narrative linearity. The
order of the composition is then that of overlapping fragments like a collage. The
idea is to create a poetic equivalent of the contemporary world and of the
relationship between the citizen living in a big city and bombarded by flashing ads
and moving images, and space:
The insurgent city of luminous ads
floats in the calendars
and there, from time to time
in the flat street an electrical flash bleeds out
This is also the structure of the radio message, in which the main and background
voices fuse together like the figure and the background in Modernist painting , in
which the emission time is compressed and the listener wanders as also does the
passerby who strolls along the city:
I am a dead point in the middle of time
equidistant to the shipwrecked shout of a star
A park of a handlebar gets stuck in the dark.
and the moon with no string
oppresses me against the window panes
(...)
The yellow silence plays on my eyes.
Prysmal, diaphanous, to enjoy everything
The poem also destroys the distinction between the primary and the secondary, in
- 158 -
the same way as the radio blurs the borderline between message and noise. This
kind of poetry was written to be shouted in the streets, printed in posters, dictated
through the radio; a poetry that changes with the medium accepting avant la letre
McLuhan's sentence: the medium is the message. The attraction of the stridentist
poets by the radio is thus due to deep aesthetic reasons and the new medium
guides the direction of literature. The kind of audience that the radio imposes is
the paradigm of the relationship between the city man and his environment. The
radio is a cold medium that does not demand an exclusive attention by the
listener, who must be alert to the multiple stimuli of his environment. The voices
and sounds projected by the loudspeaker constitute a habitat that surrounds the
listener and in which he must develop. That is, on trying to reflect the
circumstances of man in large cities, on expressing this new way of synesthesic
perception that characterizes life in the big cities, poetry comes closer to the radio,
as it provides the perfect model of the new sensitivity. As Maples announced in
Actual nº1, poetry should be: a successive explanation of ideological phenomena
by means of equivalent images, orchestrally systematized. This is why the radio
was considered as a symbolic referent for the new literature, much more suitable
than the murals of the young Mexican painters, since the possibilities that mural
painting provided for the construction of new forms of aesthetic reception were
limited and obsolete.
2.- Poetry in the radio. “T.S.H.”
From the roots on which the interest of the stridentists in the radio were based,
other fruitful aspects emerged, among which it is worth mentioning the reading of
poems on the radio. The occasion for that came at the end of March 1923 with the
inauguration of the radio station La Voz de América Latina, a radio station
sponsored by the newspaper El Universal, whose weekly issue El Universal
Ilustrado, directed by Carlos Noriega Hope, constituted the main platform of
dissemination of the stridentist movement. The inaugural radio broadcast ended
up with the reading of Manuel Maples Arce's poem T.S.H. (El poema de la
radiofonía), probably written for the occasion, published some days later at El
th
Universal Ilustrado (5 April 1923) and collected in Poemas interdictos (1927). As
Luis Mario Schneider indicated, “T.S.H” (Wireless telephony) possesses the
historical value of having been the first poem radio-broadcast in Mexico
(Schneider, 1970, 71). “T.S.H.” constitutes a poetic tribute to the radio that
converts the radio into a metaphor of the avant-garde aesthetic ideology. As
Schneider also remarks (1970, 190) Wireless telephony is at the same time
symbol and reality: reality for the great advance that the radio represents and
symbol for its great power to link unlike elements languages, lives through
inscrutable distances. For the avant-garde T.S.H. is almost a concrete equivalent
of the metaphor. In fact, the poem transforms the radio into a cosmic metaphor,
identifying the emitting antenna with a star that lights up darkness with its words:
Above the night cliff of silence
the stars throw their programs
and in the inverse audion of reverie
the words are missing,
forgotten
From the emitting to the receiving antenna, the antenna is, from one end to the
other end of the invisible string of the waves, a metaphor of the wish to