The face of writing in El árbol del lenguaje en otoño, by Andrés Anwandter

Abstract

Andrés Anwandter's poetry, in the first of his titles, El árbol del lenguaje en otoño (1996), focuses its attention on the figure that orders the represented world, the Book-Tree, not insisting primarily on its mythical-(preter)natural background, but on the intellectual sense and the matapoetic possibilities of writing, under the perspective of a constant transgression of the precepts of reading, the (self-)referentiality of the literary text, the author/reader credibility pact and the customs of perception. If the central theme of the author's first poems is the constitution of the book itself as a symbolic support for writing, so is its reverse, the book as an autumn tree, its unraveling and, along with it, the dismantling of images and notions that are central to the imaginary of the "religions of the Book", Western culture since the invention of the printing press and the installation of modernity as a literate project, but which, however, are addressed under a minimalist perspective and through a lateral approach. These poems are eccentric in the face of linguistic communication and lyrical custom, articulating diverse textual strategies that, like writing in real time, particularize them in the time frame of post-dictatorship Chilean poetry.