Topoemas: Contradictory Constellations, New Semantic Seeds

Indianapolis, IN

Octavio Paz is undoubtedly a literary monolith of the Spanish-speaking world and at large. From 1967 to 1971, the Nobel Laureate published some of his most experimental works, culminating in the publication of Topoemas, an interdisciplinary, international, and interlingual conjunction of foundational linguistic concepts and brilliantly minimal, synestethic poetic technique. The collection of six contradictory, concrete poems creates new semantic meaning in, of, and just as often against its own parts, reaffirming linguistic foundations while simultaneously reaching across the globe. At times, Paz weaves oriental religious concepts into Mesoamerican imagery, or simply creates his own increasingly contradictory language to achieve new meanings of expression. In their minimalism, the topoemas transcend the physical page to undermine their own order. In doing so, they are what Julia Kristeva describes as a black sun, or what Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna coined prasanga, a full vacuity: that which gives light while simultaneously subsuming it, as a rest note in music might illuminate meaning via a sonical absence. Although the sum of the poemario's parts often suggests an impossibly paralytic and paradoxical emptiness, the same sum of those same parts constructs a greater-rather, fuller-new semantic constellation.