Baldomero Fernández Moreno: a style lesson

Abstract

The irruption of Baldomero Fernández Moreno on the literary scene was decisive. The gesture of designating the world under the rhetorical illusion of literalness, anticipating an effect of simplicity, paradoxically revitalized the poetic discourse. Fernández Moreno’s poetry woke up a kind of perplexity about what was most evident. The register of frequently used words begins to resurface in an aesthetic context that until recently had been alien to the colloquial flair. In Fernández Moreno’s poems, observation registers objects through verbs that refer to the optical act. It is not only observed; one is also aware of the visual event. Fernández Moreno has proposed looking at objects not in their symbolic condition or in allegorical terms, but in their simple material condition. He proposed a renewed perceptual event regulated by the exclusion of the self in favor of the object. Sometimes, perception becomes a visual theatricalization, a perceptive performance through the act of looking. A rereading of his work promotes a redefinition of his place in Argentine poetry.